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) (70 page)

From the beginning of their relationship, Gore soon realized he’d have to share Lang with others, including his Broadway co-star, Nancy Walker, the actress and comedienne who had made her Broadway debut in the 1941
Best Foot Forward
.

In the early autumn of 1948, after
Look Ma, I’m Dancin’!
closed on Broadway, Gore and Lang flew together to Bermuda, renting a cottage at low season rates. Their first days together were idyllic until one night, Lang informed Gore, “You don’t satisfy me sexually.”

After that pronouncement, Lang went out alone to the bars. According to Gore, “From what I gathered, he serviced half the British Navy. This hardly bothered me, since I was almost as promiscuous as he was.”

Before the end of the trip, Lang told Gore that even though he would continue to sleep in the same bed with him, there would be no more sex.

“He told me I could lie beside him but couldn’t have him,” Gore admitted. “One night I was so desperate for sex, I raped him. That really pissed him off.”

Even so, they lived together for one month, during October of 1948 at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Gore claimed that he was working on his fifth novel while pursuing four hours of ballet training a day.

At some point, they resumed their sexual relationship. Gore wrote that “Harold is just extraordinary when not running off to the dives of Harlem. He is really a sexual life force, giving it to both sexes. I’ve never seen anything like him and probably will never encounter the likes of him again.”

Lang introduced Gore to his friend, Ethel Merman, the Broadway musical comedy star.

One night in her loud and stentorian voice, she confessed to him, “I fuck Judy Garland whenever I get a chance, and sometimes I shop for dresses for my best pal, J. Edgar Hoover. I can’t wait to read
The City and the Pillar
. I don’t read many books, but I love books about homos!”

Gore feared that Lang’s addictive sex in public places would destroy his career, and urged him to arrange sessions with a therapist, Dr. Jules Nydes. Gore knew that during the day, Lang was having sex in the toilets of the New York City subway system. Lang began consulting with Nydes, but nothing seemed to help. Even when Lang was performing on Broadway in
Pal Joey
(1952), he was arrested three times by the police for sex in a public men’s toilet. On at least two of those occasions, he was on his way to one of his performances, as the star, in a matinee.

At the urging of Anaïs Nin, Gore, too, had begun sessions with a therapist. But the psychologist ultimately dismissed Gore, telling him, “You think your shit doesn’t stink.”

Years later, when Leonard Bernstein visited Gore at his home in Ravello, the composer was turning sixty-nine and filled with memories. He recalled Jerome Robbins, John Kriza, and Harold Lang dancing together in a long-ago performance of
Fancy Free. “
I had all three of these sailors,” Bernstein confessed to Gore. “Of them all, I would say that Harold’s ass was one of the seven—or whatever number it is—wonders of our time.”

During the remainder of the 1940s and into the early 50s, Gore continued to be one of the most devoted of Manhattan’s balletomanes. He wrote to a friend: “I am submerged in the dance world.”

At a bar patronized by dancers, Gore met John Kriza, who was famous for having performed in the Ballet Theater’s production of Aaron Copland’s
Billy the Kid
as choreographed by Eugene Loring.

Born in Illinois, the scion of blue collar Czech immigrants, Kriza was associated with the American Ballet Theater from 1940 to 1966. He originated roles in ballets choreographed by George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Léonide Mas-sine, Jerome Robbins, and Eugene Loring. In time, he would dance for John F. Kennedy at the White House and for Nikita Khrushchev in the Kremlin.

After meeting Kriza at a bar, Gore told friends such as Anaïs Nin, “I now have a new lover.”

“Johnny is about the sexiest thing that ever wore a pair of tights,” Gore told Tennessee and other friends, including the designer and television ad executive, Stanley Mills Haggart.

Sometimes, Gore attended the ballet three times a week as he became more intensely involved with the ruggedly handsome Kriza, who had been one of the sailors in Jerome Robbins’
Fancy Free
in 1944.

Soon, Kriza and Gore were hanging out with some of the biggest names in the ballet world, including Antony Tudor, the English ballet choreographer, teacher, and dancer, who in 1938 had founded the London Ballet with, among others, his future lifetime lover, Hugh Laing. The legacy of Tudor’s “psychological ballets” live on today. Mikhail Baryshnikov said, “We do Tudor’s ballets because we must. Tudor’s work is our conscience.”

After seeing Tudor’s ballet,
Pillar of Fire
, Gore defined him as “the missing link between Sergei Diaghilev and Martha Graham.”

Kriza and Gore often dined with Jerome Robbins and were frequently seen with him when he was creating the dance sequences in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway production of
The King and I
(1951). One night, Robbins showed up with his lover, Montgomery Clift. Sometimes Gore’s friend, Ethel Merman, would join them. Robbins would work with Merman on
Call Me Madam
(1950) and on
Gypsy
(1959).

Gore’s romance with Kriza did not develop into a grand passion, although they continued to have sex together for a number of years. Kriza’s ballet company toured the United States. Bernstein said, “Johnny had at least three boyfriends in every major city, often young husbands. He had a beautiful body and was worshipped by dozens of men, and attracted equal numbers of women, too. A cult formed around him. He was known for ‘great sex.’”

In his memoirs, Gore wrote: “Many men and women loved Johnny, who responded wholeheartedly in an absent-minded way. He had a large car that he called ‘Florestan,’ and together we drove down the east coast of Florida, receiving the homage of the balletomanes in the beachside houses. Eventually, he married another dancer and drank too much.”

Kriza drowned in 1975 while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico near Naples, Florida.

After memories of John Kriza and Harold Lang had faded into the long ago, another famous, charismatic dancer came into Gore’s life. He had fled as a political exile from Russia to the West.

Rudolf Nureyev.

Chapter Twenty

In 1958, Gore encountered the Beat poet
, Allen Ginsberg. Since 1956, the native of Newark, New Jersey, had been both celebrated and denounced for his epic poem,
Howl
, which depicted heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every state in the Union.

Howl
became even more notorious when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, at the conclusion of which Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that Ginsberg’s epic was not obscene, adding, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid euphemisms?”

Gore admired Ginsberg for “his ballsy stands.” Their discussion predictably turned to their mutual relationship with Jack Kerouac, whose 1957 publication of
On the Road
had also made him a celebrated figure hailed as “The King of the Beats.” The novel was the postwar bible of the Beat Generation, its characters traveling across America, living their off-beat lives against a backdrop of heavy sex and heavy drugs interspersed with hot jazz and controversial poetry.

“When you first met Jack, he must have seemed like a dumb French-Canadian football jock to you,” Ginsberg said to Gore.

Gore said that he had met Kerouac in 1949 when both of them were wearing formal dress in the Club Circle at the Metropolitan Opera House in Manhattan. As Gore remembered it, Kerouac was with a publisher, whom he was seducing, hoping to get his work into print. “I was with a friend of that same publisher.
[Although Gore refused to identify that person in his memoirs, he described the publisher like this: “He was a brilliant alcoholic writer with a fortune he was systemically losing. He told me that he’d paid for the sexual services of Kerouac, who was making a living hustling in New York in the late 1940s.”]