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) (83 page)

Huston liked Truman so much, he moved him into his private hotel suite, which caused the cast and crew to assume they were having an affair. Bogie spread the word that he was walking past their bedroom at night “I could hear Caposy screaming in ecstasy as John fucked him.”

Truman complained to friends in Hollywood. “Bogie and John will be the death of me. They’ve nearly killed me with their dissipations. Half drunk all day and dead drunk at night. Once, believe it or not, I came around to wake up Bogie at six o’clock in the morning, as he had an early call. I found King Farouk of Egypt dancing the hula-hula in the middle of the floor.”

He revealed that Jack Dunphy had fled to Naples, as he couldn’t take it any more. “At least Jack will find diversions there. Naples has hordes of beautiful boys, all with olive skins and cocks the color of gold.”

Although Truman was writing fresh pages of dialogue every day, he could also be a prankster. John Barry Ryan, who was assisting in the direction of the picture, said that Huston picked up a piano player in Rome, asking him if he spoke English. His answer was “yes.” Consequently, Huston cast him as the purser. But soonafter, it was determined that the only English-language word the piano player knew was “yes.”

After hearing this, Truman crafted the purser’s spectacularly convoluted opening line: “Mr. Danruther, the captain of the
S. S. Niagara
presents his compliments and wants and wishes to inform you that owing to the failures of the oil pump, the sailing will be delayed.”

Huston spent three days trying to extract those phrases from the lips of the piano player. “He never got it right,” Ryan said.

The script centered around the piratical adventures of a motley crew of swindlers and ne’er-do-wells, each trying to lay claim to land rich in uranium deposits in Kenya. They are waiting for transport from a small port in southern Italy, where they plan to travel on an ill-fated steamer en route to Mombasa. The movie emerged as a parody of
film noir
, a style of movie-making that Huston himself had pioneered.

As the days proceeded, Truman became familiar with the major cast members. When he’d met Peter Lorre, the actor had grabbed Truman, locked him in a bear hug, and then stuck his tongue down Truman’s throat. Huston told Truman, “That’s just Peter’s way of showing you that he has no prejudice against homosexuals.”

Lorre had become familiar to American audiences after Fritz Lang had cast him as a child killer in the controversial 1931 movie
M
. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Lorre, a Jew, had fled to Hollywood.

Today, he is best remembered for playing Ugarte opposite Bogie in
Casablanca
(1942).

Robert Morley was well aware of the eccentricities of both Huston and Bogie, having recently filmed
The African Queen
(1951) with them. According to Truman, “Morley was given an ungainly bulk, thick lips, a triple chin, bushy eyebrows, and he comes on like a pompous windbag. Yet with all these drawbacks, he’s the best character actor to emerge from Britain. He and I engaged in a battle of wits, vying for the title of Queen of Repartée.”

Like Truman, Morley had his own opinions about the other cast members. He told Truman, “Bogie is a nice man, but not much brain, really. As for Lorre, I always thought he was a rather unpleasant character, an unlovely man in every way. Have you seen him? He’s hideous. He went to this homosexual hairdresser and got that excuse for a coiffure of his dyed blonde.”

Beat the Devil
was the first American film to star the Italian sex goddess, Gina Lollobrigida, who vied with Sophia Loren for roles. Before filming began, Loren told the press in Rome, “Gina’s personality is limited. She is good playing a peasant, but is incapable of playing a lady.”

In tribute to her physical assets, the French coined the term
“Lollobrigidienne
” to mean curvaceous.

Bogie told Truman he didn’t like Gina very much, “but then, I was never a tits man. She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.”

“When I met Gina, she was married to this Slovenian doctor, Milko Skofic,” Truman said. “I met him, but didn’t understand why she’d married him. Perhaps his clothing concealed some hidden talent.”

“I kept abreast of Gina as the years went by,” he said. “I know she had an affair with Dr. Christiaan Barnard, that famous heart transplant surgeon from South Africa. He looked hot. She should have married him. John thought Gina looked like an apartment building with balconies—that John!”

