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) (91 page)

Like Sal Mineo, Ray himself, and so many others, including Natalie Wood, Hopper seemed to have developed what Gore called “James Dean fever.”

From what he gathered from Hopper, he was having affairs not only with Dean, but with his best pal, Nick Adams, an aspiring actor, as well. He was also pursuing starlets on the side.

Despite a debauched life, Hopper looked fresh and innocently wide-eyed, even dewey.

He’d driven Gore to his favorite pizza joint in his new red Austin convertible purchased with money he’d earned from his recently signed movie contract.

After pizza, he took Gore to Googie’s, known as a “zippy, populuxe-style coffee shop where the stars gathered on Sunset Strip.” Paul Newman frequented the place, accompanied by Tony Perkins at the beginning of their torrid affair. They often came in with Vampira, a Goth and very campy TV hostess who drove around Hollywood in a long black hearse she’d nicknamed “Black Death.”

Hopper told Gore that the other night, he had been here with Dean. “Frank Sinatra walked in to check out the joint. He was with the actress, Marilyn Maxwell. Spotting Dean, he ordered the waiter to bring Dean a glass of milk. Sinatra also gave the waiter his comb to deliver to Dean.”

As Gore looked up, he noticed Anthony Perkins entering the café, accompanied by Vampira. The pair headed for their table. “It must be Tony’s night off from Tab Hunter,” Gore whispered to Hopper.

As Perkins and Vampira sat down to join them, Hopper didn’t speak to him. Gore learned later that Hopper viewed Perkins as his chief rival for quirky, neurotic parts.

Gore enjoyed seeing Perkins again. By the pool, back at the hotel, he’d found him not only handsome, but charming and intelligent. At least he had something in common with Perkins: Both of them considered Newman one of their best friends.

[Years later, Gore said, “In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock, in
Psycho
, made the ideal choice in selecting Tony, an all-American boy next door, to play a mama’s boy harboring secret demons of shocking violence and perversity.”]

After Googie’s, Gore’s next stop was Hopper’s apartment. Even at that stage of his career, he was into drugs. He’d told Gore that it had all begun when he learned to sniff gas fumes from his grandfather’s truck, which he said made him high, often leading to hallucinations. He also admitted that he and Dean consumed “grass and peyote.” In addition, he consumed a combination of heroin and cocaine, which would later be known as “speedballs.”

Ray had been correct about Hopper’s lack of endowment. He stripped down and lay on his stomach, waiting for Gore to penetrate him.

In the afterglow of sex, Hopper seemed embarrassed and wanted to re-assert his heterosexual credentials. “I like drugs and liquor, but what I’m really addicted to is sex. I can have virtually any starlet in Hollywood, just for the asking. In a period of forty-eight hours, I’m likely to bed eight women. I look at sex like drinking beer—a can of beer, a woman, a can of beer, a woman.”

“Sounds monotonous to me,” Gore said as he put his clothes back on. He couldn’t resist a putdown before departing: “Frankly, I think you should always be the fuckee, not the fucker.”

***

Anthony (“Tony”) Perkins telephoned a few days later. Gore knew that he was the son of the famous stage and screen actor, Osgood Perkins. Tony was in town to film
Friendly Persuasion
(1956), in which he played a gentle pacifist farm lad, the Quaker son of Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire. Gore had gone to see Tony when he’d played a gay student during part of the run of the long-running Broadway production of
Tea and Sympathy
(1953). He’d wanted to go backstage to congratulate him, but didn’t.

Having seen him beside the swimming pool of the Château Marmont several times, Gore was surprised to learn that he didn’t occupy a room at the hotel.

“I will when I get my next paycheck,” Tony said. “In the meantime, I’m living in this janitor’s room across the street. Right now, the building has no janitor, and the owner is renting the room to me. Why don’t you come with me and see where I live?”

“I don’t mind love in the afternoon,” Gore said.

On the way across the street, Gore said, “There’s an item in the morning paper. Louella or Hedda, I can’t remember which bitch. It said that you are the new Brando. Is that true?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Tony said.

“I intend to,” Gore said, “even if I have to move a janitor’s mop and pail to do so.”

Later, during Gore’s report to Stanley Haggart, he said, “Tony is great sex, a beautiful boy with a beautiful cock and body. But he’s a little weird in bed. No wonder his best female friend is Vampira. Tony spends a lot of time sinking his teeth into your neck, I think he really wants to go for blood, but holds back.”

“Come on, Gore,” Haggart said. “A lot of lovers, gay and straight, attack the neck. It’s supposed to turn people on.”

Later, after sex that day, Tony and Gore headed once again to Googie’s.

