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) (45 page)

“He panicked and ratted, poor bastard,” Hellman said.

Because he had betrayed and informed upon his friends, Arvin was spared a term in jail. In March of 1963, Truman heard that Arvin was dying of cancer and came to see his long ago lover.

As he was leaving the hospital after an hour-long visit, Arvin took Truman’s hand and said, “I’ve grown up at last.”

Ironically, because of all the advance publicity, including a spread in
Life
magazine, Truman Capote was already a celebrated novelist before Random House published his first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, in 1948. Publisher Bennett Cerf gave Truman an advance of $1,200.

Other Voices, Other Rooms
was released about a week after Gore Vidal’s more blatantly homosexual
The City and the Pillar
. Truman’s prose was remarkably different from Gore’s, which was more trimmed and succinct, in some ways evoking the style of Hemingway. In noteworthy contrast, Truman wrote in a style best defined as High Southern Rhetoric, each sentence poetically and painstakingly crafted as in: “
He listened content and untroubled to the remote singing-saw noise of night insects.”

Semi-autobiographic,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, tells the story of a precocious thirteen-year-old, Joel Knox, who is sent to live in a small hamlet in a backwater of Alabama called Skully’s Landing. Truman shared many of Joel’s characteristics. Both the character and the author who created him were more or less abandoned children who lived, or had lived, in big houses in rural Alabama. Both of them were delicate and pretty, ostracized because they were effeminate.

In
Other Voices
, Truman used Harper Lee as his role model for the tomboy Idabel. In turn, she used him as inspiration for her character of Dill in
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

Truman’s widely anticipated novel immediately hit
The New York Times
Bestseller list, selling 26,000 copies, which was four thousand short of what Gore’s
The City and the Pillar
sold.

Even though it was firmly perched on the list of America’s top-selling books, Truman was disappointed. “I wanted to sell more copies than Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind,”
he said.

Although Truman would not write overtly about homosexuality until three decades later, the other characters in
Other Voices
were gaudy, grotesque, and peripherally effeminate, especially Randolph, who once appears at a window dressed as a lovely lady from the court of Louis XVI.

Randolph mourns the loss of his great love, a Mexican boxer. He wears a seersucker kimono with butterfly sleeves and tooled leather sandals revealing painted toenails. His sunflower yellow curls fall over his forehead, and his hair is sprinkled with the scent of lemon cologne.

The book drew mixed reviews, the harshest attacks coming from New York City. Except for a few missiles, reviewers in the hinterlands were more praise worthy. Perhaps the sharpest criticism came from a magazine that defined
Other Voices, Other Rooms
as “the fairy version of
Huckleberry Finn.”

One Alabama newspaper tersely asserted, “Capote has produced a basket of rotting apples evoking so-called Southern Decadence, which, incidentally, does not exist except in the minds of Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner.”

The prestigious
Library Journal
warned libraries not to stock it.

Saturday Review
claimed that “Mr. Capote has concocted a witch’s brew which boils and boils to no avail.”

Critic Diana Trilling, in
The Nation
, defined Truman’s much-vaunted first novel as “an apology for homosexuality.”

Other Voices, Other Rooms
“made our flesh crawl” according to the editors and critics at the offices of
Time
magazine.

In marked contrast to their New York City competitors, the
Chicago Tribune
claimed “
Other Voices, Other Rooms
is a short novel which is as dazzling a phenomenon as has burst on the literary scene in the last ten years.”

The
Indianapolis Times
found it “a book of extraordinary literary virtuosity—the kind of thing that makes most other fictional writing seem pedestrian and uninspired.”

In
Harper’s Magazine
, Jacques Barzun stated that “Truman Capote is destined for the higher places of literary creation.”

Newsweek
found it “a deep murky well of Freudian symbols.”

Writing about it in
Partisan Review
, Elizabeth Hardwick intoned, “It’s a minor imitation of a talented minor writer, Carson McCullers.”

As a mature man, looking back years later, Truman wrote: “
Other Voices, Other Rooms
was an attempt to exorcise demons, an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.”

Chapter Fourteen

“The playwright” [Tennessee Williams]
and the actor
[Marlon Brando]
were destined to meet,” said heiress Peggy Guggenheim, a frequent summer visitor to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. “Tennessee was born in Mississippi in 1911 and Marlon was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1924. What an odd couple. But each artist needed the other. Tennessee supplied Marlon with the words; Marlon supplied the emotional intensity needed to bring those words into a memorable reality in the theater. Forget all those memoirs about them meeting at the time of the casting for
A Streetcar Named Desire
. They knew each other—rather intimately, I suspect—long before Marlon ever took a ride on that
Streetcar.”

Sidney Shaw, a homosexual lyricist linked to the Katherine Dunham dance troupe, was the first to turn Brando on to the glories of summertime P-town. Planning to spend a few weeks at the Cape, Brando arrived with only eighty dollars. “Bronze, blonde, and muscled, he was addicted to wearing jeans so tight you could tell that he was uncut,” claimed summer resident Jesse Steele, one of the first to meet Brando.

The son of a rich auto manufacturer in Detroit, the flamboyant Steele fancied himself a landscape painter. His gay parties were all the rage in 1945, attended not only by Guggenheim, but by her lover
du jour
, Jackson Pollock, and invariably by Tennessee himself. Steele, dressed in pink and lavender, introduced Tennessee to Brando.

“I first met Marlon his very first day in town,” Steele claimed. “I’m not exactly saying that he was in town hustling. Well, not exactly. But if you wanted to give him a free dinner—and a big one at that—free lodgings in your home, and free drinks, he wasn’t opposed to accepting gratuities. All of us had Marlon that summer—or rather, what he called ‘my noble tool.’ He was passed from one queen’s mouth to another like Southern fried chicken at the communal table of a boarding house.”

That summer, Brando was often seen escorting Dame May Whitty around town. In 1945, she was appearing at the Provincetown Playhouse, repeating her performance in Night Must Fall, in which she’d scored a hit both in London’s West End and on Broadway. Based on her co-starring with Robert Montgomery in the 1937 film version, she’d won an Oscar.

It was Dame May who introduced Brando to his benefactor for the summer, Clayton Snow, known as “the Queen of P-town.”

A jealous rival and gossipy competitor, Steele detested “Claytina,” his nickname for Snow, who he alleged “looked like Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934.”

Snow was a bartender at Central House, a battered dive next door to the playhouse. Dame May and Brando came every night after her performance for her “nip of gin.”

The actress arranged for a homeless Brando to move into Snow’s two-room cottage on a lane called Pumpkin Hollow. In the days that followed, Snow announced to half of P-town that, “I’ve had Marlon. In exchange for one rough-trade blow job a day, I’m giving him room and board. I told him that he’d have to hustle his own drinks and spending money from the other queens.”

Steele said that Brando didn’t confine his sexual charms exclusively to Snow. “He made out like a bandit with a lot of young women that summer, mostly actresses or dancers. He liked women with dark skin. Marlon looked upon sex as a giant smörgåsbord, and he wanted a taste from every platter.”