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) (84 page)

“You mean, he swallowed?” Huston asked.

“Not only that, but he kept glued to it for another fifteen minutes when he’d drained the last god damn drop, that fucker.”

Huston was vastly amused at Truman’s physical assault on Bogie. “He put Bogie on his ass and other unmentionable things,” he told his crew.

After the film was wrapped, Huston told Bogie he was abandoning Truman and rushing back to Paris, “and my true love, Suzanne Flon.”

But a few days later, Truman learned that instead, Huston had flown to England to “renew his old passion for Olivia de Havilland,” who had stopped off in London before flying to the film festival at Cannes.

When most of the cast abandoned Ravello and migrated to London, Huston gave a dinner party for them. He appeared drunk before the meal began. Present were Bogie and Lauren Bacall. Huston attacked their left-wing politics. Gina was there, with her physician husband, Milko Skofic. Huston contemptuously called him, “a phony doctor.” Then he attacked Gina, telling her that, “with all your beauty, you’re probably a lousy lay.”

He also announced at table that Truman was “the world’s best cocksucker. But I think it is unforgivable to be a homosexual. I can say it! I’m not able to deal with homosexuals, except for Truman. But he’s from another planet. Venus, I figure.”

Later, when Bogie and Truman returned to Hollywood, he introduced him to his wife. Bacall defined the burgeoning friendship between Bogie and Truman as “the unlikeliest couple in the world. Truman was infectious because of his incredible brain and wit. This was before any of the bad stuff happened to him.”

Beat the Devil
failed at the box office. A lot of its audiences walked out. Many movie goers didn’t understand it.

It fared better as time went by. Critic Roger Ebert claimed that
Beat the Devil
was the first camp movie.

A decade after its release, critic Pauline Kael wrote: “
Beat the Devil
is a mess, but it’s probably the funniest mess—the screwball classic—of all time. It kidded itself, yet it succeeded in some original (and perhaps dangerously marginal) way of finding a style of its own.”

Time
magazine defined it as a screwball classic. As late as 1975, Charles Champlin, film critic at
The Los Angeles Times
, wrote: “However antic and loopy the circumstances of its making may be,
Beat the Devil
holds up as a fast and disciplined comedy, with a richness of invention which even now, after fifteen or twenty viewings, I find astonishing.”

The copyright on
Beat the Devil
was not renewed, and it is today in the public domain.

Right before his death from cancer in 1957, Bogie issued his own critique: “Only phonies will like it.”

In his future, Huston would become involved in creative projects with the other two members of “The Pink Triangle,” playing Buck Loner in Gore Vidal’s
Myra Breckinridge
and directing Ava Gardner and Richard Burton in Tennessee Williams’
The Night of the Iguana
.

Chapter Twenty-Four

It all began in 1948
, when Truman organized a vacation in the Caribbean to celebrate his success as a novelist after the publication of
Other Voices, Other Rooms
.

Based on the increasing fame of Haiti among the avant-garde
[and the growing cognizance of its role as the cradle of Caribbean art]
,
Harper’s Bazaar
commissioned some of the costs of Truman’s trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, where he worked on a travel article. That article later evolved into a short story, which he entitled “House of Flowers.”

In the wake of his discovery that local nightlife didn’t really exist in Haiti in any format he understood, he began to visit the local brothels, many of which were positioned amidst lush foliage on Bizonton Road.

Although he wasn’t particularly interested in seducing any of the local prostitutes, he found them charming,
piquante
, coquettish, and fascinating, and he enjoyed their company. Most of them sat on rocking chairs waiting for customers to come along, an occasional black man but more often white foreign tourists, usually from either France or the United States.

He brought lots of cold beer for the girls to drink and learned that they had each been assigned French-language nicknames based on flowers or flowering shrubs such as Jasmine, Bougainvillea, Pansy, Tulip, Gladiola, and even Wisteria Lilac. The working girls would drink his beer and fan themselves with cardboard-backed illustrations of Jesus Christ.

