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) (61 page)

Nina found Meredith amusing and sexy in a funny kind of way, but hardly the handsomest man she had ever seduced. She was in the audience on opening night of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
.

“Just as I started my first speech, a woman in the second row had an epileptic seizure,” Meredith told Nina. “Kit saved the day by vamping until the ushers got this catatonic lady out of the theater.”

“Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, and Marlene Dietrich lay in Burgess’ future, but I got to him before those dames had their go at him,” Nina later claimed.

“God knows I’m not a dashing swain,” he told Nina. “But in a kind of mongrel way, I chased the foxes. Two of those foxes included Norma Shearer and Ginger Rogers.”

“He was sexually liberated,” Nina said. “He told me that once he was involved in a
ménage à trois
with a wealthy German lady and her lesbian lover.”

“Burgess got uglier year by year, but when I was with him, he wasn’t all that bad looking,” Nina said. The critic, Wolcott Gibbs, said, “Meredith’s extraordinary success on stage has practically nothing to do with what he looks like.”

Truman was also privy to his mother’s affair with Warren William, a film star who in the 1930s was nicknamed “The King of Pre-Code.”

“I think she really wanted John Barrymore, but he eluded her,” Truman said. “She settled for Warren instead. His distinctive mustache caused him to have a certain physical resemblance to the Great Profile.”

When Nina met Warren, he’d just filmed
Go West Young Man
with Mae West. “Nina took me to see
Satan Met a Lady
in 1936.” Truman said. “Warren starred with Bette Davis. This plot later was called
The Maltese Falcon
when it starred Humphrey Bogart. Nina got Warren, but, years later, when we were shooting
Beat the Devil
in Italy, I got Bogie. So I had one up on her.”

“Warren’s heyday had ended when Nina first took up with him,” Truman said, “although he worked steadily until his untimely death in 1948. He had a great personality both on and off the screen, and Nina told me that he was ‘competent’ in bed—that was her exact word. He was tall with a sharp nose. One of his biographers said, and I agree, that he was ‘a wolf dressed as Granny with a smile.’ He was from one of those frozen states—Minnesota, I think—and he was very debonair. He’d married in 1923, and was married until ‘death do us part,’ but he played the field.”

“He was clever. He once showed me an early version of the Winnebago, a sort of apartment on wheels he could move around. He also invented a ‘vacuum cleaner for lawns.’ When I met him, he was doing research into the many uses of sawdust.”

“As far as looks go, I always thought Warren looked like a combination of Basil Rathbone and Mischa Auer. I don’t tell people that anymore, because they always say, ‘Who in hell were those guys you speak of?’”

“Richard Barthelmess was Nina’s third movie star conquest,” Truman said. “For those not up on Hollywood history, he was nominated for the first Oscar for Best Actor back in 1928. He got into acting at the urging of that dyke, Alla Nazimova, a friend of the family. Nazimova was the godmother of Nancy Davis, who snared…what’s his name? Ronald Reagan. Dick was a bit long in the tooth when Nina bedded him. Hell, he was born in 1895.”

“Dick worked for D.W. Griffith, but he still had his looks when I met him. His heyday was in the 1920s when he was one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood. He was in this long-time marriage to Jessica Stewart Sargent when Nina met him, but like all actors, he liked a piece on the side.”

“Dick used to appear with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Griffith’s famous sister act. He told me they were lesbian lovers. In
Broken Blossoms
(1919), Griffith cast him as a Chinaman opposite Lillian. He teamed with her again in
Way Down East
in 1920. Bette Davis gave him a blow-job when they made
Cabin in the Cotton
(1931).”

“Lillian told everyone that Dick Barthelmess was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, but when I first met him, he had big circles under his eyes,” Truman said. “He was stoop-shouldered with a voice as high as that of John Gilbert, even though his career continued into the talkie era. He seemed rather smug to me, but that could have been because he was so fucking reticent. Nina told me she grew bored with his talk about social justice. She just wanted him to make love—and that was that.”

