Kissing a fairy
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Music, Christianity, Creative Nonfiction, LGBTQ, History

The blond boy doesn’t seem like the straightest thing ever, but in the early 1960s, there’s always hope. Emily Godsall, his sort-of-adopted-mom, thinks over all the advice that God and Freud have had for boys like the 17-year-old Bruce Campbell living in her house for the summer before college. His mother, Marion, is an obvious case of nymphomania, and his dad, Jim, an obvious head case of authoritarian asshole. And to a Freudian mind, they probably messed Bruce up for life.

But as a Christian, Emily goes on faith. He’s an artist. Maybe a great artist. Maybe he’ll be asexual? That’s the Freudian idea. Sublimation. Doesn’t the artist transform sex into art? If she can help him, it’s to become a classical pianist on the way to being a composer—and that means discipline. Living under her watchful eye, his life becomes an art bootcamp. Sleeping on the couch, he gets up and practices piano all day, in between cigarettes.

And maybe he can get a girlfriend.

Attending the Godsalls’ church, Trinity Lutheran in Norristown, Bruce meets sixteen-year-old Debbie Hower. With a bit of a push, they’re dating.

In church choir, she remembers, she’d sung his arrangement of ‘O Sacred Head Now Wounded’ —

‘O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down . . .’

And now ‘together’, they seem ideally matched. Two blond kids, often read as brother and sister. “We were,” she tells me, “madly in love.”

They’d spend evenings out—like going to see the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary in Philadelphia. Dropping Debbie off, he’d kiss her goodnight.

“It would go straight to my heart,” she says.

She realizes how talented he is. “He could draw. His talents didn’t just go to music. It was art, clothing, design. Multi-faceted. He was genius for sure.”

Everyone says she looks like Mary Travers in Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk group, and everyone knows Bruce is a big, big fan of the group. He’d gone to see them with his mother, and he and Debbie go see them too. Bruce loves Mary, and her hair. He loves Debbie’s hair too. “That’s what he used to comment on,” Rob Godsall says of Debbie. “The long blonde hair.”

Bruce likes Mary’s feet as well. He draws them all the time in his notebook. Did that seem unusual?

“I don’t think Bruce thought anything he did was unusual,” Rob says.

Bruce takes Debbie to visit his mom.

Marion might be home, but not answer. Or if she invites them in, soon after, asks them to leave. “Why didn’t she want me to stay?” he wails.

Debbie sighs. “Nobody could hurt him like his mom could. Not that she did intentionally. And then there was little Willy. It’s funny . . . to describe complex things.”

Debbie’s family takes him along to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, featuring Michelangelo’s Pietà, and exhibits on the ‘Space Age’.

“I did like the boy,” Debbie’s mother says. Her daughter, she sees, is “pretty smitten with him. As far as his — ”

She pauses. “I thought he was a nice boy.”

He wants a folk group.

It’ll be like Peter, Paul and Mary, a trio. Debbie doesn’t have the voice, but Phyllis does, so it’ll be her, him and Rob? Or maybe Ward, unless he’s busy but their friend Bob isn’t. Bruce tries shuffling names, then finally calls it ‘The Last Three’.

I ask Rob if there formal rehearsals?

“With Bruce, nothing could have been that formal,” he says.

Mrs. Godsall drives Bruce & co. around to gigs at various venues, like the Valley Forge Military Hospital, to play for wounded soldiers.

But he needs better singers, he decides. With Mrs. Brownlow’s help he enlists identical twins Grace and Marty Lavender, a year younger than him. They are, Rob recalls, “austere in their presentation.” They’re Baptists, and have no desire to be folk singers.

Bruce shows them the music he has in mind. Protest music? Bob Dylan?

It’s all “very radical,” Grace thinks. But they say they’ll give it a try, so Bruce starts coming over to their house with his guitar to rehearse. “His fingers just flew over the strings,” Grace says. “He had a real passionate need to play.” On his guitar, he can play all three parts.

As the girls live near Marion’s trailer they’ll drop him off there afterward. “It was common knowledge,” Grace says, “that all was not quite right.”

