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) (120 page)

Among other seminal works, De Beauvoir was known for her treatise
The Second Sex.
Originally published in French, in Paris, in 1949, and later translated and distributed worldwide, it’s interpreted as a seminal tract of contemporary feminism.]

“My God, these two sound like someone Gore Vidal should meet,” Tennessee said. “I can’t talk about any subjects that might interest them. I’ll have to look for little windows in our conversation, where I can interject a thought or two without appearing like a barefoot boy from Mississippi.”

Later, Tennessee recalled that De Beauvoir was “the icy lady,” although Sartre was far more gracious. “I understand, Mr. Williams, that you write plays.”

“I attempt it,” Tennessee said. “I’m also told that you, too, write plays.”

“The play of mine that might interest you most is called
Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands;
1948). In it, I explore the problems associated with being a politically engaged intellectual.”

“I think that Mr. Williams would find your play,
Huis clos (No Exit)
closer to his own personal dilemma,” De Beauvoir said, enigmatically.

“Among those of your plays produced in Paris, which might interest me the most?” Sartre asked.

“You’ve already missed out,” Tennessee said. “Jean Cocteau organized and produced a very French, very ‘Cocteau’ version of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. I think he somehow managed to interject Marie Antoinette into this back-street drama in New Orleans. Cocteau wanted to direct the play, at least originally, as a vehicle for his lover, Jean Marais.”

“I remember my first meeting with Cocteau,” De Beauvoir said. “I was with Jean Genet. Cocteau’s torrential flow of conversation made me dizzy. He spoke with acrobatic dexterity. With his hands, he traced hypnotic arabesques in midair. He has a narcissistic streak, but that does not restrict his vision.”

“Unlike me, Cocteau believes the poet should hold himself aloof from the follies of war and politics,” Sartre said.

“He told me that Hitler’s sheer celebrity mitigated his crime. In his words, ‘Folly is the prerogative of a Lord, and a Lord is he who lords.’”

“I also met your friend, Mr. Genet,” Tennessee said. “He reminded me of Mickey Rooney. Speaking of Hitler, I’ll always remember a story Genet told us. He said that something good came out of the Nazi invasion of Paris. He claimed that the city was filled with beautiful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed young men who turned to Genet and his gay friends for love on the darkest night. The soldiers of the Third Reich might be raping the French people, but Genet considered each of his rapes from a Nazi soldier as an absolute delight.”

“Perhaps it’s better that a Nazi soldier turn to one for love-making instead of some more hideous assault,” Tynan said in one of the few comments he contributed that evening.

“I came to Cuba to meet Castro and to speak with Che Guevara,” Sartre said.” Che is not only an intellectual, but also the most complete human being of our Age. He is the most perfect man of the 20
^th
Century.”

“I, too, have a crush on Che,” Tennessee said. “And I’ve never met him. What about Castro?”

“For the most part, I am in sympathy with his goals,” Sartre said. “However, I told him that I am violently against the persecution of homosexuals by his regime. To his face, I compared such horrendous activity as comparable to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Homosexuals are the Jews of Cuba.”

“I, too, have identified and felt sympathy for the plight of the homosexual,” De Beauvoir said. “Like the homosexual, women historically have been considered deviant, abnormal. Men have been held up as the ideal toward which women should aspire. Such an ideal limits a woman’s success, as it does for the homosexual. For feminists, and homosexuals, to assume their rightful place in society, these old assumptions about emulating ‘normality’ must be set aside forever. And that’s because both groups have always believed in transcendence, a lofty plâteau where one, a woman or a homosexual, needs to take responsibility for oneself in a world where one chooses one’s freedom.”

After acknowledging De Beauvoir’s artfully passionate speech, Tennessee rose from the table, reaching for Tynan’s hand. “It’s getting late and I must meet my lady friend, a wonderful poet named Marion Vaccaro. She and I plan to spend the rest of the evening in our favorite Havana bordello, the aptly named Garden of Delights. They have such lovely boys there. One thing that can be said of a Cuban boy (and not of an American or French boy): No Cuban boy ever lets you leave his bed unsatisfied.”

