Certainly the man I remember with fondness is unrecognizable to you. His journey to Rancho Santa Fe began, it seems now, when his life first went off track in Alabama all those years ago. He lost his job, and his family: he paid for being gay in a place that was largely hostile to homosexuality-the Deep South of George Wallace and buttoned-down manners. I know; I was there. I was close friends with a young man who had an affair with Herff Applewhite: the liaison broke up Applewhite’s marriage and drove him from Tuscaloosa. The mystery everyone is trying to solve is how Applewhite could lead so many to their deaths. But if you can appreciate the persuasive charm he had back then-no matter what his sexual orientation-you can begin to understand the force of his personality.
Mr. Applewhite, as I first knew him, was my voice teacher. I also attended his repertory class, sang in the university chorus under his direction and accompanied some of his other voice students for perhaps three or four hours a week. I saw him every day for as long as he taught at the university. Sometimes after my lesson, we’d go for tea at a hangout in the old quadrangle. When I was no longer his student, we became friends and often went to Howard Johnson’s with other friends after a class or concert. We always ended our meal with chocolate fudge brownies. If someone was short of cash, Mr. Applewhite would treat, saying, “You can buy me coffee tomorrow at the quadrangle.” When I stopped studying with him, he asked me to call him “Heriff.”
When Herff smiled, which was often, his teeth gleamed like a double row of Chiclets. His speaking voice was resonant, a rich baritone brightened by an unexpected metallic ping. He was polite, even courtly. He wore expensive Harris tweed jackets, Oxford-cloth button-down shirts and Weejuns. He always looked as though he’d just gotten out of a shower, having scrubbed himself to a pink glow.
No one thought him perfect, however. There was always something suspect about him. He smiled too much. In that time and place, other, more sinister things were seen as wrong with him even though there barely existed a language with which to discuss them. Allusions were made; some were veiled, others were not. He had long hair-at least an inch on top-in an era when men in Alabama wore theirs cropped like GIs. (In Alabama, the ’50s lasted until at least 1968.) Herff often winked at you when he talked. You couldn’t tell whether his wink was supposed to lock you into a complicity with him or just italicize a word for emphasis or if it was a tic. I never heard anyone call the gesture effeminate, but knowing glances were exchanged behind his back. Herff owned the regulation black, navy, heather gray and oatmeal crew-neck sweaters. He also had cherry red, emerald green and Prussian blue ones. No one ever said exactly what was wrong with them. They didn’t need to. Merely to name the color said it all. Herff was skating on thin ice.
Of course Herff was a talented teacher. Besides his duties at the university, Herff was also the music director of one of the largest churches in town, preparing the weekly services as well as special programs for Christmas, Easter and feast days. Always working, he had such a gift for organization that he added to his university schedule another smaller, elite choral group, the Alabama Singers, with whom he made a professional recording.
Herff was married to a beautiful woman with whom he had two lovely children. I don’t know how many times I saw Herff with my friend, a gifted young man, before I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Herff with his wife. Herff’s public encounters with my friend were innocent enough; it was their frequency and pitch that incriminated. Their chats in the hall came to be seen as more than chats. Their arrivals together in the morning and their departures together in the evenings were the equivalent of confessions. It was not long before Mrs. Applewhite left with the children and never came back.
My friend told me that he and Herff were lovers, but no matter what anyone else suspected, no one knew for certain. Things, however, didn’t work out for Herff. One professor, who was married with children, had been suspected of having sexual relations with his male students for years. Yet this man had had the grace, if that’s what you can call it, to be prudent out in the open. He supported Applewhite’s dismissal. Whether the fact that he was involved with the same young man as Applewhite had anything to do with his outrage, I cannot say. Before the ink was dry on his forced resignation, Herff’s relationship with my friend had dissolved. The last time I saw Applewhite in Alabama he was the color of cigarette ashes, and unshaven. I thought he would snap out of it. He apparently never did.
