Whore Stories (15 page)

Well, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first, say the experts. Here’s the description from
Hollywood Babylon
that describes what happens when you eat too many enchiladas then try to kill yourself:

The bed was empty. The aroma of scented candles, the fragrance of tuberoses almost, but not quite masked a stench recalling that left by Skid-Row derelicts. Juanita traced the vomit trail from the bed, following the spotty track over to the orchid-tiled bathroom. There she found her mistress, Senorita Velez, head jammed down in the toilet bowl, drowned.

To paraphrase the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, “The best-laid schemes of mice and men [also starlets]/ Often go awry,
And leave us nought but grief and pain,
For promis’d joy!” That’s true shit.

DENHAM FOUTS

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Socialite

CLAIM TO FAME:
Muse to the likes of Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, among others

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Worldwide, indeed

Truman Capote once fawned, “If [Denham] Fouts had slept with Hitler, as Hitler wished, he could have saved the world from the Second World War.” Now that’s high praise, even if it does come from the author of
In Cold Blood
during his quasi-coma-toasted-on-codeine phase. Unfortunately, there’s no documented proof that the Führer made a play for Denham’s drawers, but nobody pursued good gossip like Capote.

Denham Fouts was born. From there, the details get murky. One story asserts that at age sixteen he was liberated from behind the counter of his father’s Jacksonville, Florida, bakery and shuffled off to Berlin by a German baron, perfume magnate, and cruller aficionado. After a Christ-like ellipsis in the early years of Mr. Fouts’s biography, he emerges more or less fully grown in the 1920s. At this point we find him shagging a Greek shipping tycoon, robbing him, landing in jail, and then being rescued from the pokey by Evan Morgan, aka Lord Tredegar, a Welsh poet who took a shine to Fouts. And, even though Lord Tredegar provided more than enough cold hard cash for the young gigolo (not to mention legendary parties that included, among other bewildering creatures: a baboon, Aleister Crowley, a bear, H. G. Wells, and a parrot trained to fly out of the nobleman’s britches), Fouts soon ditched the penny-ante entertainments of British royalty for another, decidedly more influential, Greek luminary, the future king, Prince Paul. With World War II looming and Prince Paul presumably vexed about the Greek Orthodox Church’s stance on homosexuality, Fouts headed back across the pond for an American tour. He came armed with Picasso’s
Girl Reading
under his arm and “severance pay” from one Peter Watson, a satisfied customer and margarine mogul.

The word
tapette
in French typically refers to a fly-swatter. However, in colloquial usage,
tapette
is often used to refer to a person who is flamboyant, in particular, a homosexual male who publicizes his sexual orientation ostentatiously, perhaps even taking the metaphor to its inevitable conclusion: swatting meddlesome squares who insist on buzzing around asking for fashion tips, a squirt of Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male, and/or wine recommendations (or garden-variety assholes that perpetuate gay stereotypes about fashion, cologne, and/or wine recommendations).

Stateside, Fouts came face-to-face—and to other, less conventional geometries—with the A-list of American literati: Gore Vidal, W. Somerset Maugham, Truman Capote, and Paul Bowles, among other luminaries. In his role as artistic muse, Fouts again played the part to perfection, regaling his audiences with ribald tales from his past and looking at them with “eyes set on different levels, as in a Picasso painting” or like “Dorian Gray emerging from the tomb” in the words of part-time lover and British novelist Christopher Isherwood, who went on to add that Fouts was “the most expensive male prostitute in the world,” and “the last of the professional
tapettes
.” Fouts even found time to study medicine at UCLA for a brief period, but he eventually tired of America and travelled to Paris, where he could be found shooting flaming arrows out of his apartment window. He was a skilled archer, and it is always advantageous for a man of the evening to have a side gig if he’s going to walk the Champs-Élysées.

Isherwood, Capote, Vidal, Bowles, and others lionized Fouts as a lover and an Adonis, but his early thirties were marked by drug abuse and more sinister nighttime adventures. Illustrator and painter Bernard Perlin remembers Fouts lying in an opiate-induced stupor, “in bed like a corpse, sheet to his chin, a cigarette between his lips turning to ash. His lover would remove the cigarette just before it burned his lips. At night Fouts took out his cigar box of drugs, injected himself and . . . came to sparkling life for the evening.” In 1948, after years of hard living, Fouts expired in Rome of congenital heart failure, a condition that was surely exacerbated by ingesting enough opium along the way to dope up most of Western Europe. A sour endnote for a savory stud: Denham Fouts lives brilliantly in the great literature of his time, while his real life was a fog of sex, drugs, and a little archery.

SCOTTY BOWERS

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Gas station attendant; prostitution ring leader

CLAIM TO FAME:
Lover of Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, among others

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Hollywood

If you pictured the celebrated actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, as a bunch of randy whoremongers, you’d be right. The question is: Who had the talent, the moves, and the mojo to take on Hollywood’s most famous actor/fornicators? The answer: World War II Marine GI, bartender, gas station attendant, and whore to the stars Scotty Bowers.

Scotty Bowers was born and raised on his family’s farm in Illinois. He moved to Chicago, where he made a modest living turning tricks, until duty called and the young Bowers shipped off to Iwo Jima as a paratrooper. By this time he was a hardened, streetwise, battle-tested kid, but there was still nothing to suggest that Scotty would someday run a prostitution ring that catered to the Tinseltown elite out of a Richfield gas station at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Van Ness, but there rarely is. In the end, kids just grow up to be themselves.

