Every now and then, when I least expect it, I will stumble across a name that for some reason begins to pop up repeatedly, almost uncannily, in the books I’m reading at that moment. Very often it’s a name I am unfamiliar with up until then. Then suddenly there’s no escaping it! Such an occurrence has just happened to me with Emily Vanderbilt, a beautiful and sometimes scandalous figure who crops up in works by or about Thomas Wolfe, E. E. Cummings, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Mercedes de Acosta, Dolly Wilde and Dashiell Hammett, all of which I’ve been dipping my nose into recently. It’s almost as if the hand of fate were poking a finger at me, demanding that I take notice. Well, I have taken notice. Emily Vanderbilt is a fascinating and bewildering creature, an enigma who epitomizes the highs and lows of what Gertrude Stein dubbed “the Lost Generation.” (Emily, above and below, by Arnold Genthe.)

During her glamorous, yet often troubled life, Emily Vanderbilt in fact had many names. Her birth name was Emily O’Neill Davies. She was the daughter of Frederick Martin Davies, a New York banker, broker and noted horseman, who raised his family in a large private house at 20 E. 82nd Street. Her mother, also named Emily O’Neill Davies, was the daughter of Daniel O’Neill, the editor and owner of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. When Daniel O’Neill died in 1877, leaving a fortune valued at $8,000,000, his wife Emma (nee Seely) married his brother, Eugene M. O’Neill, who took over the paper. Some reports describe Emily Vanderbilt as the granddaughter of Eugene O’Neill, but she was not. An 1880 census clearly states that her mother was the “stepdaughter” of Eugene. (Not to be confused with the famous playwright of the same name.)

The Frederick Martin Davies family lived in high style at their posh Manhattan manse. In the 1910 census they are shown to have had ten servants: a parlor maid, waitress, cook, kitchen maid, two chambermaids, two nurses, a laundress and a lady’s maid. Young Emily grew up in a rarefied world of wealth and privilege, summering in Southampton, wintering in Palm Beach, weekending in Newport, and gallivanting as a debutante among the glitterati in Manhattan’s upper crust. It was a life of extreme luxury at the height of the gilded age.

Frederick Martin Davies was the cousin of Bradley and Townsend Martin, and best friend of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. Ironically, Davies died the day before Vanderbilt set sail on the ill-fated Lusitania and lost his life. So it seemed a fitting twist of fate that in a fairy-tale wedding at Grace Church in Manhattan in 1923, Davies’ beautiful young daughter Emily would marry Vanderbilt’s son, William Henry Vanderbilt III (below).

That marriage seemed, at least in the society-mad press, to be a storybook romance. But it did not fare well. They moved to Boston and Oakland Farm in Portsmouth, near Newport, which Vanderbilt had inherited in his father’s will along with $5,000,000. A daughter also named Emily was born in 1924. Three years later, William and Emily split up in a divorce that took only six minutes in court to implement. Emily claimed William had failed to provide. He was rumored to be cruel and over-protective. Some have speculated that he hired detectives to follow his wife who may have been having an affair with a handsome young theatre producer named Sigourney Thayer. In the end, Vanderbilt was granted custody of the child, permitting Emily to see her daughter only three months out of the year. William Vanderbilt III later married Anne Colby, started a bus company in Newport, then went on to become a State Senator, and ultimately Governor of Rhode Island. He died in 1981.

On December 7, 1928, Emily wed Sigourney Thayer (above). An Amherst grad, Thayer was a curious figure in New York circles. His father was William Greenough Thayer, headmaster of St. Mark’s, a tony New England prep school. When they wed, Time quipped that he was a “spasmodic theatrical producer, wartime aviator, Atlantic Monthly poet, socially prominent jokesmith.” Thayer dressed like a dandy and had a showy Proustian mustache. The marriage was a surprise to friends who didn’t think she took the affair that seriously, but perhaps she felt that it would be too big a loss to give up her daughter for a mere youthful indiscretion. She gave legitimacy to the relationship, but the marriage didn’t last. Both agreed it was a mistake. They divorced a year later.

