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) (38 page)

In front of Tennessee, Truman recited a provocative story: “On the night before the play’s opening, Margo assembled the cast for a macabre pep talk. To the assembled cast, she said, ‘This is the play of a dying man. ‘You’ve got to give it all you’ve got.’”

His words incensed the hypochondriacal Tennessee. Rising abruptly, in fury, from a seat at a small table, he turned it over, spilling the drinks that had rested upon it onto Truman’s lap. Then Tennessee and Frank stormed out of the café, but not before announcing that they would not go to Ischia with Truman and Dunphy.

Truman later claimed, “I didn’t realize that I was touching the nerve nearest to Tennessee’s heart. I didn’t think what I said would upset him. After all, every day he got up, he announced to us, ‘
Ah’m a dyin’ man!
’”

In a March, 1949, letter to Audrey Wood, Tennessee wrote, “I am not sure how much of Capote I can take. He is completely disarming; and then all at once, out shoots the forked tongue. And the sting is all but mortal.”

A few days later, Tennessee, who had remained behind in Naples, finally decided to forgive Truman, and consequently, he and Frank sailed to Ischia to join the novelist and Dunphy.

The traveling couples hooked up again in London. Truman found Tennessee very depressed over the bad reviews generated by the British press in the wake of the London opening of
The Glass Menagerie
, starring Helen Hayes. Truman tried to cheer him up. “Good God, who cares what anyone in England thinks?”

Both Tennessee and Truman had booked tickets for themselves and their companions to sail back to New York aboard the
Queen Mary
, sailing from Southampton, for the Port of New York. Before he went aboard, Tennessee posted a letter to his friend, Donald Windham. “Please stop referring to Capote as a child. He is more of a sweetly vicious old lady.”

Truman and Tennessee were the two new celebrities aboard, joining more legendary icons—Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Charles Boyer—all of whom were onboard and returning to New York after stints or sojourns in Europe.

“Truman was an amusing shipboard companion,” said Tennessee. “But at times, his pranks became tiresome. One night, he switched around all the shoes his fellow passengers had set out in the corridors to be shined. And throughout most of the trip, he told amusing stories about being chased by an alcoholic Episcopalian bishop.”

“Truman finally got rid of him by suggesting that he might acquire his bishop’s ring after he was defrocked,” Tennessee said.

During the crossing, one night over dinner, Tennessee and Truman discussed their “first time” sexual experiences.

Truman confessed that he had been repeatedly seduced at the age of twelve when he was enrolled in the St. John’s Military Academy in Ossining, New York.

“When the lights in the dormitory went out at night, the younger, beautiful boys such as myself were forced into the beds of the bigger, stronger boys. My first one was Bill, and he took sex very, very seriously. It took him only about twenty minutes to recover before he wanted more. He told me to ‘grin and bear it,’ not knowing how much I enjoyed his attacks.”

Truman had told Windham the story of his early seduction, but with a variation. “I seduced all the boys in grammar school before I was ten and then went to bed with all the other boys in my high school.”

Tennessee responded to Truman that he’d lost his virginity to Bette Reitz, a fellow student at the University of Iowa. “I was twenty-six at the time. I had previously ejaculated with males, but never had sex with them. Actually, I never masturbated until I was twenty-five years old.”

“Tennessee, I love you dearly,” Truman said. “But I think you’re taking poetic license. There’s no way in hell you could have held out that long.”

Before the end of their transatlantic crossing, Truman and Tennessee, either separately or together, had dinner with the three big-name movie stars who were on board.

Gable sought out Tennessee for a special encounter. “I didn’t know if Rhett Butler planned to rape me or not, perhaps like he did when he carried Scarlett O’Hara up those steps and she woke up the next morning with a smile on her face.”

“In the years to come, even as he aged as a matinee idol, I avidly read about the women he’d seduced—Ava Gardner, Shelley Winters, Mamie Van Doren, Hedy Lamarr, Grace Kelly, Yvonne De Carlo, even Nancy Davis (Reagan) and Marilyn Monroe. When I accepted that dinner invitation, I wondered if my name would one day be added to that list. No such luck.”

“Clark had seen
A Streetcar Named Desire
on Broadway, with Brando, and he felt it was inevitable that a movie version would be made. He asked me if I could rewrite the role of Stanley Kowalski as a somewhat older character. He dream was to reteam with Vivien Leigh, who had co-starred with him as Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
(1939).”

“Just think of the publicity—Rhett and Scarlett return to the screen again, but this time as Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois,” Gable said.

“I told him I’d think it over, but I never did,” Tennessee said. “Clark just wasn’t my ideal Stanley. I felt only Marlon Brando could bring Stanley to the screen, although the suggestion of Vivien as an aging Blanche DuBois would be perfect, or so I felt.”

Both Truman and Tennessee dined one night on board the
Queen Mary
with Charles Boyer. Neither writer found him sexy, although they thought the opinion of Bette Davis a bit harsh. When she co-starred with Boyer in the 1940
All This and Heaven Too
, she’d said, “Terribly serious about his looks…a wig, a corset, lifts in his shoes, and so on. When he took all that off, he must have looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

Truman seemed to know details about the private lives of every celebrity. He told Tennessee, “Boyer likes to keep it discreet in Hollywood, but when he travels abroad, he heads for a port on the Mediterranean. He likes young boys with olive skins.”

