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) (4 page)

[
The F.B.I director may have had a spy at Anaïs’ gathering. Just weeks later, Hoover would order his assistant and lover, Clyde Tolson, to set up a file on Truman. He would later demand that the F.B.I establish equivalent files on both Gore and Tennessee.]

Before the party ended, Cadmus had asked both Truman and Gore to pose in the nude for him. Truman accepted, but Gore rejected the idea.

The New York-born artist was notorious for his paintings and drawings of nude male figures, which combined eroticism and a style he referred to as “magic realism.”

In 1934, he painted
The Fleet’s In
for the Public Works Art Project of the WPA. It became one of the most controversial paintings of the Depression era, featuring carousing sailors, female prostitutes, and a homosexual couple. Such a public outcry arose that it was placed in mothballs and not allowed to be exhibited until the more tolerant year of 1981.

It is not known if Truman ever showed up to pose for Cadmus as an erotic nude model.

Gore was awed to see that within 15 minutes, Truman had most of the party-goers clustered around him as he told a most outrageous story:

Truman claimed that he’d been informed by the British actress Elsa Lanchester that “Noël Coward eats shit. Certain young boys are recruited in London to deposit their loads, and they’re put on a strict diet one week before they perform that service. When they’re squatted in position over Coward’s face, they are instructed to very slowly begin their bowel movement, allowing Coward time to taste and savor.”

“Truman didn’t stop there,” Gore later recalled. “He also claimed that that beautiful man, Tyrone Power, also ate shit.”

What made that story believable was that this in-the-know group was already aware that Power and Coward at one time had been lovers. The accusation of shit eating, as relayed by Truman, originated with Elsa Lanchester, who was married to Charles Laughton, another alleged shit-eater. As bizarre as it seems, handsome Ty had seduced toad-like Laughton.

In reference to this incident, when Gore published his memoir,
Palimpsest
, in 1993, he claimed that to his horror, he later heard from several people that “
I
had been transformed into the source of this truly sick invention that will be grist to the satanic mills of Capotes yet unborn.”

When Truman got around to actually talking to Gore, and not performing for the rest of the guests, he found they had certain similarities. “Both of our mothers were named Nina, and both of them were alcoholics,” Truman said. “We were both unloved as children. Both of us were amusing and bright, and fond of our own sex…at least in bed. And both of us were so terribly, terribly young, filled with such hopes and dreams that life had not destroyed for us, or made us cynical.”

“I wanted to be the firecracker of American writers. And Gore wanted that for himself. He also wanted to be President of the United States and the American version in letters of W. Somerset Maugham. Regrettably, he never found his literary voice except for his vinegary essays. His copy, unlike mine, lacked my sensitivity.”

During her “after-party analysis” with Gore, Anaïs claimed that “Truman wants to become one of my loved ones. But I’m already surrounded by enough childlike men, and I can’t take on another person. Truman reminds me of a Venus’s flytrap. I once saw one along the coast of South Carolina. Truman is exotic like that flower, but also devouring. He will feed on you, but give nothing in return.”

Gore met the following night with his closest friend at the time, interior designer Stanley Mills Haggart. Gore told him: “Capote gives homosexuality a bad name, and Anaïs does the same for self-love.”

Truman and Gore were not physically attracted to each other, but they began to “date” after the party at the apartment of Anaïs Nin. These dates were not romantic, at least not with each other. When they set out to explore underground New York, it was with the understanding that if either of them were able to pick up a trick, they’d be free to run off into the night with the object of their desire, with no questions asked the next day.

On their first date, Gore invited Truman to join him at the infamous Astor Bar at 7
^th
Avenue and 45
^th
Street, near Times Square. “Wear a red tie,” Gore instructed. “That will signal your sexual preference to the initiated.”

Gore later wrote that the Astor Bar was “the city’s most exciting place for meeting soldiers, sailors, and Marines on the prowl. No woman ever dared intrude into these male mysteries. After all, we had—all of us except Truman—won the great Imperial War, and, thanks to us, the whole world was briefly American.”

Since 1910, the Astor Bar had become legendary as a pickup spot at the “Crossroads of the World.” On its rooftop, beginning in 1940, Frank Sinatra had made early appearances with the Tommy Dorsey Band.

During the War, with so many U.S. military men in town, the Astor Bar experienced its greatest fame, welcoming thousands upon thousands of gay patrons in uniform—with the expectation that they be discreet, based on the standards of the time.

At the Astor, hundreds of men would be sardined, packed six deep around the long oval-shaped black bar within whose center bartenders ruled the sea of men on the make for each other.

A love object did not emerge for either Gore or Truman that night at the Astor Bar.

“The competition was too great,” Truman later recalled. “All the queens from Manhattan, the Outer Boroughs, and New Jersey, too, were making off with all the ‘seafood’ that night.”

After a quick hamburger at a joint on Times Square pushing papaya juice, Truman and Gore journeyed to the notorious Everard Baths, a place aptly nicknamed “Everhard,” which was said to operate because of frequent payoffs to the police.

From 1888 to 1985, these baths, housed in a former church, were the gay mecca of New York. Many great artists such as actor Emyln Williams, composer Ned Rorem, and even Truman himself, have written about their experiences cruising these baths. Other patrons have included Rock Hudson, Alfred Lunt, Lorenz Hart, Rudolf Nureyev, Dana Andrews, Montgomery Clift, Leonard Bernstein, Zachary Scott, and Dan Dailey.

In a memoir, Gore had nothing but fond memories of the Everard, even though it was mildewed, grungy, and dingy. “Military men often spent the night there because it was hard to get a hotel room in New York right after the war. This was sex at its rawest made most exciting. Newly invented penicillin had removed fears of venereal disease. Most of the boys knew that they would soon be home for good, and married, and that this was a last chance to do what they were designed to do with each other.”

Gore once published a paperback original under the
nom de plume
of “Katharine Everhard.” Although it was a straight romantic novel, the pseudonym was an inside gay joke.

Truman and Gore rented a cubicle and changed into the skimpy, knee-length white cotton robes offered as part of the entrance fee.

In
The Gay Metropolis
, author Charles Kaiser wrote: “You usually wore the robe loose with your cock hanging out. I guess you could have sex with as many as a dozen people. There were group scenes. There was a very impressive steam-bath room down in the lower level, as well as a swimming pool and a big sort of cathedral-like sauna room. It was very steamy and you could hardly see. You could stumble into multiple combinations.”

Like two voyeurs, Gore and Truman trolled the hallways, visiting the steam room, but finding nothing particularly appealing.

On the way back to their cubicle, they spotted an open door three down from their own cramped quarters. A well-built young man had just entered and had taken off his robe, lying nude on the bed with only a dim light illuminating his muscled body.