“The Baskin Robbins of Writers.”
Arthur Beckenstein and James Kirkwood met at a gay bar in 1969 and were life partners for the next twenty years. Here, Beckenstein speaks to Alastair Curtis about Kirkwood and the origins of ‘P.S. Your Cat is Dead!’
Article published by The AIDS Plays Project in September 2024.
Above: James Kirkwood with Arthur Beckenstein. Photo courtesy: Arthur Beckenstein.
You were James Kirkwood’s life partner.
I met Jimmy in 1969 at a gay bar when I was 27-years old. I was more than a little intimidated when I met him because he was a published writer, he was movie star handsome, his parents were both movie stars and his friends were all writers and actors. I hadn’t made my mark yet, having recently moved to New York from Hartford, Connecticut. I had been given ‘Good Times/Bad Times’ for Christmas; I devoured it and absolutely loved it. I didn’t mention that fact until the next day, or let on that I knew who he was when I met him.
Tell me what he was like.
He had this inner child. He always seemed so youthful. No matter where he was, or what group of people he was with, he was always the centre of attention.
Perhaps because both his parents were film stars.
They’d both started out as silent screen actors. His father, James Kirkwood Sr, was up for the same parts as John Barrymore. Lila Lee, his mother, played the bride of Rudolph Valentino in 1922. She was seventeen when she married James. He was forty at the time. They were only married four years. Both of them had a drinking problem. He grew up in Hollywood, where one year you might be living in a Beverley Hills mansion, the next year in a cold water flat.
When I first read ‘There Must Be A Pony!’, his 1966 novel, I was struck by how good-natured, funny, compassionate and optimistic his writing is.
Those are all great descriptions of him, especially being optimistic. If someone ever asked him if he wanted to hear the good news or the bad news, he would say I don’t want to hear any bad news, just give me the good news. And he always said, “A sense of humor is essential. If you don’t have one, borrow one, buy one, steal one. You must have a sense of humor to get through life.”
By the age of 11, he’d already experienced money worries, relocation, divorce and the discovery of a dead body. That’s enough to fuel a writer’s career!
All writers work from their experience or people they’ve known. If we were sitting around on a Saturday night, if there were other writers there - Terrence McNally, Edward Albee or Arthur Laurents - and one of them said something interesting, Jimmy would say “I’ve got that line.” Or Terrence would say, “that’s mine!” And it would later appear in one of their books...
Did he ever tell you about the origins of ‘P.S. Your Cat is Dead!’?
Jimmy turned to writing because, with acting, it always depended upon people judging you. He talked about reading for commercials and how ridiculous that could be, like acting out diving into a pool. In this play, the character Jimmy Zoole tells the story of being in a conference room with people from an advertising agency, who asked him to dive onto the conference table, pick up a can, and say “this is the best soda I’ve ever had.” That’s a true story. It was humiliating what they put you through. The rejection made him turn to writing.
And what about Vito?
He was based on a man named Gino Marino, a waiter at a restaurant in Long Island. Jimmy met him and had a little relationship with him. I don’t know much about him, just that he was a tough guy from the other side of the tracks.
Do you have any memories of the play’s premiere in 1975?
We were disappointed in the reviews, to say the least. I don’t think the public was ready for the homosexual overtones in 1975. It came out just a month before ‘A Chorus Line’ and it didn’t have a long run on Broadway. But Jimmy felt strongly about the play. There were a couple of other productions and he was always revising and rewriting it. I designed the logo with the cat for the off-Broadway production. I loved being part of it and was very proud that I could contribute to the production.
The play received some pretty homophobic reviews. In the ‘New York Magazine’, John Simon called it “homosexual wish fulfilment”. He’s vicious about what he calls “the vociferously responding, largely homosexual audience.”
Attitudes were very different in the 70s. I was reading an article this morning about Ian McKellen, who is appearing in a film about a repressed gay theatre critic. It reminded me so much of John Simon. He was a very bitter agent! He gave Jimmy’s play a vicious review. But there were wonderful reviews too. Fabian Bowers called Jimmy “the Baskin Robbins of writers.” That’s an ice cream brand in America, the ultimate ice-cream in 1975.
Kirkwood also led many benefits for HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s.
I remember he was involved with one in the Hamptons, which Elaine Stritch was also a part of. Everybody was trying to raise money for AIDS by putting on variety shows. Elizabeth Taylor was also raising her voice to fight AIDS at the time. Jimmy was sick for only about three months, but it seemed like years. It was endless. He was in hospital all the time. His mind was very sharp, but he’d become paralysed from the waist down. He couldn’t walk. It was a terrible, terrible time. So many people were dying of AIDS. I would sometimes feel guilty if I forgot the names of people who had passed away. You would have loved Jimmy. He was charming and handsome and very witty.