By 1944, when he enlisted in the navy, he’d become “something of an expert on the latest developments in 20th-century avant-garde music, art, and literature,” mostly by way of his own autodidactic curriculum, Gooch writes. Like Gorey, O’Hara was fluent in modern art, bristling with opinions on Picasso, Klee, Calder, and Kandinsky. At the same time, he shared Ted’s passion for pop culture, which for O’Hara meant the comic strip Blondie, hit songs by Sinatra and the big-band trumpeter Harry James, and, most of all, film: he was an ardent moviegoer, papering his bedroom walls with pictures of popcorn Venuses like Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth. Insatiable in his cultural cravings, all-embracing in his tastes, unreserved in his opinions, O’Hara was in many ways Gorey’s intellectual double, down to the fanatical balletomania.
Swanning around campus in his signature getup of sneakers and a long canvas coat with a sheepskin collar, fingers heavy with rings, Gorey was the odds-on favorite for campus bohemian, with the emphasis on odd. “I remember the first day Ted Gorey came into the dining hall I thought he was the oddest person I’d ever seen,” said George Montgomery.
“He seemed very, very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor. He was wearing rings on his fingers.” Larry Osgood, a year behind Ted, shared Montgomery’s double-take reaction the first time he saw Gorey.