to have Edward recall him. Eventually, the nobility split between those who were loyal to the king and those who were repelled by him. This led to the civil war.
The notes in the Brecht book said that Edward’s life had been the subject of an earlier play by Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright who was himself homosexual. Marlowe’s work was the source of much of Brecht’s play. In Brecht’s version, Edward — vain, frivolous, proud, willful, and incompetent — was more like the degenerate scion of the Krupp family than a fourteenth-century monarch. This characterization was emphasized by the way Brecht portrayed Gaveston, the object of Edward’s passion. Gaveston was essentially a whore; a butcher’s son who, for reasons inexplicable even to himself, was plucked from his low station by the whim of an infatuated king.
Gaveston was canny and fatalistic: the real hero of the Brecht play.
Though Edward was no hero he did have a certain grandeur which was mostly evident at the end of the play when he is held in captivity. In defeat and squalor, he repented nothing, becoming more of a king than when he actually governed.
The cost to Edward of his homosexuality was a gruesome death. While Brecht’s stage directions indicated death by suffocation, the accompanying notes discussed the actual circumstances of Edward’s murder. A red-hot poker was thrust into his anus. His last lover, who according to the historical record was not Gaveston, was castrated; his genitals were burned in public and then the man was decapitated.
The play was being performed in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Cienega. Since I planned to see Josh Mandel after the play, Larry and I took separate cars. The rain had stopped at dusk and the skies had cleared. They were flooded with the lights of the city but, for all that, Santa Monica seemed dark and uninhabited as I waited at a traffic light just east of the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery.
Behind towering walls only the palm trees were visible. As I passed the gates I saw the domes and turrets of the necropolis. On the other side of the street, young boys — hustlers — stood in doorways or sat at bus stops watching cars with violent intensity. As I drove between the whores and the cemetery I thought of Jim Pears for whom death and sex had been in even closer proximity. When I came to Highland, brightly lit and busy, I felt like one awakening from the beginnings of a bad dream.
The theater was surprisingly small, a dozen rows of folding wooden chairs broken into three sections in a semi-circle ascending from the stage. Larry and I sat third row center, arriving just as the lights began to dim. There were few other people around us. One of them was a woman with a familiar face. She glanced at me and then turned away.
“That’s Irene Gentry,” I said, more to myself than to Larry.
He looked over at her and nodded.
The house lights went out around us and I looked at the stage. A remarkably handsome man stood in the lights holding a piece of paper — it was Edward’s lover, Gaveston. He lifted it toward his eyes and said:
My father, old Edward, is dead. Come quickly
Gaveston, and share the kingdom with your dearest friend, King Edward the Second.
There followed a scene in which Gaveston was approached by two itinerant soldiers who offered him their service. He mockingly refused and one of them cursed him to die at the hands of a soldier. The three of them then stepped into the shadows. Five other men emerged. One was Edward.
“Where’s Zane?” I whispered to Larry.
“The blond.”
I looked. “His hair-” I began, remembering that on the tv show he had had black hair.
“This is natural color,” Larry said. “They made him dye it for the series because Houston is also blond. Or was, rather, twenty years ago.”
“He’s short,” I said. Zane looked no taller than five-seven.
“He wears lifts in front of the camera,” Larry explained. He looked at me and smiled. “Poor Henry, this must be terribly disillusioning.”
Someone shushed us and I returned my attention to the stage. Beneath the glare of the stage lights, Zane’s face lost the magic that the camera conjured up. He was still handsome but his face was oddly immobile; I diagnosed a case of the jitters. He delivered his first line, “I will have Gaveston,” as if requesting his coffee black.
Midway through the play two things were apparent. First, as Larry had warned me, Tom Zane could not act. Second, the cast that surrounded him had been carefully directed to disguise Zane’s disability as much as humanly possible. All except Gaveston. I glanced at my program. The actor playing Gaveston was named Antony Good. While the other actors covered Zane’s fluffed lines, Good stared at Zane in open amazement as he raced through yet another speech, spitting it out like sour milk. The other actors underacted assiduously when playing a scene with Zane, but Good threw himself into the role of Gaveston in open competition with the star. It was a one-sided contest. Good was superb, bringing to the character of Gaveston the pathos of the street outside the theater.
Zane, by contrast, lumbered through these scenes like a wounded animal dragging itself to a burial ground. Sweat soaked his underarms and he sprayed spittle across the stage. Once or twice he simply stopped mid-speech and gasped for air. Then, frowning with concentration, he would begin again, devastating Brecht’s elegant lines. I looked around to Irene Gentry. She sat, motionless, eyes facing the stage.
When the house lights went on at intermission, she was already gone.
Larry looked at me and said, almost irritably, “Whatever possessed him to do this play?”
“It is terrible, isn’t it?”
“No,” Larry replied. “He’s terrible.”
We got up to stretch.
“Gaveston is excellent, though,” I said.
“Mm. It’s a role Tony Good’s played in his life.”
“You know him?”
“Oh, yes,” he said in a curious voice.
“Meaning?”
“Tony sometimes offers his services as an escort to men of a certain age.”
“Have you ever taken him up on it?”
Larry shook his head. “No. I’m going outside to get some air. You coming?”
We went out.
In the first scene of the second half of the play Gaveston was killed. Tom Zane’s performance began to improve at once. In the final scenes, where Edward is dragged from castle to castle alone except for his jailers, Zane was transformed. His delivery was still awkward but the suffering he conveyed was authentic. Not just Zane’s expressions, but the contours of his face and his body changed so that he seemed a different man from the one who first stepped upon the stage. I began to believe that he was Edward the Second.
The culmination of his performance came in the assassination sequence. In the play, Edward has been locked in a cell in London, into which the city’s sewage drops upon him. Drums are pounded to keep him from sleeping. The assassin, Light- born, is let into Edward’s cell.
The scene began in darkness. Slowly, a blue light glimmered from a corner of the stage where a man stood, arms loose at his sides, face tilted upward toward the light. His hair was matted and his body covered with filth. This was Zane. In the flickering blue light it took me a moment to see that, other than a soiled rag that cupped his genitals, he was naked. Zane had a first-class body. He said:
This hole they’ve put me in is a cesspit.
For seven hours the dung of London
Has dropped on me.
A ladder of rope dropped from above the stage and an immense, powerfully muscled black man climbed down. Light- born. At once, Zane accused him of being his murderer. Light- born denied it.
Zane answered, “Your look says death and nothing else.”
