Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (67 page)

^*
Steward’s father took the Keeley cure for opium several times, a quack cure invented by Dr. Leslie Keeley in 1879 that relied on the injection of “bichloride of gold” to remedy alcohol and narcotic addiction.

^*
With “Pilate’s gesture,” Steward is suggesting that his father had, like Pontius Pilate, “publicly washed his hands” of any responsibility for his son (Matthew 27:24).

^*
The autograph book in which Steward collected celebrity signatures during the period 1926 to 1929 remained with him throughout his life. Distributed among the signatures of his fifty high school classmates are autographs by the stage actor Otis Skinner; the bestselling author Will Durant; the silent film star Rudolph Valentino; the pianist and composer Percy Grainger; the
prima donna assoluta
Mary Garden; the silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle; the Viennese architect and designer Josef Hoffmann; the violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler; the bestselling author-adventurer Richard Halliburton; the coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci; the silent film actress Pauline Lord; Ziegfeld’s “Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips,” Mae Murray; the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Zona Gale; the author and poet Hamlin Garland; the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff; the biographer Emil Ludwig; the jazz orchestra leader Paul Whiteman; the psychologist Alfred Adler; and the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, whom he would meet again in 1937.

^*
The Stud File notes (in code) that Steward performed oral sex on Valentino. He filed the card under the name “Guglielmi” rather than “Valentino,” and his one comment about the encounter (apart from a coded note on Valentino’s penile dimensions) is “Nuf sed.”

^*
Steward’s interviewer never asked how he had attained this prize. In a later, unpublished interview with Jack Fritscher, however, Steward mentioned using a blunt-tipped manicure scissors.

^*
The monstrance is now in a private collection in Rome.

^*
Traubel (1858–1919), the self-described “spirit child” of Whitman, published a nine-volume biography of the poet and was an active executor of his estate. He was fifteen when the two first met.

^*
Doyle (1843–1907) was the confederate army veteran and bus conductor whom Whitman met shortly after the end of the Civil War in Washington, D.C. The two were (in Doyle’s words) “the biggest sort of friends” until Whitman’s death in 1892.

^*
London, 1927.

^*
Best remembered today as a screenwriter, Hecht (1894–1964) began his professional career as a hard-boiled Chicago newspaperman, and his lifelong love of Chicago found its way into his many story collections and novels, which also included
1001 Afternoons in Chicago
(1922),
Fantazius Mallare
(1922),
Gargoyles
(1922),
The Florentine Dagger
(1923),
Tales of Chicago Streets
(1924),
Broken Necks
(1924),
Humpty Dumpty
(1924), and
The Kingdom of Evil
(1924). Steward loved and collected Hecht’s books throughout his life.

^*
Felicien Robs (more commonly, Rops), Belgian symbolist artist and engraver (1833–1898), whose work was often erotic.

^*
Steward notes in the Stud File that he first had reciprocal oral sex with Junior Stewart sometime in 1924, and that they continued to have reciprocal oral sex ten more times. The interruption at the OSU frat house, while not specifically mentioned in the Stud File, is recollected in the SMS
Straight to Hell
interview and also is mentioned in the Phil Andros novel
Shuttlecock
(p. 102).

^*
Definitions of homosexuality vary from culture to culture and period to period. For an intriguing account of the varying ways in which sexual acts have defined sexual identity in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, see George Chauncey,
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (1890–1940)
(New York: Basic Books, 1993).

^*
These stories by Steward, written in his early teens, are in the collection of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research.

^*
Steward’s PhD dissertation explored, tangentially, the probable homosexuality of Cardinal Newman.

^*
Musser converted to Catholicism, became a tertiary of the order of St. Francis, and devoted the remainder of his life to religious work as a lay monk.

^*
“JAPM” is an acronym for “Just Another Poetry Magazine.” In 1930, the two magazines were merged into his
Bozart: The Bi-Monthly Poetry Review
.

^*
Steward is citing a key moment in Huysmans’s
Against the Grain
, in which Des Esseintes is accosted by a boy prostitute and so begins his first homosexual affair: “From this chance encounter there had sprung a mistrustful friendship that somehow lasted several months…never had [Des Esseintes] run such risks, yet never had he known such satisfaction mingled with distress…the recollection of this mutual attachment dominated all the rest.”

^*
Parker Tyler (1904–1974), novelist, poet, and film critic who edited the surrealist magazine
View
. Steward, who had been told by Musser of Musser’s sexual involvement with Tyler and Ford, met both of these raucously effeminate young men but never developed a friendship with either, and later wrote disparagingly (but only in passing) of their collaborative novel
The Young and Evil
.