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) (42 page)

Cope said, “What can you expect from a has-been writer who is all washed up and fighting for any kind of publicity on the way down?”

Forced to respond, Lee delivered a sworn statement to Gore’s lawyers. “I do not recall ever discussing with Truman Capote the incident of that evening, which I understand is the subject of a lawsuit.”

When Truman heard that Lee had acquiesced to Gore’s lawyers, he said, “She’s a treacherous lady, and that’s the truth of it. She’s treacherous to absolutely everyone.”

***

The lawsuit seemed to have no end, dragging on for years.

Hoping to score points, Truman, in June of 1979, allowed
New York
magazine to publish the strong anti-Vidal depositions he had submitted to his lawyers as part of the legal proceedings.

In
New York
magazine, Truman said, “Gore Vidal wants to be all things to all men. I mean, he wants to be Caesar and Cleopatra at the same time—and he isn’t.”

Upon publication of that article, Truman was gleeful. “Right now my depositions are rolling down the chutes, along with Gore’s career. When people read my dialogues, they’ll know he’s Captain Queeg in
The Caine Mutiny
.This will explode and destroy his career, giving me the greatest single revenge in literary history. It will be humiliating for him. I love it! I love it! I love it! When he dies,
they’ll write on his tombstone, ‘HERE LIES GORE VIDAL: HE MESSED AROUND WITH T.C.’”

Contrary to Truman’s hope,
New York
magazine’s publication of his depositions had no noticeable effect on Gore’s literary career. The publicity they garnered only strengthened Gore’s resolve to continue with his lawsuit, which dragged on until the autumn of 1983, less than a year before Truman’s death, when Truman’s lawyers assured Gore’s attorney that he had no money left to pay for any damages. Gore’s career was not affected by the depositions and he continued his lawsuit for more tortuous years. In the autumn of 1983, the case was finally settled out of court when Truman agreed to write a letter of apology:

“
Dear Gore
,

I apologize for any distress, inconvenience, or expense which may have been caused you as a result of the interview with me published in the September, 1975, issue of
Playgirl.
As you know, I was not present at the event about which I quoted in that interview, and I understand from your representative that what I am reported as saying does not accurately set forth what occurred. I can assure you that the article was not an accurate transcription of what I said, especially with regard to any remarks which might cast aspersions upon your character or behavior, and that I will avoid discussing the subject in the future
.

Best, Truman Capote.”

The only legal ruling that ever came down from the bench had occurred in August of 1979, when a judge denied Truman’s request for summary dismissal. The same judge also denied Gore’s request for summary judgment.

But in a preliminary ruling, as part of a statement indicating that the law would probably rule in Gore’s favor, the judge was quoted as saying, “Mr. Capote’s statements were, as a matter of law, libelous
per se
, and Mr. Vidal’s attorneys had demonstrated actual malice.”

On August 24, 1984, a bulletin came over Gore’s television that Truman Capote was found dead in Bel Air at the home of Joanne Carson, ex-wife of TV host Johnny Carson.

Later that day, in response to Truman’s death, Gore told the press, “I’ve always been an atheist, but tonight, I know there is a God.”

Chapter Twelve

What would become
Gore Vidal’s most controversial novel,
The City and the Pillar
, grew out of a luncheon he shared with his senior editor at E.P. Dutton, John Tebbel. The editor was not aware at the time that Gore was a homosexual.

Tebbel had been unimpressed with Gore’s second novel,
In a Yellow Wood
, finding it “boringly flat, not nearly as taut, as focused, as compelling as his first novel,
Williwaw.”

The two men began to talk about a possible third novel. “You need to do something really good.”

Somehow, the conversation focused on homosexuality, which in the wake of World War II had become increasingly evident on the streets of New York. “This is a dark, shadowy world that most people know nothing about except for a few locker room jokes,” Tebbel said. “Perhaps you should explore the subject in a novel. Such a book would attract a lot of attention.”

Gore seemed to agree. “I’m bored with playing it safe. I want to take risks, to try something no American has done before.”

“You could be objective about it,” Tebbel said, “a bit impersonal, approaching it from the sociological standpoint, but with a literary overlay.”

“I hope you’re not leading me into a trap,” Gore said. “Let’s face it: To most mainstream publishers and most critics, homosexuality is an anathema.”

