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) (108 page)

Truman Capote invited Marilyn
Monroe to see Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford starring together in the 1956 release of
The Teahouse of the August Moon
. Both the author and the blonde goddess were amazed to see Marlon accessorized with “Jap makeup”
[Truman’s words]
.

On their way to the movie house in Los Angeles, Marilyn confessed, “As you know, I’ve repeatedly had Marlon, but I’ve also had a one-night stand with Glenn Ford.”

During Ford’s involvement in the shooting of that film in Japan, he had become one of Marlon’s premier enemies, as their two powerful egos clashed.

“I’ve had Marlon, too,” Truman bragged, “but I don’t expect I’ll ever get Ford, so you have to give me a blow-by-blow description after we see the movie.”

Truman had read all the details associated with the Glenn Ford vs. Brando feud. It had begun when Marlon publicly attacked the actor’s performance in
Human Desire
, a 1954 movie based on Emile Zola’s
La Bête Humaine
. Zola’s novel had originally been filmed in France by Jean Renoir in 1938.

After seeing
Human Desire
, Marlon told the press. “Ford is hopelessly boring on the screen. He just stands there on camera, waiting for accidents to occur. He is totally wooden.”

Two years later, after director Daniel Mann cast both of these temperamental stars—sarcastically referring to them as “the male versions of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis”—in
The Teahouse of the August Moon
, it was inevitable that they’d continue to clash.

In an artistic decision that surprised (and dismayed) almost everybody, Marlon was cast as a Japanese national named Sakini. Before heading off to Japan, he told friends, “I’m going to paly Sakini as gay, and naïve America will never know the difference.”

On the set of
Teahouse
, beginning with the first day of shooting, Marlon denounced Glenn Ford, calling him, “a second-rate William Holden, but without Holden’s ‘hard-on” on camera. “Ford stumbles and stammers, and his performance means nothing, says nothing, goes nowhere.”

In retaliation, Ford claimed that Marlon was nothing “but a vain showoff.”

Months later, after the movie was released, one reviewer asserted that casting Marlon and Ford in the same picture was like having a love scene between Marjorie Main and Tab Hunter.”

Teahouse
stands as one of the three worst pictures Marlon ever made. “That’s why Truman was shocked when he heard that Marlon’s next film,
Sayonara
(1957) would necessitate his return to Japan. “At least Marlon won’t be playing a Jap this time,” Truman said.

The film was based on that sprawling mess of a novel by James A. Michener. A romantic tragedy,
Sayonara
told the tale of an American (Marlon) falling in love during the Korean War with a Japanese entertainer.

Joshua Logan was signed on as the director.

Marlon had rejected the role three times and was chronically unhappy with the script. He’d later tell Truman, among others, “I could piss a better script in the snow than this shit!” However, he needed the $300,000 fee his contract provided, and he also believed that
Sayonara
would represent a plea for racial tolerance. At the time, American occupation forces legally opposed marriages between its servicemen
[many of whom were based in Japan, or had been sent from the front in Korea for medical treatments or for R&R in Japan]
and Japanese women.

When Marlon met Logan, the director shared a secret with him. “Tennessee Williams offered me the directorship of
Streetcar
before Elia Kazan read it. I should have accepted. Under my direction, you would have been an even greater Stanley Kowalski.”

Marlon would later share his impression of Logan with Truman. “At last, I’ve met a man more high strung and quixotic than I am. He’s driven by demons, maybe bigger ones than those that sometimes overcome me. Fits of depression descend on Logan like summer rain. Sometimes the rain turns into hurricane gales.”

Even before his departure to Japan in anticipation of his interview with Marlon, Truman began dredging up gossipy secrets. They included the fact that Audrey Hepburn had rejected the role of the film’s female lead. “If I play an Oriental, I’ll be laughed off the screen,” Hepburn had informed Logan.

The role was eventually awarded to Miiko Taka, a second-generation Nisei-American working for sixty dollars a week at a travel agency in Los Angeles.

Marlon made no attempt to seduce Taka, but confessed to Truman, “I must have fucked every Japanese girl involved with
Sayonara.”

The moment he arrived in Tokyo, even before interviewing Marlon, Truman began picking up “tidbits of information.” Logan told him that one night Marlon took a “deep-throated kisser” home with him. “She bit Marlon’s tongue so badly it caused it to swell. Mumbles was really Mumbles for a day or so.”

When Truman, a Southerner himself, saw rushes of Marlon in
Sayonara
, he was surprised at his Southern accent, deriding it as a “cornpone and chittlin’” type of speech pattern.

During the actual interview, Marlon would be far too candid in his mocking of Logan to Truman. Marlon told Truman, “In one scene, I did everything wrong I could think of. I rolled my eyes, grimaced in the wrong place, and used irrelevant gestures. When I was finished, Logan smiled and said, ‘It’s wonderful, Marlon. Print it!’”

Marlon also admitted to Truman, “I’m just walking through the part—nobody knows the difference anyway.”

[In spite of Marlon’s assessments of his performance in
Sayonara
, as expressed to Truman, his performance was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor of the year.]