Whatever that means, she’s too Baptist to say. But they seem to be making it work, with Bruce between two brunette girls, the blond star—the Mary.

John Ingrassia remembers the first time he sees “that beautiful boy with diamonds in his hair.”

He sighs at the memory. “He really did glow.”

John doesn’t glow. His hair is long and black. He dresses in black too, like Antonin Artaud, the ‘insane actor’, his role model.

It’s hard to ‘glow’ when you’ve just gotten out of the psych ward after your latest nervous breakdown.

But everything changes that day when he shows up at the Free Library of Philadelphia to meet up with his friend Peter, who’s a freshman piano student at Temple University. They’re the same age, but John is still in high school because of his “problems.”

John brings his history teacher, since they’re kind of having an affair. John feels used, but the guy keeps the other kids from picking on him. That’s worth something? Bruce gives one dismissive look at the guy, though—and the history teacher is history. “Ten minutes later I was hating him too,” John says. “Or seeing him in a whole new light, that was emanating from the boy next to me.”

Although a Beatnik, radical, communist, ex-Catholic, ex-everything, John was fascinated by this straight-laced guy from King of Prussia—with that crucifix reliably pinned to his lapel. “He had neat blond hair and wore sport coats, button down shirts and tie,” John recalls. “I wasn’t even sure about the really strong feelings I had for him.”

Peter had met Bruce at auditions for Temple. “He didn’t play piano as well as he should have,” he says. “He was kind of uneven and slapdash technically, but he had phenomenal data processing ability to handle notes and musical data, and had written some phenomenal chamber music and solo instrumental music.”

The three become friends, or a “Bruce groupie thing,” as Peter jokes. They go to the symphony, since Peter gets tickets through his parents, who are professional musicians, or head over to Wanamaker’s department store to see the famous, massive pipe organ.

They’ll go to Peter’s house, though his mom doesn’t like Bruce. When Bruce sits at Peter’s grand piano and starts playing—she’s not amused.

“I was supposed to be the genius, not him,” he says.

Then it’s off to class at Temple, where Peter tries to explain to Harvey Wedeen, Temple’s new young piano professor, why Bruce isn’t showing up.

Bruce seems to be “playing” with Harvey too. “His composition gift was something he’d hid from Harvey,” Peter says.

Peter talks up Bruce’s compositions, so he’s assigned a composition teacher, and doesn’t show up for that either.

Things had gotten tense at the Godsall house.

One day, Mr. Godsall, prone to depressive cycles, tells Bruce, “Don’t you know when you’re not wanted?”

Rob and Ward assure Bruce he is wanted—but he leaves anyway.

He’ll live at the YMCA in Philadelphia, and work on his career in classical music. He’s writing “something big,” Marty recalls, like an opera based on a Shakespeare play. Peter recalls a suite of seven pieces called Views From the Capitoline Hills. “I couldn’t even play some of them,” he says.

But the folk band demands more and more of Bruce’s attention. They need some glitz, he thinks. “It was kind of gold, red and shiny,” Grace recalls, of the costumes John’s sister makes for them.

It was actually John. “I stitched up a couple of nice matching gold lamé frocks,” he says. He stole the material from Wanamaker’s. It was a visual emergency. The girls are “highly resistant” to wearing them, but do.

The group’s playlist tends to range from “Take This Hammer” to “It Ain’t Me, Babe” to “What Have They Done to the Rain?” Then he has a new arrangement for “They Call The Wind Maria,” from Paint Your Wagon.

“The rain is Tess . . .”

“The fire’s Joe . . .”

“And they call the wind Maria,” each sings, as ‘Joe’ tells his story: “I’m a lost and lonely man without a star to guide me.”

It becomes their theme song, and band name: ‘Moriah, Tess and Job’.

John is surprised to learn the original lyrics have ‘Joe’ and ‘Maria’. It seems Bruce slips in biblical references, without telling anyone. Moriah is the mountain where God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac, “for a burnt offering,” i.e. to sacrifice him.

And Job, of course, is the Bible’s divine sufferer, tested by Satan for his faith.

Bruce starts wanting to be called ‘Job’ too. But when he’s Job, he doesn’t wear suits. He wears faded denim, boots, and smokes non-filtered cigarettes.

