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) (63 page)

His studio boss, Jack L. Warner, once said, “You know Flynn. He’s got to be either fighting or fucking.”

Before his life ended in 1959, Flynn himself estimated that he’d had sex with 12,000 to 14,000 different people. To him, the gender of his object of desire did not matter a great deal, as he took on all comers. In the last decades of his life, he seduced some of the sex symbols of the 1950s, ranging from Linda Christian to Rock Hudson.

On the night Flynn accompanied Truman back to his hotel, Truman learned one of the secrets of the lothario’s sexual success: “Before entering his victim, he rubbed the tip of his penis with cocaine.”

“Truman lied about not having an orgasm,” Windham said. “He told me that he experienced orgasm the moment Flynn plunged in with that cocaine-coated head of his penis. It was true, apparently, that it took a long time for Flynn to achieve orgasm. Truman claimed that Flynn rode him for at least forty minutes before both of them erupted. ‘It was the most glorious time I’ve ever spent in my life, knowing I was possessing Errol Flynn,’ Truman told me.”

There was more: Truman confided to Windham that Flynn passed out immediately after intercourse. “I took complete advantage. Until dawn broke across the Los Angeles skyline, I spent the early morning hours licking and sucking every single inch of his fabulous body, which was still in great shape in spite of his drinking, drugs, and dissipation.”

“He was the tastiest man I ever had. I literally wanted to familiarize myself with every inch of that body. At one point, I turned him over and began with the nape of his neck, taking a long, long journey until I reached his little toe. I must have spent an hour on his rosebud alone.”

“I found out much later that Errol, evocative of my own conflicts with Nina, had battles with his mother, Lily Marelle Young. She was a descendant of one of the mutineers on the
Bounty
, and she possessed the sword that had once belonged to Captain Bligh himself.”

Errol as a youngster was a fearless rebel, often getting into trouble. She caught him once playing “doctor and nurses” with three girls from Sydney when he was only seven years old.

Marelle taught him that his penis was “something dirty” and that it should be concealed.

“I decided to make it a point to show her that my genitals were clean,” Flynn said.

He would sunbathe in the nude on their terrace in Australia. He sometimes practically caused her to have a heart attack when he entered the family dining room not only nude but with a big erection.

“In his adult life, Errol was proud of his penis,” Truman said. “At a party attended by Marilyn Monroe, he came out nude and played the piano by banging the keys with his erect penis.”

“In spite of what I said, I really wanted to follow up on my night with Errol, and I called him several times, even wrote him a few letters. He didn’t return my phone calls. Nor did he answer my letters.”

“The night with him became one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. For this quintessential hedonist, I was just another conquest to be made and quickly discarded. After all, he had 13,999 other sexual partners to get around to before he eventually killed himself, mired in alcoholism, his beauty long faded.”

“In remembering Flynn, most of his lovers recall his penis and his incredible sexual technique,” Truman said. “But there was so much more. He had the most engaging and charming smile, which he flashed often, showing his ivory white teeth. He had a flawless profile and a rugged square jaw. His hair was golden brown, and you wanted to run your fingers through it. The best for last: He had brilliant flecks of gold in his brown eyes. When he turned them on you, you melted and were willing to do his bidding, whatever his request.”

“My heart was broken when I saw the last photo taken of Errol,” Truman said. “His face had a thin layer of this spongy tissue that looked as if it has been inserted between skin and bone. Like his best friend, John Barrymore, he had destroyed perhaps one of the most perfect bodies that God ever invented.”

To Windham, Truman whispered a secret that shocked him. His friend didn’t know if Truman were telling the truth or not, although there were eyewitnesses in Havana asserting that the tale was indeed true.

In 1958, Sean Flynn, Errol’s seventeen-year-old son, found himself in Havana with no money. He had gambled away all his traveling money at the casinos. Twice he appealed to his mother, the French-born actress Lili Damita. Twice, she had acquiesced and sent bailout money, with dire warnings that it was the last time she’d rescue him in this way. After the third desperate incident, she turned him down. Short of funds himself, Errol could not bail out his son, as he had so many times in the past.

“A gringo doesn’t want to be on the streets of Havana with no
dinero,”
Sean said. In desperation, he decided that all he had to sell was his own beautiful body. At that time, there were two dozen or so bordellos thriving in Havana, five or six of which were staffed by male prostitutes catering to a gay clientele.

Sean discerned, accurately, that many clients would want to have sex with the son of Errol Flynn. When Truman heard that Sean was prostituting himself in Havana, he flew there from where he was staying in Palm Beach.

“I got to enjoy a version of Errol that must have existed in the 1930s,” Truman later told Windham. “The boy was a beauty and delightful, and he even reciprocated a bit when I made love to him. At least he let me kiss him and didn’t lie there like a log, but was responsive. Errol and Sean Flynn, father and son…I’ll never forget them.”

Truman said that he cried when he read about Sean’s disappearance and tormented death, probably as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge.

[During the late 1960s, Sean developed a career as a freelance photo journalist, working under contract to Time magazine amid the bombs, bullets, and atrocities of war-ravaged Cambodia. On April 6, 1970, he and fellow journalist Dana Stone went missing on the road south of Phnom Penh. Despite the enormous sums of money his mother spent searching for her son, neither he nor his remains were ever found.]

As a social gadfly, Truman, later in his life, collected a bevy of some of the most glamorous women on the planet, referring to them as his beautiful swans.
[In some respects, Nina Capote, his own mother, had been the first of the beautiful swans in his life.]

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nina had filled her life with beaux and fleeting one-night stands. It was a life devoted to the pursuit of hedonism. But by the 1950s, both Nina and Joseph Capote would face disaster, as their problems, long postponed, caught up with them. “There was a price to be paid for the lives we’ve led,” his mother told Truman.

Truman was in Paris with his longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, when Joseph telephoned from Manhattan. It was a cold day in January of 1954. Joseph told him that Nina had swallowed a bottle of Seconals and was in the hospital in a coma.

Two days later, he called again. Nina was dead.

Truman booked the next flight to New York, where he ordered that her body be cremated. Perhaps it was his final act of revenge for her years of abandonment. All her life, she’d lived in fear of her body being cremated.

Not only did Joseph have to face the loss of his wife by suicide, but his own profligate spending had caught up with him. His Wall Street firm discovered that he’d embezzled $100,000 from the company. He was fired and ordered to pay back the money right away or else he would be officially charged.

He appealed to his adopted son, Truman, for money. Based on the success of plays he had recently written, Truman agreed to help, but he could not come up with all of the $100,000.

In 1955, Joseph pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to fourteen months in New York State’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York.

Even after his release from prison, Joseph remained a continuing problem in Truman’s life. His adoptive father later remarried, but his precarious financial situation continued. At one point, Truman told a friend that “Joe’s new wife has become an invalid living in a hospital at
my
expense.”

Andreas Brown claimed that one reason Truman wanted to write his novel,
Answered Prayers
, was to expose the foibles and foolishness of Joseph and Nina Capote. Brown said that the “world of glamour and superficial values can easily dazzle and confuse and mislead impressionable, naïve younger people to want all of these things and to pursue them with a desperation almost like an addiction to a drug. It can end up very easily destroying people. And it does. And seems to have done just that in the case of Nina and Joe Capote.”

Truman never really recovered from his mother’s suicide. He later claimed, “She didn’t kill herself because she was bored, or because she didn’t like herself. She enjoyed her lifestyle. Someone killed my mother. Someone took her away. Who did that? Who did that to me?”

Chapter Eighteen