In the early nineteen-thirties, three young gay men made the scene in bohemian Los Angeles, absorbing influences and shaping one another’s tastes. They staged art shows and concerts; they lectured confidently on aesthetics; they gawked at modernist architecture; they read Proust aloud. The leader of the trio was a thirty-year-old poet and artist named Donald Sample, who’d gone to Harvard and then wandered around Europe. In 1930, on the island of Capri, Sample had met an eighteen-year-old college dropout named John Cage, who had dabbled in literature, art, architecture, and music but had yet to decide on a vocation. Cage and Sample became lovers and moved to L.A., where Cage had grown up. There, they connected with a high-school friend of Cage’s named Harry Hay, who also had literary ambitions and talked up a storm.
At the time, it was Sample who seemed poised for bigger things. His poetry and art work won praise, his conversation glittered. But it was the quiet-voiced, ostensibly straitlaced Cage who seized the world’s attention. After breaking up with Sample, at the end of 1934, Cage studied composition with the modernist master Arnold Schoenberg and began exploring new realms of sound. Within a couple of decades, he had established himself as a cynosure of the international avant-garde—the lord of noise, chance, and silence. By the end of the twentieth century, Hay, too, had acquired legendary status. In 1950, he spearheaded the Mattachine Society, which set in motion the modern American gay-rights movement. Sample, by contrast, slipped into near-total obscurity, his name appearing spectrally in books about Cage and Hay, sometimes in odd variants (Allen Sample, Alan Sample, Don St. Paul). No one knew what had happened to him, although for a long time there were rumors that he was still alive.
Recently, I set about trying to solve the seemingly marginal mystery of Don Sample. From personal papers, newspaper archives, immigration documents, census reports, oral histories, and autopsies, I pieced together a complicated, fragmentary portrait of a bad-boy aesthete, one who evolved from a teen-age delinquent into an arbiter of taste and a tutor of provocation. Sample helped to plot Cage’s trajectory toward the outer limits of art. He also made an impression on Hay, who, in his 1996 book, “Radically Gay,” wrote that “views and vistas had bubbled forth” from their conversations. The story of Sample’s life takes strange, sad turns, but it has a messy integrity, and it cries out to be rescued from oblivion.
“Don had bright, mischievous eyes in a scholarly-looking face,” Hay told his biographer, Stuart Timmons. “He wore little glasses and had a shock of lank hair that kept falling over his lenses; he looked very boyish, pushing it back all the time.” Cage, by contrast, seemed “at first very New England, very formal and buttoned-down in his three-piece suit and tie.” According to “The Trouble with Harry,” Timmons’s biography of Hay, from 1990, Cage’s reserve dissipated in the presence of Sample’s prickly, galvanizing spirit.
He was born William Donald McAteer Sample, on February 15, 1902, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. Sample’s father, William Sample, worked as an auditor for Westinghouse and U.S. Steel; his mother, Katherine McAteer, was an Irish immigrant’s daughter whose family had prospered in the steel industry. Sample’s uncle Howard McAteer was a deputy to Henry Frick at Carnegie Steel, became a yacht-owning millionaire, and founded the American Steel Export Company, dividing his time between Park Avenue and Pasadena. Myrtle June McAteer, another McAteer sibling, was a star tennis player who won the U.S. Open in 1900. She later took up singing, formed a professional (and probably personal) partnership with the actress Marguerite Fields, and settled in Southern California.
At Wilkinsburg High, Sample fell in with a sketchy crowd. In 1918, he and three other boys from what the Pittsburgh Press called “leading Wilkinsburg families” were arrested for robbing telephone pay stations. A few months later, Sample and his fellow-ruffian James McCauley were accused of stealing cars and going on joyrides; their chief accomplice this time was W. Emerson Logan, the son of a Westinghouse engineer. McCauley was sent to reform school; Logan progressed to armed bank robberies, his spree ending when he drew a revolver on a Philadelphia policeman and was stopped with a punch to the face. Sample avoided indictment for larceny and was charged only with receiving stolen goods. His parents dispatched him to Principia, a Christian Science boarding school in St. Louis, six hundred miles away.
