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) (72 page)

Before the decade ended, the success of Kerouac’s
On the Road
aroused the jealousy of Anaïs as a writer.
[She was not acclaimed at the time.]

Initially, she’d had praise for Kerouac, but when she met with him for a final time, she warned him that “
On the Road
contains pure lyrical passages, but its realism is too harsh for me. You ultimately don’t want to write like Gore Vidal, now, do you?”

By then, their affair had long ago ended, or, as she put it, “Jack abandoned me when I could not keep up with his drinking at the Cedar Bar.”

She failed to tell the truth: Based on her physicality as an aging
femme fatale
, Kerouac no longer found her alluring.

“Fucking Anaïs would be like plowing Edith Piaf on her last legs,” he told his friend, Ginsberg.

In time, Kerouac got himself kicked out of the Cedar Bar for urinating in the bar sink and pouring his beer into the hat of artist Willem de Kooning.

Later, she had a chance encounter with Gore in Greenwich Village, when he was dining with Stanley Mills Haggart. For a while in the 1950s, Anaïs had dressed like a Beatnik herself, but she had quickly became disenchanted with the movement.

She told Stanley, “Jack’s
On the Road
seemed like a gorilla when compared to Lawrence Durrell’s novel,
Justine
. What a feast reading Durrell! A banquet! An orgy of words and colors, a riot for the senses—a male counterpart to my own novels, errative, elusive, penetrating, a sensuous jungle, a trapezist of images, a jungler, a master of a prestigitations.”

As an act of revenge for his rape by Gore, Kerouac sent his best friend and sometimes lover, Neal Cassady, to the San Remo Bar in Greenwich Village. His instruction was “to turn on your charm and sex appeal, pick up Vidal, and rape him in a room at the Chelsea Hotel before the rooster crows.”

Neal was only too willing. He was known, in the words of Ginsberg, for “great sex and genitals stolen from a bull. Sometimes, I would just sit in the living room fondling Neal’s genitals while we listened to jazz. That would really piss off Jack.”

As early as the summer of 1949, Kerouac had written about Neal’s bisexuality, one segment of which would be excised—for censorship reasons—from the original version of
On the Road
.

The censored section described a gay man who had traveled with them, stopping overnight with them in a motel room in Sacramento. Much to Kerouac’s chagrin, he jealously witnessed Neal performing sex for pay.
[In
On the Road,
the character inspired by Neal was named “Cody.”]

[That night, the gangbelly broke loose between Cody and the skinny skeleton, sick. Cody thrashed him on rugs in the dark, monstrous, huge fuck, Olympian perversities, slambanging big sodomites that made me sick, subsided with him for money; the money never came. He’d treated the boy like a girl! You can’t trust these people when you give them (exactly) what they want. I sat in the castrated toilet listening and peeking, at one point it appeared Cody had thrown over legs in the air like a dead hen…I was horrified.”]

One of Kerouac’s early works was entitled
Visions of Cody
.

Gore never wrote and presumably never talked about what happened that night he and Neal headed back to the Chelsea Hotel where he’d raped Kerouac
.

Neal presented his version of the events of that night to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others at the San Remo. “I raped Gore Vidal,” he claimed. “Revenge is yours, Jack, and I enjoyed reducing this stuffy blue blood to a whimpering pulp. I expect to see him in here tomorrow like a puppy dog with his tongue hanging out begging for more.”

According to Neal, “Vidal kicked and screamed, but I plowed him really good with my ass-splitting dick. Perhaps it was virgin ass, as he claimed, but I seriously doubt that. Even though he tried at first to fight me off, I ended up giving him two orgasms before I pulled out. I then forced him to lick me clean, real down and dirty sex. He became my slut for the night.”

[Neal Cassidy is an American literary icon today, the subject of biographies, memoirs, inspiration for other writers, and a major figure in films. He stands as a towering image in the Beatnik movement of the 1950s and the psychedelicmovement of the sixties
.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1926, Neal Leon Cassady was an exceedingly handsome boy who virtually lived on the streets in Denver after his mother died when he was ten. His alcoholic father was basically absentee, and Neal was wild, stealing cars and shoplifting. That landed him in prison, where he became top man to a lot of imprisoned gay men
.

