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) (89 page)

While living in Ravello, Austen arranged orgies for Gore at their home. A parade of olive-skinned, muscular young men were often seen filing in on certain Saturday nights. One of them revealed to an Italian reporter that Austen paid them $20 each to participate in an orgy staged by him.

Their friend, actress Susan Sarandon, visited on occasion, remembering them as acting “like an old married couple” when she visited them in their home at Ravello, La Rondinaia,
[“the Swallow’s Nest”]
, accompanied by her companion, Tim Robbins.

Villagers in Ravello became aware of the parade of the rich and famous making their way across the square to Gore’s home—on one occasion, Mick and Bianca Jagger. Woody Harrelson was a frequent visitor, telling Gore that he made $2 million a year in royalties from the hit TV sitcom,
Cheers
.

“When we were living in Ravello, Gore got a call from Princess Margaret, who wanted to spend two or three days with us,” Austen said. “She asked Gore if it were all right for her to bring a companion. He said yes. The lover she brought over was Peter Sellers.”

“I was shocked at how far he went to ingratiate himself with Margaret,” Austen said. “A real brown-nose. He told me that he’d had heart problems, but before mounting Her Royal Highness, he still used amyl nitrate as a sexual stimulant. That finally led to his fatal heart attack.”

Theo Aronson, Margaret’s biographer, wrote about her affair with Sellers, claiming that during her marriage to the Earl of Snowdon, Sellers purchased expensive camera equipment for her husband, knowing of his interest in photography. He even gave him a CIA bugging device.

In 1968, Sellers divorced Britt Ekland, and he informed Gore that Margaret’s marriage to the Earl of Snowdon was collapsing. “I’m madly in love with her and expect to marry her,” Sellers told Gore.

“Peter called her ‘Ma’am, darling,’ and he confided to me that her breasts were as large as Sophia Loren’s—‘the same cup exactly,’” Gore said.

Before she left Ravello, Princess Margaret whispered to Gore that “I have no intention of marrying Peter—call it a fling. You, of all people, know about flings.”

“I wrote the book on the subject,” Gore said.

Sometimes, Princess Margaret arrived in Ravello without an escort. Austen said Gore knew what she liked. “He once sent her off on a big boat with a good-looking guy sailor from Salerno who had the biggest cock on the Amalfi Drive. She came back with a happy gleam in her royal eye.”

That night over dinner, Gore confided to Princess Margaret that Jackie Kennedy found Queen Elizabeth “pretty heavy going.”

Margaret shot back, “But that’s what she’s there for!”

“Actually, Margaret had a dry wit,” Austen said. “Over dinner, she told us that the Queen had uncommon talents. Gore asked her what they were.”

“She can put on a very heavy diamond tiara while hurrying down a flight of stairs with no mirror,” Margaret claimed.

Gore once wrote, “Princess Margaret is far too bright for her station in life, which she takes altogether too solemnly.”

***

Over the years, Gore and Austen were frequent visitors to Hollywood, often discussing film projects that never materialized. By then, Gore had become an internationally celebrated man of letters and was often entertained by celebrities.

Barbra Streisand once fêted them at her home when she was having an affair with Don Johnson, who became famous for his TV series,
Miami Vice
.

Gore found the blonde-haired actor “very cute, just my type. I wonder if it’s true that Sal Mineo has already had him.”

At one point, Barbra revealed to Gore that she was urging Johnson to visit her doctor to have his foreskin clipped.

Later, he told Howard, “How dreadful. It shouldn’t be cut off, but made love to.”

“You never knew who Vidal and Austen were seen with,” said Truman Capote. “I was a spy in the house of love. My contacts in Hollywood gave me up-to-date reports on their social contacts. One night, they were out with Robert Downey, Jr.; another night with Sidney Poitier and Joanna Shimkus. That dyke, Barbara Stanwyck, entertained them at her house. They were frequent visitors at the home of Elizabeth Taylor, although Gore got seriously pissed off at her, or so I heard. He told people, ‘That bitch is getting fucked by Robert Wagner, and I haven’t had him yet.’”

In the twilight of their years, Gore and Austen sold their villa in Ravello, returning to live in California.

Visitors became rare, and on many an occasion, Gore would claim, “I have no regrets.”

Austen clarified that: “His life was filled with nothing but regrets. At night, he often talked about his great disappointment that he’d lost his bid for Congress. If he’d won, he planned in time to become Senator from New York and then run for president like his nemesis, Bobby Kennedy, did.”

“Frankly, I think Gore would have made a great president if it were not for the heavy baggage of the gay thing,” Austen claimed. “Of course, there was another problem. He was viewed as a pinko liberal.”

As the years went by, Gore increased his consumption of Scotch. On many a night, he was drunk by eight o’clock. He liked to sit in front of the television set, watching the news. Austen said, “Gore became virtually glued to the TV during the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, which he denounced as a Republican farce. He knew where all the bodies were buried, the most awful personal details about the senators. One night he pointed at this Republican jackass on TV and said, ‘Look at that rat’s asshole. Here he is, denouncing Clinton for a blow-job, and the shithead is the biggest cocksucker in Congress. He’s sucked off so many pageboys, his mouth has locked into a permanent O. What a hypocrite!’”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Gore didn’t exaggerate
when he claimed that during his lifetime, he seduced 1,003 men, most of those conquests before he turned twenty-five. He and his companion, Howard Austen, when they were living in Rome, often had as many as fifteen young men in and out of their apartment in one week. The pair staged orgies where they could have had sexual contact with as many as eight men in one night.

During his early days in Hollywood, when he was a scriptwriter at MGM, Gore, like so many other young men in town, also seduced the occasional movie star before they became box office attractions.

He preferred hustlers to movie stars. Never a politician. Perhaps his sexual aversion to politicians stemmed from a aborted experience he had as a teenager.

During his prep school years at Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire, Gore was assigned third base in a traditional baseball game with his school’s longtime rival, Phillips Andover Academy, located across the state line in Andover, Massachusetts.
[The rivalry between these two elite schools, whose names are annoyingly similar, is the oldest in America. The fiercely competitive schools competed in their first ever baseball game in 1878, when Exeter defeated the boys from Andover 12-1.]

The pitcher for Phillips Andover that day was George Herbert Walker Bush, the son of Senator Prescott Bush, a Republican

“I was only sixteen at the time, and several of my classmates at Exeter were homosexuals,” Gore told a party one night at Tennessee Williams’ house in Key West. “To put it bluntly, the pitcher from Andover was considered a hot piece of ass back then, a good looker, for those who liked the All-American type.”

“After we lost the game, I followed him into the showers to check out his body,” Gore claimed. “I stood next to him as we both soaped up. I was particularly interested in his cock, which seemed generous enough, though flaccid. He had a long extended foreskin. I learned later that his teammates called him ‘Skin,’ a name that stuck to him even when he joined the Navy. He had a very lanky physique.”

“I don’t know if he ever got his dick clipped—you’ll have to ask Barbara if she can remember,” Gore said.

“I was very aggressive back then, chasing after the boys,” he said. “All teenage boys are horny and will usually jump at the chance for any kind of sex. In the dorm, we called it the ‘Princeton rub.’”

[Gore was referring to a form of sex known as frottage.]

“Georgie boy withdrew in horror from me when I reached out to fondle his soapy dick,” Gore said. “He immediately fled from the shower, even though he was still soapy. He got dressed in a flash and was in his car heading back to Andover. At least I got to cop a feel from the cock that spewed the sperm that created the worst president in the history of the United States.”