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) (97 page)

During the business associated with its TV remake, Gore met the very beautiful Rhonda Fleming, who was hailed as “The Queen of Technicolor” because her fair complexion and flaming red hair photographed so well in color.

He found Fleming striking, although his sexual interests lay elsewhere. He did write a womanizer friend of his, “Tonight, I dine with Rhonda Fleming. Tell me how much you envy me.”

He did, however, find Diana Lynn so appealing that he became involved in a series of platonic dates with her that stretched over five years.

Gore was often invited to Hollywood parties, and he needed to show up with a woman. “Only Tennessee dared attend these parties with Frank Merlo on his arm,” Gore said.

He would invite Lynn, who was between marriages at the time. She was a pianist, a child prodigy, who turned to film roles, having scored her biggest success in Preston Sturges’
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. (1944
). She’d even appeared with Cary Grant in
Every Girl Should Be Married
(1949), and with Ronald Reagan in
Bedtime for Bonzo
(1951).

Gore remembered Lynn as “having this elegant sort of kittenlike manner with very sharp eyes, a pert nose, and an attractively angled face. Her look radiated with good humor and intelligence.”

Dominick Dunne, a writer and investigative journalist, was a friend of Lynn’s. He later said, “If Gore Vidal could ever have loved a woman, it would have been Diana. Gore was mad about her. Let’s call it a special friendship.”

Lynn wasn’t as straight-laced as Gore had originally perceived. At a Hollywood party for couples only, Gore and Lynn were the only unmarried couple there. As she walked through the room greeting everybody, she gave each of the men a kiss on the cheek. On the terrace, Lynn confessed to him, “You know something? I’ve had every single husband in this room.”

Jules Stein found Lynn “cute and tiny, dreaming of becoming the next Grace Kelly. I once asked Gore if they’d ever rolled in the hay together. He told me they hadn’t, but that once, they had rolled around on his carpet.”

“It was sad what happened to the girl,” Stein said. “She died of a stroke in 1971 at the age of forty-five.”

“At the same time that Gore was going out with Lynn, he was also seen with Joanne Woodward, who, unknown to us for a time, sneaked around with Paul Newman,” Stein said. “Hollywood columnists wrote about Gore’s romances with Woodward and Lynn. Those gals, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, pretended to be awful dumb in those days of deceiving the public.”

“Gore wasn’t screwing either Lynn or Woodward, but I suspected he was sucking off Newman on the side and plowing Hedda Hopper’s son, William Hopper, every other Saturday night,” Stein said. “Newspapers, except for
Confidential
magazine, never printed shit like that back in the good old days.”

As Gore later wrote in his memoirs, “I kept loving company with Diana for several years, with no thought on either side of marriage, the central God in the American pantheon during the Age of Eisenhower.”

In May of 1955, Manulis got Gore the assignment of adapting Ernest Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms
, into a 60-minute teleplay, part of the TV drama series,
Climax
.

Director Allen Reisner cast the blonde heartthrob Guy Madison in the lead, opposite Diana Lynn, who had fallen in love with Madison the moment she’d seen his brief appearance as a sailor in
Since You Went Away
(1944).

To Gore, Madison represented the epitome of the post World War II male sex symbol. He was one of the star attractions from talent agent Henry Willson’s coven of pretty boys, which included Rock Hudson, Rory Calhoun, Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, Robert Wagner, and dozens of others collectively forming “The Beefcake Brigade.”

Lynn arranged the first run-through of the made-for TV drama at Gore’s apartment. Madison showed up in tight-fitting blue jeans and a white T-shirt, revealing the outline of his pecs. For Gore, it was love at first sight.

“I’m Guy Madison,” the icon said, flashing his famous smile.

Before the night ended, Gore realized “the hunk could be had.” After kissing Lynn goodbye on the street, Madison was invited to stay over.

As Gore later told Tennessee and others, “He spent the weekend. I didn’t want to let him go. I would have liked to have held on to him, but the competition for that guy was just too severe.”

“Guy told me that Willson operated the hottest and busiest casting couch in the history of Hollywood,” Gore said. “He calls himself a flesh peddler. He always takes a pound of that flesh before he peddles one of his guys on the open market. In Hollywood, there are many takers.”