Then he turned to Sartre. “Are you here to patronize the bordellos?”

“I do not need to patronize bordellos like Genet,” Sartre said. “Simone and I are perfectly content with each other. However, when she senses I am growing bored and need more stimulation, she will introduce me to one of her young female lovers.”

“I am so very gratified that both of you stand up for us lesser mortals when faced with tyranny,” Tennessee said. Then he kissed both Sartre and De Beauvoir on both of their respective cheeks and parted from Tynan in anticipation of meeting Marion for a night in the bordellos. Later, at the bordello, they would occupy adjoining rooms with paper-thin walls.

Tennessee recalled, “That way I could use peepholes to check up on the action next door to me, and Marion could do the same. On some nights, each of us liked what was on the other side more than what we’d already bought and paid for, and we’d quickly change partners and proceed with our erotic dance.”

In New York, Marlon Brando was the first person Tennessee called. The actor said he’d like “to appear as Fidel on the screen, but it all depends on the script. If it’s written by John Foster Dulles
[then the hawkish U.S. Secretary of State]
, NO WAY!”

“But if Castro is played as a true revolutionary, a friend to the downtrodden,” Marlon continued, “then I’ll green light it. As for Marilyn, my sweet babe, I’ve always wanted to star in a movie with her. I think on screen together, we’d be dynamite.”

Producer Jerry Wald seemed elated with Castro’s invitation to turn over Cuba’s facilities and perhaps financial aid to a film crew arriving on his shores.

Tennessee had always interpreted Wald as an intriguing character, as he was said to have been the model for Budd Schulberg’s novel,
What Makes Sammy Run?
.

After talking to him, Tennessee told his literary agent, Audrey Wood, “Jerry is a vulgarian in the David O. Selznick mold, but he has a brutal instinct for what will play on the screen. We might consider him as the producer of one of my plays. If he can conquer Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence, why not Tennessee Williams? Although right now, I hear that in addition to the Castro project, he’s buried deep in a film adaptation of Joyce’s
Ulysses
.”

After his dialogue with Wald, Tennessee sent a message to Castro that he would be presented in a favorable light on the screen, regardless of the reservations of the Eisenhower administration.

Tennessee also placed a call to Meade Roberts, who told him he was halfway through writing a script. When Meade heard that Marilyn might get involved, he promised to rewrite the woman’s role, making it as strong as that of the male lead.

Roberts was the first to reveal to the world at large that Tennessee had a crush on Castro. Even before he met Castro, Tennessee once told Roberts that he’d dreamed of being kidnapped by Castro and Che Guevara and being reconfigured as their love slave.

“He wanted me to go to Cuba with him, way back when Castro and his guerillas were still hiding out in the mountains. I told him, ‘If you go and get kidnapped, MCA will ransom you. After all, you’re Tennessee Williams. No one will ransom me. I’m only Meade Roberts.’”

Brando had told Tennessee that he felt Marilyn Monroe would be most receptive to portraying Castro’s mistress in any film shot in Cuba. Tennessee found politics boring, and until he talked to Brando, he didn’t realize that Marilyn, in the wake of her marriage to a left-wing playwright, Arthur Miller, had become increasingly political. “She’s even to the left of her husband,” Brando claimed.

Marilyn had joined SANE (Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy). She signed up with fellow stars who included Brando, Shirley MacLaine, Peter Lawford, and Gene Kelly.

In the late 1950s, Marilyn had begun to seek out men who sharpened her awareness of international politics. She’d become a friend of Lester Markel, the Sunday Editor of
The New York Times
. At one point, he took her on a tour of that newspaper’s offices.

