Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, Denham Fou

The lives of these men relied on two legs, the first was work, so intensive that Capote was at times seen to concentrate to the point that it was feared he would rupture a temple vein, visibly swollen, and Williams, Isherwood and Vidal were no less impassioned. The second leg was feverish sex, Williams so wild that his partners in love had to leave the apartment in order to get rest. As for Vidal, he himself said he had had 1,000 different boys by age 25, and Isherwood claimed he had had 500 in Berlin alone. The role of Denham Fouts was to enliven these men, his body scent of vanilla and the scorpion tattoo at his groin that each kissed before moving on. Vidal featured Denham in his The Judgment of Paris, Isherwood invoked his American years with Denham in Down There on a Visit, and Capote in his ‘’Spoiled Monsters’’. This book will concentrate on both aspects, their creative genius and their need for a second form of beauty, that of the boys their art attracted--followed, later, by boys drawn to the money it engendered. Their incessant work allowed them to buy the objects of their lust, especially in the Europe of Paris and Rome and Venice, of Taormina, Capri and Ischia, and, back home in the States, during the war when the blackout made California beaches a jungle of bodies--as Isherwood put it--there were soldiers and sailors innumerable. Capote, for me, was the greatest American writer to have lived, and Tennessee was America’s never-equaled playwright; Vidal was a chronicler of an America gone forever; Denham a source of inspiration who played his role to the hilt, beginning with his startling lifestyle and his absolute determination to be the world’s best-kept male whore, to turn day into never-ending night, sighs into memories his men would never forget. Of them all, only Isherwood came away with the world’s greatest prize, a boy who loved him even beyond his last breath.