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) (126 page)

Dancing in Newman’s arms, she told him, “Everybody is looking at us. We’d make a fabulous pair on the screen.”

“Everybody is looking at you,” he corrected her. “To attract attention, I think I’ll have to take off my jacket, shirt, and undershirt.”

“Later, darling,” she whispered into his ear.

Newman did not share details of his subsequent visit to Lana’s hotel suite. He’d seduced her before, finding her clinging and desperate.

Even though he didn’t give a blow-by-blow description of what happened that night with Lana, he did share an intimacy two nights later over drinks with Tennessee.

“As I was leaving her suite the following morning, she held me close and delivered a shocker. ‘You may not know it now,’ she said to me, ‘or even tomorrow. But one day in the not-so-distant future you are going to become my next husband. Note that I said next and not last husband.’ With that tantalizing remark, she shut the door in my face.”

—Elvis Presley to Paul Newman

Newman was stunned when he received a note from the stage door security guard. He was used to beautiful movie stars arriving backstage to greet him, often on the pretense of wanting to appear as Alexandra del Lago in play’s movie version. He told Frank Sinatra when he came to visit one night that he felt that many of these glamorous stars “are just coming backstage to hook up with me so that they can fuck me.”

Sinatra had laughed at the remark, telling him that an entire lineup of screen queens, ranging from Joan Crawford to Ingrid Bergman, had arrived at the stage door to greet the new sensation of Broadway, Marlon Brando, when he had appeared in
A Streetcar Named Desire
.

“Fuck those broads who appeal to you and tell the rest of them to go home and use a dildo,” was Sinatra’s advice.

One note that arrived was the most startling of all. Not from a women, it was from Elvis Presley.

Was he still bitter over not being allowed to appear as Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
? Intrigued, Newman told the guard that he’d meet Elvis when the curtain went down. In a return reply, Elvis told him that he’d be waiting outside in a white limousine, its windows darkened so that fans could not peer inside to discover him.

After the show, outside on the street, one of Elvis’ “boys” opened the back door of the limousine and ushered Newman inside. There, Elvis was waiting, swigging blackberry brandy directly from the bottle. “Haul your ass in here, kid,” Elvis said. “I’ll take you for a ride.”

“Another pissing contest?” Newman asked. “Don’t tell me you want to play Chance Wayne in the movie.”

“No more pissing,” Elvis said. “You won that round.

[Elvis was referring to a drunken night in Hollywood when he challenged Newman to a pissing contest in his garden to determine who could urinate a golden shower over the longest distance. The winner would get to play Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.]

“We’ve got some serious business to talk over tonight,” Elvis told Newman. “And, yes, MGM has offered me the role of Chance Wayne. Fuck what Colonel Parker says. I’m gonna play that male whore. No one ever takes me seriously, as a film star, considering the shit I do.” He swigged more from the brandy bottle. “But that day is gonna change.”

“Actually I think you might be great as a hot-headed redneck male prostitute,” Newman said.

“Thanks for the compliment,” Elvis said. “Hal Wallis wanted me to appear in
The Rainmaker
(1957) with Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. I was set to do it, but the deal fell through. All the serious roles I’ve been offered I never got to do. That scumbag Parker saw to that. He sabotaged every deal.”

In the suite of the king of rock and roll, Newman confronted a much more mature and rather bitter Elvis, not the man he’d encountered before. He continued swigging the blackberry brandy, but he was also popping pills. Newman suspected the drug was Seconal, a now-controlled substance that was evaluated as relatively harmless in the late 50s.

Years before, Elvis had been considered quite the Southern gentleman, but the star tonight was snapping orders at his staff. He was rude and flashing a bad temper, but not at Newman, whom he continued to treat with respect.

“Col. Parker is a bloodsucker,” Elvis claimed, “and he’s virtually ruined my film career with junk movies. This time, thanks to Chance Wayne, I’m gonna defy the fucker.”

“I’ve got to ask you,” Newman said. “Why am I here? I have no control over casting. If you want the part, you’ve got it. You’re the hottest thing in town. I think that you playing opposite Ava Gardner would be the biggest grosser of the year.”

“Ava Gardner,” he said. “I’ve never fucked her. Frank Sinatra told me he’d cut off my dick if I plunged into that succulent pussy.”

“This time, no pissing,” Newman said. “If you want the role, it’s yours. I’d love to play Chance Wayne on the screen, but it’s yours for the asking.”

“That would make me a heel,” Elvis said, before turning to one of his boys from Memphis. “It’s time my best friend here and I did some serious drinking. Get us a pitcher, asshole. We’re ready to start chug-a-lugging screwdrivers.”

When Elvis turned his attention back onto Newman again, his voice became softer. “I’d be a fucking son of a bitch if I took something you wanted,” Elvis said, standing up and starting to pull off his clothes. “That’s why I’m here to make a deal with you. I just learned that MGM is willing to pay you $350,000 for starring as Chance Wayne. Elvis is going to offer you $350,000 for NOT being Chance Wayne. You can find an even better script that will also pay you $350,000. That means you can double your money. Sounds God damn fair tome.”

He continued to strip down to his jockey shorts. “I’m not trying to turn you on, although I know you go for the boys. My masseur has arrived. I’m taking youth treatments. Would you believe I’m starting to sag a little bit here and there? After all, I was born in 1935.”

