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) (118 page)
Authors: Darwin Porter,Danforth Prince
“In Key West, there’s so much talk about you and your legacy that I came up with an idea for a play about a struggling writer living in Paris with his first wife,” Tennessee said. “Of course, I won’t call her Hadley.”
[The reference was to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, married to Hemingway from 1921 to 1927.]
“In my play, the young writer and his wife would become friends with a very stately, rather macho, lesbian writer, and her lover, who is known for her recipes. Of course, I’m referring to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The first act will be set in Paris. I see it as a sort of “Lost Generation First Act” of the expatriate community living in Paris in the 1920s.”
“The hero of my play outgrows his first wife,” Tennessee continued. “Of course, as Pauline’s friend, I know her much better. I know she came from a wealthy Catholic family. In my play, she persuades the young writer to convert to her religion. They have two sons, one of whom, Gregory has a problem with his gender assignment.”
“In my play, I will change the name of Pauline to Paula,” Tennessee said. “When her son turns nineteen, he is arrested as a male trying to enter a women’s toilet, not as a voyeur, but because he thought of himself as a woman born into a man’s body. The writer calls his wife and informs him of the arrest of their son, whom they’ve nicknamed ‘Gigi’ throughout most of his life. The shock of the news, along with her failing health, leads to her having a fatal stroke.”
Papa Hemingway
(left) with his tormented son,
Gregory
, were estranged for many years. Gregory sent his father a note in 1954 to congratulate him for being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ernesto sent him $5,000 in return.
Gregory wrote a memoir of their strained relationship entitled
Papa: A Personal Memoir
that had a thin cutting edge of malice.
Living in the shadow of his father’s fame, Gregory once claimed, “What I really wanted to be was a Hemingway hero.” But as the years went by, his dreams changed. What he wanted to be—and ultimately did become—was a woman named Gloria Hemingway.
In 2001, at the time of his death in a woman’s jail in Miami, he had never completed the long process of transformation from male to female.
Throughout his tortured life, Gregory, a medical doctor, battled bipolar disorder, alcoholism, drug abuse, and what he defined as “gender dysphoria.”
“Much of my play will deal with father-and-son issues,” Tennessee continued, “Part of it will be about a son growing up in the shadow of a very macho father. For a while, he becomes a celebrated athlete in school and later finds release killing elephants in Africa. But he never gets over the fact that a real woman is hiding in his body, struggling to get out. He will ultimately become transgendered.”
[Ernest Hemingway’s son, Gregory Hemingway, also known as Gloria Hemingway, underwent a sex change operation in 1995. As Gloria, he was arrested on a beach in Miami as he was wandering about in the nude. Perceived to be a woman, he was charged with indecent exposure and committed to the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center, where she died of a stroke on October 1, 2001.]
“My son has the biggest dark side in the family except for me,” Hemingway said, heatedly. “That story is far too complicated for a mere play—in fact, I will not allow you to dramatize such a personal invasion of my private life. I suggest that instead, you write a play about the troubled marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. You would find it far more rewarding to invade their heads than mine, and you would understand both of them better. As for you, it is impossible for the homosexual mind to understand what motivates me.”
—”His Success Involved a Blend of Scars & Cojones”
In Havana, at the Floradita, still at table with Hemingway, Tennessee decided to switch to the more neutral topic of bullfighting.
“In Madrid, I got to know your friend, Antonio Ordóñez,” Tennessee said.
“That young Andalusian is the first undisputed
torero de epica
since the death of Manolete in 1947,” Hemingway said. “Manolete spent his last moments alive on the right horn of a Miura bull.”
“I have seen all the great bullfighters of my day, and, to me, Antonio is
Numero Uno,”
Hemingway continued. “He knows that bullfighting is not a tragic conflict. Rather, it is a lyrical dance, a partnership between the bull, who must inevitably die, and the man, who may die.”
“One afternoon, Ordóñez took me for a drive in his Rolls Royce from Madrid to Segovia,” Tennessee said. “Instead of chasing a bull in the ring, he pursued cars on the road. He was a speed demon, passing every vehicle in sight, sometimes at 100 miles per hour. Once, he almost collided into a large oncoming truck. We just missed it by two seconds.”
The celebrated bullfighter,
Antonio Ordóñez
(left)
with the bullfighting aficionado,
Ernest Hemingway
, who wrote the definitive English-language book on the art,
Death in the Afternoon
.
