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) (152 page)

Three of the 20
^th
century’s
most famous writers, each a homosexual, formed part of a so-called “Pink Triangle” in letters. They might have claimed membership in the “Dead Poets’ Society.”

They were Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal. Of the trio, only Gore lived to a ripe old age. At the time of their respective deaths, Tennessee was seventy-one; Truman fifty-nine; and Gore, eighty-six.

Of the three, Tennessee experienced the most bizarre death. (See below.) Some obituary writers noted a line that Blanche DuBois uttered in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. “You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out of the ocean.”

Both Truman and Tennessee had died before the world moved too deeply into the plague years. Gay artists died in droves from AIDS during the turbulent 1980s.

Although Tennessee continued to write until the year of his death, his “hits” were for the most part associated with the 1940s and 1950s, coming to an end in the early 1960s.

Truman only pretended to write in his later years. In contrast, Gore remained consistently productive until overcome with dementia.

“How perilously do these fountains leap, Whose reckless voyager along am I.”

In a call to Maria St. Just, Tennessee remembered, “I once saw a movie with Glenn Ford, whom I never managed to seduce. It was called
The Return of October
. Well, October is here, and I’ve returned to Key West. I’ve been absent awhile, and even my cat and dog have wandered off to destinations unknown. How typical. Like all my so-called friends except for you.”

Feeling depressed and alone in Key West, he flew to New York again, “Mostly, I was receiving obituary notices. It seemed that everyone I’d known and loved was dying.”

That November, he made his last public appearance at the YMHA on 92
^nd
Street in Manhattan. When he walked on stage at Kaufman Hall, the audience, mostly young people, applauded wildly.

“I was expecting a rare evening in the theater,” said student Richard Loomis. “But out staggered this poor, beaten-up relic of a human being on his last legs. I’d seen the movie versions of
The Glass Menagerie
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and I was impressed with his reputation, since I wanted to be a writer myself.”

“I was shocked at how nervous Williams seemed to be,” Loomis continued. “He read us this short story, which he defined as a work in progress. I don’t remember much about it except that he used the words ‘well hung’ three times for his hero. The short story was called “The Donsinger Women and Their Handy Man Jack.” Then he read some poems, including one called ‘Old Men Go Mad at Night.’”

What’s left is keeping hold of breath

And for cover never now a lover

Rests them warm…

Was that a board that creaked

As he took leave of us
,

Or did he speak—

“I’m going to sleep, good night.”

After reading that poem, he took off his glasses and confronted the audience. “My friends, that is the end. The curtain is going down on one Tennessee Williams.”

After that, he walked off the stage. It took at least a minute, maybe more, before his ears were greeted with mild applause.

By December, he’d returned once again to Key West. Before flying out of New York, he’d met with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who’d had a warning for him.

She suggested that he should sign a codicil to his will, entrusting his papers to Harvard University instead of to Sewanee, “The University of the South,” a small
[1,600 student]
private, co-educational liberal arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee. The former First Lady advised him that she feared “the swarming locusts descending on America.” She defined many of America’s right wing political leaders as religious fanatics who prayed to God, thanking him for sending the AIDS virus to kill off gay men. Her fear was that at Sewanee, some of the executors, to whom Tennessee’s work might represent heresy, might burn his papers and heavily censor his plays.

***

All calls to Tennessee’s Duncan Street home in Key West had gone unanswered. Finally, neighbors contacted the police, thinking he might have been murdered. When the police arrived to investigate, they found the front door unlocked. They entered the house, discovering that it was empty except for one locked bedroom.

When they knocked on the door, no one answered. They forced the lock and entered the room to find a nude Tennessee, drunk and drugged, lying on the bed muttering incoherently.

In an ambulance, he was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found him totally dehydrated. His drug-filled system was flushed out, and after a few days’ stay, he was released.

Back at Duncan Street, he slept there only one night before flying to New York the next day. He stayed at the home of Jane Smith, an actress and singer who had long been a loyal, supportive friend of his.

He felt well after some time with Smith, to the point that he was overcome “with a certain wanderlust.”

To his remaining friends, he said, “I’m still Tom in
The Glass Menagerie: “The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something.”

He began planning a return to Taormina on the eastern coast of Sicily, inviting his companion at the time, John Uecker, to accompany him. His sometimes secretary, however, had made other plans. “But I can probably find a suitable person to travel with you,” he told Tennessee.

“I can no longer depend on the kindness of strangers,” Tennessee responded. “I will go alone, like I used to back when I was called Tom, back when I followed in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”

In Taormina, the staff at the San Domenico Palace Hotel
[a richly nostalgic historic monument whose core originated centuries ago as a cloister]
warmly welcomed Tennessee. Some of the older members recalled his first visit with them when he was accompanied by his Sicilian lover, Frank Merlo. The hotel’s aging manager told him, “You and Frankie looked so happy in those days.”

“We did give that illusion,” Tennessee responded. “The trouble with happiness is that it inevitably is followed by long periods of mourning over loss.”

He was alone and depressed during his sojourn there. Acting on his own, the manager sent food and drink, which the maid, the following morning, would find uneaten.

One early evening, as a kind of
passeggiata [evening stroll]
along Taormina’s Corso Umberto, Tennessee left his hotel room to wander over to his favorite bar, Caffè Wunderbar, a high-ceilinged gathering place opening onto the Piazza IX Aprile. Here he sat, looking out at the sea and the ominous Mount Etna in the distance.

At that time of year, most of the tourists were gone, and a mean
sirocco
was blowing in from North Africa.

Many young Sicilian men were hustling and eager for a cash customer. Some of them solicited him at his café table, but he showed no interest in them, even though he had richly patronized them in his past.

Back at the hotel bar, the manager said that Truman Capote had visited, telling everyone that he was working feverishly on his novel,
Answered Prayers
.

“He fell in love with Taormina, and even purchased land here,” the manager said. “For only $10,000, he bought Isola Bella, which is not an island, but land with a beach at the tip of a conical peninsula—small, ringed with sand, and absolutely beautiful. He told us he was going to build a villa there and invite all the beautiful people to visit Taormina. He and the landowner celebrated right in this bar. But the deal fell through. Truman’s check was returned from a New York bank, marked ‘insufficient funds.’”

Before he left Taormina, Tennessee began work on a screenplay called
The Lingering Hour
, describing a forthcoming apocalypse of devastation and massive death.

“All the volcanoes in the world explode more or less at the same time, and there are earthquakes and destruction everywhere. Here in Sicily, there is Etna and the action is set in the main square, with people talking. The first earthquake happens in California. Hollywood disappears into the sea.”

His title,
The Lingering Hour
, was his English-language equivalent of the Italian term
prima sera
, that time at dusk, right before the oncoming night. He described it in
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
, as “the moment before the lamps go on, when the atmosphere has that exciting blue clarity of the nocturnal scenes in silent films, a color of water that holds a few drops of ink, the amethyst light of
prima sera
.”