It was around 1978 when journalist Bob Weiner took me to a Joffrey ballet company party in the Village on 6th Avenue. It was a small affair in terms of the intimate space and number of guests, but it was PACKED with star power because THEY were there. Woodward was quite involved with the dance, on boards and such, and even took ballet class when she was middle-aged. At this soiree, she radiated her stock in trade: glowingly fresh and natural, a total people person, exuding warmth and realness, mingling easily with all the guests.
He was a different story and, yes, along with Marvin Gaye, Kris Kistofferson, Issey Miyake, a boy I met in San Francisco named Kevin Kalihi, with the body of a quarterback and Brooke Shields’ face, who went crazy, and my Edward, quite the handsomest man I ever saw. Shorter than I expected but gorgeously compact and perfectly proportioned, he wore that God-given face someone once likened to Praxiteles’ Hermes, like any miracle of nature, say, a panther, would, with unaffected, unconscious ease, those electric blue eyes registering 20 feet away. His navy suit and baby-blue shirt fit him with razor-blade precision, as Heineken in hand, he remained apart from his wife’s schmoozing and just prowled around this loft space, checking it out – the furniture, what was hanging on the walls – with an interest that didn’t seem feigned.Of course everyone was too timid to approach this living god somehow fallen into our midst, although you know they were all – myself, incuded – CLOCKING his every move from the corner of their eyes. It’s funny when you think of such a jaded been everywhere/done everybody Manhattan crowd being so quiveringly agog in the presence of true sublime pulchritude, but it does happen here every time there’s a unicorn in the room, nothing enslaves le gratin more than sheer, mere beauty.
s
And I realized that night that I am the biggest, saddest, most hideously predictable cliche in the world. Because I went home, fell right asleep from a surfeit of chablis, and immediately had the most intense erotic dream about him.
Noh Way 