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) (73 page)

While in Mexico, according to Ginsberg, Kerouac had a series of affairs with good-looking young Mexican boys. But that didn’t prevent him from writing, in
Desolation Angels
, “I am nonqueer. But some 60 percent to 70 percent of our best writers (if not 90 percent) are queers.”

Even though he was under attack by Kerouac, Gore privately envied the success of the best-selling
On the Road
. Marlon Brando had expressed interest in it, wanting to appear in a movie as “Kerouac’s alter ego, the anti-hero of the novel.”

Gore resented Kerouac for having picked up critical praise from such august literary lions as Lillian Hellman.

“My god, when Kerouac appeared in San Francisco, fans treated him like Elvis Presley, even ripping off his clothes,” Gore said. “But in this age of total publicity, personality is all that matters.”

Kerouac was candid in assessing his new found fame. “From all over America, both young men and women write me, and they are blunt—‘I want to fuck you.’”

In January of 1956, Kerouac wrote Philip Whalen, a poet friend from Rocky Mount, North Carolina. “I can outwrite any sonofbitch in the world today,
and why now?
I’m the only one who’s put in any time in it. You have your Gore Vidals who published 24 novels in 10 years. But the time he puts in is Hack-time.”

In that same letter, he also attacked Ernest Hemingway, whom he always considered a closeted homosexual chasing after F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kerouac reserved special venom for Gertrude Stein. “She makes me puke with her dyke cuteness concealing all that venom.”

If Kerouac disliked Gore, he positively loathed Truman Capote. It all began when Truman appeared with Norman Mailer and Dorothy Parker on a television show,
David Susskind’s Open End
, which aired during the winter of 1959.

Whereas Mailer defended the Beat Generation, Truman attacked it. “None of them can write, not even Mr. Jack Kerouac. It isn’t writing at all—it’s typing.”

For the rest of his life, thanks partly to Truman’s pronouncement, Kerouac would be referred to by some critics as “the typist.”

In its aftermath, Kerouac denounced Truman as “the most loathsome of faggots.”

But Truman wanted the last word. He made a round of parties in New York and Los Angeles, with an additional biting assessment of his own. “I have it on absolute authority from a painter friend of mine who has gone to bed with Kerouac. He may be the darling of the Beat Generation if he doesn’t take his clothes off. He’s hung like a cigarette butt.”

—Kerouac

When Kerouac finished
The Subterraneans
, he sent a copy of the novel to his agent, Sterling Lord, in New York. Grove Press had agreed to schedule its publication of the 111-page semi-autobiographical novella in 1958. In it, Kerouac often wrote about friends and acquaintances, giving them fictional names.

In a note to Lord, Kerouac reassured him that the novel was “libel safe & fixed.” However, he also issued a warning. “Perhaps the only libelous point is Ariel Lavalina, a recognizable portrait of Gore Vidal.”

In the novel, Kerouac wrote about his encounter with a famous gay author. He goes with him to his hotel room, but passes out on the couch and does not have sex with him. There is no mention of him performing fellatio on Gore or being sodomized by him.

The novel also contains an account of his brief fling with Alene Lee, who was black. In the novel, he calls her “Mardou Fox” and writes of her carefree spirit and her contribution to the ambience of jazz clubs. Frank Carmody is clearly William Burroughs, and Adam Moorad is a recognizable Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac himself is Leo Percepied, who is depicted as a young novelist at the peak of his physical allure—“so beautiful that some found it impossible to look at him.”

As Kerouac’s alter ego, Percepied is sexually confused. At one point, he goes in for gay bashing, but later tells Mardou to go home alone. He then spends the evening with gay buddies, “later drooling over homosexual pornography” and listening to Marlene Dietrich records. He also goes cruising for sailors.

“Jack thinks he can partake of gay sex yet be part of society’s straight tyranny,” Ginsberg said to Gore.

“A wild delusion that will destroy him,” Gore predicted.

One of the final MGM films produced by Arthur Freed,
The Subterraneans
went before the cameras in 1960. The African American character Mardou Fox, Kerouac’s love interest, was seguéd into the character of a young French girl, as played by Leslie Caron. Comedian Arte Johnson was cast as the Gore Vidal character. In the aftermath of its distribution, the film lost $1.5 million.

Gore had his first real talk with Allen Ginsberg in 1958 (not in 1960, as Gore remembered in his memoirs). The two authors attended a party celebrating the publication of Kerouac’s
The Dharma Bums
.

Ginsberg appraised Kerouac’s latest novel as “an extraordinary mystic testament,” although
The New York Times
headlined its review—
THE YABYUM KID: HOW THE CAMPFIRE BOYS DISCOVERED BUDDHISM
.

Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin’s former lover, praised the book, but Kerouac modestly asserted that it was merely adequate as a means of keeping him supplied with cat food and brandy.

Reluctantly, Gore opted to attend the book party honoring Kerouac’s latest achievement. “At least for the night we buried the hatchet,” he said.

