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) (41 page)

The year 1975 marked a turning point in the feud between Gore and Truman. Long past their prime, both writers had dreamed of movie stardom. Whenever a role loomed as possible for them, both went for it like a shark sensing blood in the water.

Such a role arose during the casting of Neil Simon’s farce,
Murder By Death
.

Gore wanted the role, but producers expressed their belief that “Truman will bring more camp to it.”

When Truman was cast, he said, “Gore must be dying of envy—hopefully—or else turning green with jealousy.”

Truman interjected his own personality, with very little interpretive acting, into a character which had assembled the world’s greatest detectives to solve a murder he’d carefully plotted. In addition to Truman, the other members of the cast included such luminaries as David Niven, Elsa Lanchester, Peter Falk, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Maggie Smith, Nancy Walker, and James Coco.

With the understanding that he’d have to report for work to a movie studio in Burbank every morning at 6:30AM, Truman was paid $10,000 a week for an eight-week gig.

To the press, he defined himself as an actor. “I am what Billie Holiday is to Jazz, what Mae West is to tits, what Seconal is to sleeping pills, and what King Kong is to penises. Truman Capote is the great god Thespis! Eat your heart out, Gore Vidal! The role is mine.”

Months later, after Gore had schlepped to a movie theater to see
Murder By Death
, he told a columnist, “And now we know why Capote never became a movie star. The
Harvard Lampoon
will surely award him as the worst performance of this or any other year. What a ham! And the bitch looked on screen exactly like he looks in person. The dog’s dinner. No, no. No self-respecting dog would touch that plate of maggot-ridden rotting flesh.”

Perhaps in retaliation, Truman arranged an interview between himself and one of the editors at
Playgirl
, a publication noted for its nude male centerfolds. He had never seen the magazine before, until one afternoon he visited Liberace in his outrageously decorated home in Las Vegas.

The entertainer revealed to him that he was a devotee of its centerfolds. “What I do is take a thousand dollar bill and split it in half,” Liberace said. “I then send one half to the centerfold of the month, telling him that if he wants to claim the other half, he needs to come to Vegas and spend some time in my elegant boudoir. I have almost never been turned down.”

In the interview with
Playgirl
, Truman described an incident that had allegedly happened at the White House in 1961 when Jackie Kennedy had invited Gore to a party honoring her sister, Lee Bouvier (Radziwill).

The September-October, 1975 edition of
Play-girl
showcased a headline on its front cover: OUTRAGEOUS INTERVIEW WITH TRUMAN CAPOTE. Its subhead trumpeted: GORE VIDAL…BOBBY THREW HIM OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE.

In the article, Truman claimed that this was the only time that Gore had ever been invited to the White House. According to Truman, he not only got drunk, “but insulted Jackie’s mother. Bobby Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger, I believe it was, and one of the guards just picked Gore up and carried him to the door and threw him out into Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s when he began to write all those cruel pieces about the Kennedys.”

As his source for this information, Truman listed his close friend, Lee Radziwill.

The fireworks were yet to come in a retaliatory blast from Gore at that ill-starred bash in Camelot.

As best as the “RFK vs. Gore” story can be pieced together, Jackie had invited Gore to the White House, mainly because of his status as the stepson of Hugh Auchincloss, who also had been the stepfather to both Lee and Jackie. At the party, Gore sustained an extended chat with Janet Auchincloss, mother of Jackie and Lee, although there is no evidence that Gore insulted the matriarch.

Witnesses said that Gore made several visits to the well-stocked bar, and became noticeably drunk before he had confrontations with both Lem Billings and Robert Kennedy.

Gore had long been fascinated by the intimate relationship between JFK and LeMoyne Billings. “He was not only Jack’s lifelong slave, but had been in love with him ever since he’d gone down on him in the shower back in 1933 at Choate. Jackie once told me she’d love to spend a weekend with her husband without Lem tagging along. Because of his bad back, Jack was even helped into his jockey shorts by Lem, who also put on his black socks in the morning.”

Gore later claimed that “Lem had challenged me for not attending meetings of the Council on the Arts. I told him that I didn’t believe the government should involve itself in the arts.”

In print, Gore referred to Lem as “the principal fag at court, who wanted to eliminate any potentially controversial figure from the scene. In Lem’s view, here was room for only one queer in residence at the White House. He always wanted to be near the only man he ever loved.”

