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) (19 page)

Gore arrived home one afternoon to hear Nina sitting with Henry Luce in the living room. As the founder of both
Time
and
Life
, he was one of the most influential private citizens in America, a major player in what he called “The American Century.”

At the time Nina met Luce, he was married to his first wife, Elizabeth Hotz, and had not yet married Clare Booth Luce, whose fame at one point almost equaled his own.

Gore overheard Luce tell Nina that “my wife doesn’t understand me. There is no love between us any more. I need a woman in my life. Will you go to bed with me?”

Gore didn’t hear his mother’s answer, but he did hear both of them ascending the steps to her bedroom. She remained locked away with the publisher for two hours. He later learned that Luce made repeated return visits to seduce his mother.

At one point, Gore dared confront her. He told Nina, “It would be a good career move if you got a divorce and married Henry Luce.”

“Fuck you, you little son of a bitch,” she shouted at him, slapping his face. Then she paused, as if realizing that if Gore were a son of a bitch, then she was the bitch.

At one point, Gore was introduced to Luce. He didn’t remember what they said, but he did recall “his long fingers covered with orange fur like a caterpillar.”

At a lavish party in Washington, D.C., during the early 1930s, Eugene and Nina met a power-house couple, John (“Jock”) Hay Whitney, the wealthy publisher of
The New York Herald Tribune
, and his beautiful socialite wife, Mary Elizabeth Altemus Whitney, known as “Liz” to her friends. She was the champion horsewoman of America and its most prominent breeder of thoroughbreds.
Time
magazine defined her as “a spirited devil-may-care rider and a blue-ribbon champion of the horseshow circuit.”

She had married Jock in 1930. For his bride, he purchased the Llangollen Estate, a sprawling historic property in Southern Virginia at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

No one knows exactly what happened at that Washington party, but Jock secretly made arrangements to set up a rendezvous with Nina. Likewise, Eugene and Liz exchanged phone numbers for what became a series of love-in-the-afternoon sessions.

Both of the Whitneys launched these adulterous affairs at the beginning of their marriage, a pattern that would continue throughout the remainder of their decade-long union.

On one occasion, Eugene took Gore to visit Liz on her Virginia estate. She was throwing a lavish “wild hunt ball” at which Prince Aly Khan, her close friend, was the guest of honor. Neither Jock nor Nina were among the invited guests.

Gore bonded with Liz, finding her “funny, amusing, with chiseled features including a gorgeous nose. She was very rich and uneducated,” he later said. He remembered the “little dirt marks in the wrinkles around her neck, as she emerged from working in the stables all day. In the moccasins she always wore during the day, she looked like an Indian princess with flashing black eyes.”

“She was certainly eccentric,” Gore said, “a sort of Auntie Mame character. She brought her favorite horse right into her vast living room. Guests had to avoid stepping in a pile of horseshit. She had at least three dozen dogs running about. She took me on a tour of a vast freezer filled with her favorite dogs of yesteryear. When they died, she put their bodies in deep freeze.”

These eccentricities did not turn off Gore, who urged Eugene to divorce Nina and marry Liz if she could free herself from Jock.

In the months to come, both Jock and Liz talked not with each other, but privately with friends about getting divorces which would free them to marry Nina and Eugene, respectively. Washington society just assumed that divorces were inevitable.

At one point, Liz dropped in on her friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, unannounced. Although mired in the enormous burden of trying to get America out of its worst depression, he agreed to see her. She confessed to FDR that she wanted to divorce Jock and marry Eugene. FDR recommended a good divorce lawyer to her, although she later attacked FDR for giving her bad advice.

Unknown to Nina at the time, Jock was a serial seducer of famous actresses, including Paulette Goddard, Joan Bennett, and even the regal Joan Crawford. At one point, he proposed marriage to Tallulah Bankhead, pending his divorce from Liz. Tallulah used to tell her lovers, including Burgess Meredith, “For God’s sake, don’t come inside me. I’m engaged to Jock Whitney.”

When Nina divorced Eugene in 1935, she thought Jock would marry her immediately. But he seemed reluctant to do so. At that point, he had tired of her, and she went instead in search of another potential husband, providing he was rich.

Liz was still deeply in love with Eugene and wanted to marry him, but he never proposed, even after his divorce from Nina was finalized.

[Jock and Liz would not divorce until 1940. Two years later, he would marry Betsey Cushing Roosevelt, the ex-wife of James Roosevelt, son of FDR. Liz herself would marry three more times. Her fourth marriage, in 1960, to Col. Clyce J. Tippet was her most successful, lasting until her death in 1988.]

When Liz read that David O. Selznick was conducting a nationwide search for an unknown to play Scarlett O’Hara in the upcoming movie adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind
(1939), she prevailed upon Eugene to take her to Hollywood. “I feel I am destined to play Scarlett. I’ve lived in Virginia long enough to develop a Southern cornpone accent.”