Sample spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh and then wangled a transfer to Harvard, where he majored in literature and belonged to the Classical Club and the Poetry Society. By his final year, 1924-25, he was staying in an élite residence called Westmorly Court, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had lived a couple of decades earlier. Sample drew notice on campus for his poetry and was featured in a 1924 anthology of college students’ verse entitled “Poets of the Future.” His contribution, “Revere Beach,” is stiffly written but evocative:
After receiving his undergraduate degree, in 1925, Sample remained at Harvard for three more years, studying law before returning to literature. He then moved to New York. The 1930 census shows a twenty-five-year-old Pennsylvania-born librarian named Don Sample living on Riverside Drive and Ninety-third Street—a short walk from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park, a celebrated gay cruising spot. Then, as one did, he went to Europe.
The six-foot-tall Angeleno lad whom Sample met in Capri was a characteristic product of early-twentieth-century Southern California, with its blend of hyper-capitalist energies and bohemian vibes. Cage’s father, John Milton Cage, Sr., was an ingenious, if never particularly successful, inventor, who developed a functional submarine, infrared-vision and color-television technologies, and a method for preventing lightning strikes on oil fields. His mother, Lucretia Harvey Cage, chronicled women’s clubs for the L.A. Times. Although Cage studied piano from an early age, his primary focus in high school was public speaking. At Los Angeles High, both Cage and Harry Hay, who was a year younger, joined a network of World Friendship Clubs, which the L.A. school system had set up to promote internationalist sentiments. In one World Friendship publication, you can find Cage extolling “International Patriotism” while Hay writes a song in praise of comradeship (“Awake! O ye world for the dawn is at hand”).
In 1928, at the precocious age of sixteen, Cage matriculated at Pomona College, east of L.A. There, he began to discover modern literature and art, his horizons widened by a professor, the art historian José Pijoán. In 1930, Pijoán brought the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco to the student dining hall to paint a mural of Prometheus. As it happens, Cage’s first same-sex experience was with one of Orozco’s muscular models. That summer, Cage dropped out and set off on a European tour, his expenses paid by his momentarily well-off parents.
It made sense for two young gay Americans to converge on Capri, which had won such fame as a gay oasis that a German author had published a pamphlet on the subject (“Capri und die Homosexuellen”). In a letter home, Cage leaves things vague: “I have been traveling with a chap I found in Capri. He comes from Pittsburgh and from Harvard College and a number of other places. He writes poetry which he refuses to have printed.” Once Cage and Sample became a couple, they toured other gay-friendly locales around the Mediterranean: Naples, Algeria, Majorca. They reëntered the U.S. on July 1, 1931, in Key West. Their final destination was Los Angeles.
Why not New York? Personal factors may have been at work: in L.A., Cage’s parents could provide support. But L.A. was also coming into its own as a cultural center. The Austrian-born architects R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra were building modernist residences, which Sample made a point of driving around to see. Schindler and his wife, the critic and editor Pauline Gibling Schindler, presided over a communal scene at their celebrated house on Kings Road, in West Hollywood. One Kings Road lodger, the gallerist and educator Galka Scheyer, was promoting a group of artists she called the Blue Four: Kandinsky, Feininger, Jawlensky, and Klee. The atmosphere was ripe for a new generation. Sample and Cage set about producing art in tandem and, in late 1931, mounted an exhibition at Scripps College. The following year, Sample had a solo show at the Santa Monica Public Library, winning a nod from the L.A. Times critic Arthur Millier (“sensitive little wood cuts, much influenced by the German modernist Klee”). Tracking the couple is made easier by the fact that L.A. newspapers were assiduous in reporting Cage’s movements—no doubt a result of his mother’s connections.
None of Sample’s art or poetry seems to survive, aside from his Harvard verses. But Pauline Schindler, a discerning judge of talent, thought highly of him. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that Sample’s poems showed the influence of E. E. Cummings but were “far more inward and utterly sincere . . . alive and strong and heavy with significance.” Cage and Sample, she went on, were “intellectual to the point of decadence, yet they’ll continue on, because of their inner vitality, into the emergent man who is now to come.”