Released one month after World War II ended, he married a 15-year-old, LuAnne Henderson. They moved to New York, where he was befriended by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom interpreted him as the fulfillment of their sexual fantasies
.

In 1947, he had his marriage to the teenager annulled, and he married Carolyn Robinson. She called him “the archetype of the American man,” although that was highly debatable. Her memories of him were recalled in her autobiography
, Off the Road.

By 1950, he’d entered into a bigamous marriage to Diane Hansen, a beautiful model who became “Inez” in Kerouac’s novel
, On the Road.
Although she was already married, Neal fell in love with her after meeting her at a party. Within five minutes, he was seducing her while she sat in a chair. After pulling up her dress, he buried his face in her crotch in spite of the presence of others in the room
.

In 1958, Neal was sent to San Quentin on a charge of marijuana possession. By 1962, he met author Ken Kesey and became one of the author’s “merry pranksters,” a coven that formed around him, promoting the use of psychedelic drugs. Neal is believed to be the role model for the main character in Kesey’s novel
, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
which in 1975 was made into a hit movie starring Jack Nicholson
.

Neal himself predicted “I will live forever in Jack’s
On the Road
as the Dean Moriarty character.”

Four days short of his forty-second birthday, Neal’s body was discovered in San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico. The night before, he’d gone to a wedding party where he consumed a large dose of Seconal and a lot of
pulque,
a muddy alcoholic beverage concocted from the fermented sap of the maguey plant and hailed as a sacred drink by the Aztecs. Combined with the alcohol and Seconals he had ingested, it proved lethal
.

After a night of heavy rain and strong winds, Neal’s dead body, clad only in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, was discovered beside some railroad tracks
.

Kerouac, who was to die to following year, refused to believe that Neal had died. “He’s just skipped out, probably to avoid the law. He’s hidingout somewhere in Mexico. One day, he’ll show up again, and I’ll be there to welcome him back home, although home was a place he never found in life.”]

—Jack Kerouac

By the winter of 1953, Kerouac had soured on Gore. He began to attack him as part of a tirade against gay writers and homosexuals in general.

A group of Karouac’s most devoted fans staged a dinner party in Greenwich Village that November. The author of
On the Road
agreed to speak to his faithful readers. Appearing drunk and drugged, he slid into a tirade attacking homosexual writers, notably Paul Bowles and Carson McCullers, but saving particular venom for Gore.

As Kerouac’s biographer, Dennis McNally, wrote, “The writer was junked out on dolophines, his brain roiled with wine and goofballs. He delivered a befuddled post-banquet enconium.”

McNally suggested that Kerouac had become jealous of Gore, viewing him as a symbol of mainstream literary success.

In another pronouncement, Kerouac claimed, “Queers are not artists. Truman Capote simpers, Gore Vidal stands legs akimbo in a baroque garden in Italy. Proust was the only fop who could write, but all the girls he wrote about were actually boys.”

On November 23, 1953, Kerouac wrote a letter to Malcolm Cowley, an editor at Viking. “I see from the latest
New World Writing
where Gore Vidal is trying to tear you down to lift himself up to position of big new dean critic which is such a laff he’s just such a pretentious little fag. Homosexuals are very powerful in American literature. Certain dull individuals who happen to be homosexual have grabbed off the limelight. Second rate anecdote repeaters like Paul Bowles, pretentious silly females with flairs for titles, like Carson McMullers (
sic
), clever dramturgists, grave self-revellers too naïve to see the shame of their position like Gore Vidal, really it’s too much.”

From Mexico City, Kerouac wrote Ginsberg about Gore’s novel,
Judgment of Paris
. He called it “Ugily
(sic)
transparent in its method, the protagonist-hero who is unqueer but all camp (with his bloody tattoo on a thigh) and craptalk. The only good things are the satirical queer scenes. The critics expect us to be like Vidal, great god, regressing to sophomore imitations of Henry James.”