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) (82 page)

That unlikely sentence marked the final words of her convoluted, tormented relationship with one of the most volatile personalities of the American Theater.

As he helped her into her limousine, he said, “If you or I have any lingering regrets, it’s because neither of us got to bed Tab Hunter.” She cackled as he shut the door on her.

To him, her limousine evoked a hearse. “It was the Black Maria that will soon be coming for me,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Three

In the film community’s glory days
of the early 1950s, Rome was known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.” It seemed that every movie producer was in town either shooting a movie or selling one. At night, you could see Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor,
et al
, parading up and down the Via Veneto to the delight of aggressive
paparazzi
.

In 1952, Carson McCullers and her husband, Reeves Mc-Cullers, were in town but not speaking to Truman Capote. He was there with his lover, Jack Dunphy. Once when the two couples encountered each other on the Via Veneto, each turned their head in the other direction.

Both had made scalding remarks about each other to their mutual friend Tennessee. “Capote exists in an extended state of faggotry, parroting my writing style,” Carson charged.

In retailiation, he defined her as “The eternal Muff-Diver, but then what is a poor, ugly, buck-toothed woman to do when married to a self-admitted homosexual?”

Carson had had many reasons for disliking Truman. They involved more than professional jealousy. She had discovered that he had had a secret affair with Reeves. And Truman had taken over a script-writing assignment that had initially been hers.

David O. Selznick was like a mother hen protecting the image of his wife, Jennifer Jones. He’d hired Carson to write the original script of
Stazione Termini
(1954), a film that would star Jones with Montgomery Clift, with whom Truman was having an affair.

[For its release in America, it was retitled
Indiscretions of an American Housewife.]

After Selznick loudly and aggressively announced his dislike of Carson’s script, he had hired Truman to replace her.

Around the same time, John Huston flew to Italy to direct
Beat the Devil
(1953), an offbeat movie that would star not only Jones, but Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollobrigida, with the understanding that Carson would write the script. Huston may not have known that Selznick had fired Carson as scriptwriter for
Stazione Termini
, and that she’d failed miserably in her attempt to deliver anything resembling a film script.

Huston had acquired the rights to Claud Cockburn’s novel,
Beat the Devil. [Cockburn had written it under the pseudonym “James Helvick.” During the Red Scare launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy, he had been accused of being a Communist.]

Carson was determined not to fail in her second scriptwriting assignment. She wrote to Tennessee, “I’ll show that little shit, Capote, which one of us is the real scriptwriter.”

As scriptwriter for
Beat the Devil
, Carson had been Huston’s third choice. He turned first to a New Yorker, Anthony Veiller, who would in time write 41 movie scripts from 1934 to 1964. He’d twice been nominated for Oscars for best screenplay, beginning in 1937 with
Stage Door
, starring Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, and in 1946, John Huston’s
The Killers
, an adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Veiller had just finished working with Huston on
Moulin Rouge
(1952), with José Ferrer and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Perhaps not letting Veiller know, Huston also asked Peter Viertel to draft his own version of a scenario for
Beat the Devil
.

In Africa, Viertel had made
The African Queen
(1951) with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. In time, he would write a novel,
White Hunter, Black Heart
, a thinly disguised portrait of Huston while they were making the film.

[Viertel’s looks and personality were the inspiration for Robert Redford’s Waspish character, Hubbell Gardiner, in
The Way We Were
(1974), with Barbra Streisand.]

When the completed scripts arrived at Huston’s manse in Ireland, he could not finish reading either of them, as he later confessed to Bogie in Hollywood. “They stink,” the actor said. “Get someone new, someone different, who can handle material like this.”

That had led to Huston’s unusual hiring of Carson McCullers, who accepted the job mainly because she needed the money. Privately, she admitted, “The material is as far from my own sphere of interest as Jupiter from Mars.”

[Ironically, Huston would, more than a dozen years later, film Carson’s third novel
, Reflections in a Golden Eye
(1967), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando.]

“The third script for
Beat the Devil
wasn’t even a script,” Huston said. He immediately fired Carson. One afternoon, he met with Selznick, who was visiting Rome to check up on his wife, whom he’d been told had fallen in love with the gay actor, Montgomery Clift.

Selznick reported to Huston the fine work Truman had done on
Stazione Termini
and suggested that the director hire him.

Actually, Huston had met Truman once before in New York at a party given by Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House.

“He was the only man I’d ever seen attired in a velvet suit,” Huston recalled. “It would have been a very easy thing to have laughed at him, if it had been anyone except Truman. I immediately fell for him—it didn’t take me five minutes to be won over completely. He had a charm that was, to coin a phrase, ‘ineffable.’ He exerted that charm freely.”

Before leaving Rome, Huston asked Truman for dinner. He showed up with his lover, Jack Dunphy. Huston was a well known homophobe, but Truman’s effeminate mannerisms were of less importance to him than his wit and charm.

At dinner, Truman did an impersonation of Carson when Selznick had demanded to check on her work to that point on the script for
Stazione Termini
. Mimicking her Georgia accent with devastating accuracy, Truman mocked her. “Now just you hold onto your grasshopper a minute, David, while I go for a look-see. It’s like finding a mouse in a barnful of newly mown hay. But I just know—as God is my witness—I just know that god damn script is somewhere heah. Doggone it, it must be under the bed. That’s where Reeves hides out when I need to get fucked, which he never does. Too busy out cruising the boys in the streets of Rome at night. I swear on my left sugartit the script is hiding here. I’d better check the bathroom. I was reading it on the can. These pastas of Rome give me the runs.”

When Selznick fired her, Carson complained to Tennessee, “That Selznick—what an ugly beast—came galloping into Rome and trampled me to death like a herd of stampeding buffalo.”

Even so, she told him she’d made enough money to return to Paris. “Our housekeeper there, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, has gone quite mad and is roaming the streets of Paris in a see-through
négligée.”

After his fifth whiskey and three brandies with Huston, Truman agreed to take over Carson’s scriptwriting job—“
Once again, my dear
”—and write
Beat the Devil
, which had already been scheduled for shooting in Ravello, south of Naples on the Amalfi Coast. Ironically, this town would become the future abode of Truman’s nemesis, Gore Vidal.

Huston told Truman that he wanted the film to be a spoof of his early masterpiece,
The Maltese Falcon (released in 1941 as the first movie Huston directed)
, which had also starred Bogie.

Truman already knew Jennifer, but he learned that other actresses had been considered for the role, including Jean Simmons and Audrey Hepburn. Bogie had recommended Lauren Bacall, but she’d signed to play one of the gold diggers in
How to Marry a Millionaire
(1953), co-starring Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable.

Truman arrived in Ravello on a cold day in winter. He was wearing a red overcoat that came down to his ankles, accessorized with a ten-foot lavender-colored scarf. He was introduced to the supporting cast, which included the Italian bombshell, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, and Peter Lorre. Truman would record his impressions of the cast members in his journals.

Huston had told Truman that he’d wanted Sydney Greenstreet for the Morley role, but the character actor, who had retired in 1952, was desperately ill. He died in January of 1954.

Huston was somewhat reluctant to introduce Truman to Bogie. The actor defined anybody he disliked as “a fag.” To Huston’s surprise, Bogie bonded with Truman and soon was calling him “Caposy.”

Bogie liked him so much, that Huston, in front of the crew, staged a mock fight. “He’s mine, you bitch,” Huston shouted at Bogie.

“You might have seen him first, but he swore on a stack of bibles that I’m better in bed than you are,” Bogie shot back.

Bogie wrote to Bacall, “Capote is the kind of guy you want to put in your pocket and take home.”