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) (134 page)

On the patio of Tennessee’s rented villa, lit by colored lights, Bolaños danced both the rumba and the samba with Elizabeth. Tennessee had hired a six-member band, each of the members appearing in tight white pants and shirtless, as per the playwright’s request.

According to his reputation, Bolaños specialized in making a woman feel like she was the only female on earth.

The screenwriter mesmerized Elizabeth with his tales of working in the film industry in Mexico. He had been an intimate friend of the late, great modernist painter, Diego Rivera, and was also close to the Spain-born director Luís Buñuel, a towering figure in experimental cinema.

Bolaños also invited Elizabeth to see the Mexican historical epic,
La Cucaracha (aka The Soldiers of Pancho Villa;
1959), whose screenplay he had written.

She pumped Bolaños for any details he could supply about Monroe’s final weeks alive. Hanley came over to join them. “Bolaños was very clever,” he said. “He did not speak unkindly of Marilyn, but he placed Elizabeth on a higher pedestal. About three times, he told her that ‘you are, of course, a far greater star than Marilyn, who possessed neither your talent nor your beauty.”

“Your beauty is a natural beauty,” Bolaños told Elizabeth in front of Hanley. “Marilyn had to become Marilyn Monroe by acting the part, dressing up, and painting her face. With no make-up on, I’m sure you’d look stunning. Surely no one on the planet has eyes as beautiful as yours.”

Hanley drove Elizabeth and Bolaños to his apartment, where they disappeared upstairs. He waited downstairs in his car for two hours. When Elizabeth finally came down the steps, he drove her home. She told him that Bolaños had asked to remain in Hanley’s apartment for the night, not wanting to drive after dark on the impossibly treacherous roads.

Back in his own apartment, he found a nude Bolaños asleep on his bed. Very gently, Hanley draped a sheet over him. “Lucky Marilyn, lucky Elizabeth,” he later told Roddy McDowall.

“The next morning, I made breakfast for him,” Hanley said. “He also let me make love to him, but only in exchange for a big favor.”

“I know you’re her secretary,” Bolaños said, “and you can arrange for me to have a rendezvous with her in Hollywood. I want to be in her life. She’ll tire of Burton. He’s an old man of failing powers, I heard. I want to be nearby when she replaces Burton.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal, but I’ll expect my pound of flesh.”

Bolaños sighed. “All of you
mariposas
want that. So if you deliver Elizabeth Taylor to me, you can have me on occasion. After all, I’m the most sought after male in all of Mexico.”

Bolaños was already aware of the important roles Tennessee had written for men, including the character of Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and the role of Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.

Consequently, Bolaños asked Hanley to call Tennessee immediately to ask if he could spend the day with him, and possibly the night.

Tennessee was only too eager to invite Bolaños over, telling Hanley, “If Marilyn and Elizabeth can go for him, why not me?

In the aftermath of that call, Tennessee spent a day and a night with Bolaños before he headed out of Puerto Vallarta the following morning.

Tennessee was so taken with Bolaños that he promised to write a role for him based on the archetype of a dashing young Mexican. “The part will be ideal for you.”

Of course that was an empty promise. Tennessee never came through for Bolaños.

***

On most mornings, Tennessee met Elizabeth at her villa. Together, they headed out, wading through chickens, naked children, and mange-encrusted mongrel dogs. He and Hanley carried the makings of a picnic with them, to be shared with Burton later when they reached the remote peninsula where filming was occurring.

Huston liked to launch his day with five Bloody Marys, and Elizabeth and Tennessee joined him.

One day, Elizabeth was feeling ill and Tennessee went alone, telling Huston that he stood ready to write additional dialogue.

Huston told him, “I don’t think we’re going to get much shooting done today. The heat is crushing, and Burton disappeared into Ava’s dressing room at ten o’clock. They may be in there for the day.”

As author Nancy Schoenberger wrote: “Ava seemed to come alive in Burton’s presence. The press were not just covering a congregation of some of the world’s greatest talents and personalities in a remote Mexican village, they were waiting—hoping?—that Burton and Taylor’s vaunted love affair might founder on Ava Gardner’s dangerous shoulders.”

The coming together of the drunken, poetry-spouting, lust-filled Welsh actor and the Tarheel
femme fatale
and sex symbol had sparked “meaningful eye contact,” as Huston described it to Tennessee.

One day before noon, both Gardner and Burton got drunk on a local moonshine known as
raicilla
. It was made from the agave plant. Gardner called it “cactus piss.”

Huston defined it to Tennessee as “a cactus brandy stronger than tequila.” Burton told him that the way to drink
raicilla
was straight down. That way you can feel it going into each individual intestine.” When Elizabeth tried it, she said, “I hear it’s made from cactus. Tell the fuckers who brewed it that they left the god damn needles in it.”

One evening when Elizabeth was suffering from “
turista
,” Hanley drove Tennessee and Burton to the Casablanca Bar. To Hanley’s surprise, a sultry Gardner was waiting there for him. Burton turned to Dick, “I can always count on you for being discreet around Her Ladyship.”