“I think the ‘Job’ thing was just more conducive to calling himself ‘J.C.’, which he sometimes did,” John says.

But Job—in addition to Jesus—seem to have been longtime identifications, and part of the mystery of ‘Jobriath Boone’, his later performing name. A reference might be Archibald MacLeish’s verse play, J.B., which is about the biblical Job. Bruce doesn’t explain things.

At finals at Temple, neither Bruce nor Job show up.

“He was just bored and very unhappy about something,” Peter says.

“We’d go visit friends of his down in the seamy districts of Philadelphia,” Debbie recalls. John eyes her warily.

The folk group is offered a regular gig at The Main Point, a coffee shop in Bryn Mawr, but days after graduating high school, in 1965, the girls leave for college.

He stays busy. The Bryn Mawr Repertory Theater hires him to play piano for productions of The Fantasticks and Carnival. “It’s really funny,” John reports in his letters to Grace, “because he’s supposed to hate theater and I love it, but he’s the one with the job.”

Debbie goes on late-night train rides to turn pages as Bruce plays, she sighs, “masterfully.”

He’ll be a famous artist, of course, but in which art? He keeps up his painting. Peter likes one of a minaret pointing into a golden sunset — “kind of phallic,” he thinks, “with an Arabic skyline way below that.” Bruce gives a painting to Helen of himself as Robin Hood, asleep under a tree.

He could be a classical, or folk musician. Rock music, of course, is out of the question. “I mean,” John says, “it really was yucky.”

Bruce takes his guitar on the train and plays concerts to passengers. He works as an organist for a local Presbyterian church. All his adopted mothers come to hear him. “He could punch your lights out with his piano playing it was so beautiful, but to me he wasn’t as good on organ,” Mrs. Joe says. “He was capable, but he didn’t have the flair or fire he had on piano.”

John and Peter go too. Bruce opens that service with the overture to Lawrence of Arabia. They laugh so hard, they leave the pulpit. Later on, Bruce announces he’ll play a piece by Prokofiev, his favorite composer, and one of his own. “These two composers,” he says, “both have Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.”

He says in a later interview: “I was flipped out by Prokofiev’s music — then it was too late to do anything musically whatever that is.” That might mean that being a serious classical musician starts to feel like it died around 1953, with Prokofiev. Bruce does love him, though, especially Alexander Nevsky, a soundtrack to a 1938 war movie.

There’s wars inside of him too. Willie recalls that Bruce takes him once to the huge mall, and they go into the piano store. Bruce sits down at one and breaks out into a frenzied performance, as a clerk closes in nervously.

“He was not afraid of confrontation,” Willie says.

Rob recalls another time being in a music store, and Bruce sits at a player piano, the kind that played automatically. He improvises harmonies as it plays the melody.

An irritated clerk comes over and removes the roll, so the piano goes silent. Until it keeps playing—the same exact tune? It’s Bruce.

He’s a great mimic in general. For comic effect, he’ll quack like Donald and Daisy, his two pet ducks he keeps at his father’s house, or he does until they move.

Not returning to college, he becomes eligible for the draft. He’d delayed registering. Helen takes him in, recalling the ‘perturbed’ woman clerk who glares at the blond miscreant, saying, “We’re gonna get you.”

Meanwhile, John is back in the psych ward.

He’s been talking about suicide again. When Peter brings news of Bruce, though, John gets better quickly. He has an idea! His parents and doctor even agree, so Bruce comes to stay at their house.

It’s a period of intense artistic activity. Bruce listens to John’s mother’s canary. “He could imitate the song on guitar, which excited the bird.”

John only remembers because he’d recorded it, and would listen to the tape later. “There was lots of laughter on that tape, and he had the most beautiful laugh.”

Bruce writes music and teaches John to play guitar, though John can’t pick up Bruce’s odd style of holding the neck, pinky pressing down as four fingers fly over the strings.



They paint. Bruce does one of John’s history teacher that he’d been seeing, now slumped over a cup of coffee. And he does self-portraits. “Lonely men leaning on lamp posts, smoking cigarettes, gazing far off,” John recalls.