Here, they are seen together in Málaga, Spain, in 1959, taking in the Andalusian sun.
“He seems to want to defy death every day of his life,” Hemingway said.
“One afternoon, before one of his appearances in Madrid, he invited me to watch him dress,” Tennessee said. “He even showed me what he called his
cogidas
, as you know, scars on his thighs.”
“Do you think he would talk to you and show us his
cogidas?”
Hemingway asked.
Tennessee didn’t understand the wording of such a curious question. “Oh, I’m certain he would. He’s a most accessible boy. Not only did I see his
cogidas
, but his
co-jones
were on ample view, too. Now I know why he’s so popular with the ladies. The evidence was before me.”
Surrounded by adoring fans,
Ordóñez
receives their applause in his form-fitting “suit of light,” showing off his prodigious endowment.
Tennessee Williams, who had seen him get dressed, later said, “Seeing was believing—it practically came down to his knee.”
“Don’t let Antonio mislead you,” Hemingway said. “Most bullfighters pad their crotches. Let’s face it: Mother Nature didn’t make all men equal. Sometimes, the male penis is as different as my penis is from that of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
Antonio seemed very concerned with money,” Tennessee said. “He refers to U.S. dollars as
‘Washingtones
.’ He said he has a lot of people to support.”
“Yes, he’s a family man with mistresses and their children to support,” Hemingway said. “In 1953, I urged him not to get married. I warned him that wives inhibit a bull-fighter and imbue him with their fears. They want to keep their husband’s
cojones
intact. Wives also don’t want their husbands ending up with a femoral artery slashed or a punctured lung. Antonio told me that he’s stabbed 150 bulls to their death in a moment of truth in the ring. But he never knows if the next bull horn he encounters has his name on it.”
“Will you be returning to Madrid any time soon?” Tennessee asked.
“Alas, I’m growing bored with bullfighting. I find that the young hustlers in the ring today adhere to a self-castrating style that merely passes for bullfighting,” Hemingway said. He never explained what “self-castrating” meant. Then he turned to Tennessee. “What is your opinion of bullfighting?”
“Perhaps my reaction is strange, but I think bullfighting today is the only place where you can see the sword being used for the purpose for which it was invented.”
—Tennessee Williams
“F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald embody concerns of my own, the tortures of the creative artist in a materialist society. They were so close to the edge. I understood their schizophrenia and their thwarted ambition.”
—
Tennessee Williams commenting on
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
As ironic as it seems, Tennessee, in 1976, took Hemingway’s long-ago advice. He began working on a play revolving around the troubled lives of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, entitling it
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
. It would be the last of his plays to debut on Broadway during his lifetime.
The play revolved around a one-day visit Scott pays to Zelda at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. It included a series of flashbacks highlighting scenes from their turbulent marriage in the 1920s.
En Famille
:
The Fitzgeralds
left to right:
F. Scott
, their daughter,
Scottie
, and the mentally disturbed
Zelda
.
Throughout the course of their stormy marriage, she taunted her husband that he didn’t “measure up” to her other male lovers. She also accused him of being a homosexual, lusting after Ernest Hemingway.
For inspiration, the play drew upon Tennessee’s frequent visits to his mentally incapacitated sister, Rose, who had also been committed to a mental hospital.
Starring Geraldine Page as Zelda, and directed by José Quintero,
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
opened at the Court Theater in Manhattan on March 26, 1980. Stricken by a critical assault from the press, the play closed after fourteen performances. At the debut of its short run, New Yorkers faced a paralyzing blizzard and a transit strike.
“I’ll never open a play on Broadway again,” Tennessee vowed. “I can’t get a good press from
The New York Times
, and critics Harold Clurman, Brendan Gill, and Jack Kroll hate me. I put too much of my heart into my plays to have them demolished by some querulous old aisle sitters.”
***
In his memoirs, Tennessee described his meeting with Hemingway: “He could not have been more charming. He was exactly the opposite of what I’d expected. I had expected a very manly, super-macho sort of guy, very bullying, and coarse spoken. On the contrary, Hemingway struck me as a gentleman who seemed to have a very touchingly shy quality about him.”
Maria St. Just, one of Tennessee’s closest female friends, claimed that he maintained quite a different point of view in private. “All his life, Tenn felt that Hemingway was a closeted queer and that the love of his life was F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Gertrude Stein forced Hemingway to face that reality, he never spoke to her again. He was extremely jealous of Fitzgerald, but also extremely passionate. It was unrequited love.”