“As an actor, Guy was a bit wooden in
Farewell to Arms,”
Gore said. “I fear our attempt at Hemingway bombed, but Guy certainly was a fringe benefit to me for my adaptation. He was three years older than me, but looked ten years younger and had a great body—and he sure knew how to use it. Lots of practice, I’m sure. Also, Guy—whose original, pre-Hollywood name was Robert Moseley—was the only person I ever met from Pumpkin Center, California.”:

“My fling with Guy didn’t work out, so I went back to taking Diana out at night,” Gore said. “After giving her a fleeting kiss and a promise to call in the morning, I headed for Santa Monica Boulevard to locate my hustler for the night.”

[Later, in 1957, another member of Will-son’s stable of good-looking men, Rock Hudson, would make
A Farewell to Arms
into a full-length movie, playing opposite Jennifer Jones. Previously, Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes had co-starred together in a previous film adaptation, released in 1932, of the same Hemingway novel.]

In July of 1955, Dore Schary, chief of MGM (he’d replaced the tyrannical Louis B. Mayer) chose Gore to write a big screen adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s teleplay,
The Catered Affair
. MGM had purchased the movie rights and had selected the very talented Richard Brooks, as director.
[Not to be confused with Peter Brook, the English director disastrously associated with Truman Capote’s
House of Flowers,
Philadelphia-born Richard Brooks was also a screenwriter, a novelist, and occasional film producer.]

Brooks had a lot of clout at the time, as he had just directed the hugely successful
Blackboard Jungle
(1955). Two big hits lay in his immediate future, including Tennessee Williams’
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1958) and Sinclair Lewis’
Elmer Gantry
(1960).

Gore signed on as a scriptwriter for $2,000 a week, and immediately met for luncheons in the MGM commissary with fellow scriptwriters. Leonard Spieglegass, who spoke with a voice evocative of Noël Coward’s, was the king of MGM scriptwriters at the time. At the writers’ table in MGM’s commissary, he warned Gore not to show up his fellow writers by producing more than three pages of dialogue a day.

Schary was pleased with the choice of Ernest Borgnine as the male lead, cast as a Bronx taxi driver and the scruffy husband of the dowdy Aggie Murley, a character famously portrayed in Chayefsky’s TV teleplay by character actress Thelma Ritter.

[Ironically Ritter had portrayed Davis’ maid in
All About Eve (1950)
, and now Bette Davis had “surpassed” Davis once again, having been chosen by Brooks to replace Ritter in the role of the Bronx housewife on screen. “I am really pissed off,” Ritter told Brooks in an angry phone call.]

Schary, however, didn’t want Davis, whose career was in great decline, at the time. “Davis will turn the role into grand opera. She’ll play it like Queen Elizabeth I.”

Brooks, however, won out, and Schary caved in.

Schary also objected to Brooks’ casting of Debbie Reynolds in the film as the beautiful, well-adjusted bride-to-be.

“She’s a musical comedy star wrapped up with that closeted fag, Eddie Fisher,” Schary said. “There are a hundred young stars in Hollywood who would be more convincing.” Again, Brooks prevailed, and Reynolds got the part.

Borgnine had just won an Oscar for playing the lead role in
Marty
(1955), cast as a warmhearted but ugly man, a lonely, self-deprecating Bronx butcher who tenderly woos a shy schoolteacher.

Bette was hoping that her portrayal of Aggie Hurley, an offbeat role for her, would also earn her another Oscar.

Gore was convinced that Bette’s biggest challenge would involve her ability to gracefully transition herself from glamour roles—one of the best examples was that of Margo Channing in
All About Eve—
into character parts.

Gore hadn’t seen Davis since her days back at the Hollywood Canteen. He noted that while living in Maine, she had put on several pounds. “Wardrobe will not have to pad her dresses, and makeup can let her keep those thickened jowls,” Gore told Brooks. “While I’m working on the screenplay, Bette is practicing her Bronx accent.”

Filming began on
The Catered Affair
in January of 1956, even though the producer, Sam Zimbalist, didn’t like Gore’s script. He complained to Brooks, “Vidal at several points abandons the naturalistic dialogue of a Bronx housewife. He has Bette dip into her role of Margo Channing. And tell the bitch to get rid of those Bette Davis mannerisms, for God’s sake.”

Bette invited Gore to lunch in the MGM commissary. “I saw little Ronald Reagan last night at a party. He was with his new wife…that starlet, I can’t remember her name.”

[Ever since she’d starred with Ronald Reagan and George Brent in
Dark Victory
in 1939, Bette had referred to the future president as “Little Ronald Reagan.”]