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) (60 page)
Authors: Darwin Porter,Danforth Prince
The world famous boxer,
Jack Dempsey
, became Lillie Mae’s first high-profile seduction, with many more to follow.
In his early days, the well-hung boxer posed for frontal nudes. After he became celebrated, his nude photograph became one of the hottest selling items in underground outlets for thousands of homosexual fans who viewed his nude frontals as valued collectors’ items.
Back in Alabama, Lillie Mae got into trouble with the law. Arch had asked her to drive his car across the state line to the hotel where he was staying in Atlanta, Georgia. On the way back to Alabama, she was stopped for speeding by a patrolman. He became suspicious and forced her to open the trunk of her car, where he found a large stash of “bootleg hootch.”
She protested that her husband had placed the moonshine there without her knowledge. She ended up spending two nights in jail—presumably cursing the day she ever met her husband—until she was rescued by the Faulk family, who managed to get the charges against her dropped.
After that, making her domestic matters worse, she learned that Arch had been arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was facing charges of extortion and writing bad checks.
Lillie Mae fled from Alabama to Manhattan, where she found a job as a waitress in a restaurant on Lower Broadway. As what was defined at the time as a temporary, interim solution, she stashed young Truman at the Faulk homestead, which was owned by Jennie Faulk, her cousin, and populated by Jenn’s two eccentric, middle-aged sisters and a reclusive older brother. It was within this bizarre household that Truman passed part of his adolescence.
In time, he would define the Faulks as the inspiration for characters in his first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
.
In New York, Lillie Mae, deciding that her name “too hillbilly,” changed it to the more sophisticated “Nina.” Even though he was married, and she was, too, she resumed her affair with Joseph Capote. During the next few years, she had at least three abortions, including one in Brooklyn that nearly killed her.
Her divorce from Arch was legally finalized on November 9, 1931. On March 24, 1932, after Joseph’s own divorce was granted, he married Nina.
In the first week of September of that year, Nina sent for Truman to come and live with her new husband in their Brooklyn apartment. Unexpectedly, Truman bonded with his new stepfather. The tow-headed youngster had a high-pitched voice, “girlish manners, and an effeminate walk.”
Nina complained constantly that “My son is a fairy,” but Joseph assured her it would be all right. “In Cuba, we call such boys
mariposas,”
he said. “But I like the kid.”
He liked Truman so much, he adopted him, changing his name to Truman García Capote. Arch was horrified to learn about his former wife’s new husband, calling Joseph “a Dago New Yorker,” and “A Cuban, the lowest form of a white person.”
In New York, beginning at the age of eleven, Truman began to write fiction. When other kids were doing their homework, he was spending three hours every afternoon writing.
In 1935, Truman attended the exclusive Trinity School in New York, a private preparatory school which had been founded in 1709. It was here that he had his first sexual experience. His English teacher had read his short stories and thought he was talented.
He began to walk him home from school. One day, he invited him to attend the Olympia Theatre on Upper Broadway to see a Clark Gable movie. The teacher led him to the back row. In the darkened theater, he began to fondle Truman and asked him to masturbate him. These secret rendezvous continued throughout the remainder of Truman’s stay at Trinity. He later said, “I always had a marked homosexual preference, and I never had any guilt about it.”
At Trinity, Truman joined the “Gay Blades,” an ice-skating group on the city’s West Side. He also appeared, cross-dressed, in a school theatrical, playing Evangeline St. Clare (the saintly and sometimes saccharine “Little Eva”) in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.
Nina was becoming increasingly alarmed that her son was “growing up to be a homosexual.” In an attempt “to make a man out of him,” she sent him to St. John’s Military Academy at Ossining, New York.
Truman
was eighteen when he posed for this photograph during his enrollment as a student at St. John’s Military Academy.
“From Day One, I knew I would never become a soldier,” he said. “But my life among Army wannabees had its advantages. It was at night in our dormitory that I learned about dicks, and I realized that they come in all shapes and sizes. These young men at the academy were at their sexual peak, and, for the most part, their only sexual relief came when I crawled between the sheets with them.”
“St. John’s didn’t make a man out of me, but I
made
half of its young men,” Truman jokingly recalled later in life. “During the day, the boys made fun of my mannerisms. But at night, my services were in great demand. I was like a pretty young boy sent to prison. All of the boys wanted their chance at me, and they got it night after night. I was in Heaven. I practically seduced every boy in my dormitory and was very popular. Sometimes, they rewarded me with candy bars or some special gift. A few of them, such as the captain of the football team, actually developed a crush on me.”
Back in Brooklyn, the Capotes (Joe and Nina) secretly began to court other lovers, as they seemed to have grown tired of each other. Joseph was gone for days at a time, pursuing women in Manhattan, and Nina developed a string of paramours. Hypocritically, she attacked Joseph for his philandering despite her many infidelities. Once, after confronting him for one of his affairs, she assaulted his testicles with her long fingernails until he bled. He was rushed to the hospital.
“When I came home, I was witness to several of her affairs,” Truman claimed.
Nina remained slim, chic, stylish, and still beautiful, though, as the years went by, she spent more and more time maintaining her looks in the beauty parlor.
