Kiwi playwright Robert Lord. Photo / MS-1907/005, Hocken Collections.
Robert Lord was one of New Zealand’s first internationally successful playwrights. David Herkt talks to the editors of his explicit and revealing 1980s New York diaries.
“Jay came around this afternoon and we played Scrabble and for once I won,” the New Zealand playwright, Robert Lord, wrote his New York diary on August 31, 1980. His phone was in danger of being cut off for non-payment and his typewriter needed repair.
“I then played with his body, which was OK I guess but he does rather lie there like a dead fish,” Lord continued. “Evening I wandered around and ended up at St Mark’s Baths, where for once I felt quite good about my body and got laid.”
For many centuries, a diary or a journal has been somewhere people can confide their daily lives and secrets. Their pages contain innermost thoughts, honest accounts, and personal observations. Historically, they are powerful witnesses to past times and places – for their writers no less than for their readers. It is harder to lie to oneself in a diary.
Gay during a time of immense sexual and social changes, Rotorua-born Lord was one of New Zealand’s most important professional playwrights the author of numerous stage and radio plays, including Well-Hung, Bert and Maisy, and Joyful and Triumphant. His work was also acted in the United States – in off-Broadway and regional productions – and he is probably the only New Zealand writer to have this achievement.
The just-published Robert Lord Diaries contains material from the eight volumes kept by Lord from 1974, when he first moved to New York, until his 1992 death from HIV/Aids at the age of 47 in Dunedin. They are a record of his ambitions, observations, people, places, parties, the casual sex, love affairs that did not always go right, along with his frequent trips back from the US to New Zealand, which gave him a unique view on both nations.
“I love the intensity of a diary, and the way it can present a different view of a person than the view most other people are used to,” says Chris Brickell, the author of Mates & Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand, amid other books, and one of the three editors of the Robert Lord Diaries, published by Otago University Press. “Robert Lord, for instance, is often seen as a sociable, gregarious person, but his diaries show his hesitancy.
“He was hesitant about his relationships, pretty much all of them; he wasn’t sure how robust he really was – writers so often come across as embodying a stance of authority, but Lord was just not sure of his talents. He wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote his plays, as he was never sure if they were good enough – many of us who write feel that way quite a lot of the time. I can identify with that.”
The well-known New Zealand actress and arts administrator, Nonnita Rees, who knew Lord well, describes him succinctly.
“He carried with him a sense of positive energy and revelled in working out the best and fastest way to do new things – a real ‘leave it to me’ character,” she says.
“We had an intense and fun working relationship and our friendship began when we first met – both in our 20s. We ran a theatre magazine, I was in one of his plays, and we started Playmarket.”
Founded by Lord, Rees, Judy Russell, and Ian Fraser, Playmarket was created to encourage and foster the performance of New Zealand drama. Circulating and licensing plays, gathering royalties, and promoting New Zealand works are all part of its continuing mandate. Lord’s Balance of Payments was the first play it licensed and now the organisation deals with more than 400 plays a year both in New Zealand and internationally.
Lord and Rees were also part of New Zealand’s creative “New Wave” in the 1970s. A fresh sense of national pride was galvanising the arts. Local movies and plays began exciting audiences who relished the experience of seeing and hearing themselves for the first time.
“Once he went to New York we met very intermittently and corresponded a bit, mainly for the period I was his agent from 1981 to 1986,” Rees continues. “The relationship was a bit crochetty in those circumstances. He was cross if I published any negative reviews about his plays and frustrated if I could not get theatres to put them on.”
“In our mid-40s, I stayed with him for a terrific few days at his Dunedin cottage, about a year before he died, and we snapped back into our warm, immediate friendship, bouncing ideas around and making plans. He cooked delicious food.”
The Robert Lord Diaries are filled with immediacy. Sometimes they were written during hangovers after big nights in the ferment of Lord’s Manhattan life where money could be short, but future possibilities seemed endless. Often, he wrote long entries travelling on aircraft as he crossed and recrossed the Pacific from the US to New Zealand with frequency.
