THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 47
teletype machine, at Columbia Pictures.
He was going to turn it down until he
was told that the room was across from
the president’s office and that only the
top executives sent or received messages.
He took the job, and stayed for nearly a
year. He then began to study acting at
the Neighborhood Playhouse, which was
run by Sanford Meisner. Sydney Pollack
was teaching there at the time, and, while
fond of Kramer, he was blunt about his
acting prospects: “He told me I was very
good, but that I would never get the girl.’’
By 1960, Kramer was back at Co-
lumbia, working as a script reader in the
New York office. Kramer impressed Mo
Rothman, who was in charge of the stu-
dio’s European business, and in 1961 he
was invited to set up a story department
in London. “Those were the golden
years for film in London,” he said. “I
was able to witness and be a part of
some of the greatest films of my time:
‘Dr. Strangelove,’ ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’
‘Guns of Navarone.’” In 1965, he learned
that David Picker, the president of
United Artists, was looking for an as-
sistant in New York. Kramer got the
job but immediately regretted it. “It was
extremely boring and I missed London.
But you couldn’t just quit on David
Picker unless you were ready to leave
the business for good.
“I told him that I wanted to go back
to England and make movies. He agreed
to send me as an associate producer on
a film called ‘Here We Go Round the
Mulberry Bush.’ The script was dread-
ful, and there was no way the film was
going to get made; to save my job, I sat
down and rewrote the screenplay. Picker
liked it and the movie was back on.” In
1966, the director Silvio Narizzano, who
had just completed “Georgy Girl,” told
Kramer that he wanted to make a film
of the D. H. Lawrence novel “Women
in Love,” and he invited him to pro-
duce it. Kramer read the book, optioned
it from the Lawrence estate for fifteen
hundred pounds, and hired the British
playwright David Mercer to write a
screenplay. “It was a horrible Marxist
tract,’’ Kramer said. “Just horrible. I had
no script and no more money for an-
other writer. So, once again, out of des-
peration, I sat down and wrote one my-
self.” Picker liked Kramer’s script enough
to back the film; Kramer asked Peter
Brook and Stanley Kubrick, among oth-ers, to direct; eventually, Ken Russell
said yes. The movie, which was made
for a little more than a million dollars,
was nominated for four Academy
Awards, one of which was for Kramer’s
sexually explicit screenplay. (He lost to
Ring Lardner, Jr., for “M*A*S*H.”)
Kramer was thirty-four years old at
the time, and his unexpected success
helped establish him in Hollywood. He
went there in 1970 and wrote the screen-
play for the musical of “Lost Horizon,”which turned into the “Ishtar” of its day.
(“It was the one thing I have done in
my life that I truly regret,’’ Kramer told
me. “People still laugh about it.”) None-
theless, he was paid nearly three hun-
dred thousand dollars for his work—an
enormous sum at the time. Kramer gave
the money to his brother, who invested
it so well that Kramer never had to rely
on a paycheck again (and is now wealthy).
He decided to write about gay life, and
by the middle of the nineteen-seventies
he was back in New York, working on
“Faggots” and looking for something
exciting to happen.E
arly in 1982, there was still no name
for the disease that was beginning
to spread among homosexuals in New
York and Los Angeles; it was often re-
ferred to as GRID (gay-related immune
deficiency), because its prevalence among
heterosexuals in Africa was largely un-
known. “The Normal Heart” recounts
the story of the beginnings of the epi-
demic in New York, as seen through one
angry man’s eyes. Kramer’s battles with
Mayor Koch, the city of New York, the
Times, his ambivalence about his brother
(to whom he is now close), his furtive
love affair with a once married (and now
dead) man were all up on the stage each
day for more than a year. So was his grow-
ing disgust with the gay community.
Kramer had never been a joiner; still, in
January of 1982 he arranged a meeting at
his apartment and made a point of in-viting attractive, successful men—not the
fringe crowd that so often fills radical
groups. After listening to some dark the-
ories and the grim facts, one of the men
at that first meeting, Paul Rapoport, said,
“Gay men certainly have a health crisis
on their hands,’’ at which point Kramer
shouted, “That’s it! That’s our name!”
It turned out to be one of the most
important political gatherings of the era.
“I walked into that very first meeting in
Larry’s apartment, which overlooked
Washington Square Park, where there
were friends and strangers,’’ Rodger Mc-
Farlane told me. “And I watched Larry
Kramer call a room full of grown, wealthy,
accomplished men a bunch of pathetic
fucking sissies to their faces, and it was
astonishing. I thought he so fundamen-
tally and so viscerally believed that he
was right and that we could fix it and I
fell madly and hopelessly for him.’’
G.M.H.C. set up the first AIDS hot
line in the world, which within days was
swamped by calls. Kramer was thrilled
by the excitement of it all, yet he clashed
with the other volunteers, and in par-
ticular with a closeted banker and for-
mer Green Beret named Paul Popham,
who emerged as the first president of
the organization. From the start, there
was tension over their different ap-
proaches to the city, to gay life, and, es-
pecially, to Mayor Koch. Popham didn’t
want to antagonize the Mayor; Kramer
detested Koch and, as the epidemic
spread, he seemed to hold him person-
ally responsible.
Not long ago, I visited Koch at his
law office near Rockefeller Center. He
hasn’t changed any more than Kramer
has: still ready to battle over the most
minuscule of issues. In many ways, they
were the perfect couple: two morally
certain Jews from Greenwich Village
(with, ironically, apartments in the same
building on lower Fifth Avenue). Koch’s
law office is filled with pictures of friends
and accomplices: Al D’Amato, Cardi-
nal O’Connor, even the Pope—not ex-
actly Kramer’s crowd. Koch told me that
he hoped Kramer would survive, and
he called him a “genius” for starting
G.M.H.C. and ACT UP. But that is
pretty much where the compliments
ended. “He blames me for the deaths of
his friends,’’ Koch said, shouting the
word “me” loud enough to startle his
ANTHONY RUSSO, AUGUST 28, 2017 secretary. “I just looked at the figure