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) (40 page)

“After the war
, everybody was waiting for the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald to appear,” Gore Vidal said. “That’s why a new novel by one of us was an event. The effete Truman Capote was definitely the dark horse in the race.”

Biographer Gerald Clarke wrote: “Gore was terribly anxious to be number one. If Truman thought of himself as a condor waiting to pounce on literary fame, Gore believed that he was a golden eagle who, if he could not find fame first, would quickly snatch it away.”

Truman more or less echoed that sentiment. “Gore was very anxious to be the number one American writer. He was afraid that maybe I was going to do him out of that honor.”

Writer and critic Glenway Wescott defined Gore as “lunatic competitive. When I told him I found Truman extremely talented, he blew up. ‘How can you call anybody talented who’s written only one book at twenty-three? I’ve written three novels and I’m only twenty-two.’”

“When I mentioned this to Truman, he stamped his feet like Rumpelstiltskin.” Westcott said.

“Miss Vidal has no talent—
None! None! NONE
!” Capote shouted.

Tennessee was one of the first to learn of the competition between the two writers. “Gore is infected with that awful competitive spirit and seems to be continually haunted over the successes and achievements of other writers—namely, Truman Capote,” Tennessee said. “He is positively obsessed with poor little Truman Capote. You would think they were running neck and neck for some fabulous gold prize.”

Both Truman and Gore found themselves in the post-war Paris of 1948, where the boys were cheap and the food not only cheap but terrific. It was a time for Gore to discover what a liar Truman was. Before the summer was over, Gore would proclaim, “Truman made lying an art form—a minor art form.”

From the Right Bank to the Left Bank, at various parties, Truman uttered some startling name-dropping news. He spread the world that both Albert Camus and André Gide were in love with him.

Truman confided to Tennessee that “Camus comes to my room every night. He is madly in love with me.” Tennessee reported this to Gore.

“Could you imagine Camus wanting to hold that dwarfish body of Capote’s in his loving arms?” Gore asked.

“My imagination has unlimited possibilities,” Tennessee said, jokingly. “For all you know, Camus has sworn eternal devotion to
me.”

Gore was very skeptical. He’d actually been with Truman when both of them had met Camus at a party thrown by the French publishing house, Gallimard.

“From what I gathered, Camus was fucking beautiful actresses that summer,” Gore said. “There were stories about how, in his native Algeria, he’d plowed a few boy asses in his day, but Truman’s butt wasn’t one of them.”

“If Truman were having sex with Camus, he might have caught TB before the end of that summer,” Gore claimed.

[Albert Camus, the world-renowned existentialist and author of
The Rebel, The Stranger
, and
The Myth of Sisyphus
contracted tuberculosis in 1948 and went into seclusion for two years to recover from the disease
.

A French-Algerian born into a pied-noir family in 1913, he became the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1957) after Rudyard Kipling
.

On January 4, 1960, he died in a car accident near Sens, France. In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children to Paris, but made a last minute decision to drive to Paris with his publisher instead. He left an unfinished novel
, The First Man
(aka
Le premier homme
; not published until 1995), which he was writing before he died. It was an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria.]

When not discussing the sexual prowess of Camus as it applied to his (non-existent) affair with him, Truman spread the word around Paris that the great André Gide was also in love with him.

Truman showed everyone who wanted to see it—even those who didn’t want to view the object—a gold and amethyst ring, asserting that it was “a love token from André.”

[Born in 1869, the fabled French author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years before Camus
.

Like Camus, Gide, too, had spent time in North Africa, mostly in Algeria. He admitted that one of the attractions of that country was its “coven of beautiful boys,” available for rent at extremely reasonable prices
.

In 1895, Gide had indulged his passion for Algeria with his traveling companion, Oscar Wilde. Long before Gore wrote his homosexual novel
, The City and the Pillar
, Gide had published Corydon (1924), in which he defended pederasty. The book received widespread condemnation.]

“Before my eyes, Truman turned himself into a gemlike flame with the aged Gide as a suicidal moth,” Gore claimed.

When Gore met Gide, he asked about his relationship with Truman.

“Who?” Gide asked. “I’ve never met him.”

In the following year, August of 1949, Gore and Truman found themselves in the same place together, the port city of Tangier on the northern coast of Morocco.

