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) (35 page)

In May 2009, after protracted courtroom tussles that were widely reviewed in the mainstream and tabloid press, Thelema was recognized by the British legal system as a religion, as it has both a “Holy Book” (
The Book of the Law
) and a deity (Nuit, invoked mainly during rites of initiation) as defined by Crowley and by his later disciples.]

Crowley was also an insatiable bisexual and drug experimentalist who staged orgies—many associated with mystical rites and a pervasive sense of the occult—the scope and breadth of which had not been seen in Italy since the days of the Roman Empire.

In Cefalù, Tennessee and Gore located and visited the ruined Abbey of Thelema, a small stone house whose interior was adorned, during Crowley’s tenure, with cultish murals later highlighted in a film by Kenneth Anger and described in some of Marilyn Manson’s lyrics. It had been abandoned since Benito Mussolini had ordered Crowley out of Italy in 1923.

Through a translator, Tennessee and Gore interviewed an aging fisherman who told them that during Crowley’s tenure in Cefalù, boys and girls aged 12 to 16, rounded up from villages along the northern coast of Sicily, were involved in “deflowerings.” He had been one of those virginal boys.

“He called me Sweet Flesh and buried his face between what he called ‘the scented valley between down-covered hillocks.’ He said the greatest treasure that could be given to a man’s hot prick is the virgin arse of a tender boy.”

“He was my tormentor, and the more I screamed and cried and thrust about, the more his monstrous assault on my buttocks continued. When it was over, I was bleeding.”

The fisherman also claimed that Crowley “had planted his seed” in many of the women of Cefalù, and that some of their descendants defined Crowley as their ancestor.

“There were lessons that Crowley taught all of us, both boys and girls,” the fisherman said. “That is, to rejoice when others inflict physical pain upon us, and to view such suffering as a celebration of life.”

When Gore returned to New York, he found no publisher willing to distribute a graphic novel depicting the sexual (some said Satanic) contexts incited by Crowley.

[In 1908, W. Somerset Maugham had already used Crowley as a model for a character in his novel, The Magician, which film producer Rex Ingram had turned into a silent screen picture with the same title in 1926.]

Back in Rome, Tennessee sold his Jeep and told Salvatore goodbye. He and Gore had heard that Truman Capote had arrived in Paris and was virtually the toast of the town. “We’ve got to go there at once and put a stop to that!” Gore commanded Tennessee.

Tennessee was only too willing to go along. “After Paris, we can go on to England. After all these Mediterranean dark-haired boys and olive-skinned bodies, I’m famished for blondes.”

Both of them would use that line when they worked on
Suddenly Last Summer
(1959), which originated as a one-act play by Tennessee that would later be made into a movie adapted for the screen by Gore.

When the pleasures of Rome faded for them, Gore and Tennessee made their way to Paris. They stayed briefly at the Hotel du Pont Royal, where they encountered Jean-Paul Sartre and his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, in the bar.

Gore tried to strike up a conversation with them, but “these French Gods ignored us.”

When they heard of the Left Bank’s Hotel de l’Université, Gore and Tennessee moved in. “This hotel seemed to prefer young bachelors of a certain kind,” Tennessee said. “I especially liked the hotel because its staff didn’t mind if we returned with gentlemen callers at night.”

In Paris, Gore began to refer to Tennessee as “The Glorious Bird,” which he soonafter shortened to “Bird.”

“A lot of people asked me why I called him that,” Gore said. “The image of the bird figures in much of his work—the bird in flight, in poetry, in life. The bird is time, death. Tennessee once asked me, ‘Have you ever seen the skeleton of a bird? If you have, you will know how completely they are still flying.’”

Gore and Tennessee were seen together so often that the Parisians they met just assumed they were lovers. “That was not the case,” Tennessee said. “Gore and I liked boys of the same type, and we frequently traded them back and forth. We went out cruising together, but one night, we came back without catching any game. I was a bit drunk and suggested to Gore that we make it together in the sack.”

Gore turned to Tennessee and looked startled. “Don’t be macabre,” he warned.

Except for a brief fling with playwright William Inge, Tennessee had an aversion to sex with other writers. “It was most disturbing to him to think that the head beside you on the pillow might be thinking, too,” Gore claimed. “The Bird had a gift for selecting bodies attached to heads usually filled with the bright confetti of lunacy.”

