Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (109 page)

The next morning, Marlon told Fiore that his hours with Truman had been better than any session he’d ever had with his analyst. “And it didn’t cost me a fucking cent.”

Despite having had no sleep all night, a gleeful Truman telephoned Logan, who’d arrived early on the set of
Sayonara
. “Oh, you were so wrong about Brando,” an ecstatic Truman informed the director. “Last night your star talked my head off. I got my man.” He paused for dramatic effect. “In more ways than one!” Then Truman hung up the phone on a bewildered Logan.

On the
Sayonara
set, later in the day, when a hung-over Marlon showed up for work, Logan confronted his star. Logan wasn’t at all concerned with the morality involved in Truman’s seduction, but about any bad publicity that might be generated for
Sayonara
.

“Did you go to bed with Capote?” Logan demanded to know.

“If you call ‘going to bed’ getting a mere blow-job from the little monster with the succulent mouth,” Marlon said, “then OK, I went to bed with him.”

***

In the weeks ahead, Marlon began to fear that he’d be embarrassed by Truman based on what would appear in
The New Yorker
. In May, Marlon sat down and wrote him a three-and-a-half page, single-spaced, handwritten letter. Marlon’s letter, later released to the press by Truman, was filled with an bizarre choice of words, misspellings, and unusual grammatical constructions.

“It is, indeed, discomforting to have the network of one’s innards guywired and festooned with harlequin streamers for public musing, but, perhaps it will entertain. I am sorry, in a way, that you didn’t complete your plans for the full travesty you had planned to do because it has come full upon me, that there are few who are as well equipped as yourself to write, indeed, the comedy of manners.”

This letter was written before Marlon actually read the interview. But the gossipy Truman had told “everybody I know about it” even before publication. Word had traveled back to Marlon, who was aghast.

Entitled “The Duke in His Domain,” Capote’s profile of Marlon appeared in
The New Yorker
in its edition of November 9, 1957. In the article Marlon was depicted as an overweight, self-indulgent, self-delusional movie star pretending to be on a diet while stuffing himself with French fries, spaghetti, and apple pie. And that was just for openers.

“The interview could have been so much worse in print if I had wanted to reveal all I knew about Brando,” Truman later recalled. “If I’d written about the homosexual liaisons of Marlon’s, I could have destroyed his career. As it was, I was kind to him. Of course, my profile was not just a journalistic revelation. More of a celebrity
exposé
. But actors should be exposed for what they are: mental dwarfs.”

The New York gossip columnist, Dorothy Kilgallen, defined Truman’s article as “a real vivisection.”

Her rival columnist, Walter Winchell, wrote that the article was “the type of confession usually confined to an analyst’s couch.”

Marlon’s sister, Jocelyn, called the article “a well-written, bitchy hatchet job!”

Enraged, Marlon called Logan to apologize for having been so critical of him in the article. “That little bastard spent half the night telling me his problems,” Marlon said. “I felt the least I could do was tell him a few of my own. If I ever run into the pissy queen, I’ll kill him!”

Logan chided Marlon that, “You should have done that before you let him into your room.”

Truman never responded to Marlon’s heartfelt plea to suppress the profile. But the author did have a post-publication comment, which he expressed to a reporter.

“Brando apparently felt that my profile of him was an unsympathetic, even treacherous, intrusion upon the secret terrain of a suffering and awesome sensibility. I thought it was a sympathetic account of a wounded young man who is a genius at acting but not markedly intelligent.”

Seething with anger, but also painfully humiliated, Marlon called on George Glass and Walter Seltzer to press a lawsuit against Truman, seeking the advice of these two savvy Hollywood insiders. Glass had first met Marlon when he’d been working as a publicist for Stanley Kramer. A one-time publicist himself, Seltzer had turned producer.

When the men got Marlon to confess that he actually did make the revelations as reported by Truman, they advised him to drop the lawsuit.

Feeling dejected and powerless to fight back, Marlon sighed before getting up to leave their office. At the door, he paused and looked back at the men.

