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) (33 page)

Flush with hits on Broadway
, with both of his plays,
The Glass Menagerie
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
firmly entrenched as successes, Tennessee headed for Europe. For the first time in his life, he had enough money to live comfortably.

He’d met Greta Garbo when she came to see
A Streetcar Named Desire
. For his trip to Paris, she’d recommended that he stay at the supremely upscale George V. Once at the hotel, in the city’s posh 8
^th
Arrondissement, he felt out of place. “I never hated a hotel quite so much in a life filled with rented hotel rooms.”

He checked out and headed for a seedy hotel off Place Pigalle. “It was teeming with hustlers and prostitutes, a real hot-bed hotel, and I felt right at home,” he recalled.

From there, he could walk several blocks up the street to a notorious club called Madame Arthur. “Love was for sale at Madame Arthur,” Tennessee said. “Men came here who wanted to seduce drag queens, but there were a lot of young hustlers there, too. Some of them had been hired by Nazi generals staying at the Ritz Hotel during the Occupation. On one Saturday night, I spotted at least a dozen Louis Jourdan lookalikes, and that actor had only recently been voted the handsomest man in the world.”

On this visit, Paris and Tennessee did not successfully mix, especially when he became ill. He checked into the American Hospital at Neuilly, where in later years, Rock Hudson would be diagnosed with AIDS. A doctor told Tennessee he was suffering from both hepatitis and mononucleosis. As strange as it seemed, he had never heard of either disorder.

Fleeing from Paris, he left the city by train to sunny Italy to recover from his illnesses. He was deposited at Rome’s Stazione Termini, where he took a taxi to the Hotel Ambassador along the Via Veneto.

“I was in possession of what back then was called the God Almighty Dollar, and I had quite a few of them,” he said.

A newspaper man from the
Brooklyn Eagle
had told him, “The Eternal City crawls with pickpockets and mendicant whores of all three sexes.”

“As I walked the streets of Rome in those days, I rarely saw a man who did not have a slight erection,” Tennessee later wrote. Along the Via Veneto at night, he noticed young men caressing their genitals as they strolled along, hoping to attract customers.

Post-war Rome was still forbidden territory for most Americans, except for members of the homosexual community, who flocked there in droves. “Roman men are known for their beauty, and they were available for the price of a simple meal in a trattoria or even a used jacket,” Tennessee said. “Many of the best of them could be found on the Spanish Steps, posing without their shirts. Ostensibly, they were available for artists seeking nude models, or for something more intimate. It was a glorious time—in many respects, the happiest days of my life, especially after I met Salvatore Crocetti”
[Crocetti was identified as Rafaello in Tennessee’s memoirs.]

One night, as Tennessee was cruising the Via Veneto, he spotted a remarkably attractive boy at Doney’s, a café frequented by the American expatriates. “He smiled at me, and I smiled back. I gave the doorman at the Ambassador a large tip to let me slip him into the lobby. Salvatore wore a tattered jacket and strings held his shoes together on his feet. But beneath the rags was a golden Neapolitan seventeen-year-old, as I found out later that night.”

Salvatore turned out to be so skilled in bed that the next day, Tennessee purchased him a new wardrobe and moved him into the Ambassador. Later, they found a two-room apartment off the Via Veneto on Via Aurora, overlooking the Villa Borghese Gardens.

Salvatore spoke no English. If the two men had to communicate something important, they used an Italian-English dictionary.

[In years to come, Salvatore would inspire the young hustler depicted in the closing scene of
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
. In the movie, Vivien Leigh, as Mrs. Stone, tosses her key out the window to the young man in tattered clothing.]

At Doney’s Café, Tennessee also met a brooding Orson Welles, sitting by himself. He introduced himself to the famous actor, and they chatted for about an hour. Welles told Tennessee that he was in Rome working on a film script inspired by the life of Cagliostro. Welles just assumed that Tennessee knew who Cagliostro was.

Tennessee did not.

