GLR November-December 2024

the boyishly handsome Campbell, born in 1922, had privileged beginnings, having grown up in New Jersey as the son of the owner of Magnus Chemical Co., a manufacturing company that made detergents and cleaning products. He attended the Kent School in Connecticut and then went to Princeton on the Army’s student deferment plan, where he became passionate about acting and literature. Deciding not to finish Princeton in his final year and declining to go into the family business, Campbell arrived in New York City hoping to become an actor. In the 1940s and ‘50s, he got small roles in several major Broadway productions, including Crime and Punishment , Richard III , Cyrano de Berg erac , and A Streetcar Named Desire . During his modest acting career, he performed alongside Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, Jessica Tandy, Lillian Gish, Tallulah Bankhead, José Ferrer, and Lois Smith. He was also in a few films and TV shows of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Always prone to stage fright, Campbell eventually stopped acting in the late 1950s and turned to writing profiles for Harper’s Magazine on subjects such as Nora Joyce, E. M. Forster, and his friends Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. He also worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker (including on its serialization of In Cold Blood ). He occasionally wrote unsigned book reviews. He also wrote the privately published B:Twenty Nine Letters from Coconut Grove , chronicling his time in a pre Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire with Tallulah Bankhead. From that book: “Miss Bankhead arrived dressed in tan slacks. She was dragging a lion cub on a leash. ... ‘Who’s this?’ she asked the stage manager, pointing at me. ‘He’s going

La Cosa con Plumas When I started calling myself a man, I first thought teakwood, tobacco, mahogany, whiskey, ash, and smoke— before I found me in my soft-petaled citrus, cinnamon and pastels, fuchsia and leather heels, la cosa con plumas.

M ATEO A CUÑA

to play the cloak-room attendant.’ ‘Oh my God, he’s a child! Darling, excuse me,’ she said, coming up to me.” In any case, after that first meeting at Paul Cadmus’ studio, which was seemingly a case of love at first sight, Campbell and Windham were together for 45 years and lived primarily in a rent-controlled, two-story apartment on Central Park South. W INDHAMAND W ILLIAMS W HILE Windham’s literary output did not achieve the level of commercial success or critical acclaim that many of his friends had achieved, a few of his books were praised by some critics. Many featured LGBT characters, gay themes, and explicit sit uations. His first novel, The Dog Star , published in 1950, cen ters on a young Southern man who’s haunted by the suicide of his best friend at reform school. Despite a positive critical re sponse, particularly in England, and praise from Thomas Mann and André Gide, the novel found little success in the U.S. A subsequent novel, The Hero Continues (1960), which was based on the life of Tennessee Williams, was about a Broadway playwright seduced by success. That same year, Windham re ceived a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction and published The Warm Country , which featured an introduction by Forster. It was a collection of seventeen short stories, most of which had originally been published outside the U.S. Two of the stories, “The Warm Country” and “Servants with Torches,” treated ho mosexuality both openly and as a hidden subtext. He also pub lished a series of recollections in The New Yorker about his Depression-era youth in Georgia. The collected stories later be came his highly regarded 1964 autobiography, Emblems of Con duct . It contained a blurb by his close friend Truman Capote, who wrote: “A writer of admirable quality, and one long de served of a larger audience.” His 1955 novel TwoPeople was about a love affair between a middle-aged New York stockbroker named Forrest whose wife has left him and a seventeen-year-old Italian boy in Rome. “Love’s power is that it lets you live outside your own body,” says Forrest. “It is present in affection’s most immaterial man ifestations, in the knowledge that your thoughts contain another person, and that another person has you in his mind. Its biolog ical end is the creation of a new body, and because of this it has been taught that the love between men should remain chaste. But life is not so clearly defined.” The book was savaged by critics and failed commercially. Over the next 25 years, due in no small part to Campbell’s efforts, Windham’s subsequent books were private editions, published by Stamperia Valdonega in Verona, Italy, several of which were eventually picked up by mainstream publishers in the U.S.

Carl Van Vechten. Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, 1955.

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