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) (105 page)

“While pretending to be one thing, which he isn’t, he’ll live a secret life in the shadows,” she said. “He’ll grab pleasure where he can find it and then flee from it back into this fake celluloid world. A tragedy, really. But, this is, after all, Lotusland.”

In 1958, Paul Newman finally married Joanne Woodward. “And then all of us, including Howard, lived happily ever after,” Gore wrote.

Of course, he was exaggerating, but Newman and Woodward did spend part of their honeymoon in London with Gore and Austen, who had rented a flat on Chesham Place. Woodward remembered it as “very dark and very cold.”

Woodward arrived pregnant at their apartment, and during her honeymoon, she miscarried. “Had it been known that she was pregnant on the honeymoon, her career might have ended—hard to believe today,” Gore said.

In his memoirs, Gore wrote: “The Newmans made a calculated choice to present themselves as a folksy, lower-middle-class, all-American couple when, in actual fact, he came from a wealthy family in Ohio that had sent him to Yale, while Joanne was the daughter of a vice president of the publisher, Scribner’s.”

The by-now-famous quartet reunited again for an extended period in 1961. Gore had just completed his second most controversial novel after
The City and the Pillar
. It was entitled
Myra Breckinridge
.

As a celebration of their shared decade of friendship, they chartered a yacht together for a sail through the Greek islands with a final destination at Rhodes. Collectively, they departed from Piraeus with a captain and a small crew. The seas were stormy, and all of them were sick at times from the turbulent sea. The cruise was badly conceived and badly organized, and the year was not good for exploring Greece, a country that was midway through a series of military coups and plagued with chronic civil unrest.

Gore later recalled, “Our idiot captain brought us too close to an island where 10,000 political prisoners were jailed. We were fired upon by the Greek navy. Officers boarded our boat. Two of them recognized Paul as an American movie star. Not wanting to generate headlines by creating an international incident, they retreated. We were saved from arrest as potential Pimpernels.”

By this time, Woodward had had enough. “Get me off this fucking boat!” she shouted at Newman. When the opportunity arose for her to board a ferry back to Piraeus, she jumped ship and sailed away, heading for London to watch plays in the West End.

Throughout the cruise, regardless of the island or port on which they landed, Newman’s arrival was greeted with hysteria, with youthful voices shouting “POLE NOO-MUN!”

In his second book of memoirs,
Point to Point Navigation
, Gore wrote about an encounter they had on the island of Mykonos. Here, a tall, Giacometti-style woman vaulted aboard their yacht, claiming she was a Hohenzollern princess of Prussia. Newman ordered Gore to get rid of her, but he and Austen found that her limbs were “made of fettuccine. This self-styled heiress to Frederick the Great slithered herself free of us and rushed into Paul’s stateroom, where she relieved herself of what seemed to be a gallon of
[vomited]
ouzo on his bunk.”

Later, when Gore relayed anecdotes about his trip to Tennessee in New York,
[and perhaps as a means of inflaming his jealousy]
, he confessed to having enjoyed intimate relations with Newman after his wife abandoned the ship. “Paul never looked sexier and more macho than he did in the Greek islands,” Gore claimed. “We both grew beards. He walked naked around his stateroom, a sight for my sore eyes. I viewed that as a green light.”

“Joanne was in England, and I took advantage of her horny husband. When I came to his bed at night, I did the dirty deed. He always managed to explode, so I assumed he enjoyed it. We were never close like a romantic couple, and it was very mechanical. But I enjoyed it.”

From all appearances, Newman was attracted to Gore’s mind, perhaps not his body. “He exposed me to literature and was very familiar with the ancient world. He told me stories of the ancient Greeks that were mesmerizing. He constantly set off a buzz in my head. I think I came to realize what a great chance I had to get educated when I met Gore.”

As the years went by, Gore saw Newman and Woodward only periodically.