“That certainly has always been true, but I’ve heard that homosexuality blossomed during the war, when millions of young men, on both sides, were thrown together in crotch-to-crotch encounters night after night.”

“Give me some time to think about this,” Gore said. “Many people might get the idea I’m a homosexual, and as you well know, I don’t like fags.”

Whereas
The City and the Pillar
, Gore’s third novel, grew out of that luncheon, its origins began in the 1930s when Gore met “the only man I have ever loved.”

His name was Jimmie Trimble. The two boys met at St. Albans, an all-boys prep school near the Washington Cathedral.

As Gore remembered, “Jimmie had pale blue eyes; mine were pale brown. He had the hunter-athlete’s farsightedness; I had the writer-reader’s myopic vision. He was blonde with curly hair. His sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the Great.”

Their affair began when he followed Jimmie into the shower room one afternoon after he’d played a baseball game. “In those days, boys at St. Albans fell into two categories: Those with pubic hair and those with just a little peach fuzz. I wanted to see what Jimmie possessed. He not only had pubic hair, but a large, rather fat, uncut penis. When he caught me looking at it, he smiled with a very come-hither look. I knew I’d found my man.”

On a hot sunny afternoon, on a rock overlooking the Potomac River, Gore and Jimmie made love. “I discovered the type of sex I’d been looking for all my life. “I’d made love to a girl named Rosalind Rust. It did nothing for me.”

Jimmie was also dating a girl, an aspiring actress named Chris White.

“I later became very close friends to Joanne Woodward,” Gore said. “Ironically, in the early part of the 1950s, this Chris White woman was getting roles that Joanne desired for herself.”

Gore brought his new lover home to meet Nina, his mother, who was married at the time to Hugh Auchincloss. Jimmie later told his own family, “They have silk sheets, and the butler asks you at night what you want for breakfast.” He had never experienced such luxury before.

The two handsome men began to date, going to hear Benny Goodman at the Capitol Theater and secretly holding hands in the dark. “I preferred classical music, but Jimmie could listen for hours to Billie Holiday records. He also loved swing music that was so popular during the war, and he even played the saxophone. In contrast, I was non-musical.”

Jimmie gave Gore a portrait of himself, which had been painted in 1937, depicting him holding a model sailboat. Gore would keep that picture by his bedside until the end of his life.

Jimmie had to undergo surgery to enlarge his urethra, and Gore hovered over his bedside like a Florence Nightingale until he recovered.

“Once again, on the baseball field, “Jimmie overflowed with animal energy, not to mention magnetism for both sexes,” Gore said.

As Fred Kaplan, Gore’s biographer, wrote, “Jimmie was Gore’s alter ego, a twin who would be the playmate of his soul, a completion of the incomplete, the perfect fit that makes two comrades into one friendship.”

After graduation, the two young men separated. Nina sent Gore to the wilderness of New Mexico to the Los Alamos Ranch School. It specialized in turning “sickly boys into healthy men.”

In marked contrast, Jimmie had been offered a contract to play professional baseball with the Washington Senators, which also included a scholarship to college. That would have kept him out of World War II.

The last time Gore saw Jimmie was right before Christmas of 1942 at a dance, when he told Gore that he’d enlisted in the Marines and was going to be sent to the Pacific. On seeing him again, Gore longed to return to the woods above the Potomac River, where they’d first made love.

Eager to reunite physically with each other, the two young men went to the toilet, where in a cubicle, they made love again, “standing up, belly to belly,” as Gore wrote in his memoirs.

Gore always wondered if Jimmie found another lover in the Marines. “I learned from his mother that he’d written home for a copy of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
. Did some more poetic male friend advise him to read these homosexual poems?”

By 1944, Jimmie was in the Marines, Gore in the Army. “We were worlds apart, but I thought of him every day and especially at night. Our futures were uncertain. For Jimmy, there would be no future.”

On February 2, 1945, on the Sands of Iwo Jima, Jimmie joined 6,821 other American Marines, mostly teenagers, who died storming the beaches.

Gore later learned that Jimmie had been shot by a Japanese soldier and was later bayoneted almost eighteen times, even though he was already dead.

Gore later wrote, “Those Marine landings were a mindless slaughter of our own. The waste of young American lives was appalling. When I went to see John Wayne’s
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
, I cried all the way through it.”