Actually, Burton was wrong about the degree to which Hanley would remain discreet.

“After Ava and Richard consumed enough alcohol to resink the
Titanic
, they retired to one of the hot-bed shanties out back, where they disappeared,” Hanley said. “I wondered if Richard would be able to get it up in his condition. I sat in the bar with this beach boy hustler waiting for their return.”

“Tennessee hired this other hustler and seduced him in our car. Ava and Richard were gone for about three hours. When both of them finally emerged, they were barely able to stand up.”

“I literally had to toss them into the back of our car, where they cuddled up with Tennessee for the ride back home,” Hanley said.

The next day Elizabeth suspected that something had happened between Ava and Burton. She also suspected that something might be going on between Burton and Sue Lyon, who played the rigidly chaperoned blonde nymphet in
Iguana
.

In some ways, Lyon’s casting in that role had been influenced by her involvement, in 1962, of Stanley Kubrick’s
Lolita
, an adaptation of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov (
Lolita
) about a middle-aged man’s sexual obsession with an adolescent girl.

Burton, incidentally, had seen Lyon’s film interpretation of Lolita three times, exhibiting a keen interest in both the film’s concept and in its protagonist, of which Elizabeth was emphatically aware.

Elizabeth wasn’t the only person struggling to keep Burton away from Lyon. At the debut of filming, she had arrived in Puerto Vallarta with her boyfriend, Hampton Fancher III. Huston’s biographer, Lawrence Grobel, described the boy as “a tall, pale youth ravaged by love.” Soon after his arrival, Fancher warned Burton, “I tend to be murderously inclined.”

The circumstances which led to Burton finally being left alone with Lyon involved the fact that her boyfriend, as it turned out, was married. His young wife arrived unexpectedly on the set one day. Fancher would marry Lyon before the year ended, after his divorce became final.

As Lyon remembered it, “Richard drank so much at night that the alcohol literally oozed out of his pores the next day. It gave off a terrible odor.”

One night, Tennessee served as a “beard” to protect Burton during one of the actor’s secret flings with Lyon. He’d told Elizabeth that he was going drinking with Tennessee to discuss future roles for them.

Instead, he left Tennessee in the Casablanca Bar, talking with yet another hustler, while he and Lyon disappeared upstairs into a private room.

***

Tennessee could not wait around for the shooting to end. He had to fly back to New York to face other commitments. He was in a Broadway theater when he heard the news about Kennedy’s assassination. He later heard that both Elizabeth and Ava Gardner took the news rather badly. Both of them had had flings with the assassinated president.

“So did I,” Tennessee said enigmatically, with no explanation.

In the future, Tennessee would deal with Elizabeth and Burton again when they filmed
Boom!
in Sardinia, based on his play,
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
.

But Truman was also a friend to the Burtons, and would have several encounters with them.

So would Gore Vidal, when he urged Elizabeth to interpret the role of a transsexual in his controversial film,
Myra Breckinridge
, starring Mae West.

Elizabeth Taylor and Truman Capote had known each other for years, their relationship mostly stemming from their mutual friendship with the doomed Montgomery Clift. Truman encountered her on frequent occasions, and he shared some of the most dramatic moments of her life with her.

During the shooting of her Oscar-winning role playing a prostitute in
BUtterfield 8
(1960)
[Elizabeth was starring opposite Laurence Harvey and her then-husband, the singer Eddie Fisher]
, the scriptwriters of Hollywood went on strike.

Despite the
[supremely inconvenient]
strike in force at the time, she wanted her dialogue sharpened and extra scenes added. She especially wanted changes in the script to include love scenes between Fisher and herself. Prior to her involvement in script changes, the onscreen relationship between her character and Fisher’s character had been strictly platonic.

Consequently, she approached both of her friends, Tennessee Williams and Capote, to tweak the script for her. Whereas Tennessee was reluctant to get involved but agreed to rewrite some of it, Truman was delighted with the unpaid assignment.

When he came to discuss its details with Elizabeth, he found her distraught, almost on the verge of tears. She told him, “I have to work. I have no money. Eddie has no money. Debbie Reynolds took it all when they divorced…every last cent.”

Soon, she and Truman jointly conceived of a torrid love scene “under the sheets” between Fisher and herself. Truman devised a scenario that director Daniel Mann claimed was perhaps too hot to film. Eventually, however, Mann’s curiosity became voyeuristically intrigued, and he arranged for the scene to be shot, albeit with a sense of caution.

On the set, on the day of the actual filming, both Fisher and Elizabeth
[who were married to each other at the time]
stripped completely nude and crawled together under the sheets.

As Fisher later claimed, “Having the camera on Elizabeth and me and with that faggot, Capote, drooling at the mouth, turned me on. I had sex with Elizabeth. We really went at it. She liked it rough, and I delivered.”

Later, in his memoirs, he denied that he had a climax, but Elizabeth, in dialogues with Truman, insisted that he did.

“It was evident that Fisher was blasting off inside Elizabeth,” Truman said. “From the look on her face, she was also experiencing an orgasm. She was not good enough an actress to fake it.”