Parting Glances
I was ten when my grandmother took me to see "The Picture of Dorian Gray." It was the only time she ever took me to the movies.
The film, based on Oscar Wilde's most famous tale, played the Mayfair movie house, now Wayne State University's Bonstelle Theater. Admission, 25 cents, adults; 12 cents, kids. (A quarter also bought a Coke and buttered popcorn.)
My grandmother, born in 1880 in Durham County, England, was 15 years old when Wilde's three trials took place. Wilde was goaded by his sometime lover, Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas to take Douglas's father, the notorious John, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, to court on charge of libeling.
Queensberry left a calling card for Wilde at his club, accusing the playwright of "posing as a somdomite." Even with misspelling (sodomite), its intent was to challenge: Wilde, though married, father of two young boys, was a menace to society. (Not only that, gossip this: he fraternized below his social rank with clerks and unemployed roustabouts.)
At the final 1895 trial sentencing, Queensberry, who had hired detectives to track down rent boys – Victorian version of today's hustlers – servicing Wilde (and Bosie) gloated when Wilde got two years at hard labor for gross indecency. Bosie was not tried.
It's since come to light that Queensberry had another son, Viscount Francis Drumlanrig, rumored to have committed suicide – covered up as an accidental hunting death by gun shot wound – because he was having an affair with the Prime Minister of England, Lord Rosebery!
"Gentleman, take your choice," weaseled Queensberry, behind the scene among royalty and peers. "Either Wilde goes to prison or Rosebery gets publicly exposed. Make no mistake. I'm playing by Queensberry below-the-belt boxing rules."
"Well, how did you like the movie, Bobby?" asked my grandmother. "I thought the picture was scary. It seemed like magic when the bad guy stabbed his picture, and it changed back to the handsome guy. He was nice looking," I said very thoughtfully.
My grandmother nodded, smiled, squeezed my hand. To this day I wonder if she didn't suspect that I might be, like Wilde, his alter ego Dorian, well, perhaps just a little bit painted with similar brush strokes? (I was 30 when she died. "Still not married, Bobby? I'm not surprised," she said shortly before passing.)
Although I first read "The Picture of Dorian Gray," a long, long time ago – finding its writing overly florid, languidly chatty, embarrassingly purple prosy at times, I bought a newly published, "annotated, uncensored edition" (Nicholas Frankel, editor; Belknap Harvard, $35.)
The pictorial version gets as close to Wilde's 1890 unexpurgated original as possible. First published in America as a "Lippincott's Monthly" serial, the British versions were repeatedly censured before publication. Result: several "authentic" versions.
(Following Jack the Ripper's five ghastly White Hall murders in 1888 London, the grotesque picture gets stabbed once by Dorian instead of slashed repeatedly.)
Among the tragic incidents of Wilde's fall from grace – Ireland's brilliant man of letters, art critic, raconteur, writer of children's fables – two among many stand out as memorable to me. The first concerns Alfred Taylor, 33, cross dresser and rent boy "madam."
Taylor, offered sentence leniency, refused to turn Crown's evidence. He too was sentenced to two years of hard labor. (He migrated to America, worked as a Chicago waiter, and, irony of ironies, waited on Lord Alfred Douglas, when piss-elegant Bosie, 50, visited the Windy City in 1920.)
The second, a touching moment …
As Wilde stood handcuffed, ostracized, a pariah, awaiting to board the train taking him to Reading jail, an unknown man looked Wilde's way, silently doffed his hat, nodding in gentlemanly, and respectful courtesy. Wilde was moved; wrote of it years later in his introspective lament, "De Profundis."
