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) (150 page)

First introduced to the gay bathhouses
of Manhattan by Gore Vidal, Truman Capote continued to visit them even after he became rich and famous. Surprisingly, he was almost never recognized along the dimly lit corridors.

Late one afternoon, clad in a towel, he wandered into the steam room, where he spotted a large, bald, and hefty man going down on a younger man who appeared to be in his 40s. Like a voyeur, Truman stood watching and waiting for the inevitable climax. When the fellator finished his task, he abruptly left.

As Truman would later tell his friends, “I faced a penis that might not have been the largest in the world, but was up there as a runner-up. Not only that, but it was the most perfect penis I had ever seen. Surely, Leonardo da Vinci had turned over his drawing of the perfect penis to God to add the final touches.”

The recently fellated was a family man with a wife and four children, John O’Shea, who managed a small bank. Like Truman, he wanted to be a writer, and immediately thought that Truman might help him in his goal. He obviously wasn’t attracted to Truman’s pudgy, fifty-year-old body, but was willing to prostitute himself for a greater goal.

He struck up a conversation, and he agreed to come by Truman’s apartment the following afternoon after the bank shut down.

The next day, in Truman’s apartment at the United Nations Plaza, John was not as alluring with his clothes on. He accurately labeled himself “Charlie Middleclass.” He was a typical family man of 1973 who, as a devout Catholic, had a wife, Peg, and a 16-year-old son, Brian, along with a daughter Kathy, 15. There were also Kerry, age 12, and Chris, age 9. When he wasn’t working at the bank, John was a track coach.

After two drinks, John asked Truman to direct him to the bathroom. Truman pointed the way. As John passed by his chair, he leaned over and kissed Truman’s forehead.

He later recalled, “Boom, boom went the sound of my heart.”

“Would you please stop that?” Truman scolded him. “In about fifteen years from now?”

Thus began the final turbulent love affair of Truman’s life, launched at the expense of breaking up what had appeared to be a happy family.

From an author who had seduced John Garfield and Errol Flynn, John wasn’t in that league when it came to looks. At the age of forty-five, he had “chocolate colored hair, heavy eyebrows, and average build, five feet, ten inches of height, and blue eyes to give Frank Sinatra competition,” in Truman’s estimation.

Beginning at twilight that dying afternoon, Truman found John “the best sex I’ve ever enjoyed, better than Jack Dunphy and the whole parade of men—David, Danny, Rick, Ralph, Peter, Steve, Paul, Dean, Mitch, Dan, Henry, Jimmy, Fred, Scott, and Jeff. Of course, far better than Errol Flynn, John Garfield, and Marlon Brando.”

John was also an Irishman. “For some peculiar reason, I have always found that Irishmen make the best lovers,” Truman said.

“John was too good to be true,” Truman said. “I’m always suspicious of men who appear to be perfect.”

The product of a violent family background, John, as Truman painfully learned, also had a violent temper when Truman did not do what he wanted. What John desired was to become Truman’s business manager in charge of his deals and finances.

Finally, Truman agreed, after a night of heavy sex. He offered John $14,000 a year, which soon mushroomed to $30,000 with benefits, including traveling the world with Truman, leaving his family behind, although Truman provided for their needs out of his own pocket.

Brian O’Shea, John’s teenage son, was surprised when he learned his father had taken up with Truman. He recalled watching Johnny Carson’s
The Tonight Show
alongside his dad. When Truman had appeared on the screen, John had defined him as “a goddamn fag.”

John and Truman went on what passed for a honeymoon in Europe, traveling as far as the Greek island of Spetsai, where they sunned themselves in the hot noonday sun, completely nude, with Aristotle Onassis and shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos.

Then it was off to dine with heiress Peggy Guggenheim in Venice before flying to Switzerland to spend time with Charlie and Oona Chaplin.

Back in Washington, Truman brought John to the home of publisher Katharine Graham. Reportedly, she was horrified at such a crude person. John was drinking heavily at the time. Under the influence of alcohol, he became belligerent.

