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) (6 page)

In contrast, Truman claimed, “I lived out my boyhood fantasy of being raped by a wild savage. The experience nearly put me in the hospital.”

Unlike Gore, Truman was so inspired by the experience that he wrote another one of his short stories, which he showed to Stanley. It was entitled
Black Mischief and Dark Desires
. Both men decided that no publisher at the time would touch it, so Truman destroyed it.

Whether it was true or not, Truman always claimed that Tennessee’s short story,
Desire and the Black Masseur
, was lifted directly from his experience with Mandingo which he’d relayed to the playwright.

For Truman, his experience in breaking down the color barrier led him to travel with Stanley to Port-au-Prince, capital of Haiti, in 1948. Here, he would find inspiration for his Broadway play,
House of Flowers
.

Perhaps to convince Anaïs that he had no prejudice against the American Negro, Gore showed up at her next party with his date for the evening, James Baldwin.

Before going out in public with Baldwin, Gore told Stanley that the writer is “as black as they come. He was born in a hospital in Harlem. He’s got a wide mouth, eyes as big as Joan Crawford’s, with heavy lids as droopy as those of Robert Mitchum. Call it a sandwich mouth and frog eyes. In the homophobic black world, he’s already been gang raped by hoodlums from Harlem.”

Gore later told Stanley that Baldwin was “a cross between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bette Davis in
A Stolen Life.”

At the party, Baldwin pointedly informed Gore, Anaïs, and Stanley, “I don’t want to be known as a Negro Novelist, and I certainly don’t want to be called a homosexual Negro Novelist.”

“All of us live with the poisonous fear of what others think of us,” Stanley said.

Gore later tried to get his editor at E.P. Dutton to purchase the rights to Baldwin’s first novel,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
. The editor rejected the idea telling Gore, as a means of explanation, “I’m from Virginia.”

The brief fling between Baldwin and Gore quickly died. Stanley said, “Don’t call it love. Gore was trying to prove something to his friends, especially Anaïs.”

Before the friendship between Gore and Truman withered, they met every Thursday at one o’clock for lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza. As biographer Gerald Clarke noted: “They niggled at their friends during the first course, devoured their enemies during the second, and savored their own glorious futures over coffee and dessert.”

Gore was struggling with his sexuality, even defining Anaïs Nin to friends such as Stanley Haggart as “my mistress.”

Truman had no such qualms. “I didn’t feel as if I were imprisoned in the wrong body,” he told Gore. “I didn’t want to be a transsexual. I just felt things would be easier for me if I were a girl. But I’ve always had a marked homosexual preference, and I never had any guilt about it.”

Even though pretending a surface friendship with Gore, Truman undermined him behind his back.

Marella Agnelli, the Italian socialite Truman would befriend in later years, figured it out: “Capote despises the people he talks about. Using, using all the time. He builds up friends privately and knocks them down publicly.”

When he met Bennett Cerf, publisher of Random House, at a party, Truman lashed into Gore. “From what I’ve seen, his writing is lifeless. There are those who say he might be another Hemingway. But really, my dear, let’s come to our senses.”

“Gore told me that while serving in the Aleutians, he suffered frostbite. He’s still not melted down yet.”

“I will give Gore credit for one achievement though,” Truman told Cerf. “He delivers the best known impression ever of Eleanor Roosevelt.”

He leaned in close to Cerf. “Gore has connections with the upper crust. He told me a secret that must go no farther than your ear to my ear. Gore claims that Mrs. Roosevelt is having an affair with Katharine Hepburn.”

[Actually, it was Truman, not Gore, who spread that rumor.]

Cerf had his own impressions of both Truman and Gore. He defined them as “a pair of gilded youths who thought they’d soon win Pulitzer Prizes followed by the Nobel Prize for Literature before either of them turned thirty. Judged by their work, Truman from the beginning found his voice in writing
Other Voices, Other Rooms
. Vidal is still struggling to find his voice. Incidentally, from what I’ve seen, Vidal’s novels are unreadable.”

“Speaking of voices,” Cerf said, “one of his schoolteachers in Alabama said Truman’s voice was identical to what it was in the fourth grade.”

During a private luncheon with his mentor, Leo Lerman, Truman confided secrets Gore had told him in confidence. “Gore confessed to me that he does not like women, with the possible exception of Anaïs Nin. I’m sure he’ll turn on her at one point. He finds women silly and giggly or else strident dykes. He also told me that he’s incapable of ever loving anyone except some boyhood friend of his who died in the war.”

“Another thing, Gore’s got this crazy obsession about the death of Amelia Earhart. Whether it’s true or not, he claims that his father financed that ill-fated around-the-world trip of hers. There’s more, although I hesitated to reveal it. What the hell…I will. Gore does a great imitation of Winston Churchill. He claims he found the wartime speeches of Sir Winston ‘raucously funny,’ although he has it from an authentic source that the prime minister has a big dick.”

