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) (22 page)

“That was the last we ever saw of Clark,” Gore said. “I think he decided that my mother’s vagina just wasn’t worth putting up with her brood. He never came back, which explains why Clark never became my stepfather. It was such an inglorious ending to Nina’s romance with ‘The King’ that I decided to leave it out of my memoirs.”

At the end of his Army career, Gore produced his first novel,
Williwaw
(1946), which earned a certain amount of praise, even an endorsement from Eleanor Roosevelt, who later became his friend and political ally.

In a critical study, Bernard F. Dick wrote: “
Williwaw
was a sort of elegiac
Story of G.I. Joe
, somewhere between a hymn to the survivor and a threnody
[A poem or song of mourning or lamentation]
for the misbegotten.”

Williwaw
was named for the sudden winds that roar down from the Alaskan and Siberian mainland, affecting ships with their fitful rage. It was based on Gore’s experience in the military when he was stationed in the storm-tossed Bering Sea offshore from the Aleutian Islands.

Four of his next five novels failed:
In a Yellow Wood
(1947);
The Season of Comfort
(1949);
A Search for the King
(1950); and
Dark Green, Bright Red
(1950). His notorious homosexual novel,
The City and the Pillar
(1948), however, was a bestseller.

Gore claimed that Nina was “thrilled at the failure of those novels.” As for the one defined as a commercial success, Nina asserted that more than any of his other works,
The City and the Pillar
subjected her to disgrace.

“Gore isn’t really a novelist,” she told her friends. “He’s only a journalist. He had only that one book in him, and now, of course, he’s finished.”

She visited him only infrequently, showing up at his country home, Edgewater, his house on the Hudson. “She arrived through the kitchen door,” he said. “with this young man, who was a pilot for Pan American. “Right in front of him, and me as well, she announced, ‘He’s got the biggest cock I’ve ever seen.’”

Then she disappeared upstairs with him to the guest bedroom.

Years would go by before Nina and Gore got together again, and letters were rare.

Gore met his mother again at the wedding of her daughter
[Gore’s half sister]
, Nini Gore Vidal Auchincloss. The groom was Newton Steers, and the wedding in 1957 was attended by both Gore and Senator John F. Kennedy, Nina’s stepbrother-in-law.

Gore recalled his mother as being “uncommonly sober at the event. She also ran into a lot of her old time Washington gents who remembered affairs with her twenty years earlier, when she was a reigning beauty. At the wedding, she looked rather puffy.”

That same year, Gore invited Nina to spend Christmas in London with Howard Austen and him. Austen was his closest friend and companion. Gore and Austen had rented a large flat in London with three servants.

In London, Gore discovered that her condition had worsened. In addition to alcohol, she had become a morphine addict.

“Like Capote, she was also a liar, and I detest liars,” Gore said.

Few things about her son impressed her, except for a visit from actor Robert Morley, wanting to appear as the lead in the 1960 film, based on Gore’s play,
Visit to a Small Planet
.

She complained to the servants that Gore’s relationship with his “Jew boyfriend” had destroyed her social status. “I am shamed by Austen’s presence in this flat.”

When he could no longer tolerate her attacks on Austen, his most loyal friend over the years, he sent Nina packing. In the aftermath of her visit, she wrote him “the most savage letter I have ever received in a lifetime of receiving the most vicious of letters. It was so violent I had to burn it right away.”

“I answered her letter. In it, I told her that I never planned to see her as long as I lived. During the remaining twenty years of her life, I kept my promise.”

When Gore appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine in 1976, Nina wrote him a letter asking for money. In response, without any accompanying letter, he sent her a check for $8,000.

After she’d cashed the check, she wrote a “rebuttal” to
Time’s
largely flattering portrait of her son.

“I never saw the complete letter,” Gore said. “But I was told it was written with a serpent’s pen.
Time’s
editors published only a small part of it under the subhead of ‘A Mother’s Love.’”

Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds died in 1978, after suffering a painful bout with cancer. Gore did not attend the funeral. Neither did his half sister, Nini Gore Auchincloss. When her daughter had been involved with her first husband in a custody battle, the mother appeared in court to testify that Nini, her daughter, “is an unfit mother.”