In a disastrous move that he’d regret for the rest of his life, Marlon agreed to meet with Truman in January of 1957 at the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto. Capote had been assigned to write a piece on Marlon for
The New Yorker
. Marlon hadn’t seen the writer since he’d performed in
A Streetcar Named
Desire more than a decade before, on Broadway. At that time, Marlon had shared an erotic moment with Truman and his friend, Cecil Beaton.

Marlon learned that Beaton was also in Kyoto with Truman, but he pointedly invited only Truman to dinner at his hotel—not Beaton, even though he’d posed nude for him several years before.

Before the meeting, Truman had reassured Marlon that the first part of the tape-recorded interview would be on the record, followed by the candid remarks later “of two old friends getting together to share a memory or two.” It sounded innocent enough.

Joshua Logan, however, didn’t fall for Truman’s reassurances and had, in fact, barred him from the set of the picture. Horrified to learn that Marlon had granted the interview, Logan telephoned Marlon’s suite to warn him, “He’s a vicious queen and he’ll destroy you.”

“Don’t worry your sweet noggin one bit ‘bout this little tadpole,” Marlon said, using the exaggerated Southern accent he’d adapted for his character in
Sayonara
. “I can’t go into details, but Truman worships me. The piece he’ll probably write on me will sound like that silly fodder printed in
Photoplay
magazine.”

“I’m not so sure,” Logan said. “I’ve heard this guy gossip at parties. He’s not that kind to you. He tells everybody that he and Cecil Beaton seduced you. He even claims that you posed nude for Beaton. I’ve even heard him describe your dick to enraptured audiences. Personally, I think he’s got it in for you. He knows you’re one of the most powerful icons in America. Capote loves to shatter icons. To expose them for having clay feet. He’ll do the same to you.”

“Before the night is over, I’ll have Capote sucking on my noble tool,” Marlon predicted.

“So you think,” Logan told Marlon. “I just read the little fucker’s
The Muses Are Heard
. He treats human beings like bugs to be squashed underfoot.”

[
The Muses Are Heard
was Capote’s non-fictional lampoon of the
Porgy and Bess
troupe traveling in Russia.]

“I know Capote,” Marlon assured Logan. “I can handle the little Southern faggot just fine. I will speak only the usual crap to him. Stuff fit to print. He will not get a look into my soul. My soul is a very private place.”

Carlo Fiore, Marlon’s best friend, remained in Marlon’s suite during the first hour of what became an infamous encounter between the author and the actor. Arriving with a bottle of vodka under his short arm, the diminutive Truman—“slim and trim as a boy”—minced into Marlon’s cluttered suite.

With his high-pitched, nasal voice, he greeted Marlon with a kiss on the lips and a handshake for Fiore. Although not a teetotaler, Marlon rarely drank much alcohol.

But in front of the suspicious Fiore, Truman started pouring the liquor for Marlon, preferring a “courtesy sip” for himself. Fiore later recalled that Truman used “his eccentric charm and sly manipulation to get Marlon to drink that vodka.”

The interview began at 7:15pm, with Fiore departing an hour later. Privately, out of earshot from Capote, Fiore told Marlon that he’d call him “every hour with an emergency. This will allow you an excuse to escape from the pansy’s clutches.” Marlon agreed to that. Fiore kept his promise, but Marlon ignored the so-called emergency calls and kept talking nonstop to Truman until 12:30am the following morning.

Sitting with pages of a script scattered around him, Marlon opened up to Truman as he’d done to no other journalist. He revealed very personal moments about his mother, Dodie; about his private views on friendship, love, and marriage; about what a lousy director Logan was—and on and on, one personal revelation piling up on top of another.

During this long ordeal, Truman took no notes, as he was known for his “unfailing memory.”

Truman later claimed that Marlon, throughout his long ramblings, “sounded like an educated Negro using big words only recently learned.”

Later Truman revealed the secret behind the success of his interviewing techniques: “You make the victim think he’s interviewing you. I told Marlon some of my most personal secrets, even about my mother. Naturally, we shared homosexual secrets with each other. Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to spin my web. By opening myself up to Marlon, I got him to open up like a flower petal facing the dawn. He began to reveal himself as he never had before. The more he talked, the more confessional he became. After the first hour, I knew I was on to a big story. My victim was trapped. I came for an interview but went away with insights that no other writer had ever gotten.”

As his opening gambit, Truman described his recent rendezvous with Yukio Mishima, the successful Japanese novelist and playwright who would commit
hari-kiri
, publicly, on November 25, 1970, as a samurai-inspired act of defiance against the modernization and corruption of the Japanese psyche.

“As a lover, Yukio found me inadequate,” Truman claimed. “But in exchange for his own hospitality in Japan, he told me that when he comes to New York he wants me to arrange for him to suck a big white cock.”

Having seduced each other before, Truman and Marlon were frank in discussing their homosexual affairs. Marlon told Truman of his involvement with Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier, and Leonard Bernstein. Truman finally left a drunken Marlon in his suite.