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) (121 page)

“Apparently, Marilyn had many arguments, even fights, with our esteemed Attorney General over his plan to eliminate Castro,” Tennessee said. “She argued against it, and in retaliation, Bobby accused her of being soft on Communism.”

To an increasing degree, Marilyn was being influenced by a former lover, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, who was at the time living in Mexico City. The wealthy scion of the Vanderbilts had been charged with communist activities and had served a jail term. After he was released from prison, he began an expatriate life in Mexico City. He influenced Marilyn’ s political beliefs. Vanderbilt himself was a strong supporter of Castro and his revolution.

Marilyn’s involvement with both Roselli and with her communist and/or socialist friends did not escape the attention of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. At one point, agents were feverishly compiling dossiers on both Tennessee and Marilyn. She was viewed as a potential threat to the security of the United States. Tennessee, however, was ultimately dismissed as “a harmless faggot.”

An agent concluded that the playwright was more interested in visiting the all-male bordellos of Havana than he was in any political activities. “After Castro shut down the whorehouses, Mr. Williams lost interest in visiting Cuba,” an agent concluded.

After the disastrous fiasco associated with the Invasion of the Bay of Pigs
[April, 1961]
, increased complications—including the threat of a nuclear war—prompted producer Jerry Wald to shelve the plans for a film about Castro.

Meade Roberts was told “It’s too hot, too controversial. I’ve got to pull the plug. Marlon has bowed out, and I’ve told Marilyn it’s off.”

***

Both Marilyn and Tennessee were heavily drugged during the 1960s, and not always the most coherent of people.
[Wald and Marilyn would each die in 1962.]

Robert Slatzer, Marilyn’s former lover and longtime friend, was allowed to read pages in her Red Diary, in which she wrote about the plot to kill Castro.

José Bolanõs, Marilyn’s last lover, an actor wannabe, later claimed that Marilyn did visit Castro. “She left Mexico City in disguise and flew to Havana. I warned her that she was playing a dangerous game, but she didn’t listen to me. She told me she was going to inform Castro of what was going on with Bobby Kennedy. Because the Kennedys were cutting her off, she remained loyal to Castro.

“I met Marilyn at the airport when she flew back to Mexico City, but she refused to tell me what had happened during her time with Castro. I just assumed they’d had an affair,” Bolaños claimed.

“She was consuming large amount of alcohol and drugs, and seemed confused about what she was actually doing,” Bolaños said. “It was a terrible time, I feared Marilyn was self-destructing.”

Tennessee left several messages for Marilyn to call him, but he later reported, “She never did. The last time I talked to her, she seemed completely unglued. But so was I at the time.”

After Marilyn’s death during August of 1962, Tennessee, for several weeks, attempted to write a play he’d entitled
Revelations from a Tarnished Heart
. The plot would follow somewhat that of
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
. In both plays, an aging actress would be depicted dictating her memoirs.

In
Revelations
, the blonde goddess, a facsimile of Marilyn, would be having an affair with a handsome, dashing American president, as well as a charismatic young dictator of some Latin American country. These two men are arch enemies, threatening to destroy each other, and the goddess runs back and forth between each of their ideologies and each of their beds.

The dictator, depicted as a “sex god,” was not modeled on Castro, but on Tennessee’s fantasy version of Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican playboy.

Most of
Revelations
would take place as the goddess fretfully lay in bed, dictating her memoirs. There would be flashbacks to the bedrooms of both the U.S. President and that of the Latino dictator.

Eventually, Tennessee abandoned the project, as he had abandoned so many other plays in his past. At his home in Key West, he told author James Leo Herlihy and Stanley Mills Haggart that, “I decided I really didn’t know enough about political intrigue to pull this one off. Besides, I think if I had gone forward, I would have been murdered. They got Marilyn. Maybe I would have been next. I definitely felt my life would be in jeopardy should I have continued. The play contained too many dangerous secrets, and sometimes you can know too much for your own good.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

In the final year
(1960) of Dinah Barrymore’s life, both Tennessee Williams and one of his best friends, the poet Gilbert Maxwell, would become intimately involved in her turbulent murk. Maxwell would fall in love with her, and she would fall in love with Tennessee.

Tennessee’s brother, Dakin Williams, summed up his sibling’s romantic entanglements at the time: “If Tennessee had put such a scene in a play, no one would have believed it or accepted it: A poet
[Gilbert Maxwell]
is in love with a beautiful and talented but flawed actress
[Diana Barrymore]
who is (or says she is) in love with a famous playwright
[Tennessee Williams]
, who in turn is in love, spiritually, with his sister
[Rose Williams]
, who had become a kind of lovely china doll, and he is living in sin with a former pharmacist’s mate in the Navy
[Frank Merlo].”

The American film and stage actress, Diana Barrymore (1921-1960), was the daughter of “The Great Profile,” John Barrymore, and the second of his four wives, Blanche Oelrichs, a poet, playwright, and theater actress known by her pseudonym, “Michael Strange.”
[John Barrymore’s stormy marriage to Oelrichs lasted from 1920 to 1925.]

Introduced to John by one of his leading ladies, Cathleen Nesbitt, Blanche had been defined as “the most beautiful woman in America” by the French portrait artist Paul Helleu.

As she was growing up, Diana had little contact with her estranged father. During a perfunctory reunion with his daughter after an absence of many years, the famous star of the stage and silent screen said, “you are my little girl three wives back, are you not?”

She later remarked, “Father wasn’t really certain just who I was.”

A casual remark made by her father wounded her deeply. “Diana is a horse’s arse, quite a pretty one, but still a horse’s arse.”

Before she even left school, she had evolved into a flamboyant alcoholic. Even so, she decided to pursue a career as a movie star, mainly because of her beauty and her famous association with the Barrymore name.

Diana and her mother also became estranged, especially beginning in the summer of 1942, when Blanche became romantically involved with her lifetime companion, Margaret Wise Brown, the author of many children’s books.

That summer, Diana signed a contract with Universal, which launched a major publicity campaign, billing her as “The Year’s Most Sensational New Screen Personality.” She became bogged down in booze and drugs, and she was soon disparaged as “The Barrymore Brat” around Universal. Studio chiefs felt she was following in her father’s self-destructive footsteps. He’d died in 1942, broke and drunk after a long run of forgettable “B” pictures.

Diana would emulate her father’s behavior with a series of drug-related disasters punctuated with severe depressions, extended stays in sanitariums, and suicide threats.

Diana also had a sex addiction. Arthur Lubin directed her first picture
Eagle Squadron
(1942) in which she co-starred with Jon Hall. Lubin said, “She was oversexed—that girl couldn’t get enough. If I needed her to film a scene, she could always be found in one of the men’s dressing rooms, usually that of Jon Hall. She wore him out so much he didn’t have much left to give to his screen role.”

After Hall, Diana set out to seduce some of the leading male actors of her day. The list is long—Eddie Albert, George Brent, Rory Calhoun, Brian Don-levy, Henry Fonda, Van Heflin, Leif Erickson, cowboy icon Lash LaRue, Victor Mature, Don Porter, and James Stewart. Somehow, she managed also to seduce the famous novelist, Sinclair Lewis.

When Blanche died in 1950, Diana was left with only $300, all that remained of a once-vast family fortune.

In 1949, Diana was offered her own television talk show, but she failed to show up for its premiere broadcast. If she had, she would have been the host of the first TV talk show in history.