“Want to hear an even sadder story?” Newman asked. “I was born ten years before that.”

Two of Elvis’ boys wheeled in a hospital bed with a curtain around it. They were followed by a masseur who looked a bit effeminate. “I know Fido here doesn’t look like much of a man, but he’s got the most skilled hands of any masseur in America. He’s from Haiti. A High Yaller.”

The mulatto smiled at Newman and motioned for Elvis to go behind the curtain. Pulling down his jockey shorts, Elvis stepped inside and apparently got up onto the rolling bed. From behind the curtain, Elvis continued to talk to Newman, who sat on the sofa enjoying the best screwdriver he’d ever tasted in his life.

After fifteen minutes of conversation, Newman heard Elvis shout, “You god damn cocksucking faggot.” Then he stormed outside the curtains, knocking the masseur in the face. The masseur fell to the floor as a nude Elvis, boasting a semi hard-on, started kicking the young man in his ribs.

Two of Elvis’ boys suddenly appeared and restrained him. “Get that faggot out of here! He was trying to jerk me off.” A third member of Elvis’ boys emerged with a red silk robe which he slipped on. “Better give him $10,000 to buy him off so the queer won’t sue me.”

And then the screen goes black.

***

A few hours before his next performance of
Sweet Bird of Youth
, Newman was relating the story about his encounter with Elvis to Geraldine and Kazan.

But their dialogue was interrupted, and consequently, Newman never finished his story of what had had happened earlier that evening with Elvis.

In panic, Tennessee Williams suddenly came rushing down the aisle of the theater. “I’m dying!” he shouted. “I’ve just come from my doctor. He says I have inoperable cancer. I’m dying! This is the last play I’ll ever write.”

This was the beginning of fifty such outbursts from the playwright, each announcing his imminent death, until the inevitable moment when the day of doom actually arrived.

Sweet Bird of Youth
ran on Broadway for 375 performances.

Newman recalled his last performance as Chance Wayne at Manhattan’s Martin Beck Theater. “I remember my last night going to the theater. I swallowed two jiggers of honey for energy and for my throat. I felt completely exhausted. I must have been in the hot shower for thirty minutes. I broke down and started crying like a baby. Then it came to me: I’d never say Tennessee’s words again. I’ll never have that kind of quiet near the end of the third act. Never that specific kind of quiet, as a hush came over the theater.”

***

After the run of the play had ended, during the long gestation period it took to adapt Tennessee’s play,
Sweet Bird of Youth
, to the screen, Newman received a call from Orson Welles. It surprised him because the talented director/actor had made his distaste for Newman known during the filming of
The Long, Hot Summer
(1958).

Yet during his phone conversation with Newman, Welles was at his most charming. It soon became apparent that he was shopping for the proper vehicle in which to star his former wife, Rita Hayworth. “She’d make the perfect Alexandra Del Lago,” Welles predicted. “The screen requires a softer, gentler del Lago, not that brash harridan Geraldine Page played on the stage.”

In some ways, Newman agreed with him. When Welles invited Newman and Richard Brooks, the upcoming director of
Sweet Bird
, for a joint meeting at Rita’s house, Newman eagerly accepted, although Welles explained that he would not be present at the gathering.

Newman had always wanted to meet Rita, as she’d long been on the A-list of stars he planned to seduce. During his stint in the Navy, he’d had a pin-up of her pasted to the inside of his locker door. In some ways, he found Rita far more enticing than Ava Gardner, a comparable beauty.

When Rita graciously received Brooks and Newman into her home, he was struck by how different she was from her screen image as showcased in her 1946 classic, Gilda. She was dressed simply in slacks and a blouse, and wore little makeup.

Time had been a bit cruel to the Love Goddess of the 1940s, a vivacious, sexy, and desirable woman known for her sunny smile and the come-hither glint in her eye. In many ways, this newest incarnation of Rita would be perfect as a fading movie star. She was a fading movie star.

During their time with Rita, Newman and Brooks met a realistic, straight talking woman without the glamorous moves of Lana Turner, who could never stop playing Lana Turner even when the cameras were turned off for the night.

In spite of her bizarre marriages—among them to Orson Welles himself, and to Prince Aly Khan as well—there was something very wholesome about Rita, Newman had read that after her divorce from the Argentine singer, Dick Haymes
[their marriage had lasted from 1953 to 1954]
, she’d married producer James Hill. But Hill was nowhere in sight.

Newman complimented her on her recent performance in
Pal Joey
(1957). “Do you know that Mae West was originally offered the part?” she said. “Mae probably could have done it better.”

“I doubt that,” Brooks said.

Brooks and Newman discussed the possibility of Rita appearing in
Sweet Bird of Youth
. But later, when the two men talked about it together privately, they expressed their belief that she didn’t really want to appear as the fading actress, and that she’d been cajoled into meeting with them because of Welles. Still in love with Rita, he was trying to jump-start her dying career.

Her reddish auburn hair looked as lustrous as ever, but she was smaller than she appeared onscreen. Her maid kept supplying her with highballs, and Newman matched her drink for drink. Brooks held back.

“As Alexandra del Lago, I could be what I am, a fading star,” she said. “I might as well let it all hang out. Somehow people think I’m as old as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. I started so young—that’s why they think that.”