(Above: Aline Bernstein; E. E. Cummings; Thomas Wolfe; Edmund Wilson)

Emily Vanderbilt Thayer led a gay social life in Paris and was a fixture in literary circles. She aspired to be a writer and critic, and surrounded herself with well-known authors. She knew Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and became chummy with dancers from the Ballets Russes. At a party hosted by Muriel Draper, she first encountered E. E. Cummings. He found her, according to one source, “blonde, statuesque, charming and gorgeous.” They had a two-month affair. She soon fell for Thomas Wolfe whom she met through Aline Bernstein. Emily “tried to make him,” according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who followed her comings and goings with a fascinated eye. She would write Wolfe urgent notes written in a childish scrawl, begging to see him. Wolfe reportedly was astonished by her beauty and seductive charms, but was wary of her insolence and sexually aggressive ways. He found her “fundamentally trivial.” Wolfe’s biographer David H. Donald says he was “disgusted by her systematic and rather dogged experience of the life of degeneracy and refused to join her in smoking opium.” He detested her gigolo Raymonde, “a bad Valentino.” Worse, she paraded Wolfe among her friends as someone “madly in love with her.” He fled to Rouen. Wolfe eventually used Emily as the basis of the character Amy Carlton in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again. Fitzgerald praised his description of her “cracked grey eyes,” and “exactly reproduced speech,” as “simply perfect.”

Emily didn’t limit her affairs to male writers. She was drawn to the lesbian demimonde, dominated by Natalie Barney and Djuna Barnes. According to Zelda Fitzgerald biographer Sally Cline, Emily was most likely bisexual. She was close friends with Dolly Wilde, the notorious niece of Oscar Wilde, as well as Mercedes de Acosta, another social butterfly who achieved fame by her dalliances with great writers and movie stars.  I found a ship record for the two of them traveling together aboard the Olympic from France to New York in 1929. On it, Emily gave her birthday as August 10, 1903. Mercedes claimed to be 30, born in 1899, although she was actually six years older. At the time Emily maintained a home at 176 E. 75th St.

(Above: Djuna Barnes and Natalie Barney; Zelda Fitzgerald; Mercedes de Acosta; Dolly Wilde)

During this period, as the Jazz Age reached a fever pitch before the inevitable plunge, Emily was swept up in the decadence of cafe society, flouncing around with a bunch of Hemingwayesque expatriate socialites who’d come to live it up in Europe. Zelda Fitzgerald said that she “was sorry for her. She seemed so muddled and lost in the grist mill.” Scott, hoping to bolster Zelda’s spirits, who was jealous of Emily’s sophisticated allure, dismissed her in a letter as someone who “could not dance a Brahms waltz, or write a story. She can only gossip and ride in the Bois and have pretty hair curling up instead of thinking.” Scott may have been projecting his own sense of insecurity among the very rich. Thomas Wolfe considered him a social climber. Fitzgerald, despite his misgivings about her, had an affair with Emily in 1930, when Zelda was in Prangins recovering from a breakdown. But it didn’t amount to much. Fitzgerald later wrote that she “was too big a poisson for me.” He remained mesmerized by her, however. Both he and Zelda kept clippings about her in their scrapbooks.

Emily in fact did have higher dreams than just being a transatlantic party girl. She wrote books and articles but never tried to get them published. Asked if she would ever write for publication, she coyly answered: “I will tell you in twenty years.” In 1929 it was announced with fanfare that she would become a reader for the publishing firm Boni & Liveright (one of the foremost houses in publishing at that time). Its founder Horace Liveright was a bon vivant and ladies man who managed to lure the leading lights of the literary firmament to his doors. Eugene O’Neill, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Dreiser were all published by him. Emily relished her role as reader and used her contacts to aid Liveright. Lillian Hellman first took note of Emily Vanderbilt at the 1934 opening night party of her first play, The Children’s Hour, which was about a lesbian scandal in a girl’s school. Hellman described her as a “a handsome, boyish-looking woman” seen at every literary cocktail party. Judging by photos of Emily taken by Carl Van Vechten in this period (below), she was still striking looking, but perhaps not as innocently radiant as before.

Emily’s interest in literature was serious and well-informed. It might explain her marriage in 1933 to the writer Raoul Whitfield. One of the big names at Black Mask magazine, a pulp that published Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and defined the “hard-boiled” genre, Whitfield was a former aviator who fought in World War One and claimed to have won the Croix de Guerre for distinguished service, although some critics have suggested that such an honor was more likely a “flight of imagination.” One biographer described him as sporting a “cane, elegant leather gloves and a silk scarf around his neck, looking aloof and imperious. His mustache is carefully trimmed, his dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle. Every inch the gentleman.” (Below, Raoul Whitfield from Argosy).

