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) (117 page)

You can guess one of them: Charlie Chaplin,” Marilyn said.

“I know all about how you fucked Charlie,” Shelley said, “because I was screwing his son, Sydney. Now for the other three—and this had better be good, not a twice-told tale.”

“Jimmy Hoffa, Fidel Castro, and Albert Einstein.”

“Are you bullshitting me, or just fantasizing?” Shelley asked. “I’m sort of inclined to believe you, because you’ve had some strange bedfellows. Ever since you shacked up with Senator Kennedy, Hoffa’s been on your tail. He thinks Kennedy will become President in 1960, and he wants to have blackmail evidence on him.”

“As for that ugly little mutt—who’s sorta cute—that Maestro of the Theory of Relativity, he told a reporter that you’re his alltime fantasy,” Shelley said.

“As for your screwing around with Fidel, I don’t know unless you made a quick trip to Cuba from Florida, or perhaps from Mexico, where you’re always hanging out.
Variety
, or some such rag, reported that the rebel leader fell in love with your Lorelei Lee image in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and that he has seen it more than a dozen times.”

In 1941, still licking his wounds from the theatric failure of
Battle of Angels
, Tennessee moved to Key West for the winter. “Swimming was an important part of my life, and I felt this was the only place along the Eastern Seaboard where the water would be warm enough to go swimming, year-round. It was only sixty miles off the coast of Cuba.”

He checked into a little boarding house, the Tradewinds, which stood on Duval, the town’s main street. There, he formed a bond with the daughter, Marion Vaccaro, of its owner. Vaccaro, became one of his most cherished
confidantes
—his “Partner in Crime,” as he liked to call her.

Even though she was married to Regis Vaccaro, one of the heirs to the Standard Fruit Company, Marion and Tennessee cruised the sailors along Duval at night, often hauling “our blushing trade” back to the inn.

Tennessee claimed that Regis was “the worst alcoholic I have ever known in my life. When he wasn’t soaked in alcohol, he was high on ether. When Regis got mad at you, he’d remove his glass eye and toss it at you. The eye often landed in your soup.”

Leaving Regis drunk in one of the back rooms at the Tradewinds, Tennessee and Marion often flew to Havana for what he called “riotous weekends.”

“She was an alcoholic nymphomaniac, and we often patronized bordellos that hired handsome, well-hung young men who catered to both genders.”

At night, they attended one or another of the fourteen “Superman shows” that featured studly men with fourteen-inch penises having various forms of sex on stage.

“When Marion sobered up, she often called her friend, Billie Burke, who had played the Good Witch in
Wizard of Oz,”
Tennessee said. “They had remained lifelong friends ever since Marion had been the tutor to her children during her stormy marriage to showman Flo Ziegfeld.”

“One night at the Tradewinds, I was the meat in the sandwich between two nude, drunken sailors,” Tennessee recalled. “Marion suddenly handed the phone to me because Miss Burke wanted to speak to me. There I was chatting with this sweet old thing, who told me her life’s desire was to appear in a play by Tennessee Williams. The talk didn’t go as I expected. Miss Burke, as it turns out, is not what she appears on the screen. In her heyday, Marion told, she and Flo Ziegfeld used to fight over who was going to sleep with which of his show-girls that night.”

—Tennessee Williams

After Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, Tennessee and Marion continued to take the 90-mile flight from Key West to Havana, at least until the dictator closed all the bordellos and shut down the live sex shows, denouncing them as a product of decadent imperialism. “The role of the new government in Cuba is not to exploit our young men and women as a means of providing sexual relief for frustrated, rich Americans.”

In 1959, Tennessee and Marion flew to Havana for another of their “raucous weekends,” where they came face-to-face with the “two most macho men of the Caribbean,” expatriate Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro.

Shortly after they’d checked into a suite at the Hotel Nacional, Tennessee received a call from Kenneth Tynan, the British critic and friend of Gore Vidal.

“Would you like to meet Hemingway?” Tynan asked. “Before you replaced him, he used to be the most famous writer living in Key West.”

“I’m not so eager, Tennessee said. “I understand he can be very unpleasant to people of my particular temperament.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Tynan said. “I’ll be there to protect you. I think you ought to meet Papa. After all, he is one of the great writers of your time or mine.”

Tennessee was very nervous about meeting Hemingway, and Marion had to mix him three martinis before he could face the ordeal. Finally, he donned a yachting jacket with gold buttons and a yachting cap before walking along Old Havana’s waterfront to the Floradita
[Old Havana’s most iconic bar and café]
, where Hemingway was already getting tanked up on
mojitos
.

Tynan was seated with Hemingway at an outdoor table. He introduced the two writers.

“That bitchy queen, Tynan, later wrote a completely inaccurate account of this historic meeting that was more amusing than truthful,” Tennessee later asserted. “I admit, though, that Hemingway and I were not plugged into the same electrical circuit, and that I was rather awkward in the beginning.”

“In Key West, I often dance to the music of this all-black band at Sloppy Joe’s along Duval Street,” Tennessee told Hemingway. “I understand it was your favorite hangout, and that your signature is still carved onto one of its bar stools.”

“I left more behind than my carving,” Hemingway said. “Don’t tell anyone, especially a book collector: I also left some discarded manuscripts behind the bar.”

