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) (39 page)

Tennessee later remembered an encounter he had one night over drinks with Jack Dunphy. “I’m new to the homosexual world,” Dunphy said. “I guess I’m expected to go to bed with everyone. But I don’t have affairs. I just go to bed with people. That’s all.”

One night, Frank and Tennessee were invited to a rather chic party at the home of the Harrisons. Lilli Palmer approached Frank and said, magisterially, “And, Mr. Merlo, exactly what is it you do for Mr. Williams? A social secretary, no doubt?”

Completely unphased and utterly without hesitation, Merlo responded in his nasal, rapid-fire New Jersey accent: “Sometimes I suck his cock, sometimes he sucks my cock, sometimes I fuck him in the ass, sometimes he fucks me in the ass.”

—Tennessee Describing Truman

By the 1970s, Tennessee came to realize that “all the nuts and bolts that kept Truman’s head together were coming loose.”

At the time, Tennessee was seeing a lot of author Dotson Rader, who later wrote an intimate memoir,
Tennessee: Cry of the Heart
, about their experiences together.

In Manhattan, as described by Rader, Truman began to invite him, with Tennessee, to some of the most bizarre bars and private gatherings in the history of New York. They flourished in that decade, disappearing with the advent of AIDS in the early 80s.

According to Rader, the first invitation from Truman was to “The Toilet,” a notorious “scat bar” in a loft in a battered industrial building near the waterfront in the western sector of Greenwich Village.

In the rear of the bar was a huge urinal where young men would strip naked and lie down. Other men would come to the urinal and spray them with their “golden shower.” After a few minutes there, Rader and Tennessee fled in horror.

Another invitation, and this one was extended to Norman Mailer as well, was to a bar catering to gay African Americans, who did not welcome white men who acted inappropriately in their midst. Some of the white intruders who didn’t were beaten up, in some cases, according to Rader, because they enjoyed it. Truman told Mailer, “Surviving inside is a test of one’s manhood and jungle skills.”

Yet a third invitation was extended to Club Forty-Eight, the most notorious private club in Manhattan, drawing a mixed clientele of gays and straights.

Through an arrangement with a funeral home, a recently deceased corpse—either male or female—was smuggled into the club for necrophiles to assault sexually. The unfortunate deceased was placed naked on a steel table, where it was ritualistically defiled by any number of patrons before dawn, at which time the body was covered with semen.

As a sexual sophisticate, Tennessee had long ago heard of the bizarre and shadowy erotic phenomenon known as necrophilia. “Most forms of human sexuality do not offend me,” he said. “But I always found it disgusting to make love to a dead body. In my lifetime, I have had many partners who may have been dead in bed, but at least their hearts were still beating.”

In 1976, Tennessee picked up a copy of
Esquire
. In the magazine was a short story entitled “Unspoiled Monsters,” part of Truman’s unfinished novel which he’d entitled
Answered Prayers
.

Tennessee practically shouted “libel” when he read the section that dealt with a “Mr. Wallace,” who was identified as “the most acclaimed playwright in America.”

The narrator of the story in
Esquire
was P.B. Jones, a voice representing Truman himself. As the story relates, Jones hires himself out as a hustler, and gets a call from Mr. Wallace, who wants him to come over and walk his English Bulldog, a pet residing in “the playwright’s” suite at the Plaza Hotel.

Inside Wallace’s suite at The Plaza, Jones discovers that it’s littered with dog feces, since Mr. Wallace is usually too drunk to walk the dog. Shortly after his arrival, Jones slips on one deposit and slides, headfirst, into a second.

Responding to Jones’ embarrassment, Mr. Wallace, in a cornpone Southern accent, says, “
Heh, heh, that’s just mah dawg
.”

In the story, Truman described Mr. Wallace as a “chunky, booze-puffed runt with a mustache glued above laconic lips.” At one point in the narrative, the bulldog sexually assaults Jones.

Evoking Tennessee himself, the story’s Mr. Wallace also wears horn-rimmed glasses, carries pencils in his vest pockets, and drinks undiluted scotch from a glass stained with toothpaste. His speech is a “way-down-yonder voice as mushy as sweet potato pie.”

In the story, Truman also satirizes Tennessee’s hypochondria, prompting Wallace to declare: “I’m a dying man. Dying of cancer. Blood. Throat. Lungs. Tongue. Stomach. Brain. Asshole.”

The character of Wallace, the playwright, also laments “six failures in a row—four on Broadway, two off. The critics are killing me out of envy and ignorance. What do they care about the cancer eating my brain?”

The scene ends with a cigar-smoking Mr. Wallace instructing P.J. to “roll over and spread your cheeks.”

“Sorry,” Jones answers, “but I don’t catch. Pitch, yes. Catch, no.”

Mr. Wallace then suggests that he needs to extinguish his lit cigar in Jones’ rosebud.

At that point in the story, Jones says, “Boy, did I beat it out of there.”

Biographer Ronald Hayman accurately observed: “Capote was writing with merciless accuracy, aiming his satirical darts at Tennessee’s most repulsive traits and exposing the squalid messiness of his daily life in luxury hotels. Mr. Wallace is a man who has lost control over his daily routine and, having nothing else to live for, uses his wealth to indulge his persecution complex, his egocentricity, his self-pity, and his streak of cruelty. The prodigious energy that had once been channeled into writing was being wastefully and self-destructively diffused.”

