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) (96 page)

Later that night, he told Gore, “The main thing for me is my dancing. Before it withers away from my body, I will keep dancing until the last moment, the last drop.”

In his memoirs, Gore recalled Rudi’s final visit to Ravello. It was in the August before he died.

Gore remembered that Rudi looked thin and exhausted. “He sat on my sofa, drinking white wine. He could go on for hours without talking. He did come alive for ballet gossip.”

As Gore reported it, Rudi said, “Peter Martins—he kill wife, no? No. Sad. Saw him when he was sixteen. In class. Big cock hangs here. I make move. Erik Bruhn say, ‘No, too young. Go to jail.’”

[Peter Martins, the very talented and hard-driving Danish classical dancer and choreographer and one of the luminaries of the ballet world, served for many years as the artistic director of the New York City Ballet.]

Gore claimed that Rudi’s face was ravaged but still beautiful. “He was still very much the Tatar king. The upper body had begun to waste away, but the lower was still unaffected—legs powerful, and the feet, for a dancer, not too misshapen, no hammertoes.”

The last time Gore met with Rudi, the dancer told him, “I will soon be joining Erik somewhere, someplace. He and I will dance a
pas de deux
into eternity.”

Rudi died on January 6, 1993 at the age of 54. He was buried at the Russian cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris, a pilgrimage site even today for his still-loyal fans.

On his last visit to Paris, Gore placed yellow roses on his grave and included a note:

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
—G.V.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In 1945, at war’s end
, as Gore was ending his tour of duty in the U.S. Army, he was a frequent visitor to Hollywood. He usually found his mother, Nina Vidal, drunk, and he didn’t want to stay with her.

Her best friend was Doris Stein, and she invited Gore, during his visits, to stay with her family. She was married to the powerful Jules Stein, an entrepreneur and Hollywood player who had taken $1,000 in capital and had eventually built a billion dollar force in the world of mass entertainment. He was one of the founders of MCA, Inc. Starting out as an eye surgeon, he later became the world’s largest producer of film entertainment.

He found Gore brilliant and talented, predicting he’d go far if he decided to devote his life to screenwriting instead of novels.

When Gore met him, Jules was the agent to such stars as Bette Davis, Betty Grable, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo (although she was retired), Ingrid Bergman, Frank Sinatra, and Jack Benny, among dozens of others.

One night, Jules drove Gore to the Hollywood Canteen, which had been founded during World War II by Bette Davis and John Garfield to provide entertainment for servicemen, many of whom were going off to battle the Japanese in the Pacific, and perhaps to their imminent deaths.

Jules was head of the Hollywood Canteen’s finance committee, charged with fund raising. At the Canteen, major stars such as Barbara Stanwyck and Betty Grable, danced with servicemen. Jules immediately introduced Gore to Bette Davis, the Queen of the Canteen.

“It was obvious to me that Jules was in love with Bette,” Gore later said. “When I first met Bette, I had no idea that in a decade or so, I’d been writing a screenplay in which she’d star.”

“I had heard that she was nothing but majestic arrogance,” Gore said. “Not on this night. She was a petite little thing, no Lana Turner, but not ugly either. She kissed Jules and me, but was enveloped by a bevy of gay servicemen who adored her. She was very, very popular.”

During the course of its existence, some two million servicemen were entertained at the canteen, dancing to the sound of Kay Kyser’s band. “Hormones raged and romances soared,” one reporter wrote. “Young, untested, and unknown servicemen danced with Betty Hutton, Ida Lupino, and Hedy Lamarr, among others. Bing Crosby often showed up to warble.”

“Before I left Hollywood for duties in the Aleutian Islands, Jules drove me back to the canteen for one final visit.” Gore said. “After all, I was a serviceman in need of entertainment. Bette wasn’t there that night, but Jules introduced me to Marlene Dietrich, who showed up in a costume of gold body paint, hard to describe. She asked me to dance.”

“As she danced real close to me, she made her intentions rather obvious,” Gore said. “Apparently, she found me attractive, but there was no way I was going home with a powerhouse of a woman like that.”

“Before the night was over, I danced with Jane Wyman, who was married to Ronald Reagan at the time. She just seemed to be doing her duty, no sparks between us. However, when I went to the men’s room, I was cruised by Zachory Scott. I’d just seen him with Joan Crawford in
Mildred Pierce.”

“I wanted to leave with this devilish hunk, but didn’t want to embarrass Jules,” Gore said. “At the time, he didn’t know I was gay.”

“I never got to seduce any male stars at the canteen. Later, I heard that Truman Capote, the lucky little fart, on very different occasions, got the pants off both Errol Flynn and John Garfield. How he managed to do that, I’ll never know.”

Although Gore more or less failed as a novelist, he did not abandon that form of writing forever. Soonafter, he began to achieve monetary success with teleplays, some of them adapted from successful works presented in books or even other films.

He was aided by the support of an administrative powerhouse, Martin Manulis, a Brooklyn-born CBS director best known for creating the television series
Playhouse 90
. The show came to epitomize what is known as “Television’s Golden Age of Live Drama.” Insofar as his relationship to Gore, Manulis said, “I was his mother, wet-nurse, and psychiatrist.”

[Manulis became known for commissioning teleplays based on the works of such established writers as William Faulkner, Clifford Odets, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Frequently working against the grain of commonly accepted belief patterns, he would eventually cast Robert Redford as a Nazi or “monster” Boris Karloff as a dignified man deeply in love. In time, he also produced movies, his most heralded being
Days of Wine and Roses
(1962).]

Manulis assigned Gore to adapt Faulkner’s short story,
Smoke
. Manulus at first thought Gore was so handsome, trim, and fit that he might become a leading man, instructing his underlings to “Bring him in front of the camera instead of having him write scenes for it.” But Gore preferred writing.

Smoke
was so successful that Gore was then commissioned to adapt Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.”

[“Barn Burning” which first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1939, is a short story dealing with social inequities and vengeance as viewed through the perspective of a young, impressionable child.]

Suddenly, Gore was turning out teleplay after teleplay—Henry James’
The Turn of the Screw;
Stephen Crane’s
The Blue Hotel
, and “A Sense of Justice” for Philco Playhouse, with a stellar performance by E.G. Marshall.

Not all of Gore’s ideas went over, however, especially when he suggested a TV series that would cast the extremely handsome Louis Jourdan as The Devil. In another script, he wanted to send a young physicist back to the year 1865, where he would prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. For each thirty-minute teleplay, Gore was paid $1,500, good money back in the mid-1950s.

Gore joined the coveted list of major teleplay writers, including Rod Sterling and Paddy Chayefsky. “I am the King of Television,” he announced to his mother, Nina, who had predicted utter failure for him.

Sometimes friendships, even an occasional romance, rose from one of these productions, since the principals worked together so closely together, often into the dawn hours.

In March of 1955, he had been asked to adapt the George Kaufman/Edna Ferber Broadway hit
Stage Door
for the TV series,
The Best of Broadway
, to star Rhonda Fleming and Diana Lynn. Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers had already co-starred together in a highly successful film adaptation of that Broadway play. Released in 1937, it was also entitled
Stage Door
.