My Trip to Paris This Afternoon

The Curious Case of the Counter Tenor

Long before Gertrude Stein set up her famed salon in Paris, the parties chez Marcel Proust were the in spot to be on the Continent. In fact, many say they were the inspiration for both Boys in the Band AND Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Marcel playing a hybrid of Michael and Martha.

They usually evolved from Marcel being a tipsy but witty host, to getting a bit aggressive with a game of get-the-guest, to a screaming, hysterical break down and finally a sober, deeply depressed realization just as the sun crept over the Eiffel Tower.

We're not sure if Louis Sullivan was invited to any of the Proust parties during his studies in Paris or trips there in the 1890s when he was at the peak of his game, but we do know that composer Reynaldo Hahn was often the center of the parties as he introduced his latest tunes.

Both Hahn and Sullivan were sort of proto-bears but with far better grooming and hygiene than those of today. Though they sported virile full beards, they always wore bespoke suits, crisply starched shirts and glorious cravats.

Hahn and Proust always had a conflicted friendship, and it's easy to see why Hahn was always the pursued and the Proust with his bland western European pasty complexion was the fawning pursuer. Hahn was not only a Jewish-Venezuelan-naturalized French citizen but also a child prodigy.

Despite his manly Andean demeanor, he produced fussy, frilly chamber music. The line in The Boys in the Band -- "Michael doesn't have charm, he has counter charm" -- derived from Hahn's fondness for counter tenors. We've heard that Hahn had a deep, booming bass voice, and all were surprised when his tunes were introduced with male voices that many mistook for castratos or boy sopranos.


In 1963 -- a mere four years before The Boys in the Band was unleashed on the world, Paul Cadmus imagined the two muses entertaining and enlightening Reynaldo Hahn. It's hard to surmise which might have evoked Proust if either evoked him at all. Likely Proust was sitting in the corner, slowly switching from club soda to straight vodka, oblivious to someone saying, "Turning, turning" as Hahn became enraptured by Mr. Sullivan on a visit from Chicago.

Let's not dismiss poor Marcel, however. We continue to read him and re-read him, even attempting to digest a dozen or so pages a day untranslated. Hahn may have been the beau of the ball, however, as Msr. Proust once said (not quoted in Boys in the Band) "That's all good and well, but do you have a questionnaire named after you in Vanity Fair?" In the meantime, we are still enraptured by the gloriously surreal imaginings of Proust and Hahn from the Parisian Gerard Bertrand which you can find here.

Louis Sullivan Is Asked to "Deal With His Issues"

One of the great tragedies for dead artists is that they rarely have a chance to respond to the analysis and critique of their work once they are in the grave. There is still no empirical evidence that the dead haunt the living, but we do know that the future frequently haunts the dead before they go to the grave. Some suspect that it was not a prostitute but news of his paintings selling for seven and eight figures in the 20th and 21st centuries that led Van Gogh to cut off part of his ear.

The case is similar for Louis Sullivan. When he was "outed" by Robert Twombly in his 1985 biography, Sullivan chose to neither confirm nor deny the claims though Twombly asserted that the evidence was there in many of the master architect's writings and his "muscular" buildings. Some have giggled at Sullivan gushing about the Marshall Field Store being a building of admirably "virile" stature.

In his 1996 book, Roman architecture professor Mario Manieri Elia went even further to add onto Twombly's theories: "The causes that Twombly adduces could in fact be described as contributing factors, to some extent acceptable, in addition to a long-standing psychological disturbance variously expressed in Sullivan's interpersonal relationships. A further analysis, including historical factors, would lead us to concentrate on the fascinating anachronism of the figure of Sullivan, an anachronism that (as is so often the case with artists) places him at the peak of his linguistic research during the time of his decline. In short, his professional success was being undermined by a disjunction that can be detected as far back as the late 1880s; right from the beginning of that seventeen-year period that Sullivan indicates as the period of incubation and development of his great crisis."

Don't think that these words didn't sting for Sullivan, even though they were written more than 70 years after his death. And they did not go past his business partner Dankmar Adler who monitored the future quite regularly and through unusual sources. Tension had been brewing between them for months after Adler asserted one morning about their business signage that adorned their office entry was a bit too "frilly". Though sensitive and meticulous, Sullivan was no cream puff and refused to be intimidated by Adler's bullying.

However, when the Elia book came out, Adler became even more stern and insisted that Sullivan seek outside guidance. Though Freudian analysis had yet to jump across the pond from Austria to the U.S. full heartedly until the 20th Century, German immigrant Adler had strong Viennese links and insisted one Dr. Schwartzy Baumgartner whose office on Michigan Avenue near Grant Park. After weeks of Adler's needling and Sullivan's resistance, the battle was finally settled and an appointment was made.
Sullivan felt uneasy from the moment he walked into Baumgartner's overly ornamented office.

"So, Herr Sullivan, how was your relationship with your father?""

"Fine."

"And with your mother?"

"Fine"

"So what would you say it is that is bothering you the most. Right now, at this very moment."

"You."