His favorite of the impoverished city’s many bordellos was called “The Paradise” (in English), run by a three-hundred-pound businesswoman, “Madame Fleur.” She advertised her establishment as “a place that can satisfy any desire known to man.”

Truman wasn’t surprised that the
putas
were usually retired by Madame Fleur before they reached the age of twenty. “Most of my customers, especially those from the States, like them young,” Madame Fleur told him. “
Très jeune
,
m’sieur
. In some cases, not even ten. I pick up a lot of kids at the border town, Dajabón.”

[Dajabón, a blood-soaked market town on the northern end of Haiti’s shared border with the Dominican Republic, with a population of about 10,000, is located on the Djabón River. That waterway is also known as the
Fleuve du Masacre
because of its connection to the genocidal Parsley Massacre of an estimated 20 to 30 thousand Haitians ordered by the Dominican dictator, Rafael (“The Goat”) Trujillo in 1937.]

“There’s a thriving market in Dajabón for both young boys and girls,” she said. “It takes all kinds to make up God’s world.”

“Right now, I have only one young boy working for me,” she said. “But when winter comes and business picks up, I might have three or four.” She went into a back room and returned with a little boy who looked no older than ten.

“He was slender, with large brown eyes, rather frightened,” Truman said. “He seemed traumatized and, in spite of his profession, was very shy, afraid really. He wore a sleeveless undershirt, and there were bruises on his arms and back.”

“His name was Juan, and he greedily devoured the candy I gave him,” Truman said. “I made it clear to
Madame
that I was not a child molester. ‘I much prefer Mandingos,’ I told her.”

“Well, I have plenty of those I can round up,” she said. “Just give me the preferred height, weight, and the size of the whanger preferred—inches, not centimeters. I can round up what you want by midnight, even if I have to drag the stud from the bed of his wife.”

“Not tonight, Joséphine,” he answered.

“
M’sieur
, my name is not Josephine,” she said. “If you must call me by my first name, it’s Rosa. I was a working girl myself until I turned twenty and put on all this fat.”

She looked down at Juan. “His mother died and he went to live with his grandmother, who didn’t want him, She sold him to me for fifty U.S. dollars. For one of my girls for an hour, I charge tourists five dollars. Unless he’s a Haitian man, and then I charge him only one dollar. Because Juan here is so special, I can ask as much as ten dollars.”

In the course of one evening, Truman met the “prettiest girl among a lot of ugly ones in those rocking chairs.”

“She was olive-skinned and an import from the old colonial city of Santo Domingo,” he said. “She had three gold teeth and five silk dresses. Her name was Ottilie.”

“Madame Fleur sold her every night as a virgin,” he said. “How she managed to pull that one off I don’t know. She said it was a special secret of hers, a secret she’d learned from her voodoo priest.”

On another night, Madame Fleur was hysterical. She told Truman that Porfirio Rubirosa was flying in from Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo) to talk with the
[terrifying, to Haitians]
Haitian dictator, François Duvalier.

“There is some shit about a border dispute,” she said. “When Monsieur Rubirosa is in town, he always visits my Paradise.”

Of course, gossipy Truman was well acquainted with the reputation of the legendary playboy, who had married Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress and the richest woman in the world. Nearly all of the conversation centered on his mammoth penis. His fame was so great that in many restaurants, when a guest wanted a giant peppermill, he told the waiter to bring a “Rubirosa.” He was also nicknamed “Rubber Hosa.”

He’d once been married to Flor de Oro Trujillo,
Generalissimo
Rafael Trujillo’s whorish daughter.

In Hollywood, Rubi’s list of sexual conquests had become part of his legend. They included Joan Crawford, Dolores del Rio, Ava Gardner, Susan Hayward, and Veronica Lake. He’d also seduced such prominent personages as Eva Perón, co-dictator of Argentina.

Rubi had once told a reporter, “I consider a day in which I make love only once as virtually wasted.”