But within a week of settling into Hollywood, Liz heard the bad news. Jock had learned of her dream, and had called Selznick and nixed the idea. “Everybody I fuck wants to play Scarlett. Just as I’m about to have an orgasm, Joan Bennett, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, or Paulette Goddard demand that I call you and get them cast as Scarlett. But there is no way in hell I’m going to let you cast Liz Whitney as Scarlett. NO WAY!”

Selznick had to placate Jock because he’d invested $870,000 into the making of
Gone With the Wind
, and he was chairman of the board of Selznick’s production company. Jock had also put up half the option money for Mitchell’s novel.

There was more bad news for Liz to face: Her beloved Eugene had met a beautiful woman, Katherine Roberts
[nicknamed “Kit”]
. A Powers model, she was only six years older than Gore. The slim, dark-haired beauty was the daughter of Owen Roberts, a multi-millionaire, with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and a “priceless” art collection. Katherine had spent much of her life living with her parents in Peking in a palace with twenty servants.

Eugene married Katherine right before Christmas of 1939. The news shocked Liz. “She went ballistic,” Gore recalled. “She made threatening phone calls to my father and came up with various blackmail schemes. She felt Eugene belonged to her. He told me that at one point, she called him in the middle of the night and threatened she was going to have Kit murdered.

“Two hit men are on the way,” Liz shouted before slamming down the phone.

When Gore met his new stepmother, he found her “young and attractive, evoking Katharine Hepburn in looks. She seemed madly in love with Eugene, in spite of the difference in their ages. Because of Nina, the word ‘mother’ would send me up the walls. Also, Kit didn’t seem to want to be my mother, as I was practically the same age as she was. We were awkward and tense around each other.”

Even though Jock did not marry Gore’s mother, he and Gore continued to encounter each other over the years, often showing up at the same parties in Washington. In the 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Jock as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

On the occasions that Gore and Jock met, they avoided talk of politics, as Jock was a staunch Republican and Gore a liberal Democrat.

Jock had never lost his interest in show business, and Gore always brought him up to date on the inside gossip.

In the 1930s, Jock used to invest in Broadway shows. That had led to his involvement in half of what Gore dubbed “The Odd Couple of Show Business,” Jock Whitney and Fred Astaire.

Astaire and the publisher had initially been drawn together because of their mutual passion for horse racing. Astaire placed bets through bookmakers and even cabled London with wagers on English races.

A deep, intimate relationship formed between these two widely diverse personalities. Jock was an early backer of Astaire, investing in two of his Broadway stage vehicles,
The Band Wagon
in 1930 and
The Gay Divorce
in 1932. Jock even arranged Astaire’s first contract with RKO in 1933, using his influence with the producer, Merion C. Cooper, a close friend of Jock’s.

During their early days together, Astaire had even taught Jock how to dance the Charleston and the Black Bottom. As Astaire once told Gore, “I much preferred Jock as my dancing partner instead of Ginger Rogers.”

In Hollywood in later years, Gore and his longtime companion, Howard Austen, once attended a party at Astaire’s home. They were astonished at the number of pictures of Jock on display, including some taken of him during his years at Yale.

After leaving the party, Gore remarked, “I’m sorry that Fred’s love for Jock has gone unrequited…at least I think it has. But who knows? For Fred’s sake, I’m glad Randolph Scott was more accommodating.”

Later that night, when Austen and Gore joined Christopher Isherwood for a drink, Austen told him they’d been to a party at the home of Fred Astaire. Isherwood looked as if he had not heard that correctly.

“How in hell did you come to know Astaire?” Isherwood asked.

“Jock Whitney introduced us,” Gore said. “When I first came to Hollywood, he called Fred and told him to— quote— ‘take me under his wing.’”

“I’m afraid Astaire did a little more that that,” Gore continued. “It’s one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood, but Fred on occasion has gotten into trouble with the police. He has this thing for little boys. As I was just young enough at the time to pass his physical, he went for me. I had sex with ol’ skin and bones. He’s definitely not my type—tiny dick, bony ass—but I endured it because he’s a big time movie star.”

“You’re a god damn starfucker, now admit it!” Isherwood demanded.

“As you know, it’s called ‘climbing the lavender ladder’ in Hollywood,” Gore said.

***

“Of all that wife swapping and bed jumping, and all those marriages in the 1930s, there was at least one endurable one, and that was my father’s marriage to Kit,” Gore said. “Because of the wide difference in their ages, I thought their marriage was doomed from the beginning. But Kit was still around in 1969 when Eugene came down with cancer. She was a good caretaker right until the end, looking after Eugene with a stoic but sinking heart.”