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) (54 page)

In 1957, in Moscow, the KGB secretly took pictures of Alsop having sex in his hotel room with another man who just happened to be a Soviet agent. The KGB sent copies of these incriminating photographs to every major newspaper in America, exposing Alsop’s sexual life
.

In 1967, Gore Vidal published a novel
, Washington, D.C
., in which his character of a gay journalist was based on Alsop
.

By the time Frank arrived in Provincetown, he had evolved into a role as the lover of the lyricist John La Touche. His rousing “Ballad for Americans” had been performed in 1940 as the theme song at the National Republican Convention and the convention of the American Communist Party, and eventually recorded by such artists as Paul Robeson and Bing Crosby. La Touche had also written the lyrics for a widely popular song (“Taking a Chance on Love”) incorporated into the 1940 Broadway musical
Cabin in the Sky
, later adapted into a movie (1943) co-starring, among others, Lena Horne
.

Years after the end of his romance with Frank, La Touche became an intimate friend of Gore’s. It was at Gore’s elegant home, Edgewater, built in 1820 on a peninsula jutting into the Hudson River (in Barrytown, Dutchess County, north of Rhinebeck) that La Touche wrote the lyrics for “Lazy Afternoon.”

“Both of us wrote during the day and made love at night,” Gore told Tennessee. Gore described La Touche as “a hard-drinking Irishman. He was always broke and pretended to be a communist. That let to him getting blacklisted in the 1950s.”

At his home in Vermont, La Touche died of a sudden heart attack at the age of forty-one. He had completed revisions on his two-act opera
, The Ballad of Baby Doe.
He was also working on his lyrics for
Candide
with music by Leonard Bernstein, which would be produced in December, just months after his death in August of 1956. He was survived by his longtime partner, Kenward Elmslic, the poet.]

On a balmy Cape Cod evening, Tennessee, accompanied by Frank, went for a stroll on the beach. Tennessee was tiring of his Mexican lover, Pancho Rodriguez, and La Touche was getting bored with Frank.

In the moonlight, Frank took out a package of cigarettes and asked Tennessee if he had a light.

“As a matter of fact, I don’t but I can light your fire in another way,” Tennessee promised.

Thus enabled and accompanied with an equivalent roster of corny lines, Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo began one of the most infamous romances in the theatrical/literary world.

Within fifteen minutes, the playwright and the former sailor were making love on the sands.

Tennessee later recalled, “It was a fantastic hour that I spent with Frankie that night. It was right on the dunes, although I don’t regard sand as a reliable bed on which to worship The Little God. However, he was given such devoted service that he must still be smiling.”

After they parted, with no commitment to see each other again, Tennessee was walking back to the cottage he shared with Pancho. Suddenly, the headlights of an oncoming car blinded him. Pancho was at the wheel, shouting in Spanish. To avoid being hit, Tennessee jumped into the marsh grass. He later claimed that Pancho had intended to run him over.

In the aftermath of that incident, Tennessee fled to a small hotel in Provincetown, where he spent the remainder of the night alone. He later said, “I knew then that it was all over between Pancho and me. The boy would soon depart.”

In one of those strange coincidences known to readers of Charles Dickens, Tennessee was strolling down Lexington Avenue in Manhattan in late September of 1948.

He passed a delicatessen, thinking he would go inside and order a sandwich for dinner. In the deli, he spotted Frank with a friend of his, a straight (i.e., heterosexual) sailor. “Frankie, my god, I didn’t know you were in town. Why didn’t you look me up? I gave you my address!”

“I didn’t want it to look like I was climbing on a bandwagon,” Frank said, introducing him to his sea-going friend. “You’ve had such a big hit with
Streetcar
. I was afraid you’d think I was a star-fucker or something. I didn’t want you to think I was exploiting our time together on the beach in P-town. Incidentally, I’ve seen
Streetcar
. Both the play and Brando were terrific.”

With their food in hand, Tennessee invited Frank and the sailor back to his apartment in a building called Aquarius. After devouring roast beef and pastrami sandwiches, the sailor figured out what was going on. He excused himself to head back to New Jersey, leaving Frank to spend the night with Tennessee.

Frank stayed over, the first of thousands of nights to come.

Almost from the beginning, Frank wanted to make their relationship permanent, but freedom-loving Tennessee wasn’t so sure.

“Tennessee wasn’t ready to settle down,” Frank said. “He wanted to be with me three or four nights a week, the other nights he wanted to spend cruising for fresh meat. After all the hot sex, I thought we’d fallen in love, but Tenn wasn’t there yet. That really hurt my feelings. In spite of my gruff exterior, I’m a very sensitive guy underneath.”

Tennessee went to visit his stern, judgmental mother, Edwina Williams, in St. Louis. There, alone in his attic room, he came to realize that, “The young Sicilian was the guy for me.”

