X8712 $1.75A BANTAM BOOK

The controversial coast-to-coast bestseller-an unusual love story, as moving as Jany ever written,

the Front Runner

by Patricia Nell Warren

Photo: Ken Howard

A Year Later: Film Milestone In Casting

by E. Donnell Stoneman

Patricia Nell Warren, author of last year's acclaimed The Front Runner, has signed with publishers William Morrow for another

gay novel.

The new book, titled The Fancy Dancer for reasons the author is not ready to divulge, is a first-person narrative of a summer of crisis a young Catholic priest experiences while serving in a remote rural parish in a western state. Totally alone, isolated from any helpful group or organization, he is forced to deal on his own with the emerging realization of his homosexuality.

Roughly a third of the manuscript is in the editor's hands and a publication date for The Fancy Dancer is expected to be announced for late fall or early winter of this year.

Meanwhile, the original hardcover edition of The Front Runner has had a year of healthy, if not phenomenal, sales. A new paperback version published by Bantam is now on the stands.

Almost from the day of publication, an eventual movie version seemed uppermost in everyone's mind. As names of actors for the two major roles were suggested, rumors multiplied. Now, a year later, a movie sale has been announced with one of the top contenders in everybody's casting game officially set as co-producer. If things develop properly, he will also star in the film. But, more of that later.

I first met Pat Warren in late February of last year. After reading an advance copy of The Front Runner. I called her at Reader's Digest where she works as an editor in the condensed book department and made an appointment to meet in Manhattan for dinner. That first meeting, over sangria and Mexican food on the upper East Side, was a time for getting acquainted.

Two days later, I took a train up to Bedford Hills and spent the day with Pat as she visited the stables at nearby Cross River where she keeps her beloved thoroughbred, Kinend, and her newest acquisition, a grey jumper named Put 'em Up.

Later, as the afternoon sun filtered palely through the bare branches around her little rented house on a spacious private estate, we talked about her early life in her home state of Montana, her troubled marriage to a Ukrainian poet when she graduated from college, the subsequent divorce and the genesis of the book that was to become The Front Runner.

Since that first leisurely weekend, Pat and I have become good friends. We've had many lengthy, late-night discussions and I've had the opportunity to read several of her earlier unpublished manuscripts. For some time, as long as she has been writing prose, she has felt drawn by the psyche of the homosexual male. One of the earliest books she discovered, and one that she returns to again and again, is T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Soon after David Lean's film came out, she wrote an

intriguing treatment for a film based on the Lawrence mystique, offering no solutions to the enigma that was Lawrence, but exploring with a kind of multiple, mirrorlike imagery the conflicting facets of his character. The approach was unmistakably, though not explicitly, homosexual.

During the year she and her husband lived in Spain, Pat became enamored of the corrida. and especially of the bullfighters. Her novel, The Burning Bull, as yet unpublished, is an ambitious, unorthodox and fascinating account of a young matador who, drawn toward the twin fires of the Church and the fiesta brava, seeks to embrace both.

There are homosexual aspects to The Burning Bull, too. Some are open; others lie deep beneath the surface of a culture that venerates the "machismo" image of the male.

It may seem a bit surprising, perhaps, that prior to the writing of The Front Runner the author of a convincing story of male homosexual love could have so little firsthand knowledge of the world she was writing about. Pat grew up in a typical small-town atmosphere with one brother four years younger. After graduating from the county high school near her home, she traveled to Stephens College in Missouri. Why Stephens? One of her mother's friends who attended the college strongly recommended it to her, and Pat obediently agreed.

"At that time I was Catholic," she says. "It was a phase a lot of people go through. So, I transferred to Sacred Heart at Manhattanville where a number of the Kennedy girls went."

The religious fervor soonabated, and, according to Pat, she became a noisy apostate, "which upset the nuns terribly." She graduated when she was 20 and married almost immediately.

"That was a big mistake. In my junior year at college we had a mutual friend who was Ukrainian and she kept saying, 'You must meet George, the writer!' I was immature and inexperienced and along came this very intense European and swept me off my feet!"

It was mostly a case of two strong, domineering and differing personalities competing with each other. The subject of writing became a familiar tug-of-war between them.

For Pat, life began after college, during her final years of marriage, when she gradually began to "find herself," to explore her own identity.

With the manuscript of The Front Runner completed and her divorce final, she decided to spend the summer on Fire Island, where she was invited to share a house with some friends. That initial exposure to an area called Bayberry Dunes-lonely, semi-deserted, without streets or shops or, in some cases, electricity-appealed to her western-bred spirit. It was also the occasion when she met at young man with whom she established a close relationship, a union

Varren

THE ADVOCATE

May 7, 1975