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) (7 page)

In his two-tone saddle shoes, a gift from his shoe salesman father, he would define his age at 26 if anyone were impolite enough to ask.

Actually, the Mississippi-born author was almost thirty.

After his arrival, he headed for the fishermen’s quarter, inhabited mostly at the time by the Portuguese. It was a cloudy day, and his vision was impaired as his left eye was weakened by a cataract.

In a three-piece, ill-fitting dress suit, he was searching for a room to rent. He paused from time to time to inhale smoke from his cigarette, held in a long ebony holder.

Occasionally, he would stop to look out over the sea, across which had come the first of the Portuguese fishermen from the remote Azores in the 1850s, hoping to catch even bigger Moby Dicks than those available in the offshore waters of their home islands.

He spotted a ROOM FOR RENT sign on a small cottage overlooking the wharf. It was owned by a Portuguese fisherman and his wife, who lived downstairs. Climbing the rickety staircase, he found a small, cramped little room with a window overlooking the sea. Later, he would write of the “lonely sand dunes, sea-gulls, and blue ocean, an excellent catharsis for a sin-sick soul such as mine.”

“P-Town,” as it was affectionately known, had long been a retreat for artists, writers, and various “queer folk.” Preceding Tennessee had been a long list of the bohemian
literati
, including novelist Edna Ferber, whom Noël Coward always insisted was a man in disguise. “The other Edna,” Edna St. Vincent Millay, had also visited the sand dunes of Provincetown. At one time, you could even have seen Gertrude Stein wandering these lonely, windswept dunes.

The diarist, Anaïs Nin, had also visited during “one of her frequent lesbian periods,” according to author Henry Miller, her lover, confidant, and muse.

Tennessee had wandered the town for only a few hours before he pronounced it “the frolicsome tip of the Cape.”

Not as sophisticated in 1940 as he later became, Tennessee was still imbued with mores imbedded in him in his early years growing up in Mississippi before his family moved to St. Louis. At first, he found the “behavior of the beach crowd shocking.” At the time, he compared himself to “an old auntie,” suggesting that “I had to leave my glasses in my bedroom if I planned to go to the beach.”

But he readily adapted and soon was aping the mores of the “natives,” and perhaps outdistancing some of them.

“P-Town was a place back then—perhaps even today—where one took one’s pleasure as one found it,” he told author Darwin Porter in Key West. “What I like about the place was that it was unnecessary to disguise one’s eccentricities. P-Town offered liberation to those of us who harbored souls that had suffered repression somewhere else in America, as I did in St. Louis. Considering some of the secret passions that resided in the hearts of many of the summer residents, homosexuality was viewed as one of the lesser evils.”

“The Gay Colony”—
[it wasn’t called that then]
—was tolerated by the supposedly straight Portuguese fishermen and sailors in town,” Tennessee said. “We queer ones provided a quick and easy way for them to supplement their meager incomes. Not bad. Two dollars in exchange for a blow-job. Two dollars was the going rate, until some vicious queen arrived from Brooklyn Heights that summer. He started giving these robust men three dollars. We practically lynched the flamboyant dandy for causing immediate inflation after dark.”

Tennessee quickly became the third member of a notorious trio who included Jesse Steele and the heiress, Peggy Guggenheim, who was having a torrid affair at the time with the artist, Jackson Pollock. Tennessee soon discovered Pollock’s “drip paintings.”

Steele was a landscape painter.
[Peggy, a noted art collector and connoisseur had claimed he had no talent.]
He was the scion of a wealthy auto-manufacturing family from Detroit, who sent him monthly checks to stay out of Michigan.

He was known as a “mincer,” dressing flam-boyantly in pink and lavender. In spite of his effeminate manner and slight lisp, he was a favorite with the fishermen at the port, a scattering of beach boys, New England boat builders, and itinerant sailors, some of whom he shared with Tennessee.

Steele’s parties were “all the rage,” that summer, attended frequently by Tennessee, Peggy, and Pollock.

The town’s foremost sexual predators—Tennessee, Steele, and Peggy—bonded. All three of them shared a mutual belief. “A small stipend discreetly slipped to your man of choice for the night will guarantee a much more reliable erection,” Steele asserted, with a great degree of accuracy.

Frequently, Tennessee and Steele would argue and not speak for days. But eventually, the wounds would heal, and they’d be seen biking down the main street of town together in their eternal search for young men.

