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) (53 page)

Wishart’s affair with Denny was written about in his autobiography,
High Diver
, published in 1977. “Denny wore nothing but cream-colored flannel trousers and had the torso of an athlete,” Wishart said. “Along with his beautiful shoulders and golden forearms ran snow white mice with startling pink eyes, which he stroked gently with the back of his hands.”

After the war, Denny had picked up this eccentricity of having white mice run up and down his arms.

In that wardrobe, shirtless, Denny made frequent appearances with Wishart, who often wore “a full Bonnie Prince Charlie kilt with a lot of écru lace and half my grandmother’s pearls and rubies.”

[By 1988, Wishart’s passion for Denny had long ago been buried upon the young man’s death in Rome. In its place, he “conceived a searing passion for Michael Jackson. He wrote to friends, “How I am to live apart from Michael is an appalling quandary.”]

While still in Paris, Denny received an advance copy of Truman Capote’s first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
. He was especially intrigued by the provocative photograph on its back cover. Truman looked like the type of young boy he preferred sexually. Denny, by then a figure of myth and legend within international homosexual circles, sent Truman a blank check with just one word written as a notation on the bottom—COME—which of course, had a double meaning.

Denny’s reputation had preceded him, and Truman was eager to meet him. When he arrived in Paris, he headed at once for Denny’s shoddy, heavily curtained apartment on rue du Bac, where the young novelist soon discovered that Denny was addicted to opium.

Even so, he and Truman became lovers. When not making love, Truman spent hours in bed reading stories to Denny, and listening to fascinating tales of his romantic escapades.

“Even though a druggie, Denny looked fifteen years younger,” Truman later said, “Actually, he was thirty-four. He radiated health, youth, and an unspoiled innocence, although he was none of those things. He was beyond being good looking. He was the single most charming looking person I’ve ever seen. Had Denny known Oscar Wilde, he would have been the inspiration for Dorian Gray.”

One of Denny’s closest friends, John B. L. Goodwin, warned Truman that “Denny invents himself. If people don’t know his background, he makes it up.”

Truman didn’t quite agree with that. “Denny had led a fascinating life. He didn’t have to make up romantic adventures with men. He’d actually experienced them.”

Alarmed by Denny’s large-scale consumption of opium, Truman eventually fled from the scene, promising Denny he would meet him in Rome, but having no intention of keeping that commitment.

“How could I say I never planned to see him again?” Truman asked. “It wasn’t just the drugs and chaos, but the funereal halo of waste and failure that hovered over him. The shadow of such failure seemed somehow to threaten my own impending triumph.”

It could be argued that Truman saw a foreshadowing of his own drug-addicted future reflected in Denny’s dissipation.

Denny would appear as a character in Truman’s unfinished novel,
Answered Prayers
upon which he was working—or not working, as the case may be—during his final opium-sodden days. Denny’s Paris is evoked by line in the book: “When I think of Paris, it seems to me as romantic as a flooded
pissoir
, as tempting as a strangled nude floating on the Seine.”

In the novel, Denny’s answered prayers “lead eventually to nightmares of emptiness and abandonment, lived out at “Father Flanagan’s All Night Nigger Queen’s Kosher Café” a kind of Shangri-La for those who have lost hope.”

***

Following in Truman’s footsteps, Gore made his own literary pilgrimage to Paris. The first person he wanted to meet was Denny. John Lehmann, the English publisher, escorted Gore to Denny’s rue du Bac apartment.

Gore sat on the edge of Denny’s bed and smoked from the pipe offered him. “The opium made me deathly ill, and I never tried it again,” he later said.

More of a historian than the ever-gossipy Truman, Gore wanted to verify some of the more outrageous stories spread about Denny, mostly by Truman. After verifying the authenticity of letter that Goebbels had written to Denny from Berlin in 1938, Gore then asked about Denny’s alleged affair with the King of Greece.

