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) (32 page)

“My agent had a hard time peddling my play,
A Streetcar Named Desire,”
he told her. “I thought I’d have to fly to Hollywood to land on a few casting couches.”

Of course he was joking, but she seemed to take him seriously. “I’ve been on a few of those myself. But I’ve never been kept. I keep myself. Hollywood is just an overcrowded, overworked brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for the horses.”

“Darryl F. Zanuck told me that studio men like it when a starlet responds to their propositions,” she said. “If they find you fuckable, they think movie audiences might, too.”

“Well, you’ll have to show me who I have to fuck out here to sell more scripts,” he said.

“Forgive me for asking, but are you good at fellatio?”

“A first-rate sword swallower,” he said.

“Good. Fellatio is the preferred form of sex, since it avoids birth control. Of course, some men won’t go for it and demand it the old-fashioned way. I’ve only recently arrived in Hollywood, but already I’ve had three abortions.”

“You sound overbooked,” he said. “If you can’t handle the demand, perhaps you’ll throw some hunks my way.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she promised. “Actually, I think some of the men I date have homoerotic impulses. That’s a word I recently learned. On my dates with them, they spend most of the night grilling me about the sexual performances of their male friends. They want to know everything, including penis size.”

“I think I’m going to have a hell of a lot of fun out here,” he told her.

“You’ve got to be careful,” she cautioned. “Two months ago, I was invited to this party where I was told that I would meet some producers. When I got there, I found four actors waiting to gang rape me. I’ll tell you who they are in case they try to trick you, too—Bruce Cabot, Steve Cochran, Lawrence Tierney, and his brother, Scott Brady.”

Before leaving, Marilyn turned to him. “Loved talking to you, Mr. Williams, but I’ve got to work the room. Do you write plays with characters I could play?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I failed writing a script for another blonde actress, Lana Turner, and I fear I’d do the same for you.”

“In that case, I’d better wiggle my ass elsewhere,” she said.

[Time would prove him wrong. For the 1956 film version of
Baby Doll
, co-produced by Williams and adapted from his one-act play
, 27 Wagons of Cotton
, Marilyn discovered a role she wanted to play, the title role of Baby Doll Meighan, a role eventually snared by Carroll Baker.]

***

At Ciro’s, Feldman also introduced Tennessee to the notorious playboy, Pat DiCicco.

DiCicco was already a well-known name to Tennessee. He’d been famously implicated in the 1935 murder of his first wife, the screen actress, Thelma Todd.

During the war years, he’d married the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, which ended in disaster. He called her “Fatsy Roo” and frequently beat her, sometimes holding her head and banging it against the walls.

He’d once been the lover of the aviator/movie producer Howard Hughes. When that sexual relationship waned, DiCicco became Hughes’ pimp, rounding up a harem of beautiful wannabe starlets willing to sleep with the eccentric billionaire.

Before the party ended, DiCicco whispered an invitation to Tennessee and pressed a note into his hand. “Ditch your boyfriend tomorrow afternoon and come by my apartment. The details are in the note. You and I have a date with destiny.”

The hustler was tall, dark, and handsome, with a lot of male flash, and Tennessee was tempted. Before the party ended, Marilyn was leaving with Feldman, but she stopped to wish Tennessee good luck in Hollywood.

She whispered to DiCicco, “See you at ten tomorrow night, sugar man.”

It was obvious to Tennessee that Marilyn was not only seducing Feldman, but engaged in an affair with DiCicco, too. Tennessee was convinced that there were others—“so many, many others,” he would later say.

The following day, Tennessee made up some excuse to ditch Frank Merlo and took a taxi to the address DiCicco had written down for him. He arrived exactly at two o’clock. DiCicco was waiting with two bottles of champagne cooling in an ice bucket.

He answered the door completely nude. “He had a body worth viewing,” Tennessee recalled. “Very impressive, indeed. In plain sight, I could see why he had attracted an heiress, America’s so-called ‘poor little rich girl,’ as well a billionaire who liked to make around-the-world flights.”

In the late 1960s, at the home of his Key West friend, Danny Stirrup, Tennessee talked to Darwin Porter about DiCicco:

“Pat had obviously heard that I was going to be a successful playwright on Broadway, with more money coming in from movie sales of my plays. Although he was in incredibly good shape, he wasn’t getting any younger, and his notorious reputation was working against him. The bad publicity he’d received during his marriages to Todd and the Vanderbilt woman was very damaging. He was looking for another gig—mainly, me.”

“Every gay man in America should have had sex with Pat DiCicco,” Tennessee said. “If the Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm gave awards to hustlers, the prize would have gone to him. He was amazingly skillful, an instrument of the greatest pleasure to a man and, of this I’m certain, to a woman as well. It wasn’t just the size of his proud possession, but his technique in making use of it.”

“Of course, it was all so mechanical. He was a machine making love, hitting all the right spots. That machine was well lubricated, at least from a technical point of view. For sheer love making, it was the best sex of my life. But something was missing, and that was an almost total lack of passion. There was not one spontaneous emotion. It was as if every move had been carefully choreographed. But who says a whore has to love you?”

“I had to say no to a permanent arrangement with Pat, which pissed him off seriously. He would mark the first in a series of young actors and hustlers who bedded me during my fifteen-year reign as America’s leading playwright. You would not believe the A-list movie stars who offered themselves to me. Many of the big names will surprise you, especially those with reputations as Lady Killers. You know who they are. I don’t have to name them.”

“Personally, I don’t believe there is such a thing as a straight actor. At least I never met one. Even the most heterosexual of actors seem willing to drop their trousers for you if they want a certain role. These actors in their conceit seem to think that your lips on their genitals entitle them to a choice role, such as Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, or Stanley Kowalski in one of the many revivals of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Think Marlon Brando and Paul Newman.”

[When Tennessee returned to New York, he encountered a fellow playwright, Arthur Miller, one night in the theater district. At the time of their first meeting, Tennessee had already met Marilyn Monroe, but Miller was years away from making the blonde goddess his wife
.

The two writers spoke of Hollywood, Miller calling it “a place of sexual gratification but also one of danger. I find the sexuality liberating but also cloying.”

Miller spoke with a certain literary flourish that was hard to decipher. “Hollywood is a contradictory mixture of certain scents. A sexual damp, I call it, the moisture in the creases of a woman’s flesh, combined with a challenging sea-salt smell, the exciting sea air surrounding a voyage on the water and the dead ozone inside a sound stage.”

“Whatever you’re saying, I agree with it,” Tennessee said. “Hollywood is all that, if not more so.”]

Chapter Nine