In Majorca, Cage had taken up composing, and Sample encouraged him to continue. “Don was an excellent critic,” Hay said in an oral-history interview. “When John began to compose, Don was very careful that he moved him . . . in the directions he should be moving in.” Among other things, Sample introduced his young lover to the writing of James Joyce, which would have a huge effect on Cage’s mature work. In a 1987 conversation with Stuart Timmons, Cage recalled Sample as a “real disciplinarian” who made him work “three hours in the afternoon, two hours after supper.”
Harry Hay, the son of a mining engineer who had once worked for Cecil Rhodes, had a fine baritone voice, which Cage put to work in early performances of his music. Hay later remembered singing Cage’s “Greek Ode”—a setting, somewhat in the manner of Erik Satie, of a choral lament from Aeschylus’s “Persians”—before an audience at the Santa Monica Bay Woman’s Club. When I perused the Santa Monica Outlook, a paper that has been overlooked as a biographical source for Cage, I could find no such event, but I did notice Hay and Cage appearing together at a Junior Republican tea on November 6, 1932—a get-out-the-vote event for Herbert Hoover, who lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt two days later. Cage and Hay also gave a recital in conjunction with a lecture by W. F. Way, who discoursed on the need for a yacht harbor in Santa Monica. During a “benefit bridge tea” at the home of the lumber executive Ethelbert R. Maule, whose daughter Cornelia was a dancer and a pianist, Cage presented his music alongside Sample’s art.
By early 1933, Cage and Sample had moved into the Palama, a bungalow court in Santa Monica. Cage describes the place in his book “Silence,” omitting mention of Sample: “In exchange for doing the gardening, I got an apartment to live in and a large room back of the court over the garages, which I used as a lecture hall.” Stories in the Outlook show that Cage played and/or discussed the music of Satie, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Schulhoff, Toch, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Schoenberg. At an American-themed event, Cage played Gershwin’s “Preludes”—not exactly easy fare, and not the kind of repertory one would expect from the future composer of “Imaginary Landscape No. 4” for twelve radios. In later years, Cage characterized his patrons as “housewives,” but his audience was cultured and appreciative.
That fall, things got boisterous at the Schindler compound on Kings Road. A German-born film functionary named Eric Locke, a longtime associate of the great director Ernst Lubitsch, was occupying one of the studios in the complex, and, according to R. M. Schindler’s correspondence, “two friends” moved in with him. These friends may have been Sample and Cage. In a 1992 conversation with the architectural historian Thomas Hines—the only interview in which the composer discussed his sexuality with any frankness—Cage mentioned that by 1933 his relationship with Sample had become an open one, and that the two were involved with a Hollywood figure who was living at Kings Road.
In early 1934, Cage and Sample passed through various alternative enclaves up the coast, including the beach town of Oceano, where Gavin Arthur, the radical-leaning, astrologically inclined, bisexual grandson of President Chester A. Arthur, oversaw a community of artists, poets, and dropouts in the dunes. Sample began calling himself Donald St. Paul, for whatever reason, and made plans to study with the photographer Edward Weston, as the Carmel Pine Cone reported. Cage, meanwhile, hoped to become a pupil of the mighty Schoenberg, who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and was teaching in Boston. To prepare for the challenge, Cage decided to move to New York to study with Schoenberg’s student Adolph Weiss. In the spring of 1934, Sample joined Cage on a cross-country trip. The two travelled hobo-style, jumping aboard boxcars. Cage mentioned this adventure when Calvin Tomkins profiled him for The New Yorker in 1964, but, again, Sample was omitted from the narrative.
