56 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 11, 2019
“Tell me our battering ram isn’t a pipe cleaner.”••
Spanked,” and the phrase seems to hold
a clue to Haynes’s obsessive art-mak-
ing. “I know that I enjoyed being seen—
performing and putting on shows for
the family, impressing people with my
drawings and paintings,” he said. “But
there may have been something beyond
that, where what I was really interested
in was replaying my own pleasure
in seeing: returning to that moment of
seeing ‘Mary Poppins’ on film, seeing
‘Romeo and Juliet.’ The rapture was in
the process of re-creating it, over and
over.” Other films, including “The Mir-
acle Worker,” “Anne of the Thousand
Days,” and, especially, “The Graduate,”
fed his excitement at how a lens could
tell a story. “I remember feeling stimu-
lated through my entire body. I would
walk around looking at the world liter-
ally through frames,” he said.
From the outset, Haynes was a sort
of escape artist, compulsively immers-
ing himself in art. But to escape to is
also to escape from. Haynes was, in part,
fleeing his parents’ “absolutely terrify-
ing” arguments, which left him in “a
constant anxiety that the family unit
was imperilled.” One brouhaha spilled
into Haynes’s bedroom while he was
asleep. “She was pulling her ring off, and
she threw it into the yard from my up-
stairs window,” he said. “I remember
them looking through the ivy the next
day on hands and knees. Never found
it.” Sherry, whose public manner was
genteel, “knew how to get what she
wanted,” Haynes said. Allen could be
moody and had a temper. Haynes’s re-
lationship with his father as a child, he
said, was sometimes “distant and com-
petitive,” but these days he refers to him
as a “mensch.” The transformative event
was a nearly fatal aortic rupture that
Allen suffered when he was in his for-
ties and Haynes was in his twenties. For
a month, Haynes and his brother, Sean,
slept on the floor of their father’s hos-
pital room. “He wanted me there more
than anybody. More than my mom—
he wanted me there,” Haynes said.
Haynes’s immersion in art was also
the result of a kind of apprehension of
his own otherness, an undertow of es-
trangement that he felt long before he
understood it. Sherry was a perfection-
ist, both in her personal style—“She
always had perfect hair, perfect nails,
perfect, perfect, perfect,” McGovern re-
called—and in the clean lines, white
walls, and spotless, plastic-covered fur-
niture of her home. “My mother would
literally pour Clorox bleach on the
kitchen tiles each night,” Haynes said.
He, on the other hand, “desired contam-
ination. I wanted it.” As a boy, he wasconstantly drawing women: “I loved
doing the lips and the eyelashes or the
cleavage.” When he badgered his father
to buy him a new sketch pad, his father
said, “I’ll buy you a drawing pad if you
draw men.” “It was the most remarkable
thing, because it was so clear and pre-
cise,” Haynes said of his father’s request.
On another occasion, while playing Cin-
derella’s Fairy Godmother in one of his
after-dinner performances, Haynes made
a limp-wristed gesture that earned him
an immediate, unexpected rebuke. “They
were, like, ‘Don’t do that!’ I was, like, ‘I’m
playing the Fairy Godmother, you guys.’
I was angry. I wasn’t ashamed. It stirred
up a kind of revolt in me,” he said.
At Oakwood, which placed a strong
emphasis on the arts, Haynes was a class
star, and he and McGovern were insep-
arable. “He was my first experience of
loving,” she said. When they weren’t stag-
ing their own performance pieces, they
were acting in school productions. After
school, at Haynes’s house, they played
theatre games, improvised sketches, re-
hearsed scenes from plays. “He was a
work machine,” McGovern said. “You’d
never see Todd just hanging out. If he
was sitting down, he was drawing or
writing. Seven days a week. Every wak-
ing hour he was making something.”
In one of many poems he wrote for
McGovern, he envisioned a joint future:. .. I will be the
Famous film director and you will be
The actress. I will write scripts for you.
Ingmar and Liv, she smiled. Someday,
I said
McGovern often slept over in
Haynes’s room, but they were never to-
gether “in any remotely physical way,”
she said. “He had a fairly clear idea that
he was attracted to boys, although not
exclusively.” Haynes’s parents maintained
“a fantasy for happy heterosexual clo-
sure” with McGovern, he said. He didn’t
come out to them until he was in col-
lege and in his first relationship with a
man. “My dad assured me that it was all
right with him,” Haynes said. But his
mother found the news hard to accept.
“She freaked out,” Wendy said. “She had
a meltdown. She was concerned about
what the world would think. She was
concerned about him being hurt in the
world. It shattered her dream.” Later,
however, according to Haynes, “she would