In later years, Truman heard a rumor that Gina had seduced Fidel Castro when she became a photojournalist. She scooped other members of the press by obtaining an exclusive interview with him.

“Gina and Tennessee Williams are the only two people I know who managed to seduce Fidel,” Truman told anyone who would listen.

“I never bonded with Jennifer Jones, although I wrote two of her scripts,” Truman said. “She took her marching orders from David Selznick. Every day, at least five yellow pages of notes arrived from Selznick in Hollywood, instructing all of us what to do with Jennifer. When not before the camera, she spent most of her time running from this aggressive Neapolitan lesbian who looked like Anna Magnani on a bad hair day.”

“In Rome, I did have a talk with David about his wife,” Truman claimed. “Other than
Gone With the Wind
, his big epic was
Duel in the Sun
(1946), in which he’d cast Jennifer opposite Gregory Peck. He told me he’d patched together just the love scenes of Peck with Jennifer. He said that on some dark nights, he had them screened, ‘during which time I jerk off,’ he confessed to me.”

During the course of the shoot, Truman invited the fashion maven, Carmel Snow, to visit the set. She was horrified at the dresses worn in their scenes by Jennifer and Gina. She immediately telephoned Paris and asked her new discovery, Hubert de Givenchy, to fly at once to Naples, where he was met by limousine and driven to Ravello, where he proceeded to redesign the costumes for the film’s two female stars.
[Carmel Snow was the editor of the American edition of
Harper’s Bazaar
from 1934 to 1958 and for many years, the chairperson of that magazine’s editorial board.]

The cast was surprised when “the fag hater,” Huston, had moved Truman into his suite. His excuse was that he and Truman often worked throughout the night preparing dialogue for the scenes scheduled for filming the next morning.

“We hoped the company wouldn’t know of our desperation,” Huston said. “How close the dragon was breathing on our necks.”

Truman later claimed that he was the sole author of the script. “John was often drinking and playing cards with Bogie. He was like Irving Berlin who had the little nigger boy in the trunk writing all his songs.”

[Huston often entertained Truman with tales of his colorful life. In the course of his career, which stretched over half a century, he would receive fifteen Oscar nominations, winning two of them. Before coming to Hollywood, he had been an amateur boxer, a newspaper reporter, a portrait artist, in Paris, a cavalry rider in Mexico, and a documentary filmmaker during World War II. Author Ian Freer defined him as “cinema’s Ernest Hemingway, a director who has never been afraid to tackle tough issues head on.”]

Truman shared his opinion of Huston to anyone in the cast or on the crew willing to listen. “He’s a classic seducer,” Truman said. “His eyes are ungentle, as bored as a sunbathing lizard. He’s a man of obsession rather than passion. He’s a romantic cynic who believes that all endeavor, virtuous or evil, is simply plodding along, a check in the amount of zero.”

“John was a mess,” Truman confessed to friends. “In our suite, he always walked around in the nude, perhaps believing that the sight of his withered cock would drive me into wild passion. I’ve seen bigger and better. Often, he could-n’t sleep and kept me up all night. The only way I could get him to sleep was to get him so drunk he passed out. He’d lie in the center of bed stark naked. ‘Go to it, kid,’ he’d instruct me. That was a laugh. He couldn’t even get it up.”

“We had an electric heater in our room. One night, he woke up at three o’clock and staggered toward the bathroom to take a horse piss. He tripped over the electric heater and started a fire. I shouted to him, ‘Our room’s on fire!’ He shot back, ‘Good, I’ve always liked the smell of smoke.’ Thank God for Bogie. He came to our rescue.”

One afternoon on the set, Truman did not show up with the anticipated pages of rewritten dialogue. One of the cast members told Huston “the little guy went down to Amalfi on the coast.”

Huston went after him, finding him in a bar, getting drunk with a roster of A-list visitors. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Huston said. “There sat Capote entertaining Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, and George Sanders. Did I leave out a young filmmaker, Stephen Sondheim, who was in the area making a documentary?”