“I was sandbagged!”

Gore Vidal was a self-admitted sexual predator, claiming that he’d had sex with more than a thousand people, mostly men. “My near contemporaries,” he wrote in his memoirs, “were Jack Kennedy, Marlon Brando, and Tennessee Williams. They were all keeping up with me.”

It was inevitable that Gore would encounter Marlon one night. The occasion occurred in 1965 at the London apartment of the British critic, Kenneth Tynan, and his wife, Elaine Dudley. The left-wing couple were known for the flexible boundaries of their open marriage.

Gore’s friendship with Kenneth and Elaine had originated in the 1950s, when both of them had visited him at Edgewater, his circa 1825 mansion on the Hudson River in New York State.

In Elaine’s own memoir, she wrote: “Once, and once only, Gore and I went to bed together. Next, let us say that we chose to bathe in the pure, refreshing streams of friendship rather than shoot the perilous rapids of physical love. Which is not to say I wasn’t in love with Gore, because I was. If platonic love is not based on passionate feelings, how can it subliminate itself and ascend to the heights?”

Gore had already seduced her husband on numerous occasions. Tynan had always fascinated Gore with his command of the English language and his devastating critiques. In London by the 1960s, he’d become a poster boy of the radical chic, derisively defined as a “champion of champagne socialism.”

Gore was even fascinated by the way Kenneth smoked his cigarettes.

“Bette Davis he was not. Kenneth gingerly held a ‘fag’
[English slang for a cigarette]
between his ring and little fingers. Alec Guinness caricatured him brilliantly in his 1951 British comedy,
The Lavender Hill Mob.”

Politically, Gore and Kenneth were aligned. Their sexual tastes, however, were dissimilar. Kenneth’s leaned aggressively toward sadomasochism. “I get my greatest satisfaction by caning a young bird or boy on their bare bums. I also like to hurt and humiliate women.”

In a late night program for the BBC, he became the first Brit to use the word “fuck” on air. The immediate response was outrage, which fumed its way all the way to the House of Commons, where Kenneth was censored. In the aftermath of that reprimand, he wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth, suggesting that a fit punishment for a reprimand would be for her “to spank my bottom.”

Her Majesty did not respond.

Gore was also fascinated by Kenneth’s close friend, Marlene Dietrich. Accompanied by Kenneth, he once attended one of Dietrich’s concerts. Later, he read Kenneth’s critique of a performance that had included her rendition of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”:

“On stage, Dietrich stands as if astonished to be there, like a statue unveiled every night to its own inexhaustible amazement. She shows herself to the audience. She knows where all the flowers went—buried in the mud of Passchendaele, blasted to ash at Hiroshima, and napalmed to a crisp in Vietnam—and she carried the knowledge in her voice.”

Gore was invited to a party in London hosted by Kenneth and attended by Marlon, who was filming
The Countess from Hong Kong [released in 1967]
at the time. In that movie, Marlon co-starred with Sophia Loren under the direction of Charlie Chaplin, a man Marlon came to detest.

Among the distinguished guests at the party were Richard Harris, who was drunk, and director Michelangelo Antonioni. Harris and Marlon were not speaking to each other, based on a feud that began during their joint filming of
Mutiny on the Bounty
(1962).

“I idolized Marlon until we made that movie together,” Harris claimed. “Then it was Shitsville. The man is crazy and some days he didn’t even bother to show up, keeping cast and crew waiting as millions were wasted.”

In one scene, Marlon, cast as Fletcher Christian, was supposed to strike Harris.

As Harris’ biographer, Robert Sellers, wrote: “Brando was absorbed with the Method and mumbling away, so his blow, when it finally came, was the dampest of squibs. Harris responded with a mock curtsy and waggled a limp wrist in the air. Brando didn’t get the joke. Take two, and again, the blow was almost non-existent. Everybody wanted to see how Harris would react. They weren’t disappointed. Thrusting his chin forward, he propositioned, ‘Come on, big boy, why don’t you fucking kiss me and be done with it?’ Brando glared back, white with rage. Harris then kissed Brando and hugged him, ‘Shall we dance?’ Angry and embarrassed, Brando stormed off and afterwards, the two men each refused to appear on the set together.”

