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) (5 page)

Both Gore and Truman surveyed what they called “a Greek God.”

“Adonis” accepted their request to enter. Both of the gay men came into the cubicle and fastened the latch on the door behind them.

Gore later told Stanley Haggart, his friend, what happened. “Truman and I devoured this handsome bit of man-flesh. But it led to our first major feud. I did a lot of the work myself, and we took turns sharing the riches. But at the last minute, Truman popped down on him and drained him dry to the last drop, although it rightfully belonged to me.”

After their communal sex, the young man was invited out to dinner at a restaurant in Greenwich Village.

He told Gore and Truman that he was an actor named Frank McCowan, and that he’d appeared in five movies—“Just small parts.” He claimed that Alan Ladd had discovered him, and he bragged that Ladd would be arriving in New York to spend four days in the city with him.

“The implication was clear that Ladd and he were lovers,” Gore claimed.

After Frank and Gore said goodnight to Truman, Gore learned that his newly minted friend had less than fifty dollars to live on for four nights. That’s why he was sleeping at the Everard, because it had the cheapest bed in town. Until Ladd flew in, four days hence, Gore invited Frank to live with him at his apartment.

“I’ll stay with you if you’ll give me all the sex I demand,” Frank said.

Gore gleefully agreed to those terms.

As he told Stanley, “The next morning, I got to enjoy the taste treat that Truman had greedily swallowed for himself.”

During the next four days, Gore and Frank bonded and would become longtime friends, seeing each other infrequently during Gore’s trips to Hollywood.

He learned a lot about Frank during their time together in Manhattan. When he was only thirteen, he’d stolen a revolver and was later arrested with it. A judge sentenced him to the California Youth Authority’s Preston School of Industry Reformatory at Ione, California.

A very inventive young teenager, he plotted his escape and pulled it off one night when there was a delay in the change of guards. He went on a rampage, robbing three jewelry stores before making his escape in a stolen Ford. He drove the car north toward Oregon, where he was arrested.

This spree involved crossing a state line, which elevated the caper to a federal offense. Frank was eventually recaptured and sentenced to three years in the penitentiary at Springfield, Missouri.

When he finished his sentence there, he was transferred to San Quentin on other charges that had been lodged against him during his rampage. He would be an inmate at San Quentin until he was paroled shortly before his twenty-first birthday.

He told Gore that in 1943, he’d gone horseback riding in the Hollywood Hills. There, he met Alan Ladd, who was just becoming famous as a movie star, after having appeared as the laconic gunman in
This Gun for Hire
(1942), co-starring with Veronica Lake. A closeted homosexual, Ladd was married to his agent at the time, Susan Carol Ladd.

The next time Gore heard of Frank, he’d changed his name to Rory Calhoun, and was seen escorting Lana Turner to a premiere. Frank (Rory) had been cast in movies which included
That Hagen Girl (1947)
alongside Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan.

A bisexual, Rory would also become known for seducing his leading ladies, appearing in two movies with Marilyn Monroe,
How to Marry a Millionaire
and
River of No Return
.

By 1948, he’d married Lita Baron, and had become the father of three daughters. When she sued him for divorce in 1970, she named Betty Grable and Susan Hayward as two of 79 women with whom her husband had engaged in adulterous relationships.

At a Hollywood party after his divorce, Gore met up with Calhoun once again. Speaking of his divorce, he confided, “Heck, Lita didn’t even include half of them. For the sake of my masculine image, I’m glad she didn’t namemy all time favorite squeeze, Guy Madison.”

At that point in his life, Calhoun had delivered his most famous line: “The trouble with Hollywood is that there aren’t enough good cocksuckers.”

Anaïs Nin, in
Volume Four
(1944-47) of her famous diary, claimed that “Gore has a prejudice against Negroes.” In later years, the very liberal author would vehemently deny such an accusation.

In a memoir, he did admit that when he was growing up, his contact with African Americans was limited to servants. “The Gores were Reconstruction Southerners, and they got on well with our dusky cousinage in master-servant relationships, but they did not believe in equality.”

As the decades went by, Gore’s assertions became more indiscreet and ironic. “Half the mulattoes in Mississippi are related to the Gore family,” which included, of course, Al Gore, the former Vice President.

Anaïs had told Stanley Haggart that both Gore and Truman had been shocked at her party when she’d introduced them to two guests she indentified in her diary as “Rita, a Negro girl, and Don, a Negro guitar player.”