There’s one of his mother holding a cocktail glass looking drunk and crazy. “We all thought Marion was a monster,” John says.

One night, Bruce and John are at a coffee house in Bryn Mawr talking to some older guy who invites him to his place—for drinks.

They go, and Bruce drinks, and drinks. The guy suggests Bruce stay over.

“It might’ve been the first and only time in my life when I felt a sense of purpose,” John says. Bruce is drunk and raving. “Why doesn’t anyone love me?” On and on, as John carries him to the train station. A lady gives them money for a cab as Bruce keeps going. “Don’t ever leave me. I’m not a good friend.”

John tries not to wake his parents as he helps Bruce to bed. Undressing him. Stopping at the sight of his nearly-naked friend. “A kind of awe of beauty,” he says. “I mean, touched by God with beauty.”

Turning off the lights in anguish he’s up all night, “thinking, thinking, thinking.”

The next day, they talk. They’re more than friends, they agree. They go to bed, and out of the darkness, Bruce says, “John, c’mere.”

“It had to be our little secret,” he sighs. And before long Bruce is saying, “Don’t get attached to me. You cannot get attached.”

The warning comes just in time. “I was deeply in love,” John says.

He clings to the boy with diamonds in his hair.

“In my nutty little head I was angry that I wasn’t a girl and I couldn’t have his baby,” he says. “If I were a girl, he would have been more affectionate.”

What all was going on in the way of intimacies?

“There was never much affection from him,” he says. “We were good boyfriends, and we ‘fooled around.’ Not much in the way of kissing. Times were weird, we were young and knew nothing, both virgins.”

But they’re together. That’s what matters.

“I thought we were glued together forever.”

Bruce isn’t too fond of whatever’s being directed at him.

“He often scolded me for being too emotional, for loving him, for not being ‘a man,” John says.

One night there’s a snowstorm.

Bruce and John take the train to King of Prussia, but can’t get a ride back. It’s really cold and snowy, but Marion’s trailer is close.

She isn’t home, but they let themselves in, and go to bed. Late at night she arrives, and somehow realizing they’re being sexual with each other—throws them out into the storm.

“We had to walk miles to the train, to get back to Philly,” John says.

Whatever he is—it what he doesn’t want to be. Bruce gets counseling at church, Debbie is told later, with Pastor Bob “confronting him with the fact that homosexuality is against God’s order.”

But Debbie’s mom thinks Pastor Bob would’ve been “accepting.”

She pauses. “Yes, I do. I think so.”

An awareness of it settles into the Campbell family—never to be discussed openly, but lurking in a discussion that erupts into argument. Jim maintains that if you don’t act like a Christian, like he does, you’re going to Hell.

Helen isn’t sure Jim is totally saved, i.e. “giving over wholeheartedly to the fact that Christ died for our sins.” But she agrees: “You can’t continually — ”

She struggles for the words. “Christ does forgive our sins, but if you continuously sin, you lose your salvation.”

Was that Bruce’s view?

“That’s what he was lambasting the family about,” she says. “That we didn’t know the meaning of Christianity, according to him.”

Bruce quits church.

He’ll visit Grace and Marty’s, for the music, or John’s Catholic church. John goes anywhere Bruce goes. “I worshipped him,” he says. It dawns on him, very slowly, that Bruce has fallen for another boy.

This is a difficult matter. John, indeed, talks about drug use, sex (ideally odd relationships with straight guys), theater, communism, his stays (past, present, and future) in mental wards, but not about the boy Bruce leaves him for. The answer is always silence.

Boy X worked in the Display department at Wanamaker’s in King of Prussia, as John works in Display in Philadelphia, so they know each other, is all he’d say.

“He seemed nice,” Peter recalls, of meeting him. But Peter is upset at Bruce. “He had dumped John, I felt, rather abruptly and cruelly.”

Throughout this ordeal, John remains the theatrical professional. He’ll mount a play, Beckett’s Endgame, which he’ll produce, direct, and of course star in. He just needs music.

