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) (14 page)

“I want to meet the man
who created the character of Sally Bowles,” Tennessee Williams told friends of the author, Christopher Isherwood. And so a meeting between these two gay writers came about at the celebrity-studded Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood.

Tennessee had read and been enthralled with Isherwood’s novels,
Mr. Norris Changes Trains
(1935) and
Goodbye to Berlin
(1939).

Born in England, Isherwood at the time was labeled “an angry pacifist, a worldly spiritualist, and an ascetic sybarite.” He was considering becoming an American citizen, which he did in 1946.

By the end of World War II, Isherwood was the most celebrated gay writer in America. What Tennessee didn’t tell him was that he wanted to assume that role for himself.

Isherwood sized up the emerging competition, referring to Tennessee as “a strange boy, small, plump, muscular, with a slight cast in one eye—and full of an amused malice.”

Isherwood, who had been in Hollywood since 1939, was also appraised by Tennessee. “I was amazed at how short he was. I found him a ruggedly handsome blue-eyed Englishman with the build of a bantam boxer. He spoke in a thin, rather reedy voice. I ruled out romance. He wasn’t my type.”

“I am a lonely man wandering in a foreign country,” Isherwood told Tennessee. “I no longer have a country. I am a citizen of love.”

Sensing a kindred spirit, Tennessee immediately became confidential, discussing his sex life. “I have these uncontrollable sexual urges,” he confessed. “I cruise for young men day and night. This obsession interferes with my work. My libido is a painful burden to carry.”

Isherwood responded with confessions of his own. “For a while, I flirted with the idea of becoming a monk. That is, until I fell in love with this blonde-haired soldier. Celibacy went out the window the first night he fucked me.”

He even explained why he went to Berlin in 1931, where he met a little cocotte, Jean Ross, who became the inspiration of his fictional character, Sally Bowles. She would later become immortalized on the screen by Liza Minnelli in
Cabaret
(1972).

[The director of
Cabaret
, Bob Fosse, sent the film’s Fred Ebb-John Kander script, based on the 1955 play
, I Am a Camera,
first to Julie Andrews. But her agent wouldn’t even let her read it, rushing the script of
Mary Poppins
to her instead.]

“I didn’t find Englishmen very sexy, but I was powerfully attracted to working class German men,” Isherwood said. “I went to Berlin seeking love and found it in the arms of a handsome, muscled, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, sixteen-year-old boy, Heinz Needermeyer. When Hitler and the Nazis took over in 1933, I fled from Germany with Heinz at my side. We wandered through Europe in a kind of limbo, living in seedy hotels often filled with prostitutes and drunkards.”

“When the British blocked me from bringing Heinz into London, we went to Paris, where he was arrested in 1937 for not having identity papers. The French deported him back to Germany, where he was arrested by the Gestapo for draft dodging. After serving six horrible months in prison, he was then forced to become a Nazi soldier. Life without my Heinz was devastating for me.”

By the end of the lunch, the two authors, Tennessee and Isherwood, had bonded, leading to a lifelong friendship. But their date at the Brown Derby ended in a most unconventional way. Throughout their meal, they had been hawkeyed by a Western character actor, Guinn (“Big Boy”) Williams. He had been dining with Errol Flynn, with whom he’d starred as a “sidekick” in movies.

Perhaps goaded by Flynn, who was a prankster, Big Boy rose from the table, an impressive 6’ 2” of Texas manhood. He headed toward the table where Isherwood and Tennessee were seated.

Both writers were astonished when he pulled out a pocket knife from his pants and proceeded to slice off the tongues of their ties. The men were more astonished than frightened. “Do you collect ties?” Isherwood asked.

Big Boy grabbed his crotch. “You two faggots suck on this.”

“We can’t unless you whip it out,” Tennessee quipped.

Big Boy stormed toward the door, cursing under his breath. The
maître d’
confronted him on his way out, asking him never to set foot in the Brown Derby again.

“That was the only tie I owned,” Tennessee lamented to Isherwood.

“I’ll buy you another one.”

Suddenly, as they looked up, it was Flynn himself who stood before them, looking “even handsomer than he did on the screen,” Tennessee recalled.

“Welcome to Hollywood, boys,” he said. “Sorry about Big Boy. It was just a little joke I conjured up to amuse myself on this hot, boring afternoon. No hard feelings.” He stuck out his hand.

Both writers shook his hand, Tennessee holding it for an extra long time.

Deliberately provocative, Tennessee said, “Is the rumor true that when you were fitted into those green tights to play Robin Hood, Warners insisted you wear a heavy duty jock strap so as not to give the men in the audience penis envy?”

“There are many rumors spread about me which are lies,” he said. “But you nailed me on that one.”

He fingered each of what remained of their ties. “You guys are good sports, and I’ll make it up to you by paying for your lunch.”

“I think we have a right to demand more tribute than that,” Tennessee said, eying Flynn’s ample crotch.

The actor winked at him. “Yes, I could do more to make you guys forgive me. Give me a rain check.”

That night, Tennessee invited Isherwood, his newly found friend, to go cruising with him along the blacked-out Pacific Palisades.

Isherwood later commented on that experience: “Tennessee could be quite courageous in approaching a sailor. He would single out his victim for the evening and just go up to him and make his pitch. Perhaps it was because of the war when most sexual restraints were removed, especially by those who thought they were going to die tomorrow. But during the time we knew each other in Hollywood, Tennessee often got his man, turning his apartment into a USO.”

“During the war years and beyond, Tennessee was constantly trying to find some fulfillment in the body of another man,” Isherwood said. “I don’t think he ever found what he was searching for during those hazy, drunkard, Dionysian nights he spent wandering, searching, forever on the move, seeking the next experience, even courting violence. So many of these young men were away from their homes, their mothers, their girlfriends, and they sought someone to love them wherever they could find it.”

Two days after their Brown Derby luncheon, Isherwood showed up at Tennessee’s apartment. He later said, “I had seen nothing like this since I visited a cheap abortionist in the slums of Berlin in 1932.”

“It was a dingy apartment where I found Tennessee sitting before a typewriter and wearing a yachting cap amidst a litter of dirty coffee cups, crumpled bed linen, and old newspapers. I learned that he works until he’s tired, eats only when he feels like it, and sleeps when he can no longer stay awake. He also told me he spent two or three hours every day on the beach.”

That night, when Isherwood and Tennessee went to a little fish house on the Santa Monica pier, Tennessee confessed why he’d been so drawn to the character of Sally Bowles. “She knows the difference between being fucked and being well fucked.”

When Gore Vidal first met Christopher Isherwood in a Paris hotel room in 1948, Gore was in his underwear and in bed. “We checked each other out for about an hour,” Gore later recalled, “and decided to become friends—not lovers.”