This surprised Stanley, who decided that both of these young writers needed greater exposure to the art world in New York. Stanley enjoyed friendships with many of the leading black artists of the late 1940s and 50s, especially dancers and singers. He would later be the art director for projects that featured Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, and Alvin Ailey.

He decided to invite both Gore and Truman to his multiracial parties and to a gala where elegantly dressed blacks and whites mingled as equals.

Stanley’s parties in New York rivaled those of Anaïs Nin in bringing key players in the arts world together. He invited Gore and Truman to a party he was giving for Martha Graham, the dancer and choreographer.

At that party, Gore was introduced to a rising young novelist, James Baldwin, who was African American.

Truman and Gore also met the rather flamboyant and eccentric Richard Bruce Nugent, a writer, painter, and key figure in the “Harlem renaissance.” In 1926, he’d published “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” a short story that was the first publication by an African American to openly depict homosexuality.

Nugent had once lived in Harlem in an apartment complex nicknamed “Niggerati Manor,” in which he’d decorated the walls with murals depicting homoerotic scenes.

Stanley also introduced Gore and Truman to Langston Hughes, an early innovator of the then-new literary art form known as jazz poetry. A poet, dramatist, and novelist, he was the leader of the Harlem Renaissance, an era which flourished
[his words]
“when the Negro was in vogue.”

Hughes was rather closeted, but exhibited a strong sexual attraction to his fellow black men, including writing beautiful poems to a male lover.

Gore and Truman also met Zora Neale Hurston, an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author best known for her novel, published in 1937,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
. Like Truman, she had grown up in Alabama.

Hurston told Truman that she was writing a novel
[Seraph on the Suwanee, eventually published in 1948]
about “white trash women.”

Sadly, Truman watched her decline into obscurity. In 1948, she was accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy. Although the case was dismissed and viewed as a false accusation, it seriously damaged her reputation. She ended up broke and in ill health, dying in a welfare home. The year of her death (1960) she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Stanley also took Gore and Truman to the annual black tie drag ball, an event inaugurated in the 1920s by Phil Black, Harlem’s most famous female impersonator. Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, and Eartha Kitt were among the famous entertainers who’d attended this annual event in the past.

The setting was the dazzling Savoy Ballroom, with its crystal chandeliers and elegant marble staircase. The highlight of the event was when fashionably dressed drag artists vied for the title of “Queen of the Ball.”

At the ball, Stanley’s longtime friend, Phil Black, wearing a pink satin gown, came up to him and executed a pirouette. In reference to the gown, he said, “I made it myself,
dahling
.”

Stanley introduced him to Gore and to Truman. Black ignored Truman, turning his full attention to Gore. “You’re cute, honey,” Black said, reaching out to fondle Gore’s crotch.

Gore withdrew in horror, which Truman found “oh, so amusing.”

When Black departed, Gore turned to Stanley, saying, “This queen is outrageous. No one has ever done that to me before.”

Ordering champagne, Stanley sat with Gore and Truman watching the excitement reflected on their faces. The audience was mesmerizing, even to the jaded eye. Many men wore tuxedos, escorting as their dates other men clad in gowns and high heels. “The patrons were multiracial and multisexual,” Stanley said.

What caught the attention of both Gore and Truman was when Stanley introduced them to a stage performer known only as “Mandingo.”

He had originated in Martinique, and was the offspring of a Creole woman and a Frenchman from Toulouse who had settled on that island into a life as a planter.

Mandingo never liked to be called a Negro or referred to as black, preferring to identify his complexion as
“café au lait.”
He showed up at the ball wearing a sequined jockstrap. A performer at private parties and at exhibitions he was known for the size of his penis, which was nine inches when flaccid, rising to 13½ inches when erect. He also hustled on the side, renting his body to both straight women and homosexual men.

By the second bottle of champagne, Stanley became more daring, deciding that the time had come for Gore and Truman to cross the color line sexually. He proposed to Gore and Truman that he could arrange separate “dates” for them to be entertained by Mandingo. At first, they resisted, but curiosity and daring eventually won out. As the evening progressed, they became more relaxed.

“It was a big step for both of them to consider. It defied everything they’d been taught as teenagers,” Stanley said. “Not only miscegenation, but homosexual miscegenation, which was illegal in every state of the union.”

During the coming weeks, and on separate occasions, both Gore and Truman engaged in sexual interludes with Mandingo, who charged each of them $50 for his services.

Later, in the afterglow of seduction, Gore confided to Stanley, “For once, and perhaps never again, I completely lowered my inhibition. I learned what animal passion really means. I want to cage that beast within myself and never let him out again.”