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) (15 page)

When Gore finally put on his pants, they walked to
Les Deux Magots
, the legendary café on the Left Bank. Jean-Paul Sartre and his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, sat at an adjoining table.

Isherwood would remember Gore as “a big husky boy with fair hair and a funny, rather attractive face—sometimes he reminds me of a teddy bear, sometimes a duck. He’s typical American prep school. His conversation is all about love, which he doesn’t believe in—or rather, he believes it’s tragic. He is very jealous of Truman Capote and talks about him all the time. What I respect about him is his courage, though it’s mingled with a desire for self-advertisement.”

Even at this early stage in his life, Gore claimed he didn’t believe there was such a thing as a homosexual. “We are all bisexuals,” he proclaimed. He admitted that only hours before their meeting, he’d had sex with a Parisian hustler who had once worked in a bordello in Algiers before moving to France.

“And the night before that, I made love to a young Juliette Greco lookalike in my hotel room,” Gore confessed to Isherwood. “She compared my love-making to Picasso’s, and I was flattered…at first. ‘Oh,’ I said to her, ‘I’m a genius in the boudoir, too.’”

“Not at all,” Gore quoted her as telling him. “Like Picasso, you’re a very bad lover. Just in and out and back to work.” After she said that, the girl stormed out of Gore’s bedroom.

“At least Picasso and I have something in common,” Gore told Isherwood.

That autumn in Paris, after Isherwood got to know Gore, he wrote: “Gorefeels that life is too damn much trouble. Being with him depressed me, because he exudes despair and a cynical misery. He’s got a grudge against society which is really based on his own lack of talent and creative joy.”

When Isherwood, back in America, confided these concerns to Tennessee, the playwright responded, “Oh, Gore is just trying to defend himself against pain.”

After Paris, Gore and Isherwood saw each other only infrequently, although they wrote letters. March of 1955 found them both in Hollywood working side by side in office cubicles, turning out film scripts—Gore for Bette Davis, Isherwood for Lana Turner (as Tennessee had done before him, rather unsuccessfully).

Gore was adapting a teleplay,
The Catered Affair
, for the big screen. On his first day, he had met the play’s original author, Paddy Chayefsky. “He seemed very neurotic,” Gore recalled. “He told me he was haunted by a feeling of horror and unreality.”

“I deal with it by lighting one cigarette after another and sitting down to eat a large chocolate cake in one sitting,” Chayefsky confided. “I call it ‘chocolate by death,’ or perhaps it should be called ‘death by chocolate.’”

In the adjoining office, Isherwood was writing a screenplay for Lana Turner. The script was vaguely related to the life of Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566), the French noblewoman and courtier at the courts of Kings François I and his son, Henri II. As the “favorite” of Henri II, and a woman who reputedly retained her sexual allure and beauty through witchcraft, she became notorious throughout France.

In 1956, the Lana film was released as
Diane
by MGM. François I was played by Pedro Armendáriz, and a young and very handsome Roger Moore starred as the future king, Henri II.

[Isherwood invited Tennessee to a screening of the film. After sitting through it, Tennessee did not have a comment until Isherwood asked him for his opinion. “I think Lana never looked lovelier,” Tennessee said.]

Gore confessed that he could not live on the meager royalties generated by his novels. That had led him to accept the job as a scriptwriter. At the end of their lunch in the MGM commissary, the two writers went for a walk around the studio lot.

They paused to sit down for a while beside the train under whose wheels Anna Karenina(Greta Garbo) had made her last dive, committing suicide.

Isherwood was despondent over his own career, urging Gore, “Don’t become a hack like me.” He also spoke of the difficulty he was having with the censors at the Breen Office. “They say I condone adultery. They want adultery to be punished by stoning, and they also think that homosexuals should be burned alive.”

In spite of his career problems, Gore claimed that he was “feeding my libido in Hollywood. Before six o’clock in the afternoon, all the hustlers along The Strip charge only ten dollars. I prefer sex in the afternoon anyway, so that suits me just fine.”

During their time at MGM, Gore and Isherwood lunched together almost every day, sometimes with a guest.

On one occasion, they dined “with a young Jewish producer.
[Neither writer identified him.]
The producer took exception with Gore comparing the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust with that of homosexuals rounded up by the Nazis.