[The life of Alessandro Cagliostro (1743-1795, an Italian adventurer, mystic, con artist, and oculist, is shrouded in rumor, propaganda, and mysticism. In the 1780s court of the French king, Louis XVI, he was implicated in the notorious, murky, and politically loaded “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” whirling around the head of Marie Antoinette. Her reputation (and that of the monarchy itself), was tarnished by vengeful accusations that claimed (incorrectly) that she had participated in a crime to defraud the crown jewelers of the cost of the most expensive diamond necklace in Europe.]

Welles ended up portraying Cagliostro in the 1949 movie
, Black Magic.
]

Tennessee decided to throw a party for Rome’s American expatriates in his Via Aurora apartment. Since Welles was “connected,” Tennessee asked him to invite several key American expatriates, friends of his, as guests.

“At the time, I thought that Orson was the only
bona fide
male American heterosexual in Rome,” Tennessee said. “I found out differently. His previous conquests were legendary, and I heard about them when I lived in Hollywood. He freely admitted that he’d been a patron of prostitutes in brothels from Singapore to Shanghai. He was also reported to have seduced a string of entertainers, including Lucille Ball, Marlene Dietrich, Dolores Del Rio, and Judy Garland. He also didn’t mind crossing the color line. He bedded both Lena Horne and Eartha Kitt…the list was long. Of course, he was known mainly for his marriage to the goddess Rita Hayworth.”

At Tennessee’s party, a drunken Welles made a number of revelations to Tennessee, all of which surprised him.

Welles told him that on his first visit to Rome as a young man, “A gypsy taught me to walk with a live chicken between my legs.” Tennessee was too polite to ask why he needed to do that.

Welles had some homosexual liaisons to confess. “When I became an actor and a young director, I was the Lillie Langtry of the homosexual set. Everyone wanted me. Whenever I directed a picture, I always tried to seduce my actors. I make them fall in love with me before I cast them.”

When Welles was introduced to Salvatore, he told Tennessee, “The Italians believe that any young boy is meat for a quick seduction, and it will have no effect on him and his masculinity as a grown man. Salvatore here will probably settle down with a little wife and have twelve children.”

The distinguished guests began to arrive, led by “the American social duenna of Italy,” Sir Harold Acton. The social historian would later write about the guests in his published diaries. He found Tennessee “a pudgy, taciturn, moustached little man without any obvious distinction.”

He met Gore Vidal at the party. Acton found him “aggressively handsome in a clean-limbed sophomore style, with success written all over him.”

Gore was taken over to meet the host. Tennessee had heard of him. His homosexual novel,
The City and the Pillar
, had just reached number five on
The New York Times’
bestseller list, a literary success he would not know for a long time.

At the age of twenty-two, Gore found the 37 year-old Tennessee “ancient.”

Tennessee later said, “Unlike Capote, I got on with Gore, but only by the strenuous effort it took to overlook his conceit. He had studied ballet, I learned, and he constantly did pirouettes. He flexes his legs and then prances about. The rest of the time, he compares himself to Balzac and attacks Truman Capote. Gore is good-looking, with a keen patrician humor.”

Tennessee told Gore that he’d come to Rome to “partake of
dolce far niente
”
[loosely translated as “sweet indolence”]
.

Gore soon learned that Tennessee had “indifference to place, art, and history. He seldom read a book, and the only history he knew was his own. He depends on a romantic genius to get him through life. Above all, he’s a survivor.”

Gore was not impressed with Salvatore except sexually. “He was just another Italian kid renting his ass,” Gore later said. “When I learned that Tennessee was seeing him only every other night, I booked him for those other three or four nights a week. I felt I could learn more about Tennessee by experiencing what he liked first hand in young men.”

As Gore had his first drink with Tennessee, one of many to come in their future, he told the playwright, “I’ve encountered you before. Once I was walking up Fifth Avenue and I spotted you trailing me. You were obviously cruising me. I remember your blue bow tie with its white polka dots. Actually, I was cruising some other guy that afternoon, a hot marine. I turned around and gave you such a scowl that you fled.”

Gore had shown up at the party on the arm of two A-list guests, both of them invited by Welles. One was Samuel Barber, the American composer, one of the most celebrated of the 20
^th
Century. He was without his companion, Gian Carlo Menotti, the famous conductor, whom he had met at school.