Then Tennessee tried to flatter Hemingway: “What I admire about your writing is that you care about honor among men.”

“What kind of men are you referring to?” Hemingway asked. “Men who have honor never talk about it.”

There arose a strained silence at the table, and Tennessee made another stab at conversation. “I realize that no sane person would ever confuse the writing of Tennessee Williams with that of Ernest Hemingway. But a recent piece in
Time
magazine at least put us in the same club together. According to the esteemed editors at
Time
, you and I belong to the ‘Cult of Dirt.’”

“What in hell are you talking about?” Hemingway asked.

“In October of 1956,
Time
ran this piece that included an appraisal of us by Robert Elliot Fitch,” Tennessee said. “He was the Dean of the Pacific School of Religion at Berkeley. He called us part of a cabal of ‘the Cult of Dirt,’ whose fellow members include Eugene O’Neill, Norman Mailer, and James Jones. We were referred to as the ‘Merde Mystics.’ His exact words, and I remember them well, were, ‘Each writer is trying to replace Christian values with a debased secular morality.’ Fitch called me the High Priest of this cult, accusing me of epitomizing the mystique of obscenity, especially in my play,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

“I wrote
Time
,” Tennessee continued, telling them I was flattered to be the High Priest of something, even something called
merde
. I went on to say I would not have exercised the subterfuge of using a foreign word for it.”

Hemingway seemed to ponder this anecdote for a moment. “I guess what this Fitch faggot is suggesting is that we’re Shit—that’s the word. I could care less what some crazed Christian fanatic says about me.” Then he ordered another
mojito
. “When I wrote my novel,
Across the River and Into the Trees, Time—
or some such piece of shit like that—said that I had become a caricature of myself as a writer.”

“I have this friend, Miss Tallulah Bankhead, who once told me that at the end of our lives, all of us become caricatures of ourselves.”

“Perhaps your Miss Tallulah was right,” Hemingway said. “By the way, I think I fucked her once—or was it Marlene Dietrich? We’ll all be dead soon anyway, and what does it matter what someone thinks of us?”

“At least no one ever accused us of writing like each other,” Tennessee said.

“I regret to say, I’ve seen only one of your plays,
A Streetcar Named Desire,”
Hemingway said.

“Dare I ask?” Tennessee said. “What did you think of it?”

“It was saturated with death,” Hemingway responded. “After my experience with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I don’t normally seek out the company of fellow writers. I prefer the company of bullfighters, garage mechanics, street cleaners, bartenders, and bordello madams.”

“Once, I was crammed into this bar in Paris, and seated next to me was Ford Madox Ford, who passed wind all evening—read that ‘farted bigtime,’” Hemingway said. “Do you have many writer friends?”

“A few but, I must confess, I’m jealous of their achievements,” Tennessee said. “Carson McCullers is a friend.”

“I know of her but I can’t bear to read her,” Hemingway said. “Some critics rank her
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
as a better piece of literature than my
The Sun Also Rises
. I can’t bring myself to pick up a novel by a lesbian writer like McCullers. I have a theory that a woman can’t write a novel unless she receives a deep penetration from the male animal on a regular basis.”

“Carson thinks like a man, I can assure you,” Tennessee said. “In 1946, I was dying in Nantucket, or at least I thought I was. She arrived in a baseball cap with that radiant crooked toothed grin of hers. She rescued me from the throes of death, and I started to polish my
Streetcar
play the very next morning.”

“Speaking of lesbian women writers, I once chatted with Miss Katherine Anne Porter,” Hemingway said. “She told me that your plays give off ‘lurid flames.’”

“She must have been talking about
Summer and Smoke,”
Tennessee said.

“You mentioned you felt you were dying,” Hemingway said. “Each morning as I rise to face my typewriter, I experience a minor death. It’s like a bullfighter facing that moment of truth in the ring.”

Perhaps as a means of flaunting his credentials as a critic of the arts, Tynan suddenly joined in the sparring between the two writers.

“The Spanish have a word for it.
Duenda
. Perhaps the word is familiar to you, Ernest. There is no English equivalent. It denotes the quality without which no flamenco singer or bullfighter can conquer the summit of his art.
Duenda
is the talent to transmit a profoundly felt emotion to an audience of strangers with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of restraint. There are examples, of course—Laurence Olivier has it, Maurice Evans does not; Billie Holiday has it, but Ella Fitzgerald never reached it. It is the quality that distinguishes Ernest Hemingway from John O’Hara; Tennessee Williams from William Inge.”

Neither writer had any comment after that. Tennessee changed the subject. “In Key West, I knew your second wife, Pauline.”

[Hemingway was married to Pauline Pfeiffer from 1940 to 1945.]

“I know she died in 1951,” Tennessee contined. “Did she die in great pain?”

Hemingway looked toward the sea and paused for a long time before he replied in very Hemingway-like prose: “She died like everybody dies, and after that, she was dead.”

“Forgive the indelicacy of my rude question,” Tennessee said. “I’ve had a run of bad luck lately coming up with new ideas for plays. My critics claim I’m repeating myself. And my psychiatrist tells me I should pursue more heterosexual themes.”