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) (44 page)

Seven subsequent novels by Gore were not reviewed by
The New York Times
. Mimicking the policies of “The Old Gray Lady,” both
Time
and
Newsweek
seemed to pretend that Gore did not exist as an entity in American letters.

Since his novels were not selling, in 1954, Gore was forced to turn to work writing scripts for live television drama, at which he distinguished himself. He also became the last contract writer employed by MGM, right before it fired all scriptwriters because of dire economic necessity.

Gore would also follow Tennessee into scriptwriting, scoring hits with
Visit to a Small Planet
and
The Best Man
.

Chapter Thirteen

Truman Capote’s first novel
,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, was published in 1948 by Random House. Its book jacket, showcasing a photograph by Harold Halma, depicts a young, sloe-eyed Truman lying supine on a sofa facing the camera with an emphasis on his petulant mouth, baby bangs, and seductive, come-hither gaze.

One reviewer advised American housewives to keep their husbands away from this tantalizing boy. Another warned “Something evil and awful this way comes.”

The novel was dedicated to Newton Arvin, a literary luminary whose name was for the most part unknown to the average American.

Truman’s agonizing saga with Arvin began at Yaddo, a creative community near Saratoga Springs, New York,

[The school was founded in 1900 by the very wealthy financier SpencerTrask, an early financial backer of Thomas Edison and later, Chairman of The New York Times, and his wife Katrina, herself a poet, in the wake of the premature deaths of each of their four children. Yaddo is a financially self-sustaining artists’ community located on what originated as the Trask family’s 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive and creatively stimulating environment. Prior to Truman’s arrival, it had previously attracted such authors as the stately but still beautiful at fifty-six, Katherine Anne Porter.]

Truman allowed time at Yaddo for summer romances. One of them was with Howard Doughty. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Hollywood actor, James Stewart, Doughty, when not in temporary residence at Yaddo, was an English instructor at the prestigious Smith College, located about 120 miles away, in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Doughty’s bloodlines stretched back to Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the Puritan minister whose fire and brimstone sermons and pamphlets profoundly affected the punitive moral climate of America’s English colonies.
[Mather is often remembered for his role in the Salem witch trials.]

Tall and dark, with dashing good looks, Doughty spoke in a Brahmin accent. Truman later claimed, “Howard and I just got together for sex. He was very attractive, but I was not in love with him.”

After the first flush of his affair with Truman, Doughty wrote to his friend and lover, Newton Arvin, a scholarly professor at Smith, that “The child
[i.e., Truman]
really has an uncanny talent—almost frightening. Of course, so far, his main literary accomplishment has been getting canned as a messenger boy for
The New Yorker
, but his short stories are just amazing.”

It was inevitable that Doughty would eventually introduce Truman to Arvin. As biographer Gerald Clarke wrote: “Truman entered the lives of both Arvin and Doughty, hurtling toward them like a shooting star, stunning them, dazing them, dazzlingly them altogether.”

Soon, Truman was sleeping with both men, until Doughty left Yaddo for another commitment. If there was jealousy, the two older men covered it up rather well.

Truman and Arvin made love almost every day, although Truman admitted, “He’s not my type at all—bald, wears glasses, is middle aged, very shy, has frequent depressions, anemic, psychologically damaged. Once he swallowed sixteen Seconals in an attempt to commit suicide, but was rescued.”

Based on Truman’s fanciful self-image as Ganymede, Arvin had assigned him that nickname.

Arvin described his involvement with Truman in a letter to Doughty: “This naughty Ganymede has made me come alive again. And I want to live.”

After a week of sexual contact with Truman every night at Yaddo, Arvin told his friend, Granville Hicks, “I’m experiencing psychological euphoria.”

Leo Lerman, a friend to both men, claimed that Truman was not attracted so much to Arvin for his physicality, but for his vast knowledge. Truman, in fact, called Arvin “my Harvard” and the older man quickly became a
[spectacularly erudite]
father figure to him.

After dark, Arvin sometimes spent an hour or so reading Truman passages from the
Iliad
. Arvin soon learned that Truman was not well educated. In Manhattan, during time away from Yaddo, he went to Radio City Music Hall to see
Great Expectations
, a David Lear movie released in 1946, adapted from the tale by Charles Dickens.

Truman returned to Yaddo in a rage. “Lean has stolen the plot of
Other Voices
,” he screamed. Arvin patiently explained that
Great Expectations
was a Victorian-era plot from the 19
^th
-century pen of Charles Dickens.

Beginning on June 14, 1946, Arvin wrote that he was “encircled by the magic ring of love.” Arvin’s biographer, Barry Werth, claimed that the professor interpreted “in Capote’s Southern Gothicism a darkness and beauty as rich and poetic as that of Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

In a love letter to Truman, Arvin wrote that, “We are drinking the water of Truth, and what we are making between us is purely beautiful.”

Doughty compared the “marriage of Truman and Arvin to Faustus and Helena.” As a literary scholar, Arvin was well aware of what an uncomfortable reference that was. After all, Helena was the Devil’s gift to Faustus, who in return had to surrender his soul.

During another brief respite from Yaddo, Truman met with Doughty, telling him, “Newton is like a lozenge that you keep turning to the light and the most beautiful colors emerge.”

The love affair between Arvin and Truman endured until 1949, even though both men slept with others on the side. From a base in New York, Truman would travel by train to Northampton, Massachusetts, to stay with Professor Arvin on weekends.

As the years passed, Arvin continued to define Truman as a “dear child,” even though he had evolved into an internationally established writer who no longer needed him. Truman continued to love and respect Arvin, but was delighted to have “escaped from the mothball world that envelops him.”

Truman was not jealous, but delighted when Arvin, in 1951, won the National Book Award for his biography of Herman Melville. But Truman detested
Moby Dick
, loudly and somewhat insensitively asserting, “Who wants to read a novel about chasing after a big whale?”

Instead of to an upfront-and-personal lover, Arvin turned to pornography as a sexual outlet, amassing a large collection of gay erotica which, by today’s standards, would be interpreted as safe and rather vanilla. But at the time, possession of such material was illegal in Massachusetts.

In September of 1960, without a lot of support from Smith College, he was arrested and charged with being “a lewd and lascivious person in speech and behavior,” even though he was the exact opposite of that. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the Northampton State (Psychiatric) Hospital, an overcrowded hellhole—nicknamed “Dippy Hall”—with the dubious honor as the third state institution for the insane built in the state of Massachusetts.

From Europe, Truman wrote to Arvin, lending his support and offering money. Lillian Hellman initially offered her support too, until Arvin, to avoid a jail sentence, gave the police the names of more than a dozen other Smith College faculty members who collected gay erotica.