In reference to the story, in a letter to Truman, which was never mailed, Tennessee wrote: “Dear Truman, what a generous nature you do seem to have!”

During the limited number of years that remained for the both of them, they kept up a certain politeness. But James Kirkwood, author of the Broadway musical,
A Chorus Line
, noted the jealousy and the barely concealed animosity between them during Truman’s visit to Key West in the late 1970s. He invited both of them to Louie’s Backyard, an open air restaurant overlooking the ocean.

“Tennessee had always been King of Key West, at least since Hemingway left,” Kirkwood said. “But on this visit to Key West, Truman was getting all the attention, much to Tennessee’s annoyance. People were used to seeing Tennessee all the time. But this little Truman Capote, that was something different. His outrageous, drunken remarks made far better copy than any of Tennessee’s utterances.”

Truman’s friend, John Malcolm Brinnin, the poet, critic, biographer, and historian, had a ringside view of Truman’s disenchanted observations about Tennessee:

“
[Truman’s]
slightly detached air of amused tolerance toward Tennessee was the norm, but this would often change to a kind of vindictive outrage out of all proportion to its causes. Truman assumed that his own sophistication and social grace were of an order beyond the reach of his friend. The latter showed itself in tongue lashings evoked by some newly uncovered evidence of Tennessee’s ‘tackiness,’ in dealing with people; some new report of his abrupt abandonment of a friend or lover. Tennessee was never out of Truman’s purview, or beyond the reach of his contumely.”

Brinnan recalled that in March of 1981 in Key West, Tennessee called him aside. “Is Truman trying to commit suicide in public?” Tennessee asked.

“What now?” Brinnin inquired.

“They’ve hauled him off another stage, smashed out of his skull. This time in San Francisco.”

[Truman had accepted an invitation to fly to San Francisco to give a talk before Authors and Artists in the Herbst Auditorium. His sponsor, Maria Theresa Caen, said, “He came out clearly disoriented. He lost his place and then he couldn’t find it. Then he turned back another page and started to read an earlier passage, and lost his place again. He was sad and hopeless. The plug had to be pulled on Truman. It was announced that the audience had to be cleared out because of a bomb threat. The people knew that was a lie, just an attempt to save face for Truman.”]

As time went by, with continued resentment, Truman expressed more outrage at how quickly Tennessee had tired of his latest lover. He called Brinnin, claiming, “Tennessee has done it again. Remember little Andrew, that nice, quiet kid? He’s just been dumped like some trussed-up body you’d find in the East River. Meanwhile, the fiend is on the loose, scot-free to do it all over again. And he will. The man’s a killer.”

Tennessee’s last encounter with Truman was in February of 1982, when the Mayor of New York presented Tennessee with a medallion of honor for his contributions to the Broadway Theater. Coming face to face with Truman, Tennessee had not forgiven him for the cruel portrait in
Esquire
, which had published chapters from his unfinished novel,
Answered Prayers
.

Tennessee asked Truman when he expected they would meet again.

“In Paradise,” Truman said.

Tennessee would die in 1983, Truman within two years.

As Truman neared the end of his life, his dependence on drugs clouded his judgment. More and more, he made public appearances at readings or on TV when he was clearly under the influence of drink and drugs. His addictions had begun when he was only a teenager, stealing sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet of his mother, Nina Capote.

By the arrival of the drug-hazy 1960s, he was already deeply addicted to mood-altering drugs consumed with large amounts of alcohol, notably Russian vodka.

By the time he researched
In Cold Blood
, he was clearly an alcoholic, although he had pulled himself together enough to write what many critics hailed as his masterpiece.

Throughout the late 1970s, he was unable to function on most days. “My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night,” he was fond of saying, quoting one of his favorite poems from childhood.

At times, Truman tried to cure his addiction as he did in 1977 when he had himself committed to the Smithers Clinic in Manhattan, a place known as “The Devil’s Island” of alcohol dependency rehabilitation centers. Author John Cheever had told him, “The place is grim, glum, and gloomy. If you survive it, you’ll come out sober.”

Truman’s most notorious TV appearance occurred during the summer of 1978, when he appeared on Stanley Siegel’s controversial talk show. In its immediate aftermath, he generated a headline: “DRUNK AND DOPED, CAPOTE VISITS TV TALK SHOW” shouted the
New York Post
.

The Post
also published a savage cartoon, depicting him with droopy eyes enveloped by piles of discarded liquor bottles and used hypodermic needles, along with a book entitled
Breakfast at the Bowery
. John Cashman, in
News-day
, wrote, “A talented man of considerable literary stature was making a fool of himself in front of 250,000 viewers.”

To recover from his embarrassment, Capote spent that night at Studio 54 with owner Steve Rubell and Liza Minnelli, who was not in great shape herself. In the next few days, Truman announced to friends, “I’m going to kill myself as soon as I work up the courage. I’ll hire someone to kill me
In Cold Blood.”

He told Jack Dunphy, “I’ve been at a long, long party. But the party’s over. It’s time to leave after this never-ending farewell I call my life.”

Chapter Eleven