The rich and famous in New York began to invite Truman to their parties. “He told the most delicious stories about everybody,” said socialite and party-giver Elsa Maxwell. “God knows what he said about me behind my back.”

“I remember one night Truman showed up at this party wearing some outrageous cape,” Maxwell recalled. “He had this large sapphire ring on. I don’t know if it were real or fake. When people admired it, he claimed it was a gift from John Steinbeck. At another party, I heard gossip that Truman claimed the ring was a love token from Ernest Hemingway. The more heterosexual the writer, the greater Truman’s claim that these authors were mad for the boy.”

These lies infuriated Gore, who ultimately doubted every word Truman uttered, including “the dots over the i’s and the crosses over the t’s.”

Stanley Haggart sounded a different note: “Truman lived in the world of the
demimonde
and was often privy to some occurrences going on behind locked doors among celebrities—closeted homosexual encounters among movie stars, adulterous affairs with many actors and actresses, and betrayals, including embarrassments we’d all like to forget. As a rough estimation, I’d say that half of what Truman told was fabricated. But much of it was true.”

“Anaïs and Gore would later dismiss Truman’s claim that he had a brief affair with James Dean before he became famous,” Stanley said. “But I knew that boast was true, because it occurred secretly in my Manhattan apartment.”

Gore was not alone in defining Truman as a liar. Another famous post-war novelist, Calder Willingham, began to size up Truman. He found him “attractive, clever, an excellent talker, but insincere, extremely mannered, snobbish even. He tries too hard to be charming. Also, he uses his homosexuality as a comedy, playing the role of the effeminate buffoon, making people laugh to call attention to himself. In any gathering, he wants to be at the center.”

“Both writers seemed obsessed with each other,” Stanley recalled. “When you were with Gore, he talked incessantly about Truman, mostly attacking what a fake he was. When you were with Truman, he spread vile gossip about Gore, some of it true.”

As time drifted by, Truman began to confront Gore with some of his shortcomings. If Truman met a young man who had gone to bed with Gore, Truman wanted to know all the details. One night at a drunken party, which Stanley attended with Gore, Truman came up to them.

In his high-pitched, drunken voice, he confronted Gore. “I hear from many sources that you’re just the
lay lousé.”

“At last, Truman, you’ve got it right,” Gore admitted, to Stanley’s astonishment.

Later that night, Gore confessed a fuller review of his point of view to Stanley. “I pick up these poor young guys in the Times Square area and take them back to those Dreiserian hotels in the area, very seedy. They provide momentary pleasure for me, but I give them little in return. It’s only fair that they walk away from my rented bed with a ten-dollar bill as opposed to the street rate of five dollars.”

It was publisher Bennett Cerf who revealed what finally destroyed any pretense of a real friendship between Gore Vidal and Truman Capote. “Blame it on
Life
magazine,” Cerf claimed.

Right before Truman published his first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, at the age of 23, in 1947,
Life
published a photo essay entitled—“Young U.S. Writers: A Refreshing Group of Newcomers to the Literary Scene Is Ready to Tackle Almost Anything.”

The editors plastered a full-page spread about Truman as the cover story’s lead. He was photographed amid the Victorian bric-a-brac of Leo Lerman’s living room. Beautifully dressed, hair artfully arranged, he was smoking a long cigarette.
Life
defined him as “esoteric, New Orleans-born Truman Capote.”

Since nothing Truman had written till then had been published,
Life
was obviously not awarding literary prizes. Truman was positioned as the featured writer only because his flamboyant picture generated the most attention. Gore would later describe it as “looking waxy, as if from under a Victorian glass bell.”

In the subsequent pages, smaller pictures were run of Jean Stafford, Calder Willingham, Thomas Heggen, and an unflattering likeness of Gore, with a caption identifying him as “a writer of poetry and Hemingway-esque fiction.”

When the
Life
article was published, Truman, in his exaggerated way, announced, “I’m the darling of the Gods. I’m the toast of New York, the only real city in America. I define a city as a place where you can buy a canary at three o’clock in the morning.”

With bitterness in his voice, Gore told a reporter, “Mr. Capote has launched himself as a celebrity, hardly as a writer.”

When Truman heard that, he shot back, “The
Life
article claimed that Mr. Vidal is twenty years old. Take it from me, she’s twenty-five if she’s a day.”

Bennett Cerf said, “Truman never forgave Gore for publishing
Williwaw
, his G.I. Joe novel written when he was only nineteen. It was a young soldier’s novel. The ending was like a cinematic rainbow and very influenced by Stephen Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
(1895).

Gore wrote:
“The sky was blue and clear now and the sun shone on the white mountains. They walked back to the ship.”

Chapter Two

In 1940
, just before the United States entered World War II, Tennessee Williams set out to visit the artists’ colony and gay mecca of Province-town at the tip of Cape Cod.