In New York, the dynamic of the relationship changed. At first, Sample had been the dominant force; now, Cage’s elfin charisma was shining brighter. The younger man made a splash in Virgil Thomson’s circle and had a fling with Philip Johnson. In December, Cage and Sample drove across the country once again, this time in the company of the composer Henry Cowell. Schoenberg had moved to L.A., and Cage was following him there. The trio stopped in Santa Fe, where the New Mexican took notice of them. Donald St. Paul, the paper said, was a “painter who plans to stay for some time.” In the end, Sample completed the journey to L.A., but he went to live in San Fernando while Cage moved back in with his parents. Cage wrote in a letter to a friend, “I was sorry that Don changed his mind about Santa Fe.” The relationship was ending.
To be gay in the mid-thirties was no easy thing. The relative sexual permissiveness of the Prohibition era had given way to a backlash. The book designer Ward Ritchie, who had visited Cage and Sample in Majorca, recalled that Cage’s parents objected to their son’s boyfriend, whether or not they perceived him as such. Perhaps Cage also wished to assume a mantle of respectability as he began his studies with Schoenberg, at U.S.C. In any case, his desires swung toward the heterosexual. He had an affair with Pauline Schindler, sending her florid love letters. He also pursued the sculptor Xenia Kashevaroff, and married her in June, 1935. Hay describes an awkward encounter at the newlyweds’ home: “John would not let me in and would not say why. He spoke to me at the back porch. It was very awkward, and I finally left. I could only guess I looked too—obvious.” Hay deemed the marriage a “loss of integrity” on Cage’s part. To be sure, Hay himself got married in 1938, in part to conform to the expectations of his Communist comrades.
Sample was the one who made no attempt to pass. In the mid-thirties, according to Hay, he was arrested on a morals charge in De Longpre Park, a favored cruising ground that has long featured a memorial to Rudolph Valentino. Sample, suffering from skin sores, was nursed by Hay’s mother, Margaret. He later moved into a house in Laurel Canyon that acquired the nickname Homo Hollow, as Timmons reveals in “The Trouble with Harry.” The dancer Helen Johnson Gorog evoked the scene for Timmons: “Don had cultivated a salon of all sorts of people—from the adventurous to the pretentious. Parties there would start Friday night and end sometime Monday or Tuesday, whenever people had to crawl off to work. That house had great suspended ceiling beams, and I remember Don walking barefoot across them every time he got drunk enough.” Curiously, Schoenberg once paid a visit to Homo Hollow, attending a dinner party given by the composer and educator David Patterson, who had a studio at the same address. That night, however, there was no drunken cavorting on the beams.
Cage did well in Schoenberg’s classes, but he rebelled against the master’s strictures regarding thematic development and harmonic variety, instead embracing the medium of percussion, in which harmony is largely beside the point. His first percussion concert took place at the home of the artist Hazel Dreis and the dancer Edward McLean, in Santa Monica, where the pair ran a bookbinding commune. A 1937 Outlook article, titled “Music Takes Strange Form,” describes how the bookbinders were making music from a garden hoe, scissors, a flyswatter, and cooking utensils. Cage is quoted as saying, “The Hindus have made great progress in rhythm, but in the West, from the time of Bach to the present, there has been absolutely no new development in this field.” There, unmistakably, is the voice of the avant-garde guru to come. In 1938, Cage went north to Seattle and then proceeded to the Bay Area, Chicago, and, finally, New York. When, in 1943, he mounted a percussion concert at MOMA, Life granted him two pages, between Navy boxers and a South African witch doctor. The Age of Cage had begun.
After the breakup, the lovers had little to no contact. Hay, who kept in touch with Sample for a number of years, didn’t remember Cage’s name coming up. Trying to reconstruct a life from scattered traces is hazardous, but it seems as though Sample found a degree of stability in the later thirties. He got a job editing instructional bulletins for the California Department of Education, collaborating with a singular woman named Vocha Fiske, who had danced with Ruth St. Denis and acted in Pilgrimage Plays at the Hollywood Bowl before earning a master’s in education from U.S.C. Fiske specialized in general semantics, and Sample assisted her on a W.P.A.-funded project that sought to standardize speech-arts curricula in the state’s schools, employing people who had been laid off during the Depression.