“Tennessee, with a few drinks in him, would criticize my profligate ways,” Steele said. “Actually, he indulged in far more daring and dangerous sex than I did. At one point, his behavior became so outrageous that the couple with whom he was boarding kicked him out. He was bringing back some of the better-developed teenage sons of the local families. He was bragging about a steady diet of fifteen- or sixteen-year old semen, which he told me was good for the skin. He was kind in his assessment of the age of these boys. I saw many of them. Fourteen, if they were a day. His only requirement was that a young boy should have reached puberty. As for myself, I preferred more mature and manly men, those with a lot of experience.”

One night, Tennessee was invited to a cook-out on the beach. His first view of Kip Kiernan was of his “callipygian ass,” as he’d later recall. “He was bending over a pot, stirring clam chowder. It was an ass like I’d never seen before. Even without seeing his face, I had fallen in love.”

“When he turned around to greet me, I stared into his lettuce green eyes and took in the glory of his shirtless body. I knew at once that a great bronze statue of Ancient Greece had come back to life. But with a little boy’s face.”

After knowing each other only a night and the following day, Kip Kiernan and Joseph Hazen invited Tennessee to move with them into the two-story shack they rented on Captain Jack’s Wharf. Both men were dancers, having studied in Manhattan at the Madame Duval Ballet School.

For the first three nights, Tennessee slept on a cot beside Hazen downstairs, while Kip occupied the small bedroom upstairs. But by that weekend, Kip had invited Tennessee upstairs to sleep with him.

As it turned out, Kip had selected the name of Kiernan from one he’d found within the telephone book. He was actually Bernard Dubowsky, who had fled from his native Canada during World War II as a means of escaping the draft. If discovered and convicted, he could be jailed. He was of Russian Jewish descent, descended from Alexander Kipnis, the great Ukrainian opera singer. His nickname of “Kip” had derived from “Kipnis.”

At the age of twenty-two, Kip was tall and handsome, with high-slanting cheekbones that evoked the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. To support himself, he posed as a nude model at the Hans Hofmann Art School in the center of Provincetown. If requested by one of the photographers at the school, Kip would pose privately with a full erection.

After their first night together, Kip presented Tennessee with a photograph of himself posing in imitation of Nijinksy during a performance of
Le Dieu bleu
(
The Blue God
), a one-act ballet composed by Jean Cocteau and choreographed by Michel Fokine.

Produced by Nijinsky’s lover, the theatrical impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the ballet, first staged in Paris in 1912, was a failure. The ballet had been presented three times in Paris that year, and three times in London the following year, but was never staged again. Yet Kip had found inspiration in the doomed ballet’s legend.

Until the photograph was stolen from his wallet in 1960, Tennessee carried it around with him wherever he went.

From Cape Cod, Tennessee wrote his friend and fellow author, Donald Windham, about the joys of having Kim as a lover. “When I lie on top of him, I feel like I am polishing the Statue of Liberty or something. He is so enormous.”

He confessed to waking up throughout the night five or six times to make love to Kip.

Kip became devoted to Tennessee, but the young man lived in fear that he would be deported as an undesirable alien because he was a practicing homosexual.

Biographer David Kaplan, an author who would later direct some of Tennessee’s plays, said, “Tenn gave his heart unguardedly for perhaps the only time in his life.”

“Nobody ever loved me before so completely as did Kip,” Tennessee later recalled.

When Kip complained at being awakened repeatedly during the night for love-making, Tennessee blamed him. “It’s your fault for being so beautiful.”

Tennessee had met Paul Bigelow, one of the guiding lights of the influential New York Theater Guild, who would become one of the major forces in his private life and career. He came to visit Tennessee and found the playwright planning to move with Kip to New York at the end of the summer.

Tennessee later criticized Bigelow for defining his affair with Kip as “purely physical.” He even gave a motive for Bigelow’s harsh appraisal. “Either consciously or unconsciously, Bigelow desires Kip for himself.”

Tennessee had confided to Bigelow that his relationship with Kip “was an intense and strange kind of love affair.”

As an afterthought, Bigelow later claimed, “All of Tennessee’s love affairs were intense and strange.”

Tennessee’s idyllic summer on the Cape came to an abrupt end one hot afternoon in August of 1940. He was enjoying the beach with Pollock, who had escaped from Peggy Guggenheim’s constant sexual demands because the heiress had returned to New York to meet with her attorneys.

Kip asked Tennessee to ride on the handlebars of his bicycle back into town. It was while riding on the bike that Kip broke the news that Tennessee would later call “one of the saddest moments of my life.”

“It’s all over between us,” Kip whispered into Tennessee’s ear. “I’m going back to a girlfriend I left in New York. You and I will never be physical again. Being a homosexual violates me in a way that is unacceptable to who I am.”