The hellraiser at Kenneth’s party was clearly Harris. He had the habit of wet-lipping everybody, man or woman—that is, everybody except Marlon, whom he pointedly ignored.

In front of this party’s highly permissive roster of guests, in lieu of a kiss from Harris, Marlon dared his host, Kenneth, to escort him into the bathroom “for a full-on-the-mouth kiss as proof of our friendship.” Kenneth accepted the dare, and Gore noticed that they remained, secluded alone and in the loo together, for fifteen minutes or more.

That provided Gore with the opportunity to move in on Harris. “I suspected he was far too intoxicated to take note of which sex I belonged to,” Gore later told Kenneth.

Gore openly propositioned Harris, who politely rejected his offer. “I’m such a horny bastard I might have gone off with you if it were a normal night. But tonight, I promised to fuck Soraya.”

[He was referring to Soraya Esfandiary Pahlavi, an actress and the second wife of Iran’s Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. She had been Harris’ co-star in the film
, Three Faces of a Woman
(1964)
.
]

“I need a woman to haunt me, to tear my insides out,” Harris confessed to Gore. “As for a love affair, if it doesn’t end tragically, I will be horribly disappointed. My ideal woman is a beautiful, mute nymphomaniac who runs the local boozer.”

After Kenneth emerged with Marlon from the loo, he told amusing stories about himself to his guests. Later, during an evaluation of his host, Gore said, “As a raconteur, I found Kenneth more amusing than Noël Coward, whose stories were too clean for me.”

Then Kenneth launched into a discussion about the “glories of masturbation,” claiming that once, at Oxford, he’d delivered a speech that both promoted masturbation and called for a repeal of British laws associated with homosexuality and abortion. Gore agreed with the critic’s opinions.

Then Harris chimed in, “When I was a teenager, I masturbated every night to this photo of Merle Oberon. After I fucked the real thing in Hollywood, I decided I preferred masturbating to her picture instead of actually mounting her.”

“People don’t know what to make of me now,” Kenneth said. “But when I was a young man, I created a sensation wherever I went. In Oxford, someone once described me as ‘a tall, beautiful, epicene youth with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, a fashionable stammer, plum-colored suit, lavender tie, and a ruby signet ring.’”

“When I was called up for National Service, I was outrageously camp. I showed up in a floppy hat, a red velvet coat that Oscar Wilde might have worn, scarlet painted fingernails, bright red lipstick, lots of green eyeshadow, and enough Yardley scent to sink the Bismarck. I was rejected as ‘medically unfit.’”

As the night wore on, Gore was also fascinated by the Italian director, Michelangelo Antonioni, who produced enigmatic mood pieces in the form of such films as
L’Avventura
(1960);
La Notte
(1961); and
Eclipse
(1962). He defined these works as his “trilogy on modernity and its disconnects.”

Gore and the director agreed that they both loathed the word “morality.” Antonioni claimed that “stereotyped morality is sustained by people out of cowardice and sheer laziness.”

Harris was one of the first to leave the party for his date with the “discarded Empress of Persia,” as he called Soraya.

He stopped off to give Gore a lip-lock. “I’m sorry I couldn’t grant your request tonight,” he said. Then he took Gore’s hand, placed it on his crotch, and said with enigmatic black humor, “Perhaps as a future date. But you’ve got to promise not to fall in love with me, and drink weed killer.”

Before the end of the evening, Gore would find himself included on the long list of Marlon’s alleged lovers. In his memoirs, written by Gore when Marlon was still alive, he tried to lay those rumors to rest. For public consumption, Gore denied having had sex with Marlon. Privately, however, to Kenneth and others, he admitted, “We did the dirty deed.”

Once, when asked by a reporter about Marlon’s sexuality, Gore was dismissive. “Anyone with a great deal of sexual energy and animal charm is going to try anything.”