Best-Kept Boy in the World

Magnus Books

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First Edition

Cover by: Nick Vogelson, Townhouse Creative

Print ISBN: 978-1936833-41-2

Digital ISBN: 978-1-62601-125-0

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Foreword

Chapter
One: “Un Homme Fatal”

Chapter
Two: “How Does One Manage to Get Kept?”

Chapter
Three: “My Dear Denham”

Chapter
Four: “A Knight in Shining Armor”

Chapter
Five: “A Genius For Enjoying Himself”

Chapter
Six: “A Marvelous Southern Whore”

Chapter
Seven: “Denny Had Real Magic”

Chapter
Eight: “I’m Sick Of Moralizations”

Notes

Bibliography

Manuscript Collections

About the
Author

It was a pity, Gore Vidal once remarked, that Denham
Fouts never wrote a memoir. For Vidal, Denny was “
un homme
fatal.
”
¹

Truman Capote found that “to watch him walk into a
room was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking; he was
the single most charming-looking person I’ve ever
seen.”
²
Capote loved to conjecture that “had Denham
Fouts yielded to Hitler’s advances there would have been no World
War Two.”
³

Jimmie Daniels, the nightclub singer who performed
at his own Harlem club that bore his name, thought Denny “was about
the most beautiful boy anybody had ever seen. His skin always
looked as if it had just been scrubbed; it seemed to have no pores
at all, it was so smooth.”
⁴

To King Paul of Greece he was “my dear Denham” or
“Darling Denham,” and the King’s telegrams to Denny from the Royal
Palace always were signed “love, Paul.”
⁵

Peter Watson, the wealthy financial backer of the
popular British literary magazine
Horizon
, had an erection
whenever he was in the same room with Denny.
⁶

The artist Michael Wishart met Denny for the first
time at a party in Paris and realized instantly he was in love and
that “the only place in the world I wanted to be was in Denham’s
bedroom.”
⁷

Best-selling author Glenway Wescott thought Denny
“absolutely enchanting and ridiculously good-looking ... He had the
most delicious body odor; I once swiped one of his
handkerchiefs.”
⁸

Lord Tredegar, one of the largest landowners in
Great Britain, saw Denny being led by the police through the lobby
of an expensive hotel on Capri, convinced the police to let him pay
the bills Denny owed, and then took Denny to accompany him and his
wife as they continued on their tour of the world.

Novelist Christopher Isherwood, who Denny considered
his best friend, called him “the most expensive male prostitute in
the world.”

Today, someone who projects such an instant and
potent power of attraction could forge a successful career, perhaps
as a male model, as a character in a daytime soap opera, as a
tabloid celebrity, as a television or movie star, maybe even as an
acclaimed actor. But Denny was born in 1914 in Jacksonville,
Florida, when such options were not yet available to those rare
individuals endowed with this sort of sexual magnetism. He never
did write a memoir that would have told his strange story, that may
have explained how it felt to possess those magical powers, to
occupy the thoughts of another, to become the obsession of their
lives, to live well off of their wealth and infatuation. How would
it feel to be Aschenbach’s Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s
Death in
Venice
? To be Humbert’s Lolita in Nabokov’s masterpiece? Jay
Gatsby’s Daisy in
The Great Gatsby
?

“The mass of men,” Thoreau was brave enough and
honest enough to write in
Walden
, “lead lives of quiet
desperation.” Most of us come, go, and are gone, our lives lived in
shades of gray no more distinguishable, no more memorable, than the
squirrels in a park on a coming of winter morning. Denny was one of
those rare individuals who, whatever his faults, brought color into
the black and white etchings of everyday life.

Denny never did write his own story, but he does
move through many memoirs of the times. And for some of the most
renowned authors of those times, he was a muse, and that color he
brought into a squirrel-gray world inspired them to capture him in
their prose. Denny is “Paul” in Christopher Isherwood’s
Down
There on a Visit
. He is a character in Gore Vidal’s novel
The Judgment of Paris
, and in his short story “Pages from an
Abandoned Journal.” He appears in Truman Capote’s infamous
Answered Prayers
on which the author was working, or not
working, when he died. Denny was proud to find himself a character
in Somerset Maugham’s
The Razor’s Edge
.

To be immortalized in a story by a famed author
would be enough to earn a footnote in literary history. To have
inspired the body of work Denham Fouts did is to become a legend.
Who was this man, this enigma, who died at thirty-four, whose looks
and personality so charmed and intrigued some of the wealthiest men
and some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century?
This is his story.

“UN HOMME FATAL”

It had been a long six years since Peter Watson sent
Denny to the United States as the Nazis marched toward Paris. Denny
had made his way to California, lived in Santa Monica with
Christopher Isherwood with whom he practiced Eastern mysticism,
became a conscientious objector and served in a forestry camp, and
was studying to become a psychiatrist. Now, at last, in the spring
of 1946, as weary and war-wounded Europe was beginning to recover,
Denny returned to Paris, heading straight to Peter Watson’s
apartment at 44 Rue du Bac.