Two nights before reaching New York, Tennessee and Truman dined with Spencer Tracy, who was involved in a platonic relationship with Katharine Hepburn. He had already seduced, among others, Joan Bennett, Ingrid Bergman, Nancy Davis (Reagan), Judy Garland, and Loretta Young. Joan Crawford had filed a bad report on him after he seduced her. She said, “Spence was a very disturbed man. He was a mean drunk and a bastard.”

Truman told Tennessee that he had it “on good authority” that Tracy was also bisexual like Boyer. “One of the reasons he drinks so much is he’s ashamed of his homosexuality, which mainly manifests itself when he gets stinking drunk.”

“After dinner,” Truman said, “I fully expected Spencer to invite me to his cabin for the night, but he didn’t.”

Later, Truman heard that one of the waiters was seen leaving Tracy’s cabin at three o’clock in the morning. Over breakfast the next morning, Truman described the incident to Tennessee. “The waiter served us Beef Wellington last night. But Spencer obviously preferred pork in the early morning hours.”

After they docked at the Port of New York, during his appearances on the party circuit, Truman spread the word that he’d had sex with Tennessee. “Onboard, he cruised me from deck to deck and followed me back to my cabin, where he forced his way in and raped me.”

Tennessee, of course, denied it. “I never had sex with Truman. He’s very effeminate, and I prefer masculine young men. As for rape, that’s physically impossible in his case. If he saw a man with an erection, he would immediately surrender the rosebud without protest.”

“Truman is a mythologist,” Tennessee continued, “ a good story teller. Like many Southerners, he loves to fabricate for the sake of the story. I love him too much to accuse him of being a liar.”

With the arrival of the 1950s, Tennessee and Truman remained “friendly rivals.” Truman once explained to Donald Windham what that meant: “Whereas Gore and I, to each other’s face, denounce one another, Tennessee and I only stab each other in the back. To Tenn’s face, I have nothing but praise for him. But just let him leave the room—and then he gets the dagger as only I can plunge it.”

To others, Tennessee and Truman were each brutally critical of the other’s writings. When Tennessee read
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, he asserted, “One third of it is brilliant. The rest falls flat and is terribly derivative of William Faulkner and Carson McCullers.”

In October of 1950, Truman wrote his friend, Andrew Lyndon, asking him if he’d read Tennessee’s first novel,
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
(1950). “
Multo volgare
, to put it mildly,” Truman wrote. “Tennessee is a bad writer.”

Even though he’d once seduced him, Truman never managed to say anything good about Frank Merlo, Tennessee’s longtime lover.

In another letter to Lyndon, written from Tangier, Morocco, Truman said: “Tenn and that loathesome
(sic)
Merlo boy are on their way to Hollywood—Perhaps Frankie will get in the movies, because I understand all the old Lon Chaney movies are going to be remade, and by hiring him, they’d save on makeup.”

In September of 1952, Truman wrote Lyndon again from Tangier. “Two weeks ago, Frankie Merlo descended without warning
sans
Tennesee
(sic)
, who is off sucking cock in Germany. I thought Frankie would never stop talking and never leave. Finally, I convinced him to get on a train.”

Truman turned to playwrighting with the opening of
The Grass Harp
in 1952. Tennessee flew into a jealous rage, sensing that Truman “is moving in on my territory.”

He wrote to Maria St. Just, one of his best friends. “I’ve only seen one notice of
The Grass Harp, The Times
, which was a rave. I, of course, am insanely jealous. How I do hate myself for it.”

Tennessee attended the opening night on Broadway, and later described, in writing, his reaction to Donald Windham. He mocked Truman’s fascination with celebrities.

“Before the opening at the Martin Beck, Truman was on the sidewalk across the street, together with the bummier
(sic)
spectators, delightfully watching the celebrities enter, and pointed them out to us after he saw us and called us over to him—‘Oh, there’s the Countess so-and-so, etc.’”

Writing in
The New York Times
, Brooks Atkinson interpreted
The Grass Harp
as a play with “dramatic strength and timely wisdom.” But, in Truman’s opinion, other reviews were “sadistic. These attacks managed to shut down the play after only thirty-six performances.”

During a subsequent trip to Italy, with Frank, in the summer of 1953, Tennessee wrote once again to Carson McCullers. “I understand that Miss Capote is in Europe, in Italy, but we have not yet collided. She is now reported to be at the fashionable resort of Portofino, which is now much smarter than Capri.”

That letter was composed in July, and by August, Tennessee and Frank were together in Portofino, being entertained by Truman and his lover, Jack Dunphy.

When Tennessee discovered that Truman had purchased a female dog, he wrote, “Now there is more than one bitch in residence.”

Noël Coward showed up, followed by John Gielgud, each of them guests at the vacation home, in the hills above Portofino, of Rex Harrison and his wife, Lilli Palmer.

In Portofino, Truman had rented an apartment on the top floor of an old house overlooking the harbor. He invited Greta Garbo to come and visit him. He later relayed to Tennessee: “I tried to convince her to star in one of your dramas, but she told me that she does not play ‘
fallen vomen.’”

Truman was in his element that summer, mixing with high society, which he would woo for many years to come “until they tossed me out on my bum.”