To his friend, John Malcolm Brinnin, Truman wrote:

“Gore Vidal has been here—
has
, I’m overjoyed to say. When I think
I’m
paranoid, I listen to him and feel better at once. He dropped in on a Sunday morning to find me
déshabillé
over coffee. He pushes in, hopped up and crazy-eyed. ‘Truman,’ he says. ‘They’re out to get us!’ He starts off on his totally incomprehensible routine about ‘them’ and how we have to ‘stand pat’ and ‘close ranks.’ ‘What in hell are you talking about?’ says I. ‘I think you’ve come to the wrong door. If you don’t mind, I’d like to close it.’”

Years later, when he was no longer speaking to Gore, Truman made a confession to Jack Knowles, his neighbor on Long Island. Truman claimed that in the late 1940s, he’d been in love with Gore, who had spurned his overtures.

When Gore heard that, he said, “That is one of the biggest lies Truman ever told, one of his gold-plated, spur-of-the-moment inventions.”

By the early 1950s, the feud between Gore and Truman had intensified. Gore mocked Truman’s attempts to break into what he called “Capote’s jet-setters.”

“Truman mistook the rich who like publicity for the ruling class, and he made himself far too much at home with them, only to find that he was to them no more than an amusing pet,” Gore claimed. “A pet who could be dispensed with when he later published lurid gossip about them.”

[Gore was referring to the chapters of Truman’s unfinished novel
, Answered Prayers,
which
Esquire
ran in installments.]

Encounters between the two of them were rare in the years to come. They did see each other at a party at the home of critic Leo Lerman.

Lerman maintained a surface friendship with Gore, but denounced Gore’s homosexual novel,
The City and the Pillar
, to Truman.

“I loathe Gore’s book,” he told Truman. It makes all things dirty. The meretricious—soap operas, slick fiction—always blacken whole areas—like locusts—and this is because in these works, there are always some echoes of truth. If they were totally false, they would have no effect on anyone, but their partial truths make them so monstrous, so insidious.”

“Hearing this from Leo was like a rhapsody to my ears,” Truman said.

Behind his back, Lerman was also critical of Truman. He felt that his sheltered life showed up in his writing. “I wonder whether he doesn’t need at least the terror of living in so dreadful a world as the army for at least a little time. I think he needs some experience in a wider life than any he seems to have known. When I tried to tell him that if he got into a sex scandal, no one save avant-garde publications would publish him, he said that I really had the most morbid approach to life. Truman lacks almost all education. He’s very Southern Belle, that Truman, at times.”

At Lerman’s apartment, Gore and Truman clashed head to head, each critical of the other’s published work.

“At least I have a style,” Truman told him.

“Of course you do,” Gore said. “You stole it from Carson McCullers, along with a bit of Eudora Welty.”

“Better than stealing from the
Daily News,”
Truman shot back.

Tennessee, who was also at the party, overheard this exchange. He rolled his eyes. “Please! Please! You are making your mother ill.”

Truman and Gore saw each other for the last time at a party at Drue Heinz’s house in Manhattan. “Without my glasses, I mistook him for a small ottoman and sat on him,” Gore said.

Truman charged that Gore “is so cold and so distant. No one is close to him anymore, unlike myself, who has thousands of devoted friends and countless admirers. There’s not a week that goes by but what I receive at least two gay marriage proposals, even though there is no such thing as gay marriage.”

Throughout the 1970s, Gore and Truman continued to make hostile remarks about each other, both privately and as part of media appearances. Appearing on
The David Susskind Show
, Truman said, “Of course, I’m always sad about Gore Vidal, very sad that he has to breathe every day.”

Truman maliciously planted fake items about Gore with gossip columnists. Gore was mailed a quote attributed to him that appeared in the Canadian
Sunday Telegraph
. The article quoted Gore as saying, “I am resented because of my genius, my sex, and my beauty.”

Of course, Gore was far too clever to make such a silly remark.

To counterattack, Gore told the press, “If Truman Capote had not existed in his present form, another would have to be run up on the old sewing machine because that sort of
persona
must be, for the whole nation, the stereotype of what a fag is.”

Andreas Brown, literary archivist, said, “People feared Capote, no doubt about it. Perhaps everyone but Gore Vidal. He was perhaps the only person who did not fear Capote and in fact relished doing public battle with him. They were real enemies.”