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) (52 page)

At the time of his affair with Denny, Marais was yet to make his reputation. He would later star in 100 roles in French films and on television, notably in Cocteau’s
La Belle et la Bête
(1946) (aka
Beauty and the Beast)
and
Orphée
(1949). In the 1950s, Marais, the star of many swashbuckling pictures, became known as “the French Errol Flynn.”

Marais and Denny made a striking couple on the Parisian nightscape. Once, they were photographed together emerging from a theater off the Champs-Élysées.

Before the outbreak of World War II, a story spread among
tout Paris
that Adolf Hitler had seen this photograph of Marais and Denny and had sent an offer through his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, for Denny to visit him in Berlin.

Denny turned down the offer. “Who in his right mind would trade the muscular arms of the gorgeous Jean Marais for the embrace of a beast like Hitler?”

Years later, Truman told Tennessee and anyone else who knew Danny that if the handsome young man had yielded to Hitler’s romantic overtures, “there would have been no World War II.”

Almost no one believed such a ridiculous assertion. Gore never believed that an overture had ever come in from Hitler at all. When Gore got to know Denny years later, he asked him about Truman’s claim.

“Denny produced a 1938 letter from Goebbels, inviting him to Berlin as the personal guest of the Führer,” Gore said. “Not only that, but Goebbels was holding out a contract with UFA that would have made Denny a star in German films, with his voice dubbed in German, of course.”

“For once in his life, it seemed that Truman was telling the truth,” Gore said. “Ever since the 1920s, there had been rumors of Hitler’s closeted homosexuality, even a book or two written about it.”

Paul Bowles eventually introduced Denny to another artist who became his lover and sponsor, Gavin Lambert. The British-born author was a screenwriter, novelist, and biographer.

Lambert and Denny had a torrid affair. Lambert was ten years younger than Denny when they met and was more his sexual type since he was only a teenager. Although he slept with older men, Denny actually preferred young boys.

Denny never lived to know that Lambert would one day become famous, first as a screenwriter, personal assistant, and lover to the Hollywood film director, Nicholas Ray. With Ray, he co-wrote the film script for
Bitter Victory
in 1947. The director had previously sampled the youthful charms of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, each of whom he’d seduced during the filming of
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955).

Lambert would also adapt for the screen Tennessee’s novella,
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961)
, starring Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty.

Denny appears in Lambert’s
roman à clef, Norman’s Letter
.

As Denny’s circle of admirers enlarged, an invitation to visit England came in from one of the richest men in England, Evan Morgan, 2
^nd
Vis count Tredegar, who was born into what the Duke of Bedford described as “the oddest family I ever met. His father owned the largest yacht in the world, and his mother built bird nests big enough to sit in to hatch eggs.”

The eccentric Viscount was a Welsh poet and author who devoted a great deal of his time to his kangaroos, whom he had taught to box at his private zoo. When Denny arrived in the aftermath of his invitation, it was “love at first sight” on the viscount’s part.

Soon, Denny, appearing nude except for a fig leaf, became a featured attraction at the Viscount’s notorious weekend house parties, which drew such distinguished guests as Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, and the painter Augustus John.

The most notorious guest was Aleister Crowley, noted in the British tabloids as “the world’s wickedest man.” He had been known for arriving with an entourage of six young boys willing to sacrifice their virginity. When Crowley spotted Denny, he told his host, “I’ve got to have him all night. I will release him only in the morning. Before the rooster crows, I want to have performed every known sexual act—and some unknown ones—on this beautiful American.”

[Later, Evan Morgan’s private eccentricities were revealed in a book
, Not Behind Lace Curtains: The Hidden World of Evan, Viscount Tredegar
, by William Cross. The book exposed not only his homosexuality, but his flirtations with the occult and with the “Black Masses,” inspired by Crowley and his teachings
.

Cross estimated that when Morgan came of age, the Welsh estate his family had owned since the 14th century was bringing in what’s estimated as today’s equivalent of £65,000 a day, or £24 million a year.]

Denny soon fled that bizarre world and returned to Paris, where an invitation was waiting from Prince Paul of Greece. He included air tickets to Athens, where he wanted to cruise the Aegean Sea “with this American beauty.”

The prince functioned as titular head of Greece from 1947 until his death in 1964. The third son of King Constantine of Greece, Paul—a handsome, dashing figure in his own right—had been trained as a naval officer. During that Aegean cruise, however, he spent more time in bed with Denny than he did directing his crew.

The prince had been born in 1901 and was not as young as Denny usually preferred.

After that cruise, the two lovers may have as many as three subsequent rendezvous, but details are lacking. During World War II, when Greece was under Nazi occupation, Prince Paul lived in exile in London and Cairo.

Peter Watson, “the Oleomargarine King of England,” was among Denny’s last lovers before the outbreak of World War II. “I could not be in the same room with Denny without getting an erection,” Watson told friends. During the course of their affair, he became so enthralled with Denny that he presented him with a large Picasso painting called
Girl Reading
(1934). Denny once lent the painting to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, but later sold it to the Samuel Marx Collection.

Watson also introduced Denny to Cyril Connolly, the British journalist and critic, who also fell in love with him. With Watson’s money, Connolly had founded
Horizon
magazine in 1939. Connolly later told his patron, “Denny comes in dripping with all that Deep South charm, enough to make you drop your trousers and bend over for him. But he’s got a very nasty temper if provoked. I hear very dark stories about him, some of which must be true. His behavior is erratic, and I understand that some of his past deeds, especially when in residence with Evan Morgan, our Viscount friend, were bloody dangerous.”

As France was about to be invaded by Nazi Germany, Watson shipped Denny off to Hollywood. “I could not stand the idea of that beautiful porcelain skin being damaged by one of Hitler’s bombs.”

In Hollywood in 1940, Denny became involved in an affair with Christopher Isherwood, who had maintained a long-time, widely publicized desire for involvement (some say possession) of the best of both German and American youth. With oceans of pain and regret, he’d been forced to sever ties with his German lover in Nazi-occupied France. Later, he found the object of his obsession for the ideal American male in the flesh of Denham Fouts.

In addition to “hot sex,” Denny also would inspire Isherwood’s
Down There on a Visit
(1962), which contains the novella
Paul
, whose titular character was based on Denny.

After the war, Denny returned to Paris, where Watson paid the rent on Denny’s apartment in rue du Bac and even gave him a large painting by Tchelitchev to decorate it.

Watson introduced Denny to Michael Wishart. “I was warned by Jean Cocteau, of all people, that Fouts was a bad influence and an opium addict. Imagine Cocteau warning someone against an opium addict. I was besotted with Denny,” Wishart later confessed. “It’s true he was an opium addict. Perhaps Cocteau was right in warning me. I, too, became an opium addict.”

Wishart was an English painter who specialized in neo-romantic landscapes and hidden faces captured in bravura swatches of oil. After an exhibition of his paintings in 1956, art critic David Sylvester wrote of Wishart’s “sensibility that is at once shamelessly romantic and deeply sophisticated, and which endows the wide open spaces of the great outdoors with a sort of hothouse preciosity . . . he is one of the select band of English romantic painters who are truly painters.”