Whitfield’s family traveled abroad when he was young and he was raised partly in the Philippines. His middle name was Falconia but he used the name Raoul Fauconnier Whitfield when describing himself. He was something of a mystery himself, and remains so to his most devoted fans. Throughout his life he held many odd jobs, including fire fighter in the Sierra Madre range, a bond salesman in Pittsburgh, and a newspaper reporter. He even tried his hand at acting in silent films. Widely considered one of the top detective story writers, he was a close friend of Dashiell Hammett’s. Hammett later had an intimate affair with Whitfield’s first wife Prudence Smith after the couple’s divorce.

Emily saw in Raoul a way out of her wayward existence in cafe society. She admired his writing ability and wrote a play with him called Mistral. But the marriage was tempestuous from the start. By this time she was drinking heavily and using sleeping pills at night. She became increasingly moody and difficult. Today she might be diagnosed as suffering from manic depression. Yet at first the marriage seemed successful. They bought a rambling spread in Las Vegas, New Mexico which they called “Dead Horse Ranch.” Here they raised cattle, built a polo field, a golf course and entertained friends from both coasts on a lavish scale. But the union soon devolved into jealous rages and accusations of infidelity. Raoul was allegedly having an affair with a local barmaid named Lois Bell.

The final chapter in Emily’s life reads like the climax of one of Whitfield’s violent novels. Shortly after starting divorce action against Whitfield, Emily was found shot to death in her bedroom at the ranch on May 24, 1935. A hastily assembled coroner’s jury found that she had committed suicide, despite the fact that the gunshot wound was on her lower left side and she was right-handed. The bullet, from a Colt .45, passed through her lungs and hit her heart. The New York Times reported that she had become “despondent after a conference yesterday on a divorce suit.” Her friend Mrs. Virginia Haydon Stone was with her earlier but did not spend the night. Emily retired at 11 PM. “The body, clothed in pajamas and a dressing robe, was found at 7:30 o’clock [the next] morning, on the bed, a revolver clutched in the outflung right hand.” The body was discovered by an employee at the ranch. But almost immediately speculation grew that someone had killed Emily Vanderbilt Whitfield. Lillian Hellman did not mince words when she wrote later: “she was murdered… and neither the mystery story expert nor the police ever found the murderer.” (Below: Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett.)

Whitfield was a prime suspect, even though he had proof that he was in California at the time of Emily’s death. Some suspected he hired someone to kill her. For the rest of his life he lived under a cloud. He inherited a small fortune, then married Lois Bell and moved about constantly, almost frenetically. He went through the money like a dose of salts. Adding to the tragedy was the suicide of Lois Bell, who leaped from a hotel window in San Francisco in 1943. Raoul Whitfield’s health deteriorated. He had tuberculosis. Hammett, in a typically generous gesture, asked Hellman to send him a check for $500. Whitfield died, broke, in a military hospital on January 24, 1945.

Not surprisingly, the story of Emily Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield has fascinated writers for 75 years. Recently a novel based on the case has been published which delves into the circumstances of her death and offers a very dramatic, yet plausible solution. Written by Walter Satterthwait, the novel is Dead Horse. I won’t give away the ending, but it is utterly convincing. You can read more about it at the author’s website: www.satterthwait.com.

As for Emily’s daughter, she was raised by her father William H. Vanderbilt. Nicknamed “Paddy,” she married Jeptha Wade, an attorney, originally from Cleveland. They lived in Boston. He died a year ago August at 83.  She is a Life Member Emeritus of the MIT Corporation, and President of MITS, Inc.

Emily O’Neill Davies Vanderbilt Thayer Whitfield may have been a character of many names, with three troubled marriages, but she was not easily categorized. As a debutante, she enchanted high society. As an heiress, she married “well” only to find that fairy-tale romances are bittersweet. As a mother, she was devoted to her daughter despite years of separation. But she was also a woman who defied the strictures of her age, became a respected devotee of the finest authors of her day, and ended as an iconoclast who lived and loved on her own terms. Whether tragic muse or literary butterfly, her legacy will haunt us for generations to come.