Tommy Auchincloss, her son, handled the funeral arrangements. She was cremated and her ashes placed in Tommy’s attic, where they rested for a decade.

He finally followed through on her request to scatter her ashes on the mountain near San Francisco where the ashes of General Olds had previously been scattered, but Tommy discovered that he’d thrown the ashes to the wind 400 miles off course, onto the wrong mountain.

The last words from Nina’s lips, Gore learned, had been a lie. On her deathbed at Sloan Kettering Institute in Manhattan, she told Tommy that Gore had come to the hospital and apologized to her for the way he’d treated her.

“I forgave him for all his evil deeds,” she confessed before dying.

“It was her fantasy,” Gore said. “I never went to see her.”

Chapter Seven

With one of those boyfriends
who pass quickly into the night, Tennessee first met Montgomery Clift on April 27, 1942, when he attended the premiere of an experimental, well-reviewed play,
Mexican Mural
, at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in Manhattan. The production had been funded by the wealthy bisexual torch singer, Libby Holman. She had developed an intense, decade-plus obsession over the beautiful homosexual young actor.

“Monty brought a tragic stature and a great delicacy to the stage in his role,” Tennessee recalled. “It was one of my most memorable nights in the theater. I thought a new Broadway star had been born.”

Backstage, Tennessee was also introduced to two women who would increasingly assume major roles in Monty’s life.

“I came face to face with the black widow spider herself,” Tennessee said, a reference to Holman.

She had once been charged with the murder of her 20-year-old millionaire husband, Zachary Smith Reynolds, heir to a tobacco fortune. Murder charges
[based to some degree on pressure the Reynolds family exerted to suppress a subsequent scandal]
were eventually dropped.

“I remember her standing there before me in a Mainbocher dress, with black, oily hair,” recalled Tennessee, “smelling of the perfume, Jungle Gardenia. It was known at the time that she was attracted to young gay men with sexual inadequacies, and to such women as the actress Jeanne Eagels and the DuPont heiress, Louise d’Andelot Carpenter. And later, to my dear friend, the author, Jane Bowles.”

At the time of their inaugural meeting, Tennessee remembered that “Standing next to Holman was Monty’s acting coach, Mira Rostova, a Russian
émigré
with a little face out of a Kathe Kollwitz drawing.”

“When it comes to acting, what I tell an actor is always right,” Rostova told Tennessee. “I am never wrong.”

Tennessee did not really get to know Monty until he was cast as the lead in
You Touched Me!
, a play that Tennessee had co-authored with his longtime friend, Donald Windham. Their plot was adapted from a story by D.H. Lawrence.

[
You Touched Me!
tells the story of a retired and now drunken sea captain, his austere sister, his daughter, and a young man he had taken from an orphanage some years before. That boy has grown up to become a Canadian pilot
.

Coming home on leave, he recognizes that the daughter will soon be like her spinster aunt. A love story develops between them, as he tries to free her, wanting her to run away with him. In that effort, the sea captain aids and abets, knowing that whereas he has been defeated by life, he does not want that despair to descend on his daughter.]

That wonderful old character actor, Edmund Gwenn, was cast as the drunken captain. Monty was cast as Hadrian, a Canadian flier who comes home from the war to woo the spinsterish young Marianne Stewart.

The director was Guthrie McClintic, who was engaged in the most famous “lavender marriage” in the theater world. He was married to the great Katharine Cornell, who was a lesbian. Previously, he’d been married to Estelle Winwood, Tallulah Bankhead’s best friend. She later claimed, “Guthrie spent all the days of our marriage ‘auditioning’ handsome young actors, but never got around to me.”

During the run of
You Touched Me!
, McClintic fell in love with Monty, devoting all his attention to him and virtually ignoring the other members of the cast. “He was practically salivating over this young boy,” Gwenn claimed. “I thought it was amusing. Guthrie was one of the most professional men in the business, except when Monty was around. He sure went crazy over the boy, who seemed rather indifferent to him.”

When McClintic met Tennessee, he proclaimed that “Monty is the most promising young actor on Broadway.”