The iconic L.A. writer John Rechy has just published a memoir, "About My Life and the Kept Woman," and he wants to make clear right away that he made stuff up.
"I consider writers a hierarchy of liars," Rechy said on a recent afternoon, "and the autobiographer is the biggest liar of all."
He was sitting in the dining room of the Beachwood Canyon home he shares with Michael Snyder, a movie producer and his partner of more than 20 years, surrounded by luminous black-and-white portraits of Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Now 76, Rechy remains best known for the 1963 novel "City of Night," a semiautobiographical window into the world of gay street hustling that has influenced artists as diverse as Jim Morrison, David Hockney and Gus Van Sant, who has long wanted to make it into a movie. ("Maybe I should talk to John about that again," Van Sant wrote in an e-mail, calling the book "an American masterpiece.")
Still, if "City of Night" remains a classic of the underground and his 11 other novels have drawn steady critical attention, Rechy feels he has never been given his due by the larger literary world. In his view, he occupies a literary gay ghetto.
Perhaps his turn to a nonfictional form in "About My Life," which has received strong early reviews, will change that -- as long as no one expects that he's told the truth, in this era of almost constant alarm over the factual basis of memoirs.
"This is the closest I have ever written with an adherence on antecedent," Rechy said of the book that begins in El Paso, Texas, when he is a boy. "But the pretense that it's all truth to me is offensive." He gestured to a photograph hanging above the fireplace. "We say that's Joan Crawford, but it's not! It's a face, re-created by light. Nobody ever looked like that in reality, but who could say that it's faked? No, that is itself now; it has its own identity, its own reality."
Rechy's fascination with glamour and artifice started early, when, as a first-generation Mexican American in a segregated border town that was "poor, drab and ugly," he encountered a woman who would come to haunt his imagination and symbolize the freedom and courage to be true to oneself (something Rechy, "outlaw" stance notwithstanding, didn't fully achieve until middle age). She was Marisa Guzman, the scandalous "Kept Woman" of the book's title, and she touched Rechy's life at the wedding of his sister Olga and Guzman's brother Luis. The mistress of one of Mexico's most powerful men, she had come to El Paso for the occasion despite her father's threats to kill her if she did, and this defiant act took on mythical status in Rechy's memory, particularly after his mother, whom he adored, defended her amid nasty gossip.
In one passage he describes seeing her, sitting by herself at the reception, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a veil and smoking a cigarette, her lips "a bold slash of crimson": "It had to be her. No one else would look like that, not in El Paso, not in the world that I knew. . . . The kept woman challenged the drabness of the room, splashed it with a grandeur it had never possessed, not even when new. . . . I was sure then that never again would I glimpse a creation as spectacular as the one my eyes, dry from staring, remained fixed on."
That was the only time Rechy ever saw the kept woman, and the singular memory is woven through the narrative of "About My Life" like the refrain of a song, popping up at pivotal moments: for instance, the time he announced his Mexican heritage to an openly bigoted woman; or when he was fired from his job editing his small college newspaper because he and his writing were perceived as "strange"; or the time, on leave from the Army during the Korean War, that he invited a man back to his Paris hotel room but immediately told him he couldn't stay; or the night a fellow hustler in Los Angeles slept on his floor while he lay awake in bed, both of them unable to admit to being "queer."
His response: a guffaw
Rechy acknowledged that at these crucial moments of his life, he may or may not actually have thought of Marisa Guzman. "But I had to give it form. Otherwise it's as meaningless as life itself." He added, "Sometimes it's necessary to invent what isn't there in order to clarify what is."
And that evidently goes for entire scenes, one of which is a climactic moment of the book that ties things together just a touch too neatly. Asked point-blank if the moment actually happened, Rechy guffawed. "No! But it should have happened. And so, because it should have happened, here it does." He added, "I think it's one of the best scenes I've ever written."
As if to further confuse matters, Rechy noted that he has been working for the past 20 years on another book, called "Autobiography: A Novel." "Just the title conveys my thinking. Parts of ['About My Life'] would have been part of that, but it started assuming its own form."