“I’m grateful for Nina introducing me to Dick,” Truman recalled. “I got one up on Gore and Tennessee. I bet they had never met any man who once fucked Theda Bara. Back in 1917, Dick made
Camille
with the original vamp.”

Of all of Nina’s movie star lovers, Georgia boy Lee Tracy was the least sexy of all of them,” Truman said.

He became famous playing Hildy Johnson, the tough-talking reporter, in the original stage production of
The Front Page
(1928).

“He did well in films until he made
Viva Villa!
in 1933 with Wallace Beery. Desi Arnaz always claimed that Tracy stood nude on a balcony in Mexico and pissed on a military parade passing below. Desi was in the movie. He said that in Mexico from then on, if one watched the crowds, they would visibly disperse any time an American stepped out onto a balcony. MGM sacrificed Tracy in order to be allowed to continue filming in that country.”

“You might say Lee Tracy ‘pissed’ away his stardom,” Truman said. “The studio fired him and shot all his scenes with Stu Erwin instead.”

“After that, in a sort of comeback role, Lee played Art Hockstader, a character loosely based on Harry Truman, in both the stage and film versions of
The Best Man
(1964). In case you don’t know, that play was written by one Gore Vidal, Tarantula from Hell, a no-talent prick and asshole, the shithead faggot who can clear a room merely by walking into it, a thoroughly detestable creature who should have been removed from the planet years ago…by force, of course.”

“Lee Tracy was not a party-goer,” Truman said. He once said, ‘I can count on one hand the number of parties I’ve been to.’ Nina picked him up at the Plaza in Manhattan. He hated roots. At the time we met him, he’d never owned a home. He preferred hotels. He also found my presence annoying. ‘If I ever get married, I will insist on no children,’ he said. ‘Who would want a snotty-nosed kid underfoot?’ he asked.”

“Lee was a wild card,” Truman said. “When Nina met him, he got drunk a lot and did reckless things. He’d once been arrested in 1935. While intoxicated, he’d fired five shots through the floor of his kitchen into the occupied apartment below.”

“Of Nina’s many movie star beaux, the only one I could have had was Lee,” Truman said. “I came home one day and found him lying nude and drunk in Nina’s bed. I looked him over carefully and could easily have taken him. In his condition, he could not have put up much resistance. Had it been Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, or Robert Taylor, I would have jumped on and had some fun. But I just wasn’t tempted.”

“Actually, and I might as well tell you, my all time fantasy movie star, the one I dream about at least two times a week, is that character actor, Lloyd Nolan.”

Sheridan Morley, in
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, defined “Bea” Lillie, known in private life as “Lady Peel,” with this description:
“Lillie’s great talents were the arched eyebrow, the curled lip, the fluttering eyelid, the tilted chin, the ability to suggest, even in apparently innocent material, the possible double entendre.”

Many of her fans thought she was British born, but she entered the world in 1894 in Toronto. One of her most popular numbers was “There are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden.” She gave the first ever performances of Noël Coward’s witty ditty, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”

Although an internationally known lesbian, she married Sir Robert Peel, 5
^th
Baronet, in 1920.

She continued to seduce some of the towering figures in the theatrical world, including Judith Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Cornell, Greta Garbo, torch singer Libby Holman, Gertrude Lawrence, and Eva Le Gallienne. But she helped engineer a few surprising male seductions, too, notably three towering figures from the era of silent films—Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, and Rudolf Valentino.

To that list of conquests can be added the name of Nina Capote. Tallulah brought Bea to one of Nina’s fabulous parties, and the performer seemed enchanted with Nina, so much so that a “sleepover” was arranged. The next day, Tallulah called Nina to find out what had happened. “I just assumed you tasted the honeypot last night,” Tallulah asked.

“Why tell you something you already know?” Nina replied.

Truman was not at all surprised that his mother indulged in an occasional lesbian fling. “All those grand old dames such as Kit Cornell were muff diving,” he said. “Why not Nina?”