Starved for some decent (or even indecent) reading material, I recently picked up a weathered old paperback copy of The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case by one of my favorite writers, George Baxt. Re-reading Tallulah’s wild exploits as a celebrity sleuth during the heyday of the McCarthy witch hunt (with cameos by Lillian Hellman and Patsy Kelly), I couldn’t stop laughing. The plot may not make much sense, and the prose is not exactly Proustian, but Baxt never fails to amuse and keep you turning pages. I wrote a blog piece on Baxt last December. Virtually forgotten today, he had at one time been a highly successful writer. I was curious to know more about him and why he had fallen out of favor. So I dug around and wrote this tribute to him. Since I am currently on hiatus, at work on a novel myself (and struggling mightily), I thought it would be fun (and easier for me) to revisit this article in case anyone out there missed it. Here it is again, in a slightly edited version.

The Mystery of George Baxt

In lofty discussions of pioneering gay writers in fancy literary journals, the name George Baxt rarely comes up. But Baxt, a former agent turned writer, was far more influential than he is given credit for. His work ranges from theater and film (he wrote the screenplay for the cult fright flick Circus of Horrors) to a series of popular mystery novels, including the ground-breaking pre-Stonewall classic: A Queer Kind of Death.

George Baxt was a true character, the kind of guy you’d love to have at a party, but would hate to have on your bad side. He had a wicked tongue, spitting out barbs like watermelon seeds. I never met the man. But I’d heard over the years about his enormous wealth of knowledge about the theater, old talkies and movie stars. He knew where all the bodies were buried and was never shy about spilling the dirt.  Reading through his hilarious books, of which I have a small collection, I got to thinking. Why isn’t George Baxt better known? It’s a riddle I tried to solve the only way I know how, by reading everything I could find about him.

I first encountered the name George Baxt when I stumbled upon a copy of a strange little book called A Queer Kind of Death. Published in 1966, it featured a campy gay detective, and a black one to boot: Pharoah Love. (The spelling mistake in his first name was deliberate). Pharoah Love was an audacious “cool cat” who loved jazz, his swanky Jaguar and sexy white boys. Campy, outrageous, arch and far-fetched, the novel created a sensation. This was before gay liberation and very few “legitimate” books were published with openly homosexual heroes. (For the record, there had been gay detectives in previous works, most notably, Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and The Gay Detective by Lou Rand in 1960.) Baxt was shocked by the response. He hadn’t thought it was that unusual. He was basically writing about people and the life he knew in Greenwich Village and the rest of Manhattan. But the book struck a Pre-Stonewall nerve. It was hip, irreverent and sexy. Anthony Boucher of the New York Times gave it a rave review, noting that the salty tale “deals with a Manhattan subculture wholly devoid of ethics or morality. Staid readers may well find it shocking, but it is beautifully plotted and written with elegance and wit.” Rarely has a first book found such a devoted audience. The love affair with Pharoah Love continued. Baxt followed Queer up with two Love sequels: Swing Low, Sweet Harriet; and Topsy and Evil.

Later, I re-encountered Baxt’s work when I dove into The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, the debut title in a series of mysteries he concocted in the 80s, using celebrity sleuths. He commandeered Noel Coward, George Raft, Tallulah Bankhead, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and even Alfred Hitchcock into his series, penning riotous, madcap capers with each of them that are wickedly clever and entertaining.

For my money, none is funnier than the first one. The Dorothy Parker Murder Case is a marvel to read. The writing is fluid. Self-assured. Totally committed. And absolutely hilarious. It’s as if Baxt were channeling Dorothy Parker herself which is no small accomplishment. It opens with a harrowing bit of black comedy. Dorothy Parker is attempting suicide in the john of her hotel room after ordering lunch. “After slitting her wrists, Dorothy Parker sat in the bathroom waiting patiently to be rescued.” That’s all he needed to say. It sets the wry, but touching tone for the entire tale. I don’t think anyone has written a better celebrity sleuth mystery before or after. But Baxt had the inside scoop. He was always writing about people he knew personally. He was a familiar figure in the worlds he wrote about. The more I delved into his lively, but checkered past, the more I realized where he got the raw material for his scandalous books.

