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) (51 page)

Truman attended Brando’s photo shoot with Cecil Beaton the following week. Brando showed up wearing his dirty T-shirt and tight jeans from
Streetcar
. According to Truman, at one point, Beaton snapped at least a hundred photographs of Brando. After Cecil was satisfied he’d had enough of those, he asked Brando if he would remain behind and pose “for some figure studies,” as Truman later quoted Cecil.

“Cecil was well aware that Marlon did not wear underwear under his jeans,” Truman said. “Everybody along Broadway had heard that fascinating tidbit.”

With absolutely no embarrassment, Brando pulled off his shirt and unfastened his jeans. In a minute, he was stark naked for Beaton’s camera. “I decided then and there that this handsome young man could be had,” Truman said.

Years later in Key West, Truman became a bit coy, especially when discussing what happened after the photo shoot. “Both Cecil and I had Marlon that night in the same bed,” Truman claimed. “He was strictly rough trade, but we managed to coax two loads from him—one for Cecil who got the first eruption, the next for Yours Truly.”

After that, Truman drunkenly claimed—in front of Tennessee, Frank Merlo, and novelist James Leo Herlihy—that he “serviced” Brando frequently during the weeks to come. Truman not only lied on occasion about many of his involvements, but exaggerated those that really took place. He was also known for altering the facts to make a good story even better.

Ironically, however, both Tennessee and later Elia Kazan felt that Truman told the truth in this case. “Even so, I think Truman highly exaggerated the extent of his romantic friendship with Marlon,” Tennessee said after Truman left Key West. “Truman might have fallen down once or twice on bent nylon and given Marlon a blow-job, or even two or three. But I’m sure that the so-called love affair between Marlon and Truman took place only in the wee one’s churning brain.”

There is no way at this point of determining if Truman told the truth.

The nude shots of Brando became the talk of gossipy underground Broadway. They have never been published, at least not for public consumption. Brando later denied having posed for the nude shots.

Apparently, the pictures were not part of the vast repertoire of photographs and diary entries that Beaton left behind at his death.

There is speculation that Beaton in the 1950s sold the nude pictures to a very rich and very devoted fan of Brando’s, where they may reside to this day, waiting for some future heir to some estate to sell them to the highest bidder as a collector’s item.

Chapter Fifteen

Son of a baker
, a Jacksonville, Florida cracker, Denham Fouts, nicknamed “Denny,” fled from home as a teenager. In Washington, D.C., he worked as a stock boy for only a short time before one of the executives at Safeway promoted him to “The Best Kept Boy in the World,” a title that would follow him for the rest of his short life.

His first patron claimed “Denny was thin as a hieroglyph, with dark hair, light brown eyes, and a cleft chin.” He also possessed something that Denny defined as “my impressive money-maker.”

In time, this extraordinary youth would provide literary inspiration for characters created by Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, and Gavin Lambert, among others.

Stifled by the boredom of Washington, Denny escaped on a train to New York to continue his career as a kept boy. He found that his body and sex appeal were all that was needed to launch himself in an even bigger city than Washington. At Manhattan’s Astor Bar, he met the writer and critic, Glenway Wescott, who later said, “He was absolutely enchanting and ridiculously good looking.”

Later, Wescott claimed “the only thing I like about Denny was that he had the most delicious body odor. I once swiped one of his handkerchiefs after he’d wiped his sweaty brow.”

Wescott was one of his early sponsors, introducing him to George Platt Lynes, the American photographer whose pictures had appeared in such magazines as
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
. He also photographed many movie stars and was known for his pictures of nude males. Denny posed in the buff for him, and copies of those photos were shopped around to some of the wealthiest homosexuals in the world, some of whom subsequently sought out Denny’s sexual charms.

Born in 1914, Denny was in his early 20s when he descended on Paris for a series of conquests, often with famous men.

One of his early sponsors was Swiss-Canadian Brion Gysin, the famous painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist. Among other achievements, he invented the “Dreamachine,” a flicker device designed as an art object and “mystical stimulant” whose patterns of light were intended for viewing with one’s eyes closed. The flicker device used alpha waves in the 8-16 Hz range to produce a change in consciousness in receptive viewers.

Gysin also collaborated with his close friend, William Burroughs, before he became world famous after the publication of
The Naked Lunch
.

As Ted Morgan, the biographer of William Burroughs, wrote: “Gysin was a tall, broad-shouldered man with thick sandy hair and the ruddy, bony, narrow-eyed face of a Swiss mountaineer, cold and imperious. He had a glacial geniality.”

As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana fudge to a cookbook being compiled by Alice B. Toklas. It was included in her cookbook and became known all over the world as Alice B. Toklas’s brownies, the most famous recipe to ever emerge from the hippie era.

In Paris, Denny introduced his new lover, Gysin, to his newly minted friends, the composer Paul Bowles and his author wife, Jane Bowles, both of whom indulged in homosexuality on the side.

Paul Bowles later reported that Denny had just returned from Tibet after Gysin and Denny visited the Bowles couple in their hotel room in Paris’ 8
^th
arrondissement
. “In Tibet, Denny had practiced archery and had brought back some huge bows with him,” Paul said. “The arrows were made with built-in tampons of cotton, to be soaked in ether before use and ignited. To demonstrate his prowess with the difficult bow, he began to shoot arrows from our hotel window down into the evening traffic of the Champs-Élysées. Fortunately, there were no repercussions.”

The Harlem singer, Jimmy Daniels, was also introduced to Denny at a Left Bank night club. “Denny’s skin looked as if it just had been scrubbed. It seemed to have no pores at all. It was so smooth. He was just adorable, so very fuckable.”

While in Paris, Denny also became the lover of Jean Marais, the French actor and director more famously associated with Jean Cocteau. Cocteau, in fact, had considered (but later rejected) Marais as the lead, Stanley Kowalski, in the French-language production of Tennessee’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
, in Paris.