Dr. Baumgartner conceded that the individual therapy might be too intimate for someone as initially skeptical as Sullivan and that a group setting might be more comfortable and productive. Relieved that the session ended earlier than originally planned, Sullivan agreed to return next week for a group session, although still having grave misgivings.

When he returned to the office, Adler immediately needled him for details.

"So how did the session go?"

"Fine," Sullivan said, dipping his pen into the ink well as he began sketching an ornate corbel.

"And...and..."

"And the doctor-client communication is always confidential."

The following Thursday afternoon, Sullivan dragged his feet slowly along Michigan Avenue as he thought of every excuse to bolt and lie to Adler that he'd attended but he knew Baumgartner would rat on him were he to bail.
Uncomfortable as the first session had been, Sullivan felt even more ill at ease as the small group circled around him and made him sit in the plush center chair. After nibbling on cookies, they were instructed by Dr. Baumgartner asked them to "check in" as each chronicled the emotional baggage of the past week.

"Oh, I was so depressed. I almost jumped into Lake Michigan."

"I had another fight with my mother. And she's been dead for eight years!"

"I keep getting more and more anxious. Even little noises bother me."

The diatribes continued until it finally was Sullivan's turn. There was a long pause until finally Dr. Baumgartner called out gently but firmly, "Mr. Sullivan, it's your turn."

"Pass."

"No, Mr. Sullivan. That's not an option. Surely there is something that you want to share. Some issue that you had to deal with, even if it was something positive."

The group moved in closer to an uncomfortable distance and eyed Sullivan up and down.

"Come on, Sully, share! Share!"

"Hey, little Louie, you gotta tell us your secrets. Just gotta!"

"Fess up. We're all here to share...and support."

Sullivan took a deep breath, staring straight ahead and refusing to make eye contact with the group. "Pass."

Dr. Baumgartner cleared his throat and said, "Okay, let's take a different approach. Mr. Sullivan, let's pretend that your mother and father are in this room. Take a couple of deep breath until you have a clear image of them in your mind's eye. Now what would you say to them, from the depths of your soul, if they were standing right in front of you."

Sullivan took the deep breaths as instructed, closed his eyes and then called out, "Mama! Papa! I'm in a room full of lunatics and they all smell of garlic and moldy cabbage."

With that, Sullivan bolted from his chair, stormed out the door and down Michigan Avenue towards his office. He decided that if it meant dissolving his partnership with Adler it was a better option than one more second in that room.

The Feline Redemption of Louis Sullivan

Many a great artist has died in obscurity or, perhaps even worse, found a glorious peak early in life only to face horrific ruin in the final years of life.

Few have embodied this as dramatically and sadly as the great Louis Sullivan. In 1890 when, at the age of 34, he unveiled the Auditorium Building, he was introducing to the world the most tremendous man-made structure on earth up to that time. At 17-stories, it was the world's tallest building. At 110,000 tons, it was the heaviest building in the world and had over eight million cubic feet of space.

When Sullivan died on April 14, 1924, died penniless, his friends coming up with $600 for his funeral and the six months past rent due the Hotel Warner where he whiled away his final days in a small, pathetic room of no architectural distinction. Those who don't believe in a resurrection or an after life need only look at the sudden returning praise of his work after years of being out of fashion and his surviving buildings for which there is a tactile afterlife for his vision and imagination. There may not be a heaven where the dead may go, but Sullivan left behind bits of heaven for those living after he died.

The pathetic last days of his life belie the fact that he did not find ways out of the hell of his final quarter of a century. What is not widely known that cats watch over fallen artists and taken them out of their quandary both in life and afterward. Though suspicious of the international style, Sullivan was no fuddy duddy. He was particularly fond of the work of Jim Flora, who was ten years old when Sullivan died and did not come into his full stride until the 1940s. He had a reputation of drawing hepcats that were cute -- and deadly.

But some nights in the teens and twenties -- and even some nights today when the spirit of Sullivan is feeling blue and in search of inspiration -- the cats come to him and transport him into paintings and rooms filled with the work of Flora. This commercial modernist came to greatest note designing covers of RCA and Columbia record albums primarily after the Second World War, a conflict Sullivan did not have to live to endure.

Though he died at the dawn of the Jazz Age, Sullivan was no square to swing and cool, and many nights he can be found swinging with the cats in some room designed by Flora. The creative spirit may come to mold a tower or sculpture or play or "So What", but more often it is still swinging out there beyond the lifetime of the creator, sometimes capturing the imagination of someone today who has no idea of its source.

Just before he died, Sullivan felt compelled to write a third book, The Autobiography of an Idea in which Louis Sullivan writes of Louis Sullivan in the third person while the idea tells his story in the first person:

"That IDEA which had its mystical beginning in so small a thing as a child's heart, grew and nurtured itself upon that child's varied consistently continuing and metamorphosing experiences in time and place, as has been most solicitously laid bare to view in detail, in the course of this recital. For it needs a long, long time, and a rich soil of life-experience to enable a simple, single idea to grow to maturity and solid strength. A French prover has it that 'Time will not consecrate that in which it has been ignored,' while the deep insight of Whitman is set forth in the line, 'Nature neither hastens nor delays.'