Denny showed Gore a crumpled telegram from a stack of papers on the floor beside his bed. The letterhead was definitely from King Paul. It read:

“My Dear Denham
,

So thrilled to hear from you. I am much better than papers report. Hope you can come to Athens
.

Love
,

Paul.”

King Paul was the cousin of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. At the time of that communication with Denny, the king was suffering from typhoid fever and was too ill to attend the 1947 marriage of Philip to Princess Elizabeth.

In Paris, Gore made six different visits to Denny’s apartment, always finding him lying nude on the bed, usually smoking his opium pipe. “His body appeared in fabulous shape,” Gore claimed. “He was still slender and boyish, a southern Penrod who still spoke with a North Florida cracker accent. His dissipation was not reflected in his asymmetrical face, which was like a ghost who would soon be dead of a malformed heart.”

Gore later claimed that during his visits, Denny was in no condition to have sex. But to Tennessee and privately to gay friends, he relayed a different story.

“Denny was impotent, but I went to his apartment several times and sodomized him. It was such a thrill to rape the young man called the ‘most beautiful boy in the world.’ His body still could offer sexual satisfaction.”

The experience left such an impact on Gore that he used Denny as inspiration for his short story, “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” which later appeared as a subsection of his
A Thirsty Evil: Seven Short Stories
, published in 1956.

Gore paid his final visit to Denham just before he left Paris. Later, he said, “It is a pity that he himself never wrote a memoir. What a story he’d have to tell.”

When Peter Watson quit paying the rent on Denny’s apartment in the rue du Bac, Denny went to Rome, where he found cheaper lodgings at the Pensione Foggetti.

Denny’s last and final lover was Anthony Watson-Gandy, a writer and translator. “Denny spent his last days dissolute, lying in bed like a corpse, sheet to his chin, a cigarette between his lips turning to ash. I had to remove that cigarette before it burned his lips.”

At the age of thirty-four, Denny died on December 16, 1948 of heart failure and was buried in the First Zone, 11
^th
Row, of Rome’s Protestant Cemetery.

Amazingly, according to his lover, his body “still looked like that of a Greek god.”

A rumor persists that his corpse was violated at the funeral parlor in Rome to which it was sent. Placed nude on a marble slab for “viewing, fondling, or the release of semen,” that perfect body was violated in death as it was in life, fulfilling some necrophiliac fantasy of a member, or members, of Rome’s gay community who never got to enjoy the pleasures of his flesh when Denny was alive.

Chapter Sixteen

Born in New Jersey
in 1922, Frank Merlo was twenty-five years old on the summer night in Provincetown when he first met Tennessee Williams.

He came from a large brood of first generation Sicilian immigrants. His out-spoken mother was tormented by the size of her unruly tribe. When she got into violent arguments with her son, she’d climb a large tree in the Merlo backyard. After one particularly bitter fight with her son, she scaled the tree and refused to come down. After pleading, then shouting at her, the volatile Frank chopped down the tree with her in it. Fortunately, she wasn’t injured.

Thoughout his fifteen or so years as the lover of Tennessee, he would display a frequently violent temper. Tennessee preferred their arguments to be oral, Frank resorting on many occasions to violence.

In spite of Truman Capote having bitchily compared him to Lon Chaney, Frank was muscular and attractive, standing one inch shorter than Tennessee. The playwright took in his large brown eyes and equine face, nicknaming him “The Little Horse.” Many of Tennessee’s friends thought that was a reference to Frank’s endowment, which as the young man himself admitted, “just grows and grows with no end in sight.”

Late in 1947, Frank had completed a six-year tour of duty in World War II, serving as a pharmacist’s mate in the U.S. Navy.

[Two famous homosexual men had each discovered Frank’s charms before Tennessee:

Joseph Alsop lived deep in the closet. At the time he met Frank, he was one of the most famous journalists and syndicated newspaper columnists in America
.

A few years after his affair with Frank, he would be pursued by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was launching a campaign to remove “perverts” from federal employment, even though he was a secret homosexual himself
.