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) (104 page)

“I’d like to live to see the day when Hollywood has advanced to the point that it will make a movie based on
The City and the Pillar,”
Newman told Gore.

“I doubt if that day will ever come,” Austen said. “Not in my lifetime.”

When Woodward read
Judgment of Paris
she sent Gore a telegram, as he was out of town. It read, “AT YOUR FEET ARTISTWISE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL MIND BETWEEN THOSE FLAPPING EARS.”

[Gore’s
Judgment of Paris,
a witty odyssey of self-discovery, published in 1952, prompted John Aldridge at
The New York Times
to describe Gore as “easily the most precocious, versatile and prolific member of the newest generation of novelists now under 30.”]

It was at the Château Marmont that Newman and Gore plotted to convince Warner Brothers to film a movie version of
Billy the Kid
, the role Paul had originally played on TV. It was there that Gore agreed to turn his teleplay into a full script ready for the cameras.

Based to some degree on the quartet’s
[Woodward, Newman, and Gore, with Austen]
, frequent dialogues beside the Château’s swimming pool, they became known as Hollywood’s most notorious
ménage à quatre
. But this was not necessarily the case.

Sometimes, when Newman was at the studio, Woodward and Gore got involved in intense discussions about Gore’s vision of one day running for President of the United States.

“Of course,” Gore cautioned, “the specter of homosexuality might rear its ugly head during the campaign.” Presumably, it was Woodward herself who volunteered to consider marrying him as a means of providing “cover.”

“I wouldn’t mind playing the role of First Lady,” she said. “It would be a hell of a lot better than this stinking part I’ve got in
A Kiss Before Dying [released in 1956]
. And it also might be a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting around this pool waiting for Paul to make up his mind to divorce Jackie and marry me.”

[The reference was to Newman’s first wife, Jacqueline Witte.]

There remained another questions. What to do about Howard Austen?

“Perhaps we could let Howard permanently occupy the Lincoln bedroom, rent free?” Gore said facetiously.

Fred Kaplan, in his biography of Gore, quotes Woodward as saying, “I think if we had gotten to that point and Gore had said, ‘Let’s get married,’ I might very well have done so. Because I was very fond of him. Many people have had that sort of marriage. I can’t imagine how long it would have lasted. I would have driven Gore crazy, or he would have driven me crazy.”

Both Newman and Woodward configured themselves as Gore’s celebrity supporters, as did Eleanor Roosevelt, when he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in a Republican district in New York State in 1960.

One day, Monty Clift arrived beside the pool at the Château Marmont when Newman and Woodward were away. He confided to Gore that he’d originally been offered the Robert Wagner role opposite Woodward in
A Kiss Before Dying
. “I turned it down,” Clift said. “Cheap melodrama. Actually, I recommended that Paul should lobby for the role. ‘Play a murderer,’ I told him. I thought it would help him get over his squeaky clean image. In love, he knows a lot about betrayal and deceit, lies even. As smart as she is, I bet Woodward doesn’t know much about the secret life of Newman. Do you?”

“I’m discovering him day by day,” Gore said. “But I do know that he’s devious enough to take a mistress and that he plays around.”

“Have you had him yet?” Clift asked.

“No, but it’s only a matter of time,” Gore said. “He’s my number one priority, but I’ll have to strike like a cobra at the right moment.”

Eventually, Newman, Woodward, Gore, and Austen found a new landlady, actress Shirley MacLaine, who collectively rented them her cottage in Malibu. Subsequently, they abandoned the Château Marmont.

Newman’s marriage to Jackie Witte had all but expired at this point. He was waiting for divorce papers to be filed.

Meanwhile, at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, Lee Strasberg told Tennessee, “Joanne Woodward will never really have Paul. He likes to share himself with other admirers, both male and female.”

Christopher Isherwood, who had recently dined with Tennessee, claimed that the playwright “was bubbling over with jealousy over Gore’s decision to live with Newman.”

“I am certain that when Joanne is away, Gore is pawing those golden inches and sucking him dry,” Tennessee told Isherwood. “Do you think Gore cold resist Paul walking around that beach house in a pair of tight-fitting jockey shorts? Paul drinks a lot, especially beer. It’s inevitable that seduction is going to take place one night when the moon goes behind a cloud. Ask any gay man: The difference between a straight sailor and a gay sailor is a six-pack.”