From Hollywood, she wrote to Markel, stating her view that American newspapers were biased against “Fidel C.,” her obvious nickname for Castro. After she was elected alternate delegate to the Connecticut Democratic caucus, she began to announce her views on the men she wanted to run for the highest two offices in 1960.

Her choice for president was William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court Justice. She feared that his divorce might be a strike against him, especially among Catholic voters. “To balance that factor,” Marilyn claimed, “why not run a charismatic young politician as the vice presidential candidate. John F. Kennedy.” Then she muffled a giggle. “I found Jack very presidential.”

When JFK was nominated for president, Marilyn actively campaigned for him, attending rallies at the home of her former lover, Peter Lawford, who was married at the time to Patricia Kennedy. Tennessee accompanied Marilyn to one of these fund-raising rallies and contributed $1,000 to JFK’s political campaign.

Marilyn once stated her own policy toward Cuba, a set of ideas which she shared with Tennessee: ”I think Fidel C. is awfully cute and very, very sexy.”

“I saw him first, Queenie,” Tennessee said jokingly.

“The Batista regime was bleeding Cuba dry,” Marilyn said. “I heard the brutal dictator stashed away billions in Swiss banks. I think Fidel C. is a true man of the people. He is the savior of his country, regardless of what Eisenhower and Dulles think.”

Tennessee transmitted Castro’s invitation for Marilyn to visit him in Havana and to star as his mistress in a movie about his revolutionary days. “I will be his mistress both on and off the screen,” she told Tennessee, who reported it and all the other developments associated with events in Cuba to his lover, Frank Merlo.

Around the same time, in a real life drama that seemed like something out of a Hollywood movie itself, Marilyn increased her sexual involvement with JFK, an affair that had actually begun in the 1950s. To complicate matters even more, she also launched an affair with Robert F. Kennedy, then the Attorney General of the United States.

Presumably, over “pillow talk,” RFK indiscreetly told her about the government’s plans to murder Castro.

Rumors circulated about JFK and Marilyn, at least among the press corps, but her affair with RFK was not well known. Arthur Schlesinger, a Kennedy loyalist and RFK biographer, later said, “Bobby was human. He liked to drink and he liked young women. He indulged that liking when he traveled, and he had to travel a great deal, especially to California.”

Marilyn had long been involved with Johnny Roselli, mob boss Sam Giancana’s West Coast henchman. For a time, Giancana became secretly involved with the CIA in a plan to assassinate Castro. When Roselli became embroiled, he came up with his own scheme, one involving Marilyn.

Roselli had learned that she was Castro’s favorite movie star. He also knew that the Cuban leader would extend an invitation to her to visit him in Havana if she asked.

At the time that Roselli was plotting such a trip for Marilyn, he seemed unaware that Tennessee had already involved her in another, entirely separate, invitation to visit Cuba to make a film.

“With Marilyn in Havana, Castro would surely want to pop her,” Roselli told his associates. “We could arrange for Marilyn to poison him, using some kind of chemical that didn’t take effect right away, giving her time to get her shapely ass out of the country.”

A renegade cabal found the plot bizarre, citing how risky it was. But Roselli moved ahead with his plan anyway.

Giancana ordered Roselli to visit Marilyn in New York to see if she’d participate in such an grisly and outlandish scheme. “Even with the blackmail we have on Marilyn, including all those incriminating photographs we have, we can’t force her into a stunt like this,” Giancana said. “She might even think we’re insane. And we’re not at all sure she’d want to take such a risk. Just because she’s fucking our new President doesn’t make her a super patriot.”

When she met with Roselli, Marilyn pretended to acquiesce with his scheme to kill Castro. But her real objective involved double-crossing both Roselli and Giancana. She wanted to get as much information about the plot as she could, and then fly to Havana to warn Castro about what was going on.

At least that is what she reported to Tennessee.

During the months ahead, the worlds spinning around Marilyn grew even more complicated. She told Tennessee that over “pillow talk” with RFK, she’d learned that he, too, was spearheading yet another plot to kill Castro.