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) (132 page)

“After we rested a bit after lunch, he suggested we go for a swim,” Tennessee said. “I told him that a daily swim was almost mandatory for me. He invited me into the changing room.”

“He stripped naked before me, telling me that he always swam in the nude, something he’d learned from his mother, Rose Kennedy, who he claimed still swims jaybird naked at her age.”

“After we swam for a few laps in his pool, we returned to the changing room to dry off,” Tennessee said. “I couldn’t help myself, but my eyes fastened on his crotch. I told him that swimming was just one of my favorite pastimes. I guess I made my dark desires rather obvious.”

“He went over to the sink for a minute and seemed to fluff himself a bit before turning around to display an erection. What else could I do? If Gore were right, he would soon become President and could command me, as his loyal subject, to do his bidding.”

“I must confess, it was not one of my most memorable blow-jobs. In fact, I think it was over in about two minutes of intense suction on my part. He was a fast shooter. His cock was only average, perhaps a little less than average, but then, I’ve never been known as a size queen.”

As Tennessee later relayed to Margaret Foresman
[his notoriously raunchy drinking buddy and long-time Managing Editor of
The Key West Citizen
]
, “The President-to-be did give me a compliment. ‘You’re good!,’ he told me.”

“Then we put on our clothes and went back into the house, where he invited me for sundowners. I changed my mind about him. I now decided he had the makings of a President. It was obvious that he was used to being serviced instead of doing the serving himself. Call it ‘Imperial Privilege.’”

“I did lose out in one respect, however,” Tennessee recalled to Foresman. “JFK became famous for saying, ‘I’m not finished with a woman until I’ve had her three ways. With me, he could have had at least two ways. But he never invaded my second portal.”

Months after JFK was elected president in 1960, Tennessee parroted a line from his inaugural address to the American people: “I didn’t ask what my President could do for me. Instead I asked what I could do for my President.”

***

[Although Jackie admired Tennessee, they never became friends. In 1976, she was seen dining with Andy Warhol and Tennessee in a Manhattan restaurant
.

“Jackie seemed a bit nervous about being with Tennessee, and he seemed a bit nervous about hanging out with Jackie,” Warhol later recorded in his diary. “All Jackie kept talking about was household business, beautifying the home, where to buy this and that, and so forth. She sounded like a glorified housewife, although, of course, she wasn’t.”

“What I really wanted to ask Tennessee was, ‘Did you really go down on Jack Kennedy?’ And what I really wanted to ask Jackie was, ‘Did you know that Tennessee once went down on your husband?’ But discretion prevented me from going where angels fear to tread.”

Chapter Forty

The arrival
of the “scandalous” Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Mexico City occurred on September 22, 1963. As mobs descended on the airport, it became an international media event. Although she hadn’t been cast in the movie, Elizabeth was accompanying Burton to Mexico, where he’d be filming Tennessee Williams’
The Night of the Iguana
.

Losing her purse, part of her wardrobe, and even her shoes, Elizabeth made it through the crowd with the help of strong-armed security guards. “Fuck this!” she shouted at Burton. “They think we’re the Beatles!”

Even before they left the airport, “The Liz & Dick” show entertained the masses by staging a big fight over a missing case of jewelry, each blaming the other for its disappearance. The box later turned up in a packed suitcase.

A press conference had been scheduled, but Burton refused to attend. However, he did issue a statement. “This is my first visit to Mexico. I hope it will be my last.”

In a short time he would change his mind and buy a vacation home there.

Elizabeth had a different opinion. She told the press, “I have always wanted to come back to fucking Mexico. I like fucking Mexico.” The Mexican reporters printed her remarks but left out the two adjectives.

Initially, there was a lot of misunderstanding in the press, headlines claiming that Elizabeth, not Ava Gardner, would be the female star of the movie.

John Huston, the project’s director, had wanted Marlon Brando to play the defrocked priest, but Ray Stark, the producer, favored either Richard Harris or William Holden. Finally, they settled on Burton. Ava Gardner had been their first choice as the notorious innkeeper, but Melina Mercouri was also held out as a replacement.

For the role of Deborah Kerr’s grandfather, Nonno, Tennessee wanted Carl Sandburg, America’s most famous playwright, but he was in failing health. The role instead went to Cyril Delevanti.

According to Elizabeth’s secretary, Dick Hanley, who accompanied the famous pair, Elizabeth arrived “pissed off” at director John Huston. In fact, by the second day, she was already lambasting him as “an ugly, old, mean, withering fart,” charging that he had mentally abused her friend Monty Clift during the filming of both
The Misfits
(1961) and
Freud
(1962).

In retribution, the director rather ungallantly chose to bring up the subject of how Elizabeth was “shameless” in stealing Mike Todd from Huston’s former wife, Evelyn Keyes.

Zoe Sallis showed up in Puerto Vallarta. It was common knowledge that she was Huston’s mistress.

In 1963, Puerto Vallarta was a seedy little fishing village lying three hundred miles north of Acapulco. Tacky and not very well known, it became instantly famous when Elizabeth and Burton arrived and put it on the international tourist map. Tennessee would soon arrive to join in the chaos.

The actual shooting of
Iguana
took place on the isolated peninsula of Mismaloya, which had no road access to the mainland and could be reached only by boat. The only inhabitants on Mismaloya were Indians who lived in thatched huts and survived on fishing.

Elizabeth and Burton and all their massive amounts of luggage were taken to Puerto Vallarta and delivered to “Gringo Gulch,” an upmarket neighborhood where Americans had purchased a number of vacation homes. Locals had another name for it, referring to it as
La Casa de Zoplotes
(the House of the Buzzards) because it lay near a garbage dump.

Whereas Burton had an actual part in the filming, Elizabeth was on site to see that he didn’t go astray in the arms of any of his female co-stars. They included man-eating Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Sue (“
Lolita
”) Lyon.

Elizabeth also had to keep her eye out for at least fifty whores, some of them diseased, who had arrived from Mexico City to service the film crew. At least half of that number of male hustlers had also come to Puerto Vallarta to service homosexual members of the crew. “I’m sure Tennessee will be royally entertained,” Burton said.

Arriving at the port, Elizabeth feared she’d be assigned to some shack, but was delighted by Casa Kimberley, the villa provided for her. In fact, she liked it so much that she eventually bought it for $40,000.

Burton liked the ramshackle port, too, and in time, he built a villa across the street from Casa Kimberley, connecting the two properties with a footbridge that linked the two buildings from points within their respective second floors. Its design was inspired by the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. “I can run across the bridge and escape from Liz when she becomes a raging harridan,” Burton told his assistant, Michael Wilding, who—as her former husband— was all too familiar with her rages.

It would take almost a novel to untangle the past and present romantic entanglements that whirled around the cast and crew of
Iguana
. Before it was over, Kerr told the press, “I’m the only one here not shacked up with somebody.”

She left out the fact that she was accompanied by her husband, Peter Viertel, the scriptwriter who had previously worked with Huston on
The African Queen
(1951) with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Viertel had also been the former lover of Ava Gardner.

There were other sexual embarrassments unfolding. Huston had a reunion with Gardner, with whom he’d once had a torrid affair. Huston had also once pursued Kerr.