For the most part, Huston was enthralled with Truman’s dialogue.

So was Bogie. “Line after line was pure Truman,” he said.

Jennifer played a chronic liar in the film. Before one of her utterances, Truman had her say, “In point of fact…”

On another occasion, Morley, followed by his band of rapscallions, appears on deck, looking out at the ocean. “Take deep breaths,” he tells his evil coven. “Every breath is a guinea
[a pound and a shilling]
in the bank of health.”

The picture shut down when Truman had to rush back to Rome to face a perceived emergency in his apartment. He had a pet raven whom he’d named Lola. When he called his housekeeper, he asked her to put the receiver up to the bird so that the raven could hear his voice and talk back. No sounds emerged from the other end of the phone line. With alarm, Truman told Huston, “Lola is either sick or sulking. I’ve got to leave at once for Rome.”

Once inside his apartment, he found out why Lola wasn’t talking to him. Prior to his first “non-conversation” with the bird, the maid had left the window open, and the raven had flown away. “For me,” said a sad-eyed Truman, “It was Bye Bye Blackbird.”

Back in Ravello, mourning the loss of his pet, Truman returned to writing the script. But three nights later, when Huston came back to their suite, he found the writer’s face swollen to twice its normal size. Truman was suffering from an impacted wisdom tooth. Huston called an ambulance to take him to a hospital in Naples. On the way out the door, Truman shouted back at Huston, “My shawl, my shawl! I can’t go without my shawl!” Jennifer had presented him with a Balmain shawl, which he wore everywhere.

***

An arm-wrestling contest between Truman and Bogie became the fodder for an underground legend that still persists to this day. In an article in
Vanity Fair
, Lauren Bacall was asked about it.

As anticipated, she denied it, although she would have had no on-site knowledge. “Truman would have wished,” she suggested.

One night, Truman attended one of the poker games with Huston, Bogie and two other crew members. When the men tired of poker, Truman challenged Bogie to an arm-wrestling contest. “I’ll arm wrestle you in three different contests,” Truman said. “If I win all three rounds, you’ll have to submit to a blow-job.”

“At first, Bogie thought I was joking until he looked into my face and realized I was deadly serious,” Truman continued. “Huston and the two other guys urged Bogie to take the challenge. One of the drunks said, ‘There’s no way in hell this little fag will beat a tough guy like you, Bogie,’”

Bogie was drunk; otherwise, he might not have accepted the challenge. The First Round evolved into a major test of strength between the two men, but suddenly, Truman slammed Bogie’s fist against the poker table. Round Two went much the same way, with Truman winning again. The poker players were astonished.

“This is it!” Huston warned Bogie. “If you don’t win round three, you’re a goner.”

The director later recalled, “Truman sounded like a girl, walked like a girl, but when it came to arm wrestling, he was a little bull.”

Truman once again won Round Three. Bogie was astonished, but looked as if he had no intention of carrying through with his part of the bargain. He staggered to his feet and headed for the door. Truman followed him and braced his foot behind Bogie before he punched him, sending him crashing to the floor. Truman then seated himself on Bogie’s stomach. “A deal is a deal, Rick,” Truman said, using the name of the bar owner in
Casablanca
.

Huston told Bogie, “As a man of honor, you must carry through on this commitment.”

Finally, Bogie agreed he’d go through with it “if you’ll get your ass off me.” As he stood up, he looked Truman square in the eye. “I’m imposing one condition, however. Under no circumstances are you to swallow.”

“It’s not fair to change the deal at the last minute, but okay,” Truman said. As he was leaving the room, he winked at Huston, indicating that he had no intention of honoring this last-minute agreement.

“By the time Bogie showed up late on the set the next morning, he had a cut on his lip,” Huston said. “I ordered our makeup man to cover it up as best he could. Bogie was angry. He was denouncing Truman. ‘That little devil didn’t live up to our deal,’ he told me.”