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) (154 page)

Fortunately, the growth was benign, and Austen recovered. But Frank died.

When Austen was released, and after his recuperation, he and Gore moved to Rome, taking an apartment on the Via Giulia overlooking the Tiber River. In time, they would move to a location further south, to Ravello, south of Naples, along the Amalfi Drive.

Most of their friends, including Claire Bloom and Susan Sarandon, reportedly speculated that Gore would be the first to die. But that was not the case.

In 1999—like Frank Merlo, whose death had preceded his—Austen was also diagnosed with lung cancer. Gore decided to leave his beloved “swallow’s nest” in Ravello to secure better treatment for his companion in Los Angeles. He chartered a plane from Rome to fly them to Los Angeles, where he checked Austen into the Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

After receiving treatment, Austen was eventually discharged, but both men knew that death would occur soon. Austen’s doctor told Gore, “I am almost certain the cancer will return. He will have to be checked regularly.”

During the months ahead, Austen was said to have waged a focused battle to live, but did he? Friends noted that he smoked one cigarette after another. Sometimes he didn’t finish one before lighting up again.

In 2003, as Austen complained of constant pain in his chest, Gore flew him once again to the Cedars-Sinai, where a radiogram revealed that he had lung cancer. An operation was called for at once.

Fearing he would never see Austen alive again, Gore said farewell, as he was wheeled into the operating room. He held Austen’s hand.

His most loyal friend looked up at him. All he said was, “Gore, it’s been great.”

Once again, Austen survived the surgery and recovered enough to fly with Gore back to Italy. But his health deteriorated rapidly. Doctors in Rome discovered that the cancer had spread to his brain.

Sparing no expense, Gore once again chartered a plane to fly them back to Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles for more tests, more radiation, more surgery.

For a while, Austen was allowed to return to Gore’s home in the Hollywood Hills, where the author hired male nurses for him.

Gore knew that Austen’s imminent death was certain. For a final time, he was checked into the hospital. This time, as he was about to be wheeled into surgery, Austen said to Gore, “Kiss me.”

Gore kissed him on the lips, later claiming, “We hadn’t done that in fifty years.”

Austen once again survived the surgery, but this time, in its aftermath, he recuperated in an oxygen tent in his hospital room. Gore noticed that as soon as the tent was removed, Austen asked for a cigarette. Gore realized that it didn’t matter whether Austen smoked or not.

Austen began to hallucinate. He told Gore, “At the first light of day, the Angel of Death comes into my room, entering with the sun.” When he could elucidate, he spoke of his failed dream to become a pop singer. “I could have become the next Frank Sinatra, or at least Perry Como.”

On September 22, 2003, a nurse alerted Gore that Austen had stopped breathing. He rushed to his bedside. Gore later recalled that moment. “The optic nerve was still sending messages to his brain. I knew he could still see me. He’d died like the boy from the Bronx claiming, ‘So this is the big fucking deal they call death that everybody carries on so much about.’ He faded, but not before I looked one final time into his eyes, a beautiful gray, bright and attentive. We stared at each other one final time.”

Months before, both Gore and Austen had purchased plots in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Austen was buried there, next to a plot that awaited Gore. Ironically, it was near the grave of Jimmie Trimble, Gore’s enduring passion from the 1930s.

***

Friends recalled that after Austen’s death, Gore began a long decline, suffering through years of depression as he lapsed into alcoholism. He was a diabetic and that no doubt shortened his life. In time, he developed dementia.

When he would be lucid, he was still interested in politics. By 2008, he’d switched his allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, although he feared that an assassin would mow him down the way it had his long ago friend, John F. Kennedy, in 1963.

Confined to a wheelchair, Gore often relived his feuds with Truman Capote. He even relived his long, drawn-out libel case against William Buckley, Jr. He feared that his old right-wing antagonist had accumulated documentation attesting that he’d had occasional sex with underaged boys. Gore had made several trips to Bangkok and had praised how submissive young Thai boys were.