In Washington, in 1994, having been invited to address the National Press Club, he received a call from Newman, who wanted to hear his speech. Newman proposed that on the evening of the day of Gore’s speech, that they have dinner with Bill and Hillary Clinton at the White House only four days before the midterm elections.

“Since no one else in Washington was talking to the Clintons, I agreed to go,” Gore said.

Chapter Thirty-One

In the summer of 1955
, Tennessee was living in Rome with Frank Merlo, working on the script for
Baby Doll
and also writing dialogue for a new play,
Sweet Bird of Youth
. He was also downing an inordinate amount of Seconal and guzzling gin martinis.

Elia Kazan had already expressed an interest in making a film version of
Baby Doll
for Warner Brothers. But, as before, both of them had different ideas about the script. Originally, Tennessee had wanted the play to be more of a comedy, and he perceived, with alarm, that Kazan seemed more intrigued with the idea of turning it into heavy drama.

In a letter to Kazan, Tennessee wrote: “
Baby Doll
is not a part for Grace Kelly or Deborah Kerr. It’s a role for a sexy little
comedienne
. Baby Doll is about as genteel as Paddy’s Pig. She is touchingly comic, a grotesquely witless creature, about as deep as kitty-cat’s pee. Who the fuck gives a shit if she is, was, or ever will be fulfilled as a woman? Woman’s fulfillment is your game, not mine.”

Originally, Tennessee had conceived of
Baby Doll
as an overweight bundle of horror, with fat arms, bulging calves, and thick ankles, a latter-day, three-hundred pound version of Anna Nicole Smith

Always restless, Tennessee later migrated to Madrid, even though he claimed, “That’s one city in Europe I truly hate.”

He was in the Plaza Mayor, having a martini and contemplating
Baby Doll
, when critic Kenneth Tynan accidentally encountered Tennessee, sitting alone nursing a martini of his own.

Tynan recorded his impression of Tennessee at the time: “He had that sleazy fat-cat smile and raffish saunter, with hair like a nest of small, wet serpents. He fits into every country he visits, including Spain, where he becomes a Spaniard; or Italy, where he becomes an Italian; or Greece, where he becomes a Greek fisherman. Only in London and New York does he seem out of place, looking like a retired bandit.”

***

First written in the summer of 1936,
27 Wagons Full of Cotton
was published in
Manuscript
magazine. In this version, the Southern plantation owner is busy ginning 27 wagons of cotton, while his fat wife fans herself on the veranda and flirts with the plantation overseer, who is a rather small man. The man constantly flicks his riding crop in her direction, ostensibly fending of flies, although there is a hint of sadomasochism in his gestures.

Eventually, she invites him upstairs to her bedroom--that is, if he promises not to hurt her.

As source material for a movie, director Elia Kazan found the one-act play too weak. He struck upon the idea of combining it with another of Tennessee’s one-act plays,
The Unsatisfactory Supper
. Consequently Tennessee delivered a reading that summer of this other play to the summer residents of Nantucket, the audience including the notable playwright, Thornton Wilder.

The Unsatisfactory Supper
was originally entitled
The Long Stay Cut Short
. It was based on an incident in the playwrights’ own life. his maternal grandmother, Rosina Dakin, had come to live with his parents, Cornelius and Edwina Williams. She became the cook, but Cornelius objected to her fare, especially all those collard greens cooked in greasy fatback.

The one-act play was published in 1945, but it was never produced on stage until 1971, in London, where it was severely criticized.

During the process of combining the plays, both Tennessee and Kazan had slimmed down Baby Doll until she was a sexy “child woman,” still living in a baby crib and sucking her thumb.

Her father gave her away in marriage to an older, lecherous man, Archie Lee Meighan, the owner of the local cotton gin. There were conditions attached—her husband had to provide for her and could not consummate the marriage until Baby Doll’s 20
^th
birthday.

At the time the film begins, Baby Doll is only nineteen, and Archie Lee can hardly wait “to plow her.” In the meantime, he drills peepholes through her bedroom wall, hoping to spy on her nudity.