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) (68 page)

During his sojourn with Kirstein and his wife, Tennessee spent time in Lincoln’s library, where he discovered an inordinate amount of literature on Billy the Kid.

Based on that literature, and on dialogues with Kirstein, Tennessee learned that his host had commissioned a ballet in 1938,
Billy the Kid
, hiring Eugene Loring (another friend of Tennessee) as the choreographer. Aaron Copland was the composer. Its first performance in New York had occurred on May 24, 1939, and it had become wildly popular, famous for its incorporation of many cowboy tunes and American folk songs.

In Kirstein’s library, Tennessee found and read a book devoted to the life of the infamous outlaw. The more he read about the life of William H. Bonney, the more he fantasized about this young man. Born in 1859, he’d been labeled “a murderous psychopath” by his enemies. Bonney’s paradoxical image was that of both a folk hero and a notorious outlaw. He had killed his first victim at the age of fifteen.

Tennessee frequently mused over a legend that maintains that Billy the Kid somehow cheated death and ended up in Mexico with a bevy of beautiful
señoritas
available day and night to do his bidding. Tennessee eventually maintained that in any film treatment that emerged, he didn’t want Billy to be slain.

He had seen the decorated American war hero, actor Audie Murphy, play the outlaw in a 1950s movie called
The Kid from Texas
. He didn’t think Murphy captured the complexities of the outlaw and that he had merely “played the cardboard version.”

In one of the coincidences of his life, Tennessee, as it turned out, was later ordered by producer Arthur Freed to write a scenario for a film about Billy the Kid for MGM. Back in 1941, MGM had cast heartthrob Robert Taylor, playing Bonner in a film entitled
Billy the Kid
. Of course, the most notorious film interpretation of the legendary renegade had been Howard Hughes’s
The Outlaw
, the 1943 picture that starred the aviator’s lover, Jack Buetel, as Billy. This was the controversial picture that introduced Jane Russell and her ample bosom to American audiences.

Tennessee seemed the least likely writer in America to be assigned the task of preparing a screenplay about Billy the Kid.

Louis B. Mayer ordered Freed to come up with a script about Billy the Kid. Under contract to MGM as a screenwriter, Tennessee at the time was struggling to adapt
Marriage Is a Private Affair
as a vehicle for Lana Turner.

On July 28, 1943, Tennessee wrote to his friend, Donald Windham. “I’ve been taken off the Lana Turner picture and reassigned. You won’t believe this. Metro wants me to create a film scenario for a possible picture about Billy the Kid. Me, of all people. A Mississippi boy who’s never ridden a horse. I have never viewed the Western genre as suitable for my particular talents. But this is Hollywood, and I need the paycheck.”

Tennessee defined his latest job at that time “as good an assignment as I could hope for, but I am lazy about it, and have barely started.”

He had written only eighteen pages of a scenario for Billy the Kid, before the project was dropped.

“In an ironic twist,” Tennessee later said, “Gore Vidal would have a far greater love affair with Billy the Kid than I would.”

In Hollywood, Gore Vidal began working on a teleplay based on the life of Billy the Kid. Gore revealed that he’d become fascinated by the legend of the outlaw when his mother sent him to Los Alamos in New Mexico to attend a military school.

In the Southwest, Gore heard many tales, often contradictory, about the outlaw. “I read book after book about him, but I don’t know why.”

As revealed by Fred Kaplan in his biography of Gore, he “was fascinated by the American outlaw, identifying with him as someone permanently young, undyingly loyal to personal bonds, resolutely insistent on individual autonomy, and defiantly critical of injustice, especially state-sanctioned.”

Somewhere along the way, Gore became convinced that William H. Bonney, born in 1859 as William Henry McCarty, Jr., and later known as Henry Antrim, was a repressed homosexual.

“We will make Billy’s homosexuality so subtle that only the hip will get it,” Gore told his friend, Paul Newman.

Harold Franklin was the chief of drama in the TV department of the William Morris Agency. He managed to interest Fred Coe, a producer at NBC, to produce Gore’s
The Death of Billy the Kid
. Coe hired Robert Mulligan as the director, and the people at Philco gave it the green light.

Early in its production, Coe had agreed that only two actors could bring life to Billy the Kid, Marlon Brando or Paul Newman. After it became clear that Brando was unavailable, Coe offered the role to Paul Newman.

In the process of breaking up his first marriage at the time, Newman was having an affair with an actress from Georgia, Joanne Woodward. Gore already knew her—in fact, some newspaper reporters, unaware of the situation, wrote that Woodward and Gore were “engaged.”

Tennessee privately commented on Gore’s burgeoning friendship with Newman. “Gore was transferring his romantic fantasies onto Newman. I would also have romantic fantasies about this good-looking charmer, especially when he played Brick in my
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

Gore told Newman that he wanted his teleplay to be “not so much about Billy himself, but about the people who created his myth.” Newman seemed uncertain how to interpret that. Gore complimented Coe on his choice of Newman, though secretly. “Paul has both vulnerability and strength,” Gore said.

On the set, both Gore and Newman felt that the teleplay could be “turned into a great movie,” and that would eventually come to be.

But, first, it would be viewed by television audiences on July 24, 1955, when
The Death of Billy the Kid
was aired on
The Philco Television Playhouse
.

After seeing Newman perform as its protagonist, Gore claimed that it was his favorite of all his teleplays. But he added, “though by no means the most admired of all my TV shows.”

During the months ahead, his friendship with Newman and Woodward deepened. Gore and Newman often met at the Château Marmont, plotting a project that would convince Warner Brothers to make a feature length film based on Gore’s vision.

In his reworked script, Gore changed the title to
The Left Handed Gun
. That movie title evolved from the belief that the outlaw was left handed, although it is possible that that was a false conclusion drawn from a 19
^th
century photograph that might have been reversed when printed.

Finally, Warner’s gave the green light, even though its chief honcho, Jack L. Warner, had reservations. Gore viewed his revised script as a Greek tragedy with modern overtones. When Newman was cast, the joke on the lot was, “Paul is going to play Vidal’s fag cowboy.”

Arthur Penn, a young Turk from TV land, was selected to direct, and subsequently, was granted a modest budget of $700,000, with orders to shoot the film in only twenty-three days.

To trim costs, Penn used sets from the 1939 film,
Juarez
. A historical drama that had focused on the armed conflicts whirling around Maximilian I, a French-installed puppet monarch of Mexico, and Benito Juárez, the country’s populist president, it had starred Bette Davis and Paul Muni. Exterior shots for
Left Handed Gun
were filmed near Santa Fe. During the shoot, Gore was working on another script,
The Catered Affair
, starring Bette Davis, and could not participate. Consequently, scriptwriter Leslie A. Stevens III reconfigured the screenplay, following dictates from Warner, who wanted all suggestions of homosexuality removed. Not only that, but he demanded a happy ending.

Newman told Gore, “That’s like filming a saga about the life of Abraham Lincoln that never mentions his experience at the Ford Theatre, and includes a divorce from Mary Todd Lincoln, and a ride off into the sunset in Kentucky with his true love, Joshua Fry Speed.”

After reading the much-revised script, Newman also reported to Gore, “I feel disconnected from Stevens’ script. Arthur Penn is shooting a very different script from yours.”