When he returned to New York, he didn’t know if Frank would be there or not. He’d given him a key to his apartment. “I found him sleeping in my bed. From that night on, he slept in my floating bed in rooms ranging from New York to Los Angeles. From London to Key West, with detours to Rome, Tangier, and Taormina, with side trips to New Orleans and Mexico.”

[Tennessee was very depressed. After two big hits
, Summer and Smoke
had opened in October of 1948 at the Music Box Theatre in Manhattan, in a production staged by Margo Jones. The play had a turn-of-the-early-20
^th
-Century setting, the tale of a high-strung, unmarried minister’s daughter, Alma Winemiller, who had a spiritual/sexual romance with a wild, undisciplined young doctor, John Buchanan, Jr. who had grown up and lived next door
.

Recipient of lackluster reviews, the play closed after 102 performances and represented a downturn in popularity for Tennessee
.

Brooks Atkinson of
The New York Times
blamed Margo Jones’ direction for the failure of the play. But other critics were far from kind, one of them denouncing Tennessee’s work as “a pretentious and amateurish bore.” Yet another found it “a juvenile and sadly delinquent effort.”

In spite of its initial reception, the play would endure over the decades and eventually be defined as one of Tennessee’s masterworks for the stage
.

In 1961, Paramount purchased the property for a movie, assigning a gay director (Peter Glenville) and a gay star (Laurence Harvey) to help bring it to life. Geraldine Page starred as Alma. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards
.

Moving in with Tennessee, Frank began to make order out of the playwright’s notoriously messy apartment. One of their first visitors, Christopher Isherwood, noted the change.

“Frank was very supportive of Tennessee,” Isherwood later said. “He made everything work for him. He looked after Tennessee in a way that was uncanny. He was no goody-goody. He was just plain good. And he wasn’t just some kind of faithful servitor. He was a lovable man with a strong will.”

At night, Frank became acquainted with Tennessee’s voracious sexual appetite. “Tenn just couldn’t get enough. Sometimes, it was almost dawn before my cannon shot off its last round.”

As Tennessee himself admitted, “my sexual feeling for the boy was inordinate.”

In December of 1948, Frank and Tennessee set sail aboard the
Vulcania
from the Port of New York, heading for Gibraltar, where they would make their way to Tangier on the northern coast of Morocco. Tennessee had planned a reunion with his friends, Paul and Jane Bowles, who were married but turned to partners of their own sex for sleeping companions.

As Tennessee remembered the cruise across the Atlantic, “Several times during the night, I got up from my bunk and crossed over to Frankie’s bunk in our stateroom.”

In Tangier, Frank and Tennessee discovered the exotic life of the Medina and the peculiar sleeping arrangements in the household of the Bowleses. They also met the couple’s Arab lovers—one a comely looking Arab boy no more than fourteen, for Paul, and Cherifa, a rather large Berber woman, for Jane. Cherifa was also the family’s cook.

Tennessee’s status as a jealous lover was reinforced when he accused Frank of having had sex with Paul. As it turned out, Frank was drawn to Paul, who supplied him with marijuana and other drugs, which were readily available in this international city of dubious expatriates from the far, and most debauched, corners of the world.

In Tangier, Tennessee solidified his friendship with Paul and Jane. Paul was a composer and author. In the upcoming year of 1949, he would write his first novel,
The Sheltering Sky
, which would make him world famous.

He had settled in Tangier in 1947, and the exotic city would remain his home for the remaining 52 years of his life.

Paul had composed the “incidental and optional” music for the stage versions of both
The Glass Menagerie
and
Summer and Smoke
. In time, he would also compose the music for Tennessee’s
Sweet Bird of Youth
and
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
.

Married to Paul since 1938, Jane was highly praised by Tennessee. She’d published her novel,
Two Serious Ladies
, in 1943. He claimed “she is the finest writer of fiction we have, even better than Carson McCullers, to whom she bears a physical resemblance. She was a charming girl so full of humor and affection and curious, touching little attacks of panic.”

He was mildly alarmed to witness the beginning of her alcoholism, which would lead to her having a stroke in 1957, when she was forty. Her health continued to decline until her eventual death in 1973.

After saying goodbye to Jane and Paul, Frank and Tennessee “on a horrid ship with putrid food,” sailed to Marseilles before heading east and then south to Rome, where they would spend a great deal of their time—sometimes five or six months a year—during their time together.

From Rome, Frank traveled to Sicily for a reunion with his family, while Tennessee remained in Rome writing a novel,
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
. During the night, he patronized Rome’s large community of hustlers, evoking the gigolos acquired by the protagonist of his novel. “Like the faded actress I am writing about, I, too, am ‘drifting,’” he wrote to friends. The word “drifting” appears nearly two dozen times in the novel’s opening pages.