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) (2 page)
Authors: Darwin Porter,Danforth Prince
Where Prostitutes Were Named After Flowers
Gore’s Longtime Companion: Howard Austen
The Amorous Pursuits of Gore Vidal
Gore “dances” With Rudi in the Nudi
Gore Confronts the Very Difficult Bette Davis
Tennessee’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
“The Dirtiest American Motion Picture Ever Made”
Truman’s Hatchet Attack on Hollywood’s Bad Boy
Fidel Castro: Radical, Revolutionary, and Media star
Diana Barrymore: I Want To Be Mrs. Tennessee Williams
The Night of the Iguana (the play)
The Debate Still Rages: Tennessee and JFK?
The Night of the Iguana (the movie)
A Trio of Illustrious Drunks Going Boom!
Truman Capote’s Party of the Century
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In the aftermath of World War II, during the latter half of “The American Century,” when literacy was higher and where more people discussed contemporary books and theater than they do today, three men, each a homosexual, rose from obscurity to positions of spectacular literary fame.
Collectively, they changed America’s tastes in entertainment, expanded the boundaries of censorship, and redefined “The Golden Age of Postwar American Literature.”
They paid a high price for their success. Their ferociously competitive personalities and private lives—frequently referenced in the tabloids, in literary journals, and on TV—eventually became more widely reviewed than their writings.
There were many witnesses to the sometimes bitchy dynamics of this infamous trio. Their habit of pulling other famous people into their slugfests invariably drew explosive media coverage and rivers of gossip among insiders on Broadway, in Hollywood, and among the jaded
cognoscenti
worldwide.
Darwin Porter, the senior co-author of this anthology of scandal, began recording its information when—as the youthful Bureau Chief for
The Miami Herald
in Tennessee Williams’ home town of Key West—he began asking questions, taking notes, and dreaming of the day when his overview of the “Lavender Literati” could become public.
With the publication of this book, Blood Moon has made history’s first attempt to compile an overview of this brilliant trio into a coherent whole. The Triangle it illuminates is Pink, its references are literate and sexy, its gossip is captivating, and its meat is raw, juicy, and bloody, indeed. For more about how it was compiled, please refer to the Acknowledgments and Authors’ Bio sections at the back.
With this book, we proudly present, as a documentation of another, more literate era, The Pink Triangle, and through it, an insight into the awesome personal histories of Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal.
Happy reading, with best wishes
Danforth Prince
Chapter One
Young Provocateurs Invade Manhattan
Enfants Terribles
:
(Left to right)
:
Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal
, and
Truman Capote
It was right before Christmas
in December of 1945. The streets of Manhattan were filled with Santas, often with a pillow stuffed into their red suits. The Salvation Army was out in full force.
The El rumbled along Third Avenue, and double-decker buses, called “Queen Marys,” rolled along Fifth Avenue. The
Twentieth Century Limited
pulled into old Penn Station every night as movie stars stepped off to be greeted by photographers and reporters—Paulette Goddard, Gene Tierney, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Myrna Loy, and a newcomer, Ava Gardner.
Author John Cheever remembered “When the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartet from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”
In midtown, servicemen were having one final blast before returning home. That was the Christmas that New York, and the rest of America, celebrated the end of World War II. Surrender had come with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which led to the final collapse of the empire of Japan.
(Left to right)
Gore, Truman, & Tennessee The only known photo of “The Unholy Trio.”
That December in New York had been blustery, cold, and gray, but there was optimism in the air. For the first time since the war, shapely women were seen wearing nylons. Sugar was no longer rationed. New Yorkers were buying cars fresh from the factories of Detroit, and used car lots were glutted with models from the late 1930s.
On Broadway, drama was flourishing, including a wildly successful “memory play,”
The Glass Menagerie
. It had been written by Tennessee Williams.
His future friend, Gore Vidal, had already written two novels, and his third, and most controversial, was on the way. Truman Capote was still struggling with his first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, a book that would propel him into international fame and notoriety.
On the heterosexual front—“I was only a latent homosexual”—Norman Mailer was contemplating
The Naked and the Dead
, his 1948 novel about World War II. Violent clashes with the three gay writers lay in his future. In the meantime, Mailer proclaimed, “New York is the center of the universe, the only place for an artist to be. Of course, there is still Hollywood for those who want to be the next Lana Turner.”
“It’s a great time to be alive,” said Marlene Dietrich before boarding a train that would take her to Chicago and then westward to California. Once there, she hoped to pick up the pieces of an almost abandoned career. It had been interrupted by the war, when she had entertained Allied troops and had spoken out against Hitler and her Fatherland.
Just as Gore and Truman were enjoying the first taste of their oncoming fame, Tennessee, flush with Broadway success, found the New York brew too heady and was planning to flee. But, first, he paid a call on “the woman I wrote all my plays for her to star in.”
Before leaving to spend most of December in residence at Hotel Pontchar-train in New Orleans, Tennessee had stopped off for a “little bourbon and branchwater” at the home of Tallulah Bankhead. He was accompanied by a young marine he’d just picked up on the sidewalk, and whose name he could not remember.