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Celebrity What-If’s
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Published in: November-December 2021 issue.

 

BETTER DAVIS
And Other Short Stories
by Philip Dean Walker
Squares & Rebels. 83 pages, $16.00

 

IN THIS COLLECTION of six inventive short stories, celebrated author Philip Dean Walker takes us into the lives of well-known celebrities and fictional characters in incidents occurring during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Walker’s skillful writing with realistic settings and believable characters makes you feel as if you’re reading a factual rendering of what went on rather than fictionalized stories.

            Walker brings to life actor Jim J. Bullock, a costar of the TV comedy Too Close for Comfort, when he’s waiting to hear about his AIDS diagnosis. While Bullock is wondering if he’s going to die, he constructs a rather bizarre episode for the show. In the story, “Elizabeth/Regina,” we encounter Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton, who head to a gay bar to see a drag show after one of their performances in Little Foxes. The dialogue between the two legendary actresses is both fun and riveting. While at the bar, Taylor reminisces about her friend Rock Hudson and how he had to sneak off to gay bars to cruise for younger companions, and how unfair it was that he had to live his life like that.

            Then, in another short story, there’s Natalie Wood on the yacht she owns with her husband Richard Wagner. Wood spends the evening flirting with Christopher Walken, her co-star in Brainstorm, which they are currently filming. This sets the jealous Wagner to seething as he wonders if the two might be having an affair. All the while, Wood is wondering if her husband is gay. Wood begins to turn the tragic deaths of her Rebel Without a Cause co-stars James Dean and Sal Mineo into a premonition that her life might also end in some horrible way.

            The title character, Better Davis, is a drag queen who comes vividly to life in her own story. There is great humor in this account as she portrays Bette Davis going blind in the movie Dark Victory. Tragically, that was the fate that awaited Better Davis as the AIDS epidemic took its toll.

            One of the most compelling stories is “The Gay Nineties,” where we meet Gaetan Dugas, the flight attendant who was falsely accused of being “patient zero.” As he deals with his developing illness, in particular Kaposi sarcoma, he justifies still having sex with other men. After all, KS is a skin cancer, he rationalizes, and “skin cancer is not contagious.” Last comes the story of Michael Bennett, creator of the Broadway musical A Chorus Line, as he struggles to replace a cast member because he has contracted AIDS.

            The creation of these short stories is brilliant and moving. Walker transports us into this time period in a way that’s believable and captivating, and with a depth of emotion that matches a period in gay history that altered its culture in ways both rich and terrible.

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William Burton is a writer based in Provincetown, MA.

 

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