![]() “When she entered the room I realized at once that she was to be for all of my life, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. for she is to me the Danäe of my period, being showered with gold.” ![]() “The beautiful Madame de Pompadour of the period was Daisy Fellowes, dangerous as an albatross this Circe of art, fashion, and literature must be considered to be much more than just the best dressed woman in the world. “He is not a man who desires glamour, and he uses taste, fashion, and décor in a fascinating way, manipulating them as a stockbroker does stocks and shares.”ĭAISY FELLOWES. It stands out not for its accuracy but for its originality.Įven though there are factual issues with Saying Life, Sir Francis's characterizations of those in his circle are mostly accurate (and rather marvelous).ĬECIL BEATON. However, it is one of the strangest memoirs published in the 20th Century. This memoir, published in 1961, was not the financial success he desperately needed. Friends like Cecil Beaton helped out until finally fatigued by his constant drama. His final three decades were characterized by more folly, but he no longer had the necessary funds to bankroll it. In 1938, he lost most of his fortune when the American stockbroker to whom he had given his power of attorney was convicted of engaging in a massive embezzlement scheme.īy the end of World War II, Francis Rose was nearly penniless. The relief from chaos proved to be short-lived. In preparation for his escape, he weaned himself off opium and donated his menagerie to American and Japanese zoos. He spent three years happily touring Southeast Asia until world events intervened, becoming stranded in Peking as result of the Japanese invasion. There’s even a photo of “the mock reliquary containing a lock of pubic hair Steward had kept after his 1926 sexual encounter with the film star Rudolf Valentino” (page number unknown the pages are unnumbered).Following the interlude with the Nazis, Sir Francis fled to the Far East, traveling on a massive yacht with his own private zoo. Martin’s, 1977).Īnd now we have An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward (edited by Justin Spring, with extensive notes: Antinous Press & Elysium Press, 2010), a great big book of drawings (almost all sexual, many pornographic) and sexual photographs of men (some of them showing Steward having sex with them), plus some cards from the detailed records he kept. Toklas to him and combined them with a long memoir, with photographs, in Dear Sammy (St. Steward edited the letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. ![]() (There are several more available as used books, but at exorbitant prices: My Brother, My Self Greek Ways Roman Conquests Boys in Blue The Joy Spot.) Literate porn with a male hustler as its central character. I have four Phil Andros books: $tud (1966), Below the Belt (1982), Different Strokes (1984), Shuttlecock (1992). Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) (a book from which I learned an enormous amount about sex as a kid, starting around age 9 astonishingly, it was available on the shelves of the Reading PA public library and wasn’t stolen or defaced). x) some of the pseudonyms Steward published under: Donald Bishop, Philip Cave, John McAndrews, Phil Sparrow, Philip Sparrow, Ward Stames, D.O.C., Ted Kramer, Biff Thomas, as well as Phil Andros.Īs someone who had sex with an enormous number of men (some of them very famous) and kept records of his encounters, he was a valued source of data for Alfred C. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, the photographer George Platt Lynes and others, he was simply Sammy. To a close circle of artistic friends like Wilder, Cadmus, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. But as the author of gay pulp fiction, he went by Phil Andros and a half-dozen other pseudonyms Hells Angels in Oakland, Calif., who used him as their official tattoo artist, called him Doc Sparrow readers of his articles in underground newspapers and magazines knew him as Ward Stames. The novelist and professor at a Roman Catholic university who was born in 1909 into an austere and puritanical Methodist household in Ohio was Samuel M. ![]() Continuing the pseudonyms theme, I turn to the remarkable character Samuel Steward, the subject of Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), which was nominated for a National Book Award this year (but was aced out by Patti Smith’s touching Just Kids).īack on August 26, the NYT Arts section had a piece (“Sexual Outlaw on the Gay Frontier” by Patricia Cohen) about the book and the man.
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