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) (3 page)

Ever since the summer of 1937, Tennessee had been a defender of Tallulah when she was under attack from his fellow Southerners. “I do not consider the alleged perversions and promiscuity of the star, Tallulah Bankhead, to be filth, but a robust natural life, boiling up to the surface.”

He told Tallulah that “Broadway seems like some revolting sickness,” even though he was enjoying his first success there. “It’s centered around eating, then vomiting, and ultimately shitting—all at once. One’s ego becomes so sickly bloated with it.”

“Would that I, a mere mortal woman, was suffering through such a triumph,” she said. “The wolf is always at my door,
dahling
.”

Tennessee confessed that one of his major reasons for leaving New York involved his wish to overcome his sex addiction. “I can’t get any work done here. All I have to do is walk out on the streets around Times Square. Soldiers, sailors, marines, like this gentleman sitting here with us, and Air Force pilots, are returning home in droves, one horny bunch. I haven’t had so much sex since I departed wartime San Francisco, where I met countless young men, who’d left their wives or girlfriends back home, before shipping out to the Pacific theater—and perhaps death.”

It was inevitable that the three most famous homosexual writers in America—Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote—would eventually meet in postwar America. Years later, after the 1940s had long ago been buried, they would communicate with each other mainly through their attorneys, threatening lawsuits.

But early friendships were possible among this “Unholy Trio,” as each of them wandered, young and most often alone, down the lonely sidewalks of New York and through its cold canyons.

First came the historic meeting of 20-year-old Gore and 21-year-old Truman, who looked like he was twelve and spoke like a strangled child.

In Greenwich Village, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote were heading for the same party, where they would meet for the first time. The party would already be underway before they arrived. Fellow guests included an array of mostly struggling poets, novelists, playwrights, actors, and actresses, plus a flotsam and jetsam of people who lived on the periphery of the arts world in post-war America.

The meeting between Truman and Gore occurred in the skylit bohemian apartment of Anaïs Nin, a fifth floor walkup on West 13
^th
Street.

She had already met and befriended a handsome young Gore Vidal, who was serving his final days in the military. Throughout most of them, he’d been stationed in the Aleutian Islands.

Anaïs, the party’s host, was already an underground legend of her own making. Unable to get her novels published in the 1940s, she had arranged to have them printed herself. At the time of her party, Gore had promised to get her novels republished by E.P. Dutton, where he was its youngest editor.

In
The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin
, author Noël Riley Fitch defined her as “the ultimate
femme fatale
, a passionate and mysterious woman, world famous for her steamy love affairs and extravagant sexual exploits, most notably her simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller, and her bicoastal bigamous marriages.”

She was continuing to work on her endless diary, which she’d begun as a young girl and which her former lover, Henry Miller, had proclaimed would one day take its place alongside the writings of Marcel Proust.

At that point in her life, she viewed herself as an Earth Mother to a growing number of homosexual artists, including the young poet James Merrill.

Gore spent most of the party talking to Merrill, whom he’d first seduced when he met him as an undergraduate at Amherst. He later likened himself to “an older warrior to his unpublished Ephebe.”

The night of their first meeting, he’d gone to bed with Merrill, the son of Charles Merrill, co-founder of the brokerage house, Merrill Lynch.

James had published his first book at the age of sixteen. His wealthy father had paid the printing costs.

Author Christopher Bram defined Merrill as “pale, lean, and an aloof young man, cool and cryptic, full of courteous formality, suggesting that in some photos he looks like a suave extraterrestrial.”

Gore later suggested that Anaïs praised Merrill’s poems only because he wrote favorable critiques of her own prose.

At Anaïs’s party, Gore would later disappear into the night with Merrill to repeat a seduction that had begun at Amherst.

In 1977, Merrill would win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Later on, Gore would mock him for selling so few books.

“I’d rather have one perfect reader instead,” Merrill told him. “Why dynamite a pond in order to catch that single silver carp?”

In later years, especially during the 1970s, Gore, with a tinge of jealousy, watched as Merrill became one of the most celebrated poets of his generation.

Gore met another noted American poet at the party, Robert Duncan, and his lover, the expressionist painter Robert De Niro, Sr., father of the famed actor, Robert De Niro, Jr.

Duncan was a pivotal figure in Gore’s life, giving him some of the courage to write his gay novel,
The City and the Pillar
. In 1944, Duncan had written the landmark essay,
The Homosexual in Society
, comparing the plight of gay people to that of African Americans and Jews. It became a pioneering treatise on the plight of homosexuals in American society.

In the 1950s, Duncan’s mature works were consumed by the Beat Generation, who adopted him as a cultural hero. He also became a shamanic figure in artistic circles, especially in San Francisco, in a movement hailed as the “San Francisco Renaissance.”

When Gore complained to him about the hardships he’d experienced in the military, Duncan chided him. “You should have done what I did. When I was drafted in 1941, I declared myself a homosexual. There was no way the Army wanted me to share the shower with all those innocent young men from the Grain Belt of America.”

At the party, the other soon-to-be famous writer, a young Capote, had never heard of Merrill or Duncan, although he’d heard a lot about Gore.

Anaïs had never met Capote, who arrived on the arm of her friend, Leo Lerman, the writer and critic, who in the words of Anaïs, talked and looked like Oscar Wilde. At the time, Truman was using Lerman as his role model.

“Leo parries with quick
repartée
,” wrote Anaïs. “He is a man of the world who practices a magician’s
tour de force
in conversation, a skillful social performance, a weather vane, a mask, a pirouette, and all you remember is the fantasy, the tale, the laughter.”

She remembered Truman as a “small, slender young man, with hair over his eyes, extending the softest and most boneless hand. He seemed fragile and easily wounded.”

She had been impressed with Truman’s short story,
Miriam
, which had been published in
Mademoiselle
in its edition of June, 1945. It was the story of a sinister little girl who moves in with an older widow, gradually taking over her life.

Truman was not immediately introduced to Gore, until he had pirouetted around the room, showing off his black cape and his large black hat that evoked the popular concept of the headgear of a witch.

Anaïs must have wondered if Truman had adopted her own dress code. She often appeared in an Elizabethan hat like that worn by Sir Walter Raleigh, and she, too, wore capes around Manhattan, brightening many a gray day in Greenwich Village with her capes in tones of chartreuse, magenta, cerise, marigold orange, emerald green, or sapphire.

Truman came up to Gore. “How does it feel to be an
onn-font-tarribull [enfant terrible]?”
he asked.

Gore chose not to answer, but to ask a question instead. “Did you know that in Italian,
capote
means ‘condom?’”

Thus, one of the famous literary feuds in American letters was launched, although it didn’t heat up right away.

“Almost from the beginning,” Anaïs later said, “Gore and Truman sized each other up as future rivals. After all, there could be only one
enfant terrible
. Gore was almost a historian, dealing in facts, whereas Truman came from the Southern school of
raconteur
, meaning he never wanted a fact to get in the way of a good story. Gore camouflaged his homosexuality, whereas Truman used it to draw attention to himself. The more flamboyant he was, the more onlookers he attracted.”

The painter, Paul Cadmus, was at the party, observing both Truman and Gore. “Gore was formal and stiff, with military posture. Truman was the opposite. I always liked the little devil. He didn’t give a fuck what people thought of his high-pitched voice or anything else, including his outrageous opinions about anything. He was brave and gutsy.”

“At a time when all of America was afraid of J. Edgar Hoover, this Southern Magnolia (i.e., Capote) denouncd him at Anaïs’ party as a ‘killer fruit,’ a certain kind of queer who has Freon refrigerating his bloodstream,” Cadmus said.