Like his most popular character Pharoah Love, Baxt was a fabulous creature of many talents and a cat of nine lives. But he also shied away from revealing interviews. Armed with very little to go on, I set out to see if I could fit together a few shreds of his life story. There’s no entry on him in Wikipedia, which is odd since he wrote over two dozen books and scripted numerous films. His name appears on IMDB as the screenwriter of such horror hits as the aforementioned Circus of Horrors and Horror Hotel. But there is little or no biographical information given.

Luckily I found an obituary for him written in England. (Except for a few isolated notices, the American media failed to mention his passing in 2003.) The obit focuses primarily on his film work in that country. Baxt had moved to England in the 50s and wrote most of his scripts there. Variety had posted a rather perfunctory obituary, again primarily because of the screen credits. But there was scant material for a researcher to rely on to find out where he came from and who his family was.

His book jackets provided a few more intriguing details. On the back of A Queer Kind of Death he wrote: “George Baxt was a dropout. He left Brooklyn College to pursue a writing career.” In another, he said he was born on a kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York. So taking that as a starting point, I did a little census-scouring and found that he was born in Brooklyn on June 11, 1923, the son of Samuel Baxt, an operator at a clothing manufacturer who came over from Minsk, Russia around 1906. George’s mother was Lena Steinhouse whom Samuel had married in 1910. George had several siblings, a brother Morris, a sister Esther and a sister Juliette. They lived on Dumont Avenue. Nearby is an Isidore Baxt whom I presume is his uncle. He also came over from Minsk in 1906. By 1930, George’s father had opened his own grocery store on Avenue L.

Baxt joked later that he had an active sex life as a boy in Brooklyn. He was not shy. One commentator quoted him as saying he “regarded gay sex among the Irish, Italians, and Jews as normal.” Baxt settled down “with a boyfriend in high school, although he claimed to also have sex with teachers, particularly those in Physical Education.” He was probably just being his old provocative self. But it does indicate that Baxt was a rebel with a cause early on. He claimed in yet another wry author’s note that his first published piece appeared in the Brooklyn Times-Union when he was nine. He was paid a couple of dollars for it and got bit by the freelance writer’s bug. He scribbled articles in high school and won the Columbia Scholastic Press Award. He sold his first radio script at 18.

Baxt went to City College and Brooklyn College before dropping out to pursue his passion for the theatre. His first venture was a musical play called Pity the Kiddies which was performed in 1942 for one night only at the Barbizon Plaza’s concert hall. In March that year he performed as an actor in Theatre of the Soul by Nicolai Evreinov, right, staged by his friend William Boyman.

Baxt claimed to have been in the armed services which might explain the gap in his career credits from 1942 to 1945. But I have not found any records of such service. He also claimed to have been a “propagandist for Voice of America.” In 1946, he wrote a one-act play Laughter of Ladies that was produced at a theatre showcase on 47th Street. A year later he penned a comedy, Alex in Wonderland, about a Jewish family in Canarsie. Boyman announced that Molly Picon, the Yiddish actress, was set to star in it, but it never seems to have gotten off the ground. Later he changed the title to Make Momma Happy and it made the rounds. At one point Sidney Lumet (son of the famous Yiddish actor Baruch Lumet, and later film director) was slated to appear in it. In 1948 Blanche Yurka announced she was to star in Laughter of Ladies. Then Estelle Winwood was added to the cast. (In his Tallulah Bankhead book, which features Winwood, Baxt makes it clear that Yurka was fired because the producers and directors found her wanting. He also makes the outlandish claim she was a murderess, but that’s another story.) The play failed to get picked up. It was eventually staged with Grayson Hall (of Dark Shadows fame) in a New Jersey summer theater in 1953, and went on tour to Hartford and Philadelphia in the fall. It never appears to have made it to Broadway. (Baxt actors: Dullea, Picon, Yurka and Zachary Scott, below).

Obviously George Baxt was having a hard time gate-crashing the Great White Way. He often got pocket change by pitching stories to Walter Winchell. “Always on the hunt for new clients,” his UK obit says, “he would ride in the elevator in the Algonquin Hotel to find out who was staying there.” This experience would serve him well later in his Dorothy Parker novel. As an actor’s agent, he was not always a good judge of up-and-coming talent. He admitted to throwing a young James Dean out of his office because the kid needed a shower!

