Armistead Maupin, Telling Tales
Author of multiple books in the Tales of the City series, Maupin is a much loved treasure of LGBTQ+ cultural history: I encountered him in 1980 for this interview.
In 1976, Armistead Maupin made journalistic history of a sort when the staid San Francisco Chronicle began running his soon to be infamous serial, “Tales of the City.”
Over the next two years, thousands upon thousands would rush to read the latest installment in the bubbling life of a Michael (Mouse) Tolliver, discover the giddy disagreements between the Social Register’s Beauchamp and DeDe, and otherwise lose themselves in an amusing, if not campy soap opera.
Maupin, a native of North Carolina, remains quite modest about his talents. “I’ve never been real concerned about being an artiste,” he confides. “There are no great principles of writing I feel I’ve had to live up to. I’d rather be entertaining than anything else. I couldn’t be more aware that ‘Tales of the City’ is Nancy Drew for grownup. That’s exactly what I’m going to continue to write until the day I die.”
That single-minded sense of purpose extends to his broader view of gay literature. “I think it’s time for gay writers to stop writing about cocksucking as if it were some sort of pagan ritual of the Aztecs. We’re queer, which means odd or different. I think it’s time we celebrated what our life is like day to day.”
His two-year serial has been collected in Tales of the City (originally published by Harper & Row ($5.95!!) — it’s never gone out of print) and More Tales of the City. The movie rights — you guessed it — have already been sold (Editor’s Note: see AFTERWORD, below for a clarification).
Truman Capote once wrote that “people love California; they close their eyes, and the wind through the winter says sleep: it is a preview of heaven.” Here is the word from a very heavenly prophet:
Rich Grzesiak (RG): Someone said to me recently, “You know, I lived in San Francisco for a year and I am certain Armistead Maupin does not exist. Tales of the City was composed by a committee, just as Penelope Ashe’s Naked Come the Stranger was.”
Armistead Mapuin (AM): I have also heard that Tales was written by a lesbian chocolate chip cookie collective in Marin County.
RG: How did your writing begin?
AM: I did a weekly humor column for The Daily Tarheel at the University of North Carolina. I really never pushed my writing at all. I was a journalist with the AP in San Francisco. While working for them I was making things up and somehow they didn’t appreciate it. But Tales of the City was the first fiction that I had ever written. Putting together that serial for the Chronicle was such an extremely intimate experience. The people who liked it tend to be a lot like me. Their phone calls usually begin, “This is extremely embarrassing for me, but, but, but …” And when I talk to them on the phone I often make friends. It’s very reinforcing.
RG: Like Michael Tolliver (a love-torn character in Tales), are you desperately looking for a lover to settle down with?
AM: No. Well, I don’t know.
Sometimes. I alternate between that and enjoying my life of total freedom. At the time I wrote Tales of the City I was very much like Michael, but I think I’ve learned things in the interim.
RG: One learns so much about the crazy quality of living in San Francisco from Tales. For middle class people, it can frighten, even terrify. How did your parents react to the book?
AM: My mother had known for several years I was gay. My sister told her. So she crept into the stacks of the local library and read books on homosexuality. She wouldn’t borrow them, though: she was afraid it might incriminate her. She eventually made such a supreme effort to understand my gayness that she used to hit me with all these clinical questions on the subject and bore me to tears with it.
My father kept the blinders on until he read about his son, the gay journalist, in Newsweek. I wrote him a letter before that article appeared, but he and his friends saw the article first, so they had no time to lament.
Ultimately, he handled it well. The irony is that his law partner is a very, very conservative man who was then managing the senatorial campaign of Jesse Helms in North Carolina. When the partner confronted my father with the fact that he had a “faggot writer son in California,” my father replied, I have three fine children, one of each.”
RG: Why do Southern men have that lightness, the inability to be stuffy?
AM: Because stuffiness is rooted in Calvinism and there is very little of that in the South. But gay men are just as susceptible to that “This is the way it is going to be and we will not put up with anything else” attitude. I’ve been able to keep that rigidity out of my life.
RG: Our best writers stem from that Southern, lyrical, articulate tradition. Truman Capote, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal — all come from that graceful interaction with life.
AM: The storytelling tradition is still alive in the South. There is that very oral need to entertain — other than that other oral need, of course.
RG: You wrote a weekly serial for the Pacific Sun that was subsequently taken over by Cyra MacFadden — who in turn turned her chapters into tat satire of liberal ennui in Marin County, Serial. What did you think of the film version?
AM: Cyra (pronounced Sigh-rah) and I are good friends, and we’ve talked about it over the phone. I hated it and so did she. Time put it accurately when it observed that it seemed that those four families were trapped in Marin County against their will. The film had nothing to do with California, the landscape looked as much like Marin County as Van Nuys. And then there was the horridly fascistic statement at the end (of the film) when that guy abducts his family to take them to Denver, saying goodbye to California forever. Whenever you see a film, keep in mind the middle class mentality that is reshaping all this material, no matter how intelligent it might be to begin with, before it it is sent out to the American public. I am simply petrified at what the movie people will do to my Tales of the City.
RG: Has Jerry Kass (author of the screenplay for Tales of the City) retained the campy flamboyance of the gay characters (Michael Tolliver, John the gynecologist, etc.) in his script?