Natalie Wood recalled the time Truman brought John to her home in California when she was married to Robert Wagner. “Everything this guy said was ‘fuck that…or fuck this.’ He was a monster.”

John later recalled, “I was pampered, but in a prison with Truman as my jailer. I felt more and more castrated by him. He brought me sexual relief, but it was the equivalent of masturbation. We were drawn to each other, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a love affair.”

Both men continued to drink heavily and often got into fights with each other. At the home of Carol Matthau, wife of actor Walter Matthau, John even threw his drink in Truman’s face.

To his gay friends, Truman lavished praise on John’s sexual equipment. One night, at a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Joanne Carson, former wife of TV host Johnny Carson, John got drunk and turned belligerent. At one point, he spit into the face of one of her guests.

Then he wandered off into the nearby study and fell asleep on the carpeted floor. One of the guests, a gay opportunist, slipped into the study and unzipped John’s trousers, since he was slumbering deeply. He later told two of the other guests, both of them gay, “Capote didn’t exaggerate. It’s a whopper!”

During those turbulent years, Truman managed to write
Mojave
, a short story for
Esquire
, the first piece he’d published in eight years.

With John, he broke up, reunited, then broke up again. Truman admitted to friends, “John was poison to me, but we always got back together again. I must have developed a taste for arsenic.”

When John bolted one time, Truman recruited some of his burly friends, ordering them to go after him and beat him to death. That never happened, but the two men did locate his apartment in Los Angeles. Instead of wreaking violence upon him directly, they set his car on fire.

John retaliated, finding out where Truman was staying at a motel in Malibu. He came to his room and, in his words, “beat the shit out of him.” Truman was rushed to the hospital with a fractured rib, cracked fingers, and abrasions on his face, legs, and chest.

On another occasion, John and Truman agreed to meet in New Mexico for reconciliation, away from the homes of the rich and/or famous people he frequented. But during their time together, John kept slipping away to make phone calls out of earshot. Finally, he admitted that he’d fallen in love with Joanne Biel, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Southern California. “At last I’ve found true love,” John told Truman. “It’s over between us.”

“Let’s call it the love affair that never was,” Truman responded.

***

Months went by and Truman began to long for John again. He didn’t know where he was, so he hired detectives to track him down. At the time, he was working on his final novel,
Answered Prayers
. When Random House began demanding to see some finished chapters, Truman didn’t have them. He lied to his publisher, claiming that John O’Shea had stolen the rest of the manuscript. That was not true. There was no manuscript to steal.

Despite the many troubles they’d already experienced between them, Truman flew to Los Angeles, hoping for a final reconciliation with John, who met him at the airport. On the way to his hotel suite, they got into an argument.

Truman was drunk and heavily drugged and wanted to go to sleep immediately after entering the bedroom.

He later recalled, “I was not completely asleep. I was awake enough to see John going through my luggage, where he found $20,000 in one-thousand dollar bills in a manila envelope. He also went to my closet and took out my wallet from the jacket I’d worn on the plane. It contained $500. He removed only $300 of it, leaving me the final $200 for expenses. I heard the door softly shut before I drifted off. The man with the perfect penis was leaving my life forever. But even the perfect penis could no longer fulfill my needs or give me a reason to stay alive.”

***

Truman believed that his final novel [
Answered Prayers]
, would be his masterpiece if only he could write it. At a dinner with Marella Agnelli, he told her, “My novel will do for America what Proust did for France in
Remembrance of Things Past.”

When Gore Vidal heard that, he claimed, “Capote has never read Proust.”

Apparently, Truman wanted to replicate the disillusionment that overcomes the narrator in the final pages of the Proustian masterpiece set in
Belle Époque
Paris. For his novel’s setting in the 1970s, Truman chose to expose “the beautiful people,” especially the fashionable ladies he referred to as his swans.

The narrator of
Answered Prayers
is a seedy hustler, P.J. Jones, a dark
Doppelgänger
replica of Truman himself.