Off he goes to King of Prussia, to find Bruce at work. Unhappy to be interrupted, Bruce says he can’t do the job “for professional reasons,” but takes the script and shoos John away.

Weeks pass. John’s co-star quits. Bruce can take the part? Off he goes, as Bruce again sends him away, though as he leaves, John turns to see Bruce staring at him? Speaking in an altered voice —

“Finished, it’s nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.”

A line from the play, delivered, John thinks, exactly right. “I bet you didn’t know that Bruce is quite an actor,” he writes Grace.

Otherwise the tone in John’s letters is resigned. “Have you ever been surrounded by hundreds of people every day and you still feel lonely? That’s the way it is with me.”

He hears Bruce was dumped by Boy X. Then he hears Bruce has quit Wanamaker’s, and got a job at another department store, typically working in the men’s department.

Then Bruce calls him to say—he’s been drafted.

John remembers the song on the radio. It was “The Sound of Silence”—as he was freaking out. “I would have gone to Canada with him,” he says. “But he was somehow resigned to this fate.”

He pleaded with Bruce, to no avail.

“The main reason he was doing this, was to prove to his father, (and perhaps to himself) that he was a ‘man.’”

On May 18, 1966, Bruce shows up at the train station.

He’s in Company E62 heading for Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He greets Rick Mott, his old classmate, who’d been drafted too.

On layover in Washington D.C., everyone gets drunk, and talks music. Bruce is into Dylan, some Beatles, Sonny and Cher. A “simple and direct” sound, Rick thinks.

On arrival they get their hair cut and start training, crossing monkey bars, marching, keeping guns and quarters spotless. Afterward they sing and joke. A couple times, Bruce recites the limerick that’s going around.

There was a young gaucho named Bruno

Who said, “Screwing is one thing I do know.

A woman is fine,

And a sheep is divine.

But a llama is Numero Uno.”

“He was such a great mimic,” Rick says. “He would ‘xerox’ the company commander all the time.” Behind the guy’s back, Bruce does the face and says, “Hey, ahh, son” just the same way, as everyone laughs.

His own father is, of course, so proud of him. Jim even drives down to Fort Jackson to visit, bringing Debbie. So Bruce gets to show off his pretty girlfriend.

“He enlisted in the OCS I’d say to try and please his father, probably,” she says. “I guess if he had to be in a situation he’d rather be leading.”

It seemed like they both had a life together, stretching out ahead of them.

“We would plan,” she says, “the castle we should live in. Or the ring I should wear. Or the shoes I should wear.”

Private Campbell has problems with authority.

He writes home about them eagerly. “He did something once and had to hug a tree for hours as punishment,” John recalls. “He made some bad puns about ‘rank’.” Bruce writes Emily Godsall too. “A lot of humor and sarcasm,” Rob recalls. “Then he would talk about how much he missed her.”

Private Campbell likes getting muscular, and likes his dad being proud of him, for once. Jim drives Debbie down for a visit, so he gets to show off his pretty blonde girlfriend.

Upon taking the Army’s aptitude test he’s offered Officer Candidate School, which means a third year? “He decided he was going to make something of himself,” Rick says. Bruce passes around the letter from home, full of his praises. A year later he’s home on leave.

The song on the radio is “Stop, In the Name of Love.” John is living in a thespian commune when Bruce shows up, still in love, he says, with Boy X. Can John talk to him? John knows him. Can John help?

Obviously, John says, he can’t.

“Why can’t you just be my friend?” Bruce pleads.

“I could never be friends with you!” John screams. “It would tear me apart!”

Bruce is crying. John is crying harder!

Spending the next three days and nights sobbing in the arms of his lesbian den mother, he finds, at last, the great role of his life. “The light went out of my life when Bruce went away,” he sighs. “I bored endless potential lovers with tales of the one true great love of my life.”

Jim and Helen drive Bruce to the train station in Philadelphia. He’ll be sent, they understand, to Vietnam.

The train is delayed. He frets he’ll be late. It pulls in, and away he goes.

The F.B.I. is all over town. An agent tells John he was the last friend to see Bruce, and if he hears from him, he’s to report him. “Yeah right,” John snickers.

How Debbie weeps. But Bruce is gone.