If, as seems likely, Sample fell out with most of his family, he remained close to his aunt Myrtle June McAteer, who had come out West with Marguerite Fields, in 1935, stayed briefly in a Schindler apartment in Silver Lake, and then taken up residence in the San Fernando Valley. McAteer, having switched from tennis to classical singing, gave lessons and directed a church choir. Sample lodged with McAteer and Fields in the late thirties and early forties. The Santa Monica Outlook tells us that Sample also kept in touch with Cornelia Maule, who, in 1936, invited him to her house to give a talk on “Modern Phases of Art Forms.”
Trouble appeared, in the form of a handsome, hard-drinking young New Mexican named Jack Hening. In 1940, Sample and Hening were sharing an apartment in Hollywood; Hening’s draft card lists Don Sample in the field for “Person Who Will Always Know Your Address.” Hening, the son of a newspaper and magazine publisher, had studied bacteriology and served as a pathologist with the U.S. Army Medical Service. For a time, he lived in Gavin Arthur’s Oceano colony; then he drifted up to San Francisco, working as a hotel porter. Sample went north in the same period, taking a post as an English teacher at the San Rafael Military Academy. If there was a relationship between the two, it did not last. In 1946, Hening went on a fatal bender with two men named Menypenny and Megirt. In a room at the Mint Hotel, in San Francisco, Hening fell onto a radiator valve and received a wound that penetrated the left eye through to the brain. Or so the coroner surmised. The incident has the earmarks of the kind of thing that, in those days, the police did not bother to investigate.
Bereft or not, Sample returned to Southern California. A 1948 voting list places him at a medical building in Downey, California—presumably the Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center, which was known for polio care but handled many other conditions. This suggests that Sample’s health was in decline. In the fifties, he could be found in the Valley, no longer actively employed, possibly housebound. He died of heart failure on February 24, 1964. The death certificate in the records of the California Department of Public Health states that he had been suffering for ten years from “spastic paralysis”—suggesting a stroke, multiple sclerosis, or some other degenerative disease. Such an end may sound bleak, yet the evidence is far too scant to draw any conclusions. Perhaps Sample brooded over his losses and unfulfilled ambitions; perhaps he enjoyed lively company to the end.
By the mid-sixties, Cage had become a global celebrity, his influence extending from Boulez to the Beatles. After the demise of his marriage to Kashevaroff, he settled into a decades-long partnership with Merce Cunningham, who provided a gentle counterpoint to his smoldering intellect. (The image of Cage as an unflappable sage is deceptive, as I argued in a 2010 article.) Although Cage lived openly with Cunningham, he shied away from identifying himself as gay. Only in interviews at the end of his life did he begin to speak more candidly. As the critic and Cage scholar Mark Swed recently suggested to me, the composer may have sensed that his time was limited and that he should reveal more of himself.
In the wake of Cage’s death came another odd twist. Stories began circulating in musicological circles that Sample was still alive and living under an assumed name in France. He was said to have accumulated a storehouse of Cage material, including unknown manuscripts. Those stories reached Hay, who lived until 2002, long enough to be hailed as a gay-rights pioneer. Hay wrote briefly about Cage and Sample in “Radically Gay,” comparing the relationship, in his customarily florid way, to Alexander the Great’s love for Hephaestion. Correspondence in the Hay archive at the San Francisco Public Library shows that Hay hoped to send a copy of the book to Sample, not realizing that the latter had been dead for more than thirty years. Memories of Sample’s boldness lingered in Hay’s mind.
Cage, too, seemed a little haunted by the man who had picked him up on Capri and schooled him in all things modern. He wrote to Timmons in 1987: “When did he die? How old was he? Where did he die?” In 1992, in his conversation with Hines, Cage spoke briefly about Sample before assuming his customary mask of benign diffidence. “I don’t think I’m faithful emotionally,” Cage said. “I don’t think I am faithful about my emotions.” When Hines asked what he meant, Cage replied, “I don’t know, but what I’m trying to say is that my concern is with all the things that you see on my public side and which are, so to speak, in no sense emotional. But, if you ask, as you just did, where is Don Sample, I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive.” ♦