In retaliation, Gore’s attorneys had accumulated data about Buckley having had homosexual relationships when in college. If Buckley had ever publicized details about Gore’s sexual interactions with underage boys, Gore planned to air his evidence against Buckley.

He had long ago been forced to sell his villa in Ravello. He told Sarandon, “I spent my final night there bathed in tears. I can’t live there again. Too many memories of Howard.”

During his final visit to the Cedars-Sinai, a nurse remembered Gore’s conversation:

“In 1950, I went to see Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond in
Sunset Blvd.,”
he said. “Did you see it?”

“Never heard of it,” the young nurse responded. “I’ve also never heard of any actress by that name.”

“Well, I am now Norma Desmond myself,” he said. “She wanted a ‘return’ to pictures. She detested the word ‘comeback.’ Well, my Norma Desmond is not seeking a comeback. Nor a return. I’m going away, never to return.”

As his weight dropped, he continued his prodigious consumption of single malt Scotch. He began to drink the moment he got up, and was often still drinking at midnight.

His final three years were the worst, as he ended up weighing only ninety pounds. He developed what his doctors defined as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome.

[Also known as wet brain, Korsakoff’s psychosis, and/or alcoholic encephalopathy, Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome (WKS) is characterized by ocular disturbances, changes in mental state, unsteady stance and gait, apathy, inability to concentrate, and a decrease in awareness of the patient’s immediate circumstances.]

As a result of this affliction, he became confused and at times, hallucinated. Fluid built up inside him, and doctors had to “drain” him almost daily near the end. He also suffered from congestive heart failure.

***

Back from the hospital, at his shadowy home in the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal, American man of letters, died at 6:45 PDT on July 31, 2012. He was sitting up in his living room.

Newspapers and TV stations in Europe and America hailed his passing, the
London Daily Telegraph
defining him as “an icy iconoclast who delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him.”

His close family members, including half-sister, Nina Straight, and his loyal nephew, Burr Steers, were shocked to discover that he’d left his estate, worth nearly $40 million, with more millions to come in the future, to Harvard University.

He’d once told friends, “I was supposed to go to Harvard, but I didn’t. Instead, at seventeen, I went into the Army. There was this thing called World War II, a little skirmish we were having with the Nazis and the Japs.”

His remains were placed alongside those of Howard Austen in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Cemetery.

He’d once said, “The epitaph on my tombstone should read: ‘America, love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.’”

Pink Triangle
is dedicated to two exceptional men,
Frank Merlo
and
Stanley Mills Haggart
, both of whom I met one long ago winter’s day in Key West, Florida, where I had been appointed as the young bureau chief of
The Miami Herald
.

Frank, in turn, introduced me to his longtime companion, Tennessee Williams. From that day, Frank and I bonded, and he invited me to virtually every party, premiere, or event revolving around Tennessee until Frank’s early death.

When distinguished visitors came to Key West, Frank saw to it that I got to “hang out” with them in preparation for writing profiles on them. Guests flying in to confer with Tennessee in his heyday included some of the most flamboyant personalities in show biz—from Gloria Swanson to Marlon Brando, from Paul Newman to Geraldine Page.

In the early 1960s, after Frank and Tennessee separated, before Frank’s death from lung cancer in a New York City hospital, he came to my home in Greenwich Village. There, he proposed that I write a memoir, with his help, about his experiences with Tennessee. Frank had been his companion during the most creative period of the playwright’s life, an era when he created masterpieces which included
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.

Up until about a month before his death, Frank was still dictating his memoirs to me, but asked to stop the narrative when the topics addressed the collapse of his relationship with Tennessee. “I can’t go on,” he said weakly. “It’s all too painful.”

***

One of my first interviews in Key West was with a promising new playwright and novelist,
James Leo Herlihy
. He’d written a play,
Blue Denim
, on Broadway, and had just completed a nationwide tour of his latest play,
Crazy October
, starring Tallulah Bankhead and Joan Blondell, both of whom became friends of mine. Herlihy provided many insights for this book, years before he wrote his famous novel,
Midnight Cowboy
, which was filmed in 1969, winning an Oscar as Best Picture of the Year.