The highlight of their trip to Paris occurred on a hot summer afternoon in July, when Gore invited Tennessee to accompany him to a male brothel originally financed and subsidized (and frequently patronized) by Marcel Proust. Known as the Hotel de Saumon, it was located between Les Halles and rue Réaumur. It was still decorated with some of Proust’s furnishings, which Oscar Wilde on a visit had defined as “hideous.”

Gore and Tennessee were introduced to an old bald Algerian named Said. In Gore’s words, “He looked like an evil Djinn from
Arabian Nights.”
As a young boy during Proust’s heyday, Said had worked as a prostitute in the brothel. Gore was eager to interview him about Proust’s sexual preferences.

Said claimed that the fabled French writer always came in wearing a fur coat, even on a hot summer night. He never removed that coat even when he took a boy to one of the rooms upstairs.

“I always kept three caged rats,” Said told them. “Anticipating a visit from Monsieur Proust, I made sure they were very hungry. Proust would insist that the boy he hired stick his hand into the cage containing the ravenous rat. Invariably, the boy’s hand would get bitten. Proust would then go into rapture, as if experiencing some sort of orgasm.”

Later, through a peephole, Tennessee and Gore observed about eight young blue collar youths, sitting around smoking, drinking beer, or reading newspapers. The ethnic range of male flesh was widely varied: There was usually at least one blonde from Scandinavia; a Slavic type; a young man from Senegal; two or three boys from North Africa; and the rest from throughout the French provinces.

Gore and Tennessee spent a lot of time walking around Paris, which looked shoddy after its long wartime occupation, during which no repairs had been made.

“One afternoon as we sat drinking at La Coupole, I gave Tennessee a copy of my first play,
A Search for the King,”
Gore said.

After making an ostentatious show of reading it, Tennessee announced, “This is the worst play I’ve ever read.”

“Our friendship survived that attack,” Gore said. “But he had mortally wounded me.”

“As for Capote, I followed his lying trail like a truth squad,” Gore said. “I heard the lies he was spreading and followed up on them, telling people the truth. Unlike Josef Goebbels, most people hate a liar, and I did much to destroy Capote’s reputation.”

Midway through June of 1948, the literati of London seemed eager to welcome two emerging writers, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Tennessee arrived in time to attend rehearsals of
The Glass Menagerie
, where John Gielgud was directing Helen Hayes in the role of Amanda.

Gore and Tennessee arrived in the British capital separately. In London, Gore lodged at the Hyde Park Corner Apartments as a guest of the aristocratic Edward Montague. Like Oscar Wilde, Montague had gone to prison for eighteen months because of his affair with a young boy.

Shortly after Tennessee arrived in town, he attended a party in Montague’s flat. “I noticed a lot of rough trade belonging either to Gore or to Montague,” Tennessee recalled years later in Key West. “Since there was so much of it, I stole only one of their young men that night.”

At various parties, Tennessee and Gore met the literary elite, including Noël Coward, Graham Greene, V.S. Pritchett, and E.M. Forster.

Forster had read the play,
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and had high praise for Tennessee, who had never read anything by Forster.

In contrast, according to Gore, “Forster virtually ignored me, and I had read all of his books.”

Tennessee was not impressed. “Forster looked like an old river rat to me.”

At party’s end, Forster invited both Gore and Tennessee to visit him at Cambridge, where he promised to show them the sights of that university town.

Shortly before the prearranged day of their tour, at the last minute, Tennessee bowed out, claiming, “I cannot abide old men with urine stains on their trousers.”

Consequently, Gore traveled alone from London to Cambridge, where Forster later invited him back to his rooms. There, he showed Gore his unpublished novel,
Maurice
.

[Written beginning in 1913, with multiple adaptations during the author’s lifetime, Forster intended to never publish it while his mother was alive, fearing the pain that the resulting scandal would cause her. Although it was shown to friends, including Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, it was eventually published after Forster’s death in 1971, based on the approval of the board of fellows of King’s College at Cambridge, which had inherited the rights to his books
.

Although they were reluctant to grant their permission to film
Maurice
—not because of the novel’s homoerotic theme, but because literary critics had defined it as one of Forster’s lesser achievements—the aesthetic success of Ismail Merchant’s previous adaptation of one of Forster’s other works
, Room with a View
, eventually won them over
.

In 1987
, Maurice
became a celebrated and internationally famous Merchant & Ivory film starring James Wilby, Rupert Graves, and Hugh Grant.]