Later Baxt found side work as a disc jockey to make ends meet. An announcement in the Times in 1953 says he had signed a rental lease at 449 E. 58th Street. (Apparently there was nothing odd in those days about publishing one’s address in the paper). Judging by the tony East Side address, he couldn’t have been doing too poorly.

In the mid-50s he segued from radio into television. He scouted talent for The Big Show, helping Tallulah Bankhead land a lucrative gig on there. By 1955 he penned a comedy for NBC called The Way Things Happen starring Peter Lind Hayes. He made a bigger splash with a David Susskind production of Mrs. Miniver for TV, starring Maureen O’Hara in the Greer Garson role. Keir Dullea and Juliette Mills co-starred.

In 1956 he returned to the theater, writing a sketch for Ben Bagley’s show The Littlest Revue at the Phoenix. But nothing came from that. His dream of making his name on the stage came to a crashing halt.

Faced with the distressing fact that he couldn’t catch a break on Broadway, and that several of his clients were blacklisted as Red sympathizers, Baxt escaped to England, and accepted an offer from producer Hannah Weinstein to work on the British TV series Sword of Freedom. “I went to England on a three-month contract and stayed five years,” he later said. The show starred Edmund Purdom, of The Student Prince fame, as an artist and freedom fighter in Florence during the Renaissance. “A lot of later famous people starred,” Baxt quipped.  “Joan Plowright played Mona Lisa. I wrote 10 of the 39 episodes. I used to call it ‘The Sword of Boredom.’”

Eager for a change, Baxt began writing horror films for British producers, and struck gold. Circus of Horrors was cited by the New York Times as “the crispest, handsomest and most stylish movie shocker in a long time.” But horror was not all Baxt was up to. One of his niftiest flicks was Payroll, a taut gangster film, featuring Beckett actress Billie Whitelaw.

In 1961, Baxt wrote the eerie thriller Shadow of the Cat, about a fierce feline seeking revenge on those who murdered its mistress. Creating an aura of suspense, director John Gilling filmed it entirely from a cat’s-eye view. Other credits include Burn, Witch, Burn. Not surprisingly, Baxt also had a hand in the camp classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes starring Vincent Price. Although uncredited, Baxt is said to have come up with the now-famous device of having Phibes rise out of the floor playing his ghoulish pipe organ.

Perhaps longing for his show biz roots, or the gay life of Manhattan, Baxt of The Scarlet Pimpernel returned to Amerca in the early 60s. He landed a plum assignment, writing a new adaptation for CBS. Starring Maureen O’Hara, Zachary Scott and Michael Rennie, it was another David Susskind hit. The Times called it “exciting and richly mounted.” (At left, a pulp Pimpernel released at the time of Baxt’s adaptation on TV.)

He collaborated on a new suspense series My Son, the Detective that was probably too camp for its own good. He also wrote episodes of The Defenders. In 1963 Broadway beckoned anew. Judy Holliday was set to play in Baxt’s latest play, Not in Her Stars, with Martin Gabel. But nothing materialized. Gabel went on to act in Marnie instead. Then in 1964 the play was revived. Nancy Walker the comedian was slated to direct. Jane Wyman hoped to bring it to Broadway with co-star Anita Louise. Alas, it too, like Phibes’s organ, was a mere pipe dream.

No doubt these repeated failures broke Baxt’s spirit. He abandoned the stage completely. For two years he seems to have done nothing, or so reports in the Times indicate. Two years of silence. But Baxt broke that silence with his outspoken first novel, A Queer Kind of Death and his career took a whole new turn. He wrote the two Love sequels, then launched a new series of “wild, wacky, and weird” mysteries featuring detective Max Van Larsen in such farcical fare as A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures. Among Baxt’s other books are The Affair at Royalties (1971) and Burning Sappho (1972).

In 1972 he returned to the silver screen to write Tower of Evil (aka) Horror on Snape Island, based on his novel of the same name. He did not always have the Midas Touch when it came to books. His 1979 novel, The Neon Graveyard, a scathing send-up of Hollywood, was panned by Newgate Callendar in the Crime Books review section at the Times. That proved to be one of the few bad notices he ever got. Even the great doyenne of mysteries, Ruth Rendell, who is not known for dispensing superlatives with ease, described Baxt as “brilliant and hilarious,” adding, “I love reading George Baxt.”