Songwriter Michael Brown remembered her. “There was something almost hysterical in her fluttering, in her incessant flow of words, in her coquettish behavior. There were two or three attempts at suicide as well, or so I heard.”
In 1939, Joseph moved his family to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Truman was enrolled in Greenwich (Public) High School. There, he wrote for the school journal,
The Green Witch
.
Phoebe Pierce Vreeland became Truman’s best friend at high school. She later claimed that when Truman turned fifteen, he proposed marriage to her, claiming, “We can be buddies forever.”
She was also introduced to Nina. “They were a strange pair and looked so much alike—the same coloring, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same mouth, the same body structure. Rather slim upper body, heavy hips and heavy legs.”
“She was the first Southern woman I had ever met, and she scared me. Because she was not like a mother, at least not any mother I had met. She was a belle, extremely attractive and very attractive sexually. She was always beautifully dressed and had great style.”
“When it came to Truman, she was always ricocheting—lovely at one point, terrible the next. In front of people, she warned him, ‘
You gonna wind up in the guttah
.’”
After three boring years in Greenwich, Joseph and Nina moved to a large apartment on 1060 Park Avenue in Manhattan. Truman had not yet graduated from Greenwich High School. Consequently, he enrolled in the Franklin School, a private school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, from which he graduated in 1943. He never went to college.
It was during this period on Park Avenue, before her beauty faded, that Nina entered into her most high-profile romances.
Andreas Brown, the literary archivist, said, “Nina was very ambitious about being accepted into society. She wanted to be a member of café society, as it was called in those days. She pursued it with determination. She entertained, she spent money, and she lived well.”
Her parties grew in prestige. Her invitations were eagerly sought by authors, playwrights, movie stars, and directors. “My mother became a social gadfly,” Truman recalled. “Since Joseph was often gone pursuing whatever, she had a free range. Many famous actors were invited to stay over in her bedroom during Joseph’s absence. She was ‘auditioning’ already established stars, including two or three female conquests.”
Truman later told Carson McCullers, Tennessee, and others of his friends that Nina in the 1930s managed to seduce some of the leading male movie stars of that era, names not familiar to most movie-goers today, except those who watch Turner Movie Classics on television. For years, Truman bragged about Nina’s seductive powers until people began to ask him, “And just who were those guys?”
Her conquests included Burgess Meredith, Warren William, Richard Barthelmess, and Lee Tracy, plus lesbian attachments to both Beatrice Lillie and Marlene Dietrich.
Designated as one of the most accomplished actors of the 20
th
Century, Burgess Meredith, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, was married to Margaret Perry when he became involved with Nina. Co-incidental to his affair with Nina, he was also sleeping with Tallulah Bankhead. By 1944, he would marry screen goddess Paulette Goddard, after the dissolution of her marriage to Charlie Chaplin.
In 1935, Nina was invited to a cast party after watching Meredith perform with Katharine (“Kit”) Cornell in the Broadway revival of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
.
Truman’s Mommie Dearest;
Things They Talked About in Hollywood
(aka; Disadvantages of Living With a Precocious Child)
The film careers of Nina Capote’s celebrity paramours spanned Hollywood’s evolution from the Silents (as symbolized by
Richard Barthelmess
;
left)
to
Warren William
(center)
, known for his pre-Code drawing room dramas; to
Burgess Meredith
(right)
, shown as a
film noir
hero.
Truman evaluated each of his mother’s lovers:
RICHARD BARTHELMESS: “In the silent era, Barthelmess represented what was considered the epitome of Victorian male beauty, something suspended between the glowing images of pre-Raphaelitism and the animation of moving pictures. Much of what he did on the screen was pure corn, but he invested every role with a combination of male strength and sensitivity.”
WARREN WILLIAM: Warren William, in Truman’s view, was an actor who “exemplified the 1930s. With the arrival of World War II, a different type of leading man was called for--Van Johnson, Alan Ladd—two fags, incidentally. In his heyday, no one could play a suave rotter like Warren. There was a deep, sophisticated tone to his voice. He was hardly a hero on the screen, playing roles such as a caddish womanizer or a misogynistic banker with a habit of bedding his secretaries. I saw him emerging from the shower one day. I never did a survey, but I think he was the best hung of Nina’s lovers. if her screams were any indication. She told me, ‘Going to bed with Warren is like taking it from a bull.’”
BURGESS MEREDITH: “Paulette Goddard, Tallulah Bankhead, and my dear Mom were welcome to Burgess Meredith,” Truman claimed. “He did nothing for me. But I respected his talent and found him amusing. I encountered him decades later and asked him to tell me three or four experences he had had that might come as a surprise to me. He willingly obliged.”
“I once got a blow-job from Cole Porter,” Meredith claimed. ”In 1934, I bedded Amelia Earhart when she appeared with me on the ‘Red Davis Radio Show.’ When Charles Laughton and I did
The Man on the Eiffel Tower
, he asked me to shit for him so he could spread it on a sandwich. When I made
Rocky
with Sylvester Stallone, I found out he has a small dick. When I was married to Paulette Goddard, she complained to me that I was good for only one blast-off per night, whereas Charlie Chaplin could go for four or five times a night, and, once, she said, within a twenty-four hour period, he went nine rounds!”