After the war, Scotty went to California, Hollywood specifically, where he found work at the service station and ran a brisk side business setting up newly returned GIs with older men. Word of this new enterprise quickly spread throughout the city, where Bowers forged a “friendship” with heartthrob Tyrone Power and a host of other stars, eventually morphing into the most celebrated pimp/prostitute in a town pulsing with pimp/prostitutes. Scotty’s clients and sexual partners allegedly incorporated much of the A list, including: Edith Piaf, Spencer Tracy, Vivien Leigh, Cary Grant, Edward VIII, Tennessee Williams, Charles Laughton, Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Errol Flynn, Noël Coward, Mae West, James Dean, Rock Hudson, and J. Edgar Hoover, and that’s just the appeteaser.

In his tell-all book,
Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars
, Bowers’ gives a firsthand, warts-and-all account of screen idol screwballs and their sordid sex lives. On Katharine Hepburn, he noted that “she had skin like a dead crocodile,” and as for James Dean, he was “a fucking little prick.” Ouch. Such is the danger of pissing off your prostitute.

Speaking of crocodiles, sex, and Katharine Hepburn, it’s probably a good idea to turn to birth control for a moment. We’ve all had scares with torn Trojans, diced diaphragms, and misplayed pull-and-prays, but in ancient Egypt, the science of birth control was still stuck in the Dark Ages, and those hadn’t even happened yet. If you were a female prostitute (or anybody trying not to get pregnant) in Ancient Egypt, the preferred method of contraception was to insert crocodile excrement into your vagina. Nope. That’s it. You just went and found an alligator, encouraged it to poop in your hand, and then sought out a private place to make the necessary application. I’m all for safe sex, but I think if it were up to me, I’d just take my chances with the lunar cycle.

Before gay liberation, before this new wave of STDs started withering our genitals and before the paparazzi lurked around every corner ready to Tweet the grade of gasoline you chose, if you wanted sex and you wanted discretion, you found yourself low on fuel near the Richfield station. Now pushing ninety, Scotty still lives in Los Angeles with his wife, who must be frustrated knowing that no matter what, the best-case scenario is that she’s got the second-best stories at the party.

QUENTIN CRISP

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Writer; raconteur

CLAIM TO FAME:
“The Naked Civil Servant”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Old Compton Street, London

Before we get rolling, I’d like to introduce you to one of the best little monologues on masturbation ever.

As soon as I was old enough to wash myself, I had begun the habit of staying in the bath until my body passed from lobster-pink to scum-gray. While lying in one of these semi-submerged trances, in a boarding house in Queen’s Gate to which my parents moved temporarily, I discovered the only fact of life that I have ever fully understood. Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who, before anything has reared its ugly head, have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies. . . . Vice is its own reward.

The source of the passage is the controversial, bestselling memoir,
The Naked Civil Servant,
by English eccentric and former rent-boy, Quentin Crisp. But let’s be clear about this; Quentin Crisp was more than an intellectual pioneer in the philosophy of self-flagellation. The man was as comfortable with the trick-towel as he was with the spankerchief.

Born Denis Pratt in 1908 to “middle-class, middle-brow, middling” parents in Sutton, Surrey, our young hero was sent to school, or what he described as “a cross between a monastery and a prison” in Derbyshire where he was understandably bullied for cross-dressing. Pratt soon left school and settled in London, where he got rid of his Victorian birthright and adopted the truly fabulous sobriquet, “Quentin Crisp.”

An easily recognizable figure in London’s queer scene, Crisp would often find himself beat up, ridiculed, reviled, and ravaged—and that was on the slow nights. However, some people can’t be faded—not at their core—and that was Quentin.
The Naked Civil Servant
was published in 1968, and in addition to ruminations about how he might do in his enemies, he also includes stories about chicken hawking, nude modeling, book designing, and good old-fashioned English manners.

One particularly charming yarn involves Crisp’s adventures during the London Blitz of 1941. On one notable night during the German attack, he sprang into action for God, for country, and for men in uniform everywhere. He hurriedly applied the last of his makeup, left his flat, bought five pounds of henna, and then sashayed about the bombed-out streets of London in the dark, picking up American G.I.s. While never investigated for war profiteering, the fact that the self-proclaimed “Stately Homo of England” went out trolling for doggers and ducats during a Luftwaffe strafing is enough for us to let it slide. As you might imagine, however, the good citizens of Great Britain were scandalized by his behavior, but then everything from flatulence to wet cement seems to scandalize the average Brit.

By the time Crisp made his move to New York in 1981, most of his tranny antics seemed pretty ho-hum, but his quill, scroll, and most of all his voice really made the old rent-boy resonate here in the Colonies. A champion for gay rights, a unique presence in a knee-jerk, fall-into-rank world, and a sure bet for a sound-bite until his death in 1999 at the age of ninety, Quentin Crisp was a gentleman, a scholar, and a sexpot for the ages.

REGINA SAVITSKAYA

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Master’s candidate at Moscow State; Bolshoi ballerina

CLAIM TO FAME:
Devotchka

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Moscow

With surprising candor for a Soviet, Yuri Brokhin explored the dark underbelly of sex and crime in Moscow in his 1975 exposé,
Hustling on Gorky Street.
During the Cold War paranoia many Americans thought all Russians were busily making uranium isotopes in their bathtubs as part of a plan to blow us back to the Stone Age. We imagined that any Soviet not so engaged would be carted off by the KGB and relieved of his eyelids.

According to Brokhin, however, the Soviets were more like us than we thought; murders, the mafia, drugs, prostitution, and corruption were all rampant for the Commies, too. If we had known, we could have been singing a Cold War “Cumbayá,” but we didn’t. It would take another decade and a half before the Iron Curtain rose dramatically, and a parade of Frederick’s of Hollywood models would march toward Moscow like lemmings in lingerie.

“He that has neither fools, whores nor beggars among his kindred, is the son of a thunder-gust.”