Ed Wynn

My friend Joe was vibrant and virile in his 50s when I met him and he still had a lustrous head of silver hair when he was 80 and told me confidentially, with Barbara in another room, and with a serious face, that he was Gay. We had been having gay old times with Joe since he first taught us what it really meant to act on stage, to act with courage and truth, to speak and listen from "la panza" (which he pronounced like my Sicilian relatives "la banza") which meant the belly but he also meant the groin. He was beautifully sexual, everything he was was from la banza, yet he whispered to me that he was gay. Perhaps it's what held him back, not fully allowing himself to be himself, honestly and with courage. He ended up not on stage but in the classroom, hoping he could show the way to others to do what he could not. He must have been beaten down because in this way, and only this way, he was like the hopeful dog who wants so much to approach you and be caressed but cowers away from your hand reaching for his face.

He worked for Ed Wynn, on his TV show in the early 1950s, when TV was spontaneous and unexplored and risky. I seem to believe he told us he was Wynn's dresser, and Wynn trusted Joe and told him about his son Keenan who had romantically teamed up with Van Johnson and how happy they were together but the studio insisted that Johnson be married, and Wynn cried to Joe when he found out. (Keenan Wynn's first wife, Evie, after divorcing him, married Van Johnson.)  My childhood memories of Ed Wynn's public persona was of a big lovely man with a big lovely Jewish nose and great twinkly eyes. My adult memories of Joe are of a great lovely man with a big lovely Italian nose and eyes that were lit from within, fearless and demanding and seductive.