The unorthodox
ménage
maintained by Newman, Woodward, Vidal, and Austen became the hottest news racing along the Hollywood grapevine, but escaped serious scrutiny in the press. Once again, there was much speculation about the various sexual combinations the household might pursue. Even an ongoing four-way orgy was suggested, with Newman as the main object of communal desire.

In his memoir,
Palimpsest
, Gore addressed the rumor of a sexual tryst between Newman and himself. “I should note here that over the years, I have read and heard about the love affair between me and Paul Newman. Unlike Marlon Brando, whom I hardly know, Paul has been a friend for close to half a century, proof, in my psychology, that nothing could ever have happened.”

The logic (or lack thereof) of such a statement could be loudly challenged. The world has long been peopled with fifty-year friendships that began as youthful love affairs.

During Newman’s lifetime, Gore protected the actor’s image. But after his death, Gore informed close friends that “I did Paul on rare occasions. It was hardly a romance. Sometimes, when we were alone in the house, he would appear at my bedroom door in the nude. He just wanted to be done, perhaps to relieve sexual tension. He thought I would enjoy it to a point. But I wanted so much more, even though I knew he didn’t feel it was right, or didn’t want to give more than what I got. He was a beauty, and I did enjoy him. After all, he knew I wasn’t getting anything from Howard.”

—Anaïs Nin

Reunited with her younger second husband, Rupert Poole, in Los Angeles, Anaïs Nin, the diarist, drove to Malibu for lunch at the Vidal/Newman/Woodward/Austen household.

At their home, she warmly embraced Gore and Austen, who introduced her to their housemates, Woodward and Newman. Later, Anaïs would dismiss both of them as “starlets.”

Later, Anaïs spoke to her friend, the novelist, James Leo Herlihy
[author of Midnight Cowboy]
, who was trying to convince Newman to star in the 1962 movie adaptation of his 1960 novel,
All Fall Down
.

[The role Herlihy was proposing for Newman—that of a good-looking, hedonistic drifter—bore many similarities to the one he eventually played in
Hud
(1963). The role that Herlihy was proposing in
All Fall Down
eventually went to Warren Beatty.]

“Newman is just as much of a narcissist as Gore is,” Anaïs later told Herlihy. “But he disguises it completely, and, like the most skilled of actors, puts up a mask to confuse the world. I suspect he will go far in an industry that is all about illusion.”

“There is no self-awareness in this handsome young man at all,” she claimed. “He is an obvious homosexual, but does not dare admit that to himself. He’s a selfish rogue while pretending to be benevolent, supporting all the right causes. He has a facile charm but no depth. In spite of the hot sun out here, he already knows that California is a cold, harsh land. He does not want it to hurt him. So what will he do? What must he do? He will inflict emotional pain on others, therefore avoiding the pain of having the blows strike him first.”

“I predict he’ll have a miserable life in Holly wood,” she said. “Beneath all of his swagger, I suspect there is a sensitive man lurking somewhere there. He can’t be frank with himself. It’s obvious that he can’t have a dialogue between his own flesh and his true spirit. He has no soul, or, if he does, it is hidden behind the package of surface beauty that he presents. I advised him to write down his dreams and try to analyze them, or get help from an analyst. I even volunteered to help him myself, but he rejected me. Amazingly, he told me, ‘I don’t dream.’ What is a man without dreams?”

“His whole life is a deceit, a cover-up, and I join him in that,” she said. “I, too, as you well know, am torn between two lovers. This balancing act has made me a mistress of deceit myself. Liars need to keep track of what they say. I have a secret Book of Lies that I write in daily. That way, I can remember what I told one lover and what I told another.”

“I feel sorry for Newman because he will never be what he wants to be,” Anaïs said. “If he wants to be a movie star, then he has to be as fake and artificial as Marilyn Monroe. He has to become a sort of dream figure for the women of America. American women are shallow. They always go for the superficial. They make gods and goddesses out of cardboard caricatures. I predict Newman will turn into a cardboard figure. There will be no reality to him. He can’t be real.”

“He’s moving into a world foreign to him,” she said. “He’ll be an alien in Hollywood, as if he’s landed from another planet. We’ll never know who Paul Newman is, because he doesn’t know himself. Perhaps one harsh, brutal morning, when the world tumbles in around him, he’ll look into the mirror and see himself for the first time. But it will frighten him. He’ll immediately reach for that mask to put on again, the one that conceals him from himself.”