The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

By Justin Spring

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 478 pages; $32.50)

Samuel Steward was a charmer whom a writer of fiction couldn't invent. His odd career path - from college professor to tattoo artist - was lined with literary celebrities, muscular men (whom he decorated), and more sex with more partners than most people could count. And he counted them.

An editor of fiction might advise removing half of the story - too unbelievable.

Yet Justin Spring's jaw-dropping "Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade," reads like a novel probing a lifelong rebel's courage, creativity and ultimate sadness.

Who knew him besides tattooed sailors and bikers and readers of gay pulp novels by "Phil Andros," a pen name? If the slight, pencil-mustached Steward is obscure, it isn't for lack of documentation. Much of what he published, however, was under some 10 pseudonyms, and it's only a fraction of what he wrote.

This vivid portrait emerged from an attic packed with papers and from Spring's hunt for letters in libraries that still find Steward's sexual frankness too extreme for their readers.

Extreme, but wildly prolific. Steward's depiction of a girl of easy virtue among Columbus, Ohio, bohemians in his 1936 novel "Angels on the Bough" got him fired from the State College of Washington. Yet the novel's critical success signaled commercial potential. Steward never fulfilled it.

Steward wrote pulp "pornos" by "Phil Andros." As Phil Sparrow, he chronicled tattooing in America. Under his own name, he published "Dear Sammy," his correspondence with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, plus two mystery novels in which the pair were characters, and a memoir, "Chapters From an Autobiography."

His unpublished journals from 1924 to 1974 are encyclopedic - a personal history of gay life before gay liberation. And Steward compiled a matter-of-fact "Stud File," index cards of his every sexual contact - almost 5,000 - with names, anatomical notes and wry comments - example, Paris in 1950: "8 Frenchmen in a small hot room, smelly and messy, with Camembert crotches."

Back then, when gay men feared writing anything intimate and avoided the mail, Steward was shamelessly honest, Spring tells us: "I consider this biography in many ways a completion of his own life's work; that is, a full and thoughtful account of one man's highly sexual life, as carefully documented as possible, from birth to death."

Steward moved stealthily through intersecting worlds. Besides prowling for rough sex in alleys, bars and, he admits, anywhere else, he knew Rudolph Valentino (whose pubic hair he saved after sex), George Platt Lynes, Thornton Wilder, André Gide, Jean Genet and Stein.

Of Stein, Spring writes: "He genuinely liked her writing and she genuinely liked his praise of it." Stein urged "Sammy" to resolve "the question of being important inside in one."

In English, that's self-esteem, Steward's lifelong crisis, Spring maintains. Son of a mother who died young and an alcoholic father, he was raised by two aunts in Appalachian Ohio. By his teenage years, he led two lives, as a gay youth and as a brilliant student. Teaching in Columbus and later Chicago, he chafed at propriety. An alcoholic, he later moved to drugs.

Two obsessions set him apart - sex and record-keeping. When his prodigious self-documentation came to the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey's attention, Steward expanded into photography and the new medium of home movies of group sex. "In him I saw the ideal father - who was never shocked, who never criticized, who always approved, who listened and sympathized. I suppose to that degree I fell in love with him," he wrote. Unusual for Steward, he and Kinsey never had sex, Spring notes.

By the 1950s, the Red Scare was targeting homosexuals in academia. Sick of teaching, Steward resigned from DePaul University and opened a tattoo parlor that catered to young sailors long before "don't ask, don't tell" or today's tattoo fever.

Role-playing had become reality. As Steward wrote: "The tattoos I have on me ally me with the herd, the toughs, the lower-class, the criminal - and I like it not only sexually but because that world [of the lower-class and the criminal] spits in the face of the one which has contained me thus far."

To start a new life on his own renegade terms, Paul Gauguin went to Tahiti. Samuel Steward went to Oakland in 1964. As "Doc" Sparrow, he was the Hells Angels' "official" tattoo artist. Under siege in a rough neighborhood, he closed Anchor Tattoo Shop at 1727 San Pablo Ave. in 1970 and retreated to the Berkeley flats.

Life without compromise for a sexual Olympian? That life brought self-doubt, loneliness and anonymity as an author, not Jean Genet status. "Pleasure doesn't really make one happy," wrote the man who devoted his life to sex.

"Secret Historian" portrays an outsider out of step with his times - brazenly sexual in an intolerant era, but never winning readers or an income.

Justin Spring has written on the artists Paul Cadmus (1904-99) and Fairfield Porter (1907-75). Given "Secret Historian's" vivid details and Steward's decorative craft, the tattoos themselves are barely described. This literary biography shortchanges us on his art. But not on the archaeology. Spring has reconstituted Steward, as Phil Andros might say, in flesh and blood and all sorts of bodily fluids.