The Wild, Sad Life of John Cage’s First Lover

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.