It was a “sombre faubourg apartment with the
eighteenth century windows,” as one friend described
it,
¹
where, in paneled rooms that before the War had
been filled with sculptures and antiques, Watson had hung the
modern masterworks he had been acquiring, a collection of what he
felt were the most significant paintings of each of the artists he
was collecting, the best of de Chirico, Gris, Klee, Miro, and
Picasso. Six servants had managed the enormous apartment which was
in an elegant eighteenth century townhouse right off the Boulevard
Saint Germain, close to the Seine. It was set back from the street
with a private garden behind it, and through the large windows and
French doors leading out to a terrace was—Paris: the Eiffel Tower,
the Grand Palais, the roof of the Louvre, the Sacre Coeur, and not
far away, Notre Dame and the Jardin du Luxemburg.

Peter had not been prepared for what he found when,
after the War, he and his friend, the famed literary critic and
essayist Cyril Connolly, returned to Paris in July 1945. When they
unlocked and opened the door, they were shocked. “My flat’s a
shambles”, Peter wrote to a friend “—really heartbreaking and so
filthy.”
²
His extraordinary art collection (which today
would have been valued at hundreds of millions of dollars) had
disappeared. What furniture remained was broken, dirty draperies
hung in shreds, everything of value was missing, including what
little he had hidden before evacuating as the Nazi tanks approached
the city. Connolly found the once grand quarters “very dilapidated
and buggery”
³
and “terribly depressing, empty of
everything, no hot water, no clean sheets ...My bed is a sofa in
the dining room—nowhere to unpack anything, and I have to go
through Peter’s room whenever I want to go to the bathroom. It is
so strange that Peter, who once had a genius for gracious living,
now comes to symbolize morbid discomfort to me.”
⁴
For
Connolly the flat was “heavily mined” with reminders of his ex-wife
Jean; there, still hanging where Jean and Denny had nailed it for
Christmas in 1938, was a scraggly piece of dried out
mistletoe.
⁵

Discouraged, depressed by what he found and did not
find, Peter nevertheless had worked to prepare the apartment for a
party, a special party to celebrate the return to Paris, to him,
after six years of separation, the love of his life, his obsession:
Denham Fouts.

One of the guests at Peter’s party that evening was
Michael Wishart, the seventeen-year-old grandson of Colonel Sidney
Wishart, who had been the Sheriff of London, the son of Ernest
Wishart, who owned an estate in Sussex near the sea, and of the
sophisticated, glamorous, free-spirited Lorna, who gave birth to
Michael when she was seventeen, and who, whenever possible, sped
away from her husband’s estate in her chocolate brown Bentley,
racing straight for London’s nightclubs and a series of lovers.

Michael Wishart would become an artist, a painter of
some renown, a precocious talent who was selling his paintings when
he was fourteen and had his first exhibition in London, and a well
received exhibition at that, at the Archer Gallery at the age of
sixteen. He was, in fact, precocious in many respects. Michael was
twelve when Great Britain declared war on Germany and
Messerschmitts began flying over the English Channel. Those
occasional German aviators who managed to parachute from their
stricken fighters were captured and put to work by the English.
One, not much older than Michael, “blonde and arrogant, the
incarnation of a Hitler Youth poster,”
⁶
was brought to
work on Michael’s family’s estate. Michael found intriguingly
irresistible this sullen POW named Harm, and when no one was
watching, began bringing him small gifts—cigarettes, chocolates,
beer. At that age, Michael already was quite handsome with his
thick dark hair and eyebrows, seductive eyes and mouth, cleft chin,
baritone voice. He and the foreign laborer could communicate only
by glances, but those glances soon became more meaningful and
Michael thought he could read in them that “he would follow
wherever I led.”
⁷
Michael was correct. One day, as
Michael was seated by a stone wall sketching a landscape, the
German youth came and sat down next to him. Michael walked with him
through the orchards, past classical statuary, through gates in
walls and hedges, across fields to an abandoned shed, and there “we
made a private truce without waiting for the general armistice to
be declared, for which I feel toward him nothing but
gratitude.”
⁸
It must have been quite a private armistice
with Harm. Forty years later, and an extremely sexually active four
decades they were, Michael would write that “I have never since
experienced physical desire comparable to that which I felt for the
German POW.”
⁹
He added that “thanks to him, and his silk
parachute, I can say that homosexuality came to me, quite
literally, ‘out of the blue.’”
¹⁰
At the time, though,
Michael was alarmed about what he had done and about what he was
feeling, and wasted no time seeking a psychiatrist to determine
what was wrong with him and to cure him. After a number of
unsatisfying sessions, the psychiatrist left him with these words:
“Well, old fellow, remember that variety is the spice of
life.”
¹¹