As so often happens when the pendulum swings, it swings the old ways right out of the ballpark. The butch-femme dichotomy was rejected altogether for a while, replaced with more egalitarian liaisons. But it always exerted a tug on the heart, propelled by the sheer charisma of the archetypal bulldyke: independent, sensual, provocative, and more than a little dangerous. Today, among young women, it seems to have a place again, as long as it is recognized as a choice. But when Laura met Beebo in that lesbian bar called The Cellar all those years ago, both women were already locked into the paradigm. Laura was feminine in the traditional way. Her defenses, her fear of emotional entanglement, quickly melted under the laser of Beebo’s sexual focus. And on her side, Beebo was intrigued by Laura’s beguiling femaleness.
I knew of no other way to write about them. Interestingly, I had tried other things. After Odd Girl Out, my first book, was published, I completed about a hundred pages of what was to be the second book for Fawcett Publications. They were the publishers of the Gold Medal Series, under whose imprint all my books were originally published. The editor, Dick Carroll, saw those pages and hated them. I was trying to “go straight,” thinking it would be easier to face friends and family as an author with at least one conventional romance under my writer’s belt. But Dick discerned at once that, whatever the merits of the plot, I didn’t even like my characters; it was not possible to care how their lives turned out. They did not, as good characters must, talk to me at all.
Once again, he told me what he had told me at the beginning, when I was trying to bring Odd Girl Out to life: “Go back to the people you love and breathe some life into them.” Thus was born the idea of developing a series and making some of the characters ongoing. I had left Beth behind in the first book to marry the college man who loved her. But I had put Laura on the train out of her college town with vague aspirations for a new life somewhere where she could be who she really was. After a blow-up with her difficult father, Merrill Landon, she decamped for New York. But whom would she meet there and what would she do?
I had been reading everything I could get my hands on in the two years or so between Odd Girl Out and I Am a Woman, trying to encompass the whole wonderful, alarming, irresistible idea of women together. I had learned the word lesbian. I had learned about butches and femmes. In travel books, I had discovered that mythical hamlet, Manhattan’s own Brigadoon, Greenwich Village. I was thoroughly enchanted. But something was missing: I had Laura, my heroine, but I was lacking a hero. The idea of one had been forming out of the mists in my mind during those two years. But it would take the perfect name to bring her to life.
Before that could happen, I had to do some “field work” and get to know my chosen territory. Living first in Philadelphia, where it was easy to get to New York, and later in Southern California, where it was not, I nevertheless made my authorial pilgrimages to Greenwich Village. With the help of friends, most notably Marijane Meaker and Sandra Scoppetone, wonderful writers themselves, I went exploring and found the haunts of Beebo Brinker: the little brownstones, the specialty shops, the crooked streets, and the wonderful, slightly trashy, and wholly mesmerizing women’s bars, replete with their full complement of admiring “johns,” tucked into the nooks of the Village.
By the time the Naiad editions were settling into middle age, somewhere in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I began to realize how many women had taken Beebo and Laura to their hearts. In the most unexpected places, I found references to them: in a poem by Joan Nestle, an essay of Kate Millett’s, Audre Lorde’s autobiography; in the wrenching life story of Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s daughter; in college courses, master’s theses, articles both scholarly and popular; and ultimately, in communications from women and even some men readers from many parts of the globe. It leaves me wondering what sort of stories I would have produced in the ‘50s and ‘60s, had I known then that my work, seemingly so safe from formal scrutiny, would be discussed and analyzed by future generations. The writing might have been better, but it certainly would have been more guarded and self-conscious.
The same critical scorn that deemed the work of us paperback writers unworthy of attention had also seemed to guarantee us privacy, the chance to explore and experiment, to say the unsayable, and to fade away peacefully from the publishing scene when the paperbacks finished their popular run. But some of us didn’t fade. After all these years, it is a rare blessing to have the public’s attention and support, but a mixed blessing all the same, just because of the disconcerting attention. There are times when I wish I had done enough living back then, when I was doing so much writing, to justify my grand generalizations, my cocksure assertions, my pronouncements on life and love. I was awfully damn young. But maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t have the advantage of maturity to temper Beebo’s outbursts and Laura’s emotional extremes. After all, that’s how it feels and goes down when you’re young.
So here are Beebo and Laura meeting for the first time. Where did the characters come from? The idea for Laura was based on my friendship with a sorority sister during my undergraduate days. She was two years younger than I and had many of the personality traits that make Laura both lovable and exasperating: shyness, lack of self-confidence, and hypersensitivity, but also warmth, sweetness of character, and, once she trusted you, a staunch friendship. She was slightly taller than average, with bright Scandinavian blonde hair and an engaging smile. After we got to be friends, she confided in me about her troubles with her tough-minded and abrupt father, who sounded to me like a man insensitive in reverse proportion to his daughter’s delicacy of feeling. The days when his letters arrived were downers for her, and they gave me a sort of scaffolding on which to embroider stories about her interior life. I recognized in “Laura” some of my own shaky sense of self. But unlike me, she rarely dated, seeming content to stay home most weekends and to shine academically. Whether or not she felt stirrings of romantic affection for women, I will never know, although I have my sympathetic suspicions. But I remember her as a sweetheart, with a shy warmth, and a prettiness and appeal she didn’t recognize in herself.
Beebo was another story. She was my own unrealized romantic phantom. There was another college friend, it is only fair to concede, who gave me the physical prototype. She was taller than the rest of us and strikingly handsome, with a crop of wavy, dark-blonde hair and an irresistible smile. Her nickname was one of those too-cute tomboy variations on a boy’s name. She hated it and made us promise never to use it, but her formal name didn’t seem to suit her. I remember running into her in the dorm bathroom—one of those gray marble affairs with rows of icy washbowls and green toilet stalls—in her skivvies, and trying not to admire her unduly. I think I made her a little squirmy, and she did seem to be in love with her serious beau, whom she married upon graduation. Well, we win a few and lose a few.
Actually, I didn’t quite know in that early period in my life which glamorous options to hang on the bare architecture of my fantasy hero. I just thought she needed to look like “Tommie” and to have the “heart and stomach of a king,” to quote Elizabeth I. It took me a few trips to Greenwich Village, and the reading of some of the then-current pulp paperbacks, to begin to recognize the qualities she required and to flesh them out. By that time, I was into the planning for this book and ruminating hard about my characters.
And so we come back to the roof of that Upper West Side apartment, looking down on the lights of the city. One night, staring across the twinkling horizon and seeing the character in my mind’s eye, I thought for the thousandth time, “If I could just find a name for her, she would come into focus for me.” For whatever blessed reason, it was at that moment that the childhood nickname of an old friend floated back into my mind: Beebo. I seized upon it and captured my Beebo