Baxt caught his breath and dreamed up the celebrity sleuth series which put him back at the top of his game. He even wrote himself into a few, depicting a character named George Baxt. It was his own Hitchcock moment. He continued to write until the 1990s. According to Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold, who wrote about Baxt and interviewed him when the latter was living in Los Angeles, Baxt was very proud that the clever epigrams in the Dorothy Parker volume were all his own creation. “He told me that the people who made Mrs Parker & The Vicious Circle,” Feingold recalls, “had tried to get him to share the historical basis for the lines he wrote so they could use them in the script.  He said, ‘I invented them and if you want to use them, you’ll have to pay me!’”

Towards the end of his career, he was wooed back into writing again about Pharoah Love, his most popular creation, whom he’d killed off in Topsy & Evil. He penned two “sequels,” A Queer Kind of Love and A Queer Kind of Umbrella, set in Chinatown and using a second Pharoah Love character. But they did little to revive interest in him or his earlier work. By then his accomplishment in writing successful gay mysteries was overshadowed by the impact of Joseph Hansen and his Brandstetter mysteries which were more in the traditional hard-boiled vein and much more accessible to a wider audience. Most people I’ve talked to who are interested in vintage gay literature (and believe me, it’s a vanishing breed) have never even heard of George Baxt. He died at the age of 80 in 2003. Typically the New York Times didn’t even bother to write him an obituary even though he had been one of their favorite authors.

I wish I had met George Baxt. Maybe somewhere along the line I did, but didn’t know it. Although from what I’ve read that sounds hard to do. Journalist Tom Vallance once described meeting Baxt: “I had lunch with Baxt just once, several years ago in New York, and found him wonderful company with great zest and a rich fund of anecdotes. He could also be caustic, and he had been known over the years to have alienated some of his friends. His family described him as ‘outrageous and curmudgeonly, a complaining, perpetual naysayer’, but added that he always remembered to phone on birthdays and give presents to the children.”

I can see Baxt as a doting crotchety uncle. But one also gets the sense reading about George Baxt that he was pretty much a loner. On one book jacket he described himself as “a collector of film and theatre books [who] sits up till all hours for old movies on television.” He said his best friend was his VCR. Clive Hirschhorn, author of The Warner Brothers Story, recalled to Vallance that Baxt’s “knowledge of movies was truly vast — he could name all the girls who dance on the aeroplane wings in Flying Down to Rio!”

While there is not much else about George Baxt online or elsewhere, he is mentioned in a fun book of recollections by Wendy Werris called An Alphabetical Life. In it she describes a luncheon at Pete’s Tavern in Manhattan in 1986 when she first met him. “Baxt was a rather small man in his mid-sixties, plump yet graceful and with thinning gray hair. Although I was friends with several gay men at that time, I had never met such a flamboyant queen as he. If you can imagine a swish, fey and girlish Phil Silvers, you’ll have a picture of George Baxt. He was hilarious and irreverent. He batted his eyelashes to make a point when telling a dirty joke. His Brooklyn accent was delicious, and he had stories to tell about every great star from the Golden Age of Hollywood and beyond. You never heard dirt dished until you heard it from the mouth of George Baxt.”

Werris goes on to tell some sizzling anecdotes involving Sal Mineo and what nasty things Baxt wishes Gidget had done in her movies besides just going to Rome and Hawaii. In just a few snippets of conversation, Werris captures the ribald spirit of the man. It’s the same priceless humor you can enjoy simply by reading any of George Baxt’s campy books or seeing one of his thrilling movies.

Make that “Song of the Loon.”

Thanks for checking in. I’m on hiatus for a few days while I am on a writing retreat in Maine. An old college friend has kindly offered me his cabin. I need the quiet and solitude in order to make a dent in my work. And the ocean and mountain views are breathtaking. It’s the perfect combination.

I might find time to post an update or to re-post an older story that is languishing unnoticed in the archives. But until then, please enjoy the current offerings. You can always click on the categories buttons, at right, to sample some of the different selections. Or you can browse by month or year, above.

Right now, I’m sitting back and just enjoying the spectacular weather. And the freedom from earthly cares. (If you discount my having to cook for myself.)

Later…