AM: Jerry has written a brilliant screenplay that is sympathetic (but not too sympathetic) to Michael but retains the quality of a full fledged, loving human character. Jerry’s challenge was to take that soap opera narrative and make it into a cohesive whole. We are looking for a director now: that’s the next step. I’d rather not mention names, as I don’t want to queer it, if you know what I mean.
Get Rich Grzesiak’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
RG: Do you have any favorites whom you would like to see portray a character? Nany Walker as Mrs. Madrigal or Cloris Leachman as Mona?
AM: I would love to see Dennis Christopher pay the role of Michael. Nancy Walker would not do as Mrs. Madrigal: too low class. I think of Mrs. Madrigal as a sort of Westerner, raw-boned, but kind of a lady underneath it all. Even though Lauren Bacall has been pushing diamonds recently, I think she could funk it up for sure. There has been talk of Anne Bancroft in the role.
The general feeling is that Mrs. Madrigal should be thin in order to be believable. If Mrs. Madrigal is partridge-plump, it will be extremely difficult for people to accept the concept of her early life.
But my favorite movie star is Cary Grant. Yes, Cary Grant! I would love him to play Edgar Halcyon (a crotchety tycoon in Tales of the City).
RG: Famous names, famous names. Have you ever thought of doing a regular gossip column like Liz Smith or Arthur Bell?
AM. Every now and then. Liz is my only idol in the field. She’s funny, insightful, and kind and she has not turned into a bitch. I can’t say that for the others. The genre makes you very hardened. People kiss your ass just as a matter of course. People (the magazine) originated the formula: if you run enough famous names in bold type, the public reads it no matter how devoid it is of wit or insight..
RG: And in San Francisco right now (Editor’s Note: May, 1980) Charles Ludlam is reprising his bizarre, campy adaptation of Dumas’ Camille …
AM: Yes, and I did see it, and I roared! The stupid local press took his campy genius quite seriously. They were upset about his bad script and weak supporting cast …
RG: and also in the news from the West Coast …
AM: A few nights ago I emceed an event for Harry Britt, our local gay supervisor. The headliner of the act was Charles Pierce (a notoriously wicked female impersonator) and the backup group was the San Francisco Lesbian Chorus.
Now, Charles act has not changed one iota in the last 25 years. In the middle of Bette Davis, Charles magically transforms himself into Tallulah Bankhead and starts screaming (imitating Ms. Bankhead), “Well I’m a dyke, too, dahhhhhhhlinngggggg, but at least I have a sense of humor about it!
It was very awkward all the way around. I have often complained about Pierce’s comments on women but on the other hand, he’s an institution. You’re watching a human period piece.
RG: Who or what is “Jackie Old” (the title of Maupin’s next serial, a melodrama set in the future)?
AM: I will say only that she is a goddess, a living legend. I like to speculate about her. By her own appetite for life and the accident of history, she has been thrust into celebrity.
My feeling is that we don’t enjoy her in the way we should. I have read everything I can get my hands on about her and they tell you nothing about her personality. Periodically, there are dark hints of electric shock therapy. How does she curse or cry?
A friend described dancing with her at a charity ball in New York: she is the frailest of creatures and yet the most recognized of women in the world and suddenly she stares in your eyes as if you were a prince. That transforms you.
RG: Boston’s John Mitzel claims that Jackie is loved so much because she’s a faggot’s faggot. She does anything anywhere anytime.
AM: She is. The gist of my book Jackie Old is that sooner or later she will understand that the place for her to be is San Francisco, where can truly rules as an Empress … in 1991.
RG: Where she will be stoned to death literally and otherwise. As legendary as you are in Faggotville, California, does it inhibit your privacy?
AM: No. I get laid more (laughter). (Laughing merrily) I’m not all that cute, but celebrity does help. I’m finding that life is a lot better these days in every respect.
AFTERWORD
Very sadly, no movie version per se of Tales of the City ever made it to the big screen. The plans Maupin talks about here did not come to fruition, quite unfortunately.
According to Wikipedia:
“To date, the first three books have been adapted into television miniseries; the first, Tales of the City, was produced by the UK’s Channel 4 and was first screened in the UK in 1993, then shown on PBS in the US in January 1994. Channel 4 eventually teamed up with the American cable network Showtime to produce the sequel, More Tales of the City, which premiered in the US and UK in 1998. The third installment of the series, Further Tales of the City, was produced by Showtime (without Channel 4) and was originally aired in the US on Showtime in May 2001.”
A fourth installment, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, premiered on Netflix on June 7, 2019, with Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis, Barbara Garrick and Paul Gross reprising their roles.”
“Jackie Old by Armistead Maupin is a ‘what if’ story about what would it be like had Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived to become a recluse like her cousin ‘Little Edie’ Beale. What would Jackie O have been like in 1999???” This work was never published until April of 2014.
Maupin’s personal website is at https://www.armisteadmaupin.com/home
Maupin is 78 today, and married. He is, indeed, a great gift to us all in the genre of gay male fiction. I was quite fortunate to have had access to his wondrous self.
This interview originally appeared in a different form in the May 16, 1980 issue of the Philadelphia Gay News.