Gore embraced Kerouac when they came together again, later saying, “He was thick and sullen, about to lose his beauty for good. I told him that I recognized myself in the character of Arial Lavalina, but that he had not completely told the truth. ‘Why did you, the tell-it-all-like-it-is writer, reveal everything about that evening with Burroughs and me and then go leave out what happened when we went to bed?’ I asked him.

“I forgot,” Kerouac claimed.

“I looked into his once clear blue eyes, but they were bloodshot, distant, really,” Gore recalled.

Kerouac seemed eager to change the subject. “The world is taking notice of me…and how,” he said. “Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, invited Ginsberg and me to Sunday brunch at the Russian Tea Room. After studying my face for a long time, Dalí told me that I was far more beautiful than Brando. Later, when I got up to take a leak, he followed me into the men’s room, where he masturbated me, but only after I’d pissed.”

Huddled together in a corner, Ginsberg and Gore talked about Kerouac. “I’m still in love with him, but he’s become a hopeless alcoholic, and it’s killing him,” Ginsberg said. “Also, he’s sounding more and more like his mother, denouncing Jews and faggots in that order.”

His mother—“a prejudiced monster,” in Ginsberg’s view—was Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque of St-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup in the province of Québec.

Critic Warren French tried to explain Kerouac’s attacks on homosexuals. “He didn’t have the guts to be gay and hated himself for it.”

“Jack preferred oral sex to regular intercourse,” Ginsberg told Gore. “That’s why he’ll never really forgive you for fucking him. He likes to eat both girls and beautiful boys. I blow him. He blows me, even though I’m not a beautiful boy. Neal Cassady was the love of Jack’s life. He tells people he doesn’t like to have sex with men, but continues to have one affair with a man after another. Of course, he practices cunnilingus a few times a year. He’s a devotee of a woman’s vagina.”

[By the time Kerouac’s book
, Some of the Dharma,
his vast Buddhist Bible, was published in 1997, the writer had drastically changed his opinion about women. He’d begun working on the book in 1953, but it took almost half a century, long after his death, for it to go into print. It was a compendium of personal prejudices, meditations random notes, prayers, poems, and diaries setting forth his philosophy of life and his esthetic theories about “automatic writing.”

What astonished Gore was the misogynistic tone of the book, as Kerouac berated women. He wrote that “a woman’s slit was a gaping wound that reminded me of homicide; Women make me sick.”

Citing obscure, antiquated aspects of his own interpretations of Buddhist asceticism, he defined women as “semen nurses, castrators, grave-makers, and crocodiles. The true man eschews women, has no children, and seeks No-Return to the dreary wheel of life & death. He is constantly on his guard against lust and concupiscence & cupidity.”]

At the 1958 book party, the surprise guests of the evening were Gloria Grahame and Troy Donahue—“two dubious celluloid idols” in Gore’s estimation.

The year Gore met Donahue, that actor had appeared in three quickie films in a row—
Monster on the Campus; Live Fast, Die Young;
and
The Tarnished Angels
. Opposite Sandra Dee, beginning with
A Summer Place
the following year, he would become a major (but temporary) star and a teen idol. Gore found Donahue “blonde, blandly handsome, and a sort of pin-up boy.”

Grahame was more intriguing. She had recently divorced the writer, Cy Howard, when Gore met her. She’d been in one of Gore’s favorite movies about Hollywood,
The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952), for which she’d won an Oscar.

Her second husband had been the well-known film director, Nicholas Ray. Their marriage ended abruptly when Ray came home one day and found her in bed with his thirteen-year-old son, Anthony Ray. She later married her former stepson, in 1960, and produced two sons with him.

At the party, Gore was getting ready to leave when Kerouac cornered him. “Stick around. I know you have some of the voyeur in you. I’ve arranged with Gloria, Allen, and Troy for some entertainment.”

“But your attacks…” Gore was astonished.

“Listen, Vidal, after a few drinks, I’m game for anything, as you’ll soon see if you stay.”

At around 1:30am, Gore was invited to join Graham, Donahue, Ginsberg, and Kerouac in his bedroom for an orgy.

As Gore remembered it to Stanley Mills Haggart and others, “Kerouac’s bed was filled with the smell of Indian incense, Candles were lit, and the place had an eerie glow. The only one I wanted to seduce was Donahue, but I felt he’d be up for grabs by all of them. Grahame was past her prime. The party got really raw…too raw, when everybody stripped down for action.”

Kerouac announced to whomever was willing to take him on, “I am the fucker, not the fuckee, and, I must warn you, I believe in the long, slow fuck.”

Grahame stripped off her clothes and lay down on the bed. She apologized “for the Tampax sticking out of my cunt” and, in lieu of vaginal intercourse, offered blow jobs to the men instead. She was mocking when she surveyed the penises up for grabs. “I’ve seen bigger cocks in kindergarden, but I’ll make do with what I have to work with.”