“Bowie took forever to get his makeup off and arrived with a phalanx of photographers”– a great sweep around the room and much kissing and flashlighting and so forth,” Lord wrote after a party in New York in October 1980 when the singer, David Bowie had arrived after a concert. A young Meryl Streep acted in run-thoughs of a Lord play. There were Saturday night rituals of drugs and clubs: “the coke and Quaaludes, The Saint, all the high-powered nonsense,” he writes.
“Clubs, drugs and saunas all feature, and Robert is open about his experiences there, ‘speeding my tits off’ in one club, as he put it, getting ‘plunged’ at the sauna,” says Brickell. “His partying on Fire Island was an iconic New York gay experience of the time. And, of course, he had a room of his own in which to write plays with gay themes as well as straight ones.
“The contrast with New Zealand is mind-blowing – especially the contrast with rural and small-town New Zealand, where Robert’s extended family lived,” he continues. “These were very different cultures; the contrasts bemused him, but also provided fodder for his writing. He enjoyed a faster-paced life in New York, but he struggled to write about America, although he reacted against aspects of New Zealand.
“In one of his plays a character says ‘Culture? In this country? You’d be better off burying a bottle of Steinlager in a time capsule’ but he was more comfortable with the New Zealand idiom, and he knew New Zealand life much more than he did American. It’s funny that he came to really love Dunedin, even though he found the city ‘like visiting your grandmother’.
“But, for him, New Zealand was a place to hide his sexuality, partly given his family was here, whereas in New York he gave it free rein. These are the trade-offs of the expatriate, right?”
In Lord’s New York diary entries, there are also the first mentions of illness among his friends, and a gradual creeping fear of the unknown.
“Robert’s diaries tell us about being a writer during the 1970s and 80s,” says Brickell, “being a gay man in the years either side of Homosexual Law Reform, hearing about Aids, watching friends die, and then succumbing himself.
“Lord’s bewilderment, and at times, panic, about what was going on, are profoundly moving,” Brickell adds. “I was only coming out during the early 1990s and I remember how scary a time this was in terms of gay men’s sexual health.
“He writes a bit about Aids but is pretty opaque about it. We don’t realise he is receiving drug therapies until some time after those therapies began. He only provides snippets of detail – until he talks about his impending death, when he says he is just not sure how to speak to friends about his illness.
“He was even more reticent around family members, who complained about their gout while sitting in the living room with Robert, having no idea what he was going through – and he worried how they would judge him if they knew. His mother, Bebe, was very supportive of him near the end of his life, constantly at his bedside when he ended up in hospital.”
Rees was also present during Lord’s last days.
“He asked me to read his last play, Joyful and Triumphant, and proceeded to sit opposite me while I read. I had sometimes in the past been critical of some of his plays, but this, thank goodness, was a stunning one, among New Zealand’s very best.
“That visit, I went with him to the closing night of his Glorious Ruins at Fortune Theatre in Dunedin. It was a full house. We met with family friends of Robert’s before the show and we spotted Sam Neill – who was an old friend of Robert’s from his flatting days in Wellington and who was waiting in line for any return tickets but not recognised by others. Robert said immediately, ‘Go and get him. He can have my next seat. I’ll sit in the lighting box.’
“On our very last visit together,” she continues, “I spent a few hours with him in the hospital in the daytime and came back in the evening to listen with him to one of his radio plays. He said, ‘I ‘ve sorted out my will and set up a trust to run my cottage as a writers’ residency.’ I was then working for the Arts Council – now Creative New Zealand – and I said, ‘Oh God, those things are a nightmare to run.’ He fixed me a stern look and said, ‘This will work.’
“He left his cottage and royalty earnings to his mother for her lifetime. Joyful and Triumphant turned out to be a substantial hit and did bring in a good sum. His mother fretted about getting on with his last plan and seeing if it would work. She gave away his rights to rent and royalties to get his idea into action while she was still alive, and she left his trust a small legacy when she died 15 years after Robert.
“And here we are 31 years on. His cottage is full, year-round, with resident writers. He was right. It works.”
Information on the Robert Lord Writers’ Cottage can be found here.
The new free open-air saltwater pool is already proving popular.