Over coffee, Gore found Tony brimming with ambition. “He was riding a roller-coaster to fame.”

“I’m going to all the right parties, meeting all the right VIPs,” Tony said. “I want to be a movie star and enjoy all the trappings. I want to drink champagne with the big boys—Zanuck, Dore Schary, Jack Warner…whomever.”

Provocatively, Gore inquired about the status of Tony’s relationship with Tab Hunter.

“It’s a real problem,” he said. “To protect our careers and keep our private lives secret, we have to sneak around. We can never be seen together except on a double date. Of course, we drop the ladies at their doorsteps with a fleeting kiss on the cheek. If we’re going to an event, we arrive in separate cars and leave separately.”

“Sounds like a high degree of paranoia,” Gore said.

“About the only place we dare go together is the Vista Theater, a movie revival house in Silverdale. It’s very remote, and nearly all the audience is gay.”

“Sorry to hear you guys have to sneak around so much,” Gore said.

“Tab feels there are serious issues damaging our personalities,” Tony continued. “His point is that one has to adopt a
persona
in this town. After a while, at least according to Tab, you become that
persona
.”

“I’d say that half of Hollywood—perhaps a hell of a lot more—is living a
faux persona
,” Tony claimed. “You know, Joan Crawford as a doting mother; Cary Grant as a ladies’ man who—in private—chases boys; or Bogie, the tough guy who’d be the first to run from a fight.”

“There’s more,” Tony said. “I also lead a secret life from Tab. I’d like to slip around and see you, too.”

“I think that’s wonderful,” Gore said. “You’re hot!”

“Speaking of hot, there’s still more,” he said. “In a few minutes, Robert Francis will walk through that door. He’s that gorgeous young actor who appeared in
The Caine Mutiny
with Bogart.”

“I saw him,” Gore said. “The ensign, a real dish.”

“Hollywood doesn’t know it, but he’s

Howard Hughes’ boy. Our aviator friend supports him.” Then Tony looked up. “He’s coming here now.”

Tony introduced Gore to Robert Francis.

“I’m honored to meet
Screen World’s
most popular personality of 1954,” Gore said.

“And I you, Mr. Vidal,” Robert responded.

Seated together, facing Gore, Robert and Tony each looked like manifestations of Adonis to him. He’d later tell Haggart, “No wonder Hughes is apeshit over Robert—a swimmer’s build, a clean-cut look, and that faddish brush-cut from his barber.”

Gore and Robert must have signaled their attraction for each other, but Tony didn’t seem to mind at all. He confessed that he never liked to be seen out with only one male. “I like at least three at my table.”

“The third person is called a beard,” Gore said.

Robert said he wanted to learn to fly and that Hughes was teaching him. He was aware that Gore’s father had been America’s aviation czar during the 1930s, and he asked Gore many questions. At times, Tony felt left out of the conversation.

After about an hour of this, Gore invited them back to the Château Marmont, where he was having a few people in for cocktails, including not only Haggart, but Christopher Isherwood and his young artist lover, Don Bachardy.

Bachardy later remembered the event. “Tony Perkins never talked queer, or in any way acknowledged his queerness to us. I suppose it was much more usual then to be secretive. Of course, he was carrying on with Tab Hunter, we were told on good authority. Be that as it may, Perkins was always by himself at these get-togethers, or so I heard from Gore.”

Before leaving Gore’s party, Haggart invited the other guests for cocktails late the following afternoon at his beautiful home in Laurel Canyon. As an interior designer, it was a showplace built around a pool with a lovely little guest cottage in the back. Both Robert and Gore accepted, although Tony had another commitment.

Haggart also invited Austen, who was not at Gore’s cocktail party. “He’s still in New York on business, but he sends his love,” Gore said.

***

[Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachary would not encounter Tony Perkins again until the late 1970s, when super-agent Sue Mengers threw a party for Gore at her home
.

In addition to the May-December couple (Isherwood and Bachardy), she’d also invited actor Jack Nicholson, who had become a good friend of Gore’s. He showed up with Angelica Huston. Other guests included Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, along with producer Ray Stark and fashion maven Diana Vreeland
.

Bachardy spoke to Perkins’ biographer, Charles Winecoff, telling him that he and Isherwood next saw Perkins in the late 1970s. He’d married Berry Berenson in 1973, and the couple had had two children, Osgood and Elvis
.

Before his marriage, according to Winecoff, Tony had had affairs with Rudolf Nureyev, composer Stephen Sondheim, and dancer-choreographer Grover Dale
.

Having turned down Jane Fonda and Brigitte Bardot, he’d had his first heterosexual experience at the age of 39 with Victoria Principal, when working on the 1972 film
, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.