“There was a difference,” Gore said. “The Jews wore yellow stars and the gay men had to wear pink triangles. But regardless of their badges, the end result was the same: the gas chamber.”

“The two persecuted groups should be allies,” Isherwood said. “Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.”

“But Hitler killed six million Jews,” the producer protested.

“What are you?” Isherwood asked. “In real estate?”

At one point, Bette Davis dropped by Gore’s office to see how work was progressing on
The Catered Affair
. She joined both Gore and Isherwood for lunch.

“I was surprised that over lunch, she brought up the subject of homosexuality and shared her views with us,” Gore said. “For such a supposedly sophisticated woman, her point of view shocked me.”

“For the life of me, I can’t understand how anyone could be attracted sexually to a person of the same sex,” she told the startled writers. “It completely baffles me.”

[Throughout the life of Bette Davis, she never wavered from that position and always refused to support any gay causes. In private, she often made flippant homophobic remarks.]

Gore challenged her view, pointing out that at this stage in her film career her largest fan base consisted of gay men.

“That’s true,” Davis responded, “and I’m aware of that. I also know that I’m the one actress most female impersonators select to imitate.” The more she talked, the less homophobic she sounded, although at no point did she back down from her original comments.

“The homosexual community is the most appreciative in backing the arts,” Davis said. “They are knowledgeable and loving of the arts. They make the average male look stupid. They show their good taste in their support of my own efforts on the screen. Most of my fan mail today is from gay men. Even so, I still can’t understand why they want to sleep with each other. For the life of me, I will never condone that.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Davis said. “I believe in equal rights for all—no matter the race, religion, or sexual orientation. At this point in my life, I’m also opposed to age discrimination, especially that dished out to fading movie queens.”

Through Isherwood, Gore met far more tolerant movie queens with far more sophisticated views about homosexuality.

But first, at his cliffside home in Malibu, Isherwood introduced Gore to his teenaged lover, Don Bachardy, whom the older writer had met on the beach when he was eighteen. Friends said Bachardy at the time looked no more than sixteen, if that. Gore referred to Bachardy as “thin, blonde, chicken-hawk handsome, an unformed neophyte who gradually discovered his passion for painting.”

At one party, Isherwood introduced Gore to Marlene Dietrich, who had been a great admirer of his Berlin novels. “Dietrich ruled the night from one corner of the room, Claudette Colbert on the opposite side.”

Gore had heard rumors that both Dietrich and Colbert had been lovers in the 1930s, and that there was a famous photograph showing Colbert sitting between Dietrich’s legs as they slid down a chute.

But their relationship had grown sour. When she spoke of Colbert to Gore, Dietrich seemed to hold the Paris-born actress in contempt, referring to her as “that ugly French shopgirl.”

Gore did not share Dietrich’s feelings and was delighted to meet Colbert later in the evening. Bachardy told them that in gay circles in Hollywood, Colbert was called “Uncle Claude. She lives deep in the closet.”

On the screen in such classics as
It Happened One Night
with Clark Gable, Gore had found Colbert the personification of gaiety and sophistication, who, when the script called for it, could also be provocative. “She stood before me showing only the left side of her face, which she considered her more beautiful,” Gore said.

During the years to come, he always challenged people who labeled Colbert as a lesbian. She’d been married twice—once to Norman Foster, who later married Sally Blane, Loretta Young’s sister, and later to Dr. Joel Pressman—but Colbert always maintained a separate residence.

“Colbert should be called a bisexual,” Gore said. “I mean, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Leslie Howard, Fred MacMurray, and Preston Sturges weren’t exactly females the last time I got their peckers hard.”

After they finished their respective scripts for Bette Davis and Lana Turner, Gore and Isherwood were assigned two new screen treatments. Isherwood’s job involved writing a screenplay about Buddha entitled
The Wayfarer
. It was never filmed.

In contrast, Gore’s script, based on the trial of Albert Dreyfus, was released in 1958. It starred José Ferrer.
The New York Times
warned that the audience “is likely to feel more frustrated by political obfuscation and courtroom wrangling than poor Captain Dreyfus was. Ferrer’s Dreyfus is a sad sack, a silent and colorless man who takes his unjust conviction with but one outburst protest and then endures his Devils Island torment lying down.”