Gore admitted that he and Lem had “exchanged words, none of them pleasant. I detested the little creep. In fact, I ended our dialogue by telling him, ‘Why don’t you go and suck a cock? Not mine. The President’s.’ The fag stormed away in a huff.”

Later, Gore was crouched next to Jackie, who was sitting in an armchair. As he rose to his feet, rather unsteadily at this point, he balanced himself by placing his hand on her shoulder.

Bobby saw that and rushed over to Gore, asking him to remove his hand from the First Lady.

As Bobby turned to leave, Gore shouted at him. “Don’t ever do anything like that again. I’ve always thought you were an impertinent son of a bitch.”

“What do you mean, buddy boy?” RFK asked. “You’re a nobody! Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

“Fuck off, yourself!”

The Attorney General not only walked away, disentangling himself from further confrontation, but asked Arthur Schlesinger and George Plimpton to drive Gore home because he was obviously too drunk to do it himself.

In brief, Gore wasn’t “thrown” onto Pennsylvania Avenue, but escorted and driven away from the White House grounds.

Although many aspects of the incident were disputed, both sides agreed that RFK and Gore had engaged in a verbal fight.

Within the pages of his memoir,
Palimpsest
, Gore got even with RFK. “Between Bobby’s primitive religion and his family’s ardent struggle ever upward from the Irish bog, he was more than usually skewed, not least by his own homosexual impulses, which Rudolf Nureyev once told me, were very much in the air on at least one occasion when they were together. ‘We did share a young soldier once,’ he said. ‘
American soldier.’
Anyone who has eleven children must be trying to prove—disprove?—something other than the ability to surpass his father as an incontinent breeder.”

At his home at Ravello, along Italy’s Amalfi Coast, Gore received a copy of the
Playgirl
interview and was angry and shocked at the inaccuracies. He decided not to sue, having been burned in his libel suit against right winger William F. Buckley. “My experience with Buckley made me sensitive to the misuse of libel laws to discourage free speech.” But in Amsterdam, when confronted with row upon row of copies of
Playgirl
displayed in a local kiosk, he decided to sue Truman for libel. Shortly thereafter, he filed a million dollar lawsuit.

The press went wild. Not since Oscar Wilde threatened the Marquess of Queensberry with slander had such a lawsuit generated so much publicity. At the age of 53, Gore was suing Truman, aged 54. The press referred to them as “a pair of razor-tongued salon fighters aboil with malice.”

To bolster his defense in the libel case, Truman wanted to drag Lee Radziwill into the fray, citing her as the source of the story. He wanted her as an eyewitness that the story about Gore’s explusion was true after all.

Lee, however, denied that she had been the source of the story, and made it clear that she didn’t want to become involved. When Jackie heard about the lawsuit, and Lee’s possible involvement, she pronounced that “this whole mess is just too damn ridiculous.” She saw it as a “frivolous squabble” between two authors she’d once befriended, but had now distanced herself from. “Both Gore and Truman have become too hot for me to handle.”

Lee’s lawyers warned that if she admitted to being the source of the story, that Gore could instruct his lawyers to amend their complaint, naming her as a codefendant. If Gore had won such a case, Lee would have been liable for untold damages, whatever the court decided, plus legal fees. The case had already cost Truman $80,000, money he could ill afford.

Desperately wanting her help, Truman telephoned Lee repeatedly in 1979. His desperate calls were not returned.

Truman then telephoned columnist Liz Smith and asked her to intervene. Somewhat reluctantly, Smith phoned Lee, a woman she had met but didn’t know too well.

During her dialogue with Smith, Lee was dismissive of Truman. Reportedly, Lee told Smith, “All this notoriety is too much for me. I am tired of Truman riding on my coattails. Liz, what difference does the suit make? Truman and Vidal are just a couple of fags.”

When Smith told Truman what Lee had said, he went ballistic: “Riding on her coattails?” he said, mockingly. “Who in the fuck is she kidding? She rode on my coattails. I even talked David Susskind into casting her in Laura. And you know how that turned out. Gene Tierney, Lee was not.”

“If the lovely, divine, and sensitive Princess Radziwill has such a low opinion of homosexuals, then why did she have me for a confidant for the last twenty years?” he asked.

To her frequent escort at the time, Newton Cope, a middle-aged widower who had married the late heiress, Dolly MacMasters, Lee said, “Now I’m in hot water. The little worm [a reference to Truman] is threatening to sue me.”