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) (62 page)

Tallulah and Bea were always in touch, Tallulah once defining her friend “as the funniest lady who ever stood in shoe leather.”

“Bea shared her wit and charm with us during two more parties, and then she was gone, never to return,” Truman said. “But one morning, when I stumbled into the kitchen, I encountered Marlene Dietrich making what must be the world’s greatest omelette. She’d been brought to one of Nina’s parties by that social gadfly, Leo Lerman.”

“I will never forget my first sight of Marlene,” Truman recalled years later. “She wore a pair of rumpled pants and a shirt open at the neck. Her blue eyes stared straight at me as she saw right through me. Clean of makeup, the bone structure of her face was fantastic.”

“Sit down,” she told him. “It was an order and I obeyed,” Truman said. “The omelette had the magic touch. I would get to know her much better during the Broadway production of
House of Flowers
, when she was always backstage, but that morning with Marlene remained one of the most memorable of my life. Nina was still in bed, and I was delighted. I wanted Marlene all to myself, and didn’t want to compete with Nina for her attention.”

After breakfast, Marlene shocked me,” Truman said. “Even before our maid arrived, Marlene began washing glasses and dishes and straightening up the apartment after last night’s party. What was she? Shanghai Lily? Or a
Hausfrau?”

“Even back then, I craved gossip,” Truman said. “I was dying to ask Marlene about her legendary love affairs, but didn’t. Oh, how I wanted to hear stories of Maurice Chevalier, Colette, Gary Cooper (especially him), George Bernard Shaw, Barbara Stanwyck.”

“At last night’s party, I heard Marlene telling Burgess Meredith, ‘In Europe, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive.’ How I wanted to be that sophisticated, although I had no desire to make love to a woman.”

“Nina took me to see Marlene’s movie,
Manpower
(1941), in which we heard she seduced both of her co-stars, George Raft and Edward G. Robinson. I was amazed that any woman would go to bed with Edward G., but Marlene must have had an iron-clad stomach to stomach him.”

“Like Bea Lillie, Marlene soon disappeared from our lives, and it would be years before I got to know her during her Pearl Bailey/Yul Brynner period. We heard reports from the battlefields, as Marlene entertained the troops. Stories reached us that she was sleeping with Edward R. Murrow, General George Patton, Jr., General James Gavin, and even had a one-night stand with General Dwight D. Eisenhower. That Marlene! Hitler never got her, but others did, so many others.”

In later years, Truman said, “God had a talent for creating exceptional women. Even in Heaven,
she
came up with one of her greatest accomplishments when she created Marlene Dietrich. Instead of my own life, I would much preferred to have been Marlene.”

“He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. My mother saw him just once and tried to get him into bed with her.”

—
Truman Capote
, on John Garfield

“Nina and I didn’t agree on most things, but we were in complete agreement in our responses to the on-screen images of John Garfield and Errol Flynn,” Truman said. “Both of us considered them the two hotties of the screen. Although Nina wanted both of them, she failed to get either one. Not me! I was the lucky one. I got both John and Errol in my bed, as unlikely as that seems. But you must remember that in the late 1940s, I was considered somewhat a pretty boy before age, booze, and Miss Time herself fucked me over.”

“Had John stayed with those Bronx street gangs he grew up with, he might have become a full-time gangster, but he got involved with the Group Theater and became an actor,” Truman said.

Garfield expressed it even better, saying, “If I hadn’t become an actor, I might have become Public Enemy Number One.”

At one point, Garfield told Truman that he went through a period of vagrancy, hitchhiking across the country, freight hopping, picking fruit in California for a dollar a day, logging in the Pacific Northwest. When he told writer/director Preston Sturges of these adventures, it catalyzed him into the creation of
Sullivan’s Travels
, the 1942 movie that starred Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake.

Screenwriter Walter Bernstein said, “Garfield always had the face of a bar mitzvah boy gone just wrong enough to enhance his appeal.”

“By the time I got around to John, half the women in Hollywood had already had him, including Francis Farmer, Hedy Lamarr, Ida Lupino, Eleanor Parker, Ann Sheridan, singer Margaret Whiting, Shelley Winters, and a whole chorus line of showgirls, script girls, wannabe starlets, waitresses, and students of both sexes at the American Laboratory Theatre, where he trained in New York,” Truman said.

“John was generous with his sex organ. He wasn’t too particular where he put it. He was of the school that ‘all cats are gray at night.’ I was a beneficiary of his equal opportunity seductions.”

“So was Lana Turner,” Truman said “I fell in love with John when he made
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946) with her. She told me, ‘John had a penchant for picking up girls, sometimes two at a time, and a reputation as a demon lover. That reputation was well deserved. He died young and in bed, which was understandable.”

He was also sexually aggressive with his other co-stars. When he was introduced to Joan Crawford on the set of their joint venture,
Humoresque
(1946), she offered her hand for him to shake. He preferred to pinch her breasts instead. Taken aback for only a moment, she quickly recovered. “I think you and I are going to get on just fine on the screen and in the sack,” she said.

