My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Gracie Allen (1895): Comic Muse

37 Gracie Allen Comic Muse Lloyd Schwartz I first discovered Gracie Allen listening to the Burns & Allen show on the radio. It was love at first sound—the lilting, silvery twinkle of her voice. But even more, I found her slippery use of words, taking them more literally than they were intended, hilarious and irresistible and mind bending. Playing with words amused me from my earliest childhood. I remember howling at the joke: “Whatever happened to your get up and go?” “It got up and went.” 38 Comedy, irony, turning things inside out became my defense against not fitting in. In high school the tough kids disliked me because I was a good student. But when I acted in plays or invented comic pantomimes for school assemblies and amateur contests, even the scary tough guys got a kick out of my willingness to make a fool of myself in public. Kids who once threatened me suddenly adopted me as a mascot. It was cool to like me, because I made them laugh, because I didn’t seem to be taking myself as seriously as they thought I would, because I didn’t think I was better or smarter than they were. Something similar was true about my love for poetry. I knew there was beauty in the world—I saw it, I read it. But I didn’t feel I was part of it. I loved Keats not only because his poems were so beautiful, but also because that beauty had meaning. And since I never thought I could reproduce that beauty, I tried to turn that beauty inside out, create something that was something like the opposite side of the same coin—something that had meaning because it was the opposite of beauty, the inversion of it. My first poem was called “Moonlight and Garbage.” Did this have something to do with being gay? With a sense that I “didn’t fit in?” Well, probably—though I see this explanation now only in retrospect. And because the question this book poses has forced me to think about it. Of course, this answer is too simple. After all, not all comedians are homosexual (and yet they don’t call homosexuals “gay” for nothing). Isn’t all comedy a good way of defending oneself against a hostile world? Eventually, I started writing poems in the voices of other people, other characters—often quite the opposite of myself (although we shared significant qualities). It was like being an actor (one of my most serious ambitions)—both escaping from qualities in myself I didn’t especially like or want and extending my own range of possibilities. My first book, These People, was essentially a collection of dramatic monologues. After that book was (finally ) published, I didn’t want to repeat myself. I wanted to move away from simple monologues toward something more narrative, Gr acie Allen 39 in which more than one voice would come into play. In Boston a local UHF TV station was playing ancient repeats of the Burns & Allen show, and all of a sudden my childhood delight in Gracie Allen overwhelmed me. I was tickled, teased, titillated. Bewitched and bothered. I wanted to kiss her and strangle her. Her modesty and generosity and affection (like my mother’s!) were remarkably touching. Yet her ineptitude was causing real damage. But wasn’t that also her source of power? And what could be funnier? When Gracie hears that one of her friends has to choose between spending money on a face-lift “or the Bahamas,” she thinks her friend should get the face-lift first, and then deal with her “Bahamas” later. Seeing these shows again inspired me to write a poem—half comedy, half elegy. I couldn’t figure out how to use that last joke (it was too simply a joke), but other Gracie-isms seemed more profound, more poetic—more my kind of poetry. When I was assembling the poems for my second book and looking for a title, Goodnight, Gracie seemed the inevitable choice. Wasn’t her embodiment of inversion, of turning things on their heads, my own response to the world, to the world of poetry? Hadn’t she always been my real Muse? Gracie Allen ...