The columnist, Sheilah Graham, former lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald, once spoke about Garfield with Truman at a party. “He makes love like a sexy puppy,” she claimed. “In and out, huffing and puffing in quick gasps.”

Tired of hearing about Garfield in bed instead of experiencing him firsthand, Truman made his big play for the drunken actor at a party at the lavish Manhattan apartment of celebrity collector, Leo Lerman.

“John was not a real homosexual—not at all,” Truman claimed. “In bed, he treated me like he might respond to a young woman. He wanted only one thing, and you know what that was. As he made love to me, huffing and puffing, like Graham had told me, I thought not so much of him, but of the role he played with Lana in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. He was such a turn-on for me. I saw that one picture eight times. One Saturday alone, I sat through it three times.”

“In the post-coital glow, John sat on the living-room sofa, smoked a cigarette, had a drink, and talked to me about
Postman
. He said that the Joseph I. Breen office, the chief censor of movies, kept it off the screen for an entire decade, even though MGM had bought the rights for $25,000 in 1934.”

Garfield claimed that two unauthorized versions of
Postman
had been made subsequent to the success of his original version, one in France in 1939 and another in Italy in 1942 by director Luchino Visconti.

Truman was shocked that Garfield didn’t like his role in the movie. “We weren’t allowed to let the sexual spark between Lana and me catch fire. There she was, all in virginal white, from her high-heel pumps to her turbans and platinum hair. I felt emasculated as Frank Chambers’ playing against her interpretation of Cora, since she held all the power.”

“I was told to tone down my character’s complexities—a diversion from my usual acting style.”

The next morning, as Truman later related, he came into his bathroom to find Garfield standing nude in front of the vanity mirror shaving himself.

“He had a semi-erection,” Truman recalled. “I’d had John drunk. Now in the cold light of day, he was sober, and I wanted to try him out when he was in full control of his powers. I handed him a towel with a request. ‘John,’ I said to him. ‘Would you rape me this morning, imagining I’m Lana Turner? And one more thing…Don’t hold back. Don’t be kind.’”

***

Truman was very distressed to hear over the radio that Garfield had died on May 21, 1952 at the age of thirty-nine. There was speculation that his long-term heart problems were aggravated by the stress of his blacklisting during the Red Scare, when he was accused of being a communist.

After he appeared on the Red Channels list, he was barred from future employment as an actor by Hollywood studio moguls for the remainder of his film career.

At his funeral in New York, Truman was among the estimated 12,000 fans who showed up. It was the largest funeral in the city since the untimely death of Rudolph Valentino back in 1926.

“John—or Julie, as his friends called him—came a long way in just a short time after having been born into a Russian Jewish immigrant family,” Truman said. “His father was a clothes presser and part-time cantor. John knew early struggles and then, near life’s end, had all these right-wing bigots like J. Edgar Hoover working to destroy him.”

“Long before such Method actors as James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Monty Clift, there was John Garfield. At times, I think I’m one of the luckiest men alive: I got to make love to all four of those young men during their prime!”

“Sean Flynn, son of Robin Hood, was so 1950s handsome, he could have been another Troy Donahue or Tab Hunter. Sadly, in spite of his superb physique, good looks, and his tallness—more than six feet—he lacked not only Errol’s talent but his charisma. Errol Flynn was one of a kind. We may never see the likes of him in our generation.”

—
Gossip maven
Louella Parsons

In public utterances, Truman was rather dismissive of his one-night stand with the swashbuckler Errol Flynn, “the Man in the Green Tights.”

On the screen, Flynn had thrilled both Nina and Truman in such roles as
Captain Blood
(1931);
The Perfect Specimen
(1937);
The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938), and
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(1939).

At the time Truman met him at a Hollywood party, Errol had just completed the 1949 MGM film,
That Forsyte Woman
, which had teamed him with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon.

In the face he turned to the world, Truman was rather contemptuous of the drunken night he spent with Flynn. “If his name had not been Errol Flynn, I would not have even remembered our brief fling. We were both drunk, and I didn’t have an orgasm.”

“It also took him the longest time to have an orgasm himself, because he was so intoxicated.” Truman claimed.

In contrast, privately to Donald Windham and a few selected friends, he gave a completely different and contradictory account.

Flynn’s endowment was legendary. Iron Eyes Cody, the Native American actor who appeared in several films with Flynn, said, “Errol was so well hung that he was famous for it all over Hollywood. He often unzipped on the set in front of everybody, whipped it out for all to see…Just to set the record straight.”

When Truman met Flynn, he had already enjoyed sex with the likes of Joan Bennett, tobacco heiress Doris Duke, aviator Howard Hughes, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, Hedy Lamarr, Laurence Olivier, Argentine dictator Eva Perón, Tyrone Power, Lupe Velez, Gloria Vanderbilt, and director Edmund Goulding. Sometimes, Flynn entertained as many as four different starlets, simultaneously, in his dressing room. As he put it, “I just lie there reading the trade papers while they work on me.”