Best-Kept Boy in the World (11 page)

Like Paul in Isherwood’s novel, Denny became a
favorite of the others at the forestry camp. From the start, he
enjoyed his months there, happy to find, as Isherwood noted, that
“he could get along in a group and be accepted and popular. He
spent money wildly, on all kinds of luxury equipment—waterproof
wristwatches, super-sleeping-bags, fur-lined jackets—for himself
and as presents for his friends.”
⁸²
Denny adopted a
stray dog wandering around the camp, “huge and shaggy and
sloppy-tongued,” just like Gigi in the novel. Trotsky became his
life companion. Denny was the cook for the camp and in his free
time was studying correspondence courses through UCLA to get his
high school diploma, with the plan of then following a program of
higher education to become a psychiatrist.

The directors of the camp weren’t quite certain what
to make of such a worldly free spirit who had no regard for
routines or authority. They reported to Isherwood that Denham Fouts
was a “subversive influence”
⁸³
and accused him of
bringing liquor and marijuana into the camp, accusations they were
not able to prove. Their major concern was that Denny “has simply
been talking about his gay [exciting] life in Paris and making them
[the other men] discontented.”
⁸⁴
The directors were
quite relieved when Denny was reclassified as medically unfit due
to a heart murmur and discharged in the spring of 1943.

Like Paul in
Down There on a Visit
, Denny’s
thinking had changed when he was away at the forestry camp; as he
told Christopher as they sat at a bar, “I’ve decided to hold on to
the things I can see.”
⁸⁵

Denny moved into an apartment above a restaurant on
Entrada Drive, close to the beach in Santa Monica, enrolling in the
University of California to prepare for his pre-medical
examinations, with the hope of becoming a psychiatrist. Both Denny
and Christopher realized that Denny had developed new goals and
that their days of living together were no longer possible. “Denny
is now going along a different road,” Christopher wrote in his
diary. “His discipline is all built on his studying, which I can’t
share.”
⁸⁶
As Christopher wrote to Gerald Heard: “Denny
has two jobs: one daytime one, as a janitor, during which he
studies algebra, Shakespeare and German for his high school
diploma, which, in the rush of getting educated in other ways, he
never stopped to take—and an evening job at a bookstore [The London
Bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard.] We go swimming together every
Saturday.”
⁸⁷

It was here on the beach at Santa Monica that Denny
spotted a seagull staggering through the sand. The gull had a
broken wing, and touched by its hapless plight, Denny “amputated
it, which made the bird more comfortable but didn’t solve its
problem.” Christopher followed it and saw how it couldn’t fly,
couldn’t swim, and was being harassed by other gulls pecking at it.
He killed it. “This made me feel horrible all day. I asked Swami,
did I do right? and he said no, one shouldn’t interfere with the
karma of any creature.”
⁸⁸
This didn’t convince
Christopher, who rationalized that the only other option would have
been to take the bird home and make it a pet.

Another day on the beach, Denny made a tail for a
kite out of Christmas decorations. (“This sort of play project,
undertaken on the spur of the moment, was characteristic of Denny,”
Christopher noted.)
⁸⁹
A gust of wind off the ocean
caught the kite, it dove, hit a power line by the highway, the
tinsel ornaments short-circuited the line, the line sparked,
flashed, exploded, fell across the road, cars swerved, brakes
squealed, traffic backed up, the neighborhood was without power,
the police came, and the kite flyers innocently joined the crowd of
spectators. Like everyone else who had lived with him discovered,
Denny made life a continuing adventure.

Often, too, they bicycled together. In June, while
cycling around Beverly Hills, Denny “suggested we should look in on
Lena Horne, the colored singer. She has a little house just above
the Sunset Strip. They have become great friends. Denny opened the
door and shouted, ‘Lena darling, I’ve brought a friend in to take a
shower.’ Lena seemed to find this perfectly natural.”
⁹⁰
(While on leave from the forestry camp, Denny and his
African-American friends from the camp would “often go down to
night spots, in the colored part of town, and Denny is proud of
being accepted in places where whites are not
welcome.”)
⁹¹

On their bicycling trips, Denny started composing a
bicycling song to the tune of “Take a Pair Of Sparkling Eyes,” a
song that began: “Just a pair of cycling queens/no longer in their
teens.”
⁹²

Whenever Isherwood went to Santa Monica to visit,
Denny “was very sweet and sympathetic. He suggested, as so often
before, that I should come and live with him here, or that we’d go
East together and he’d study at Columbia. But I can’t walk out on
Swami right now. And Denny himself is so unsettled. I could never
rely on him.”
⁹³
The two were co-dependent, aware of each
other’s virtues and vices, each appreciative of the strengths of
the other and needing them. As Christopher confided to his
diary:

Being with Denny unsettles me, and yet I need him
more than ever before ... He’s always getting in digs at Swami,
whom he’s never forgiven, but he doesn’t suggest I should leave.
His attitude was summed up the other day when he said “either make
up your mind to be a monk or a dirty old man.” Sometimes I find
this kind of brutality bracing; sometimes it just annoys me,
because I know, and Denny knows, that he has no right to talk to me
like this, when he isn’t faced with the same problem himself. If I
were to leave [Swami], he’d be pleased in a way, because it would
shock a lot of people he dislikes, and because he knows I could
only turn to him and depend on him more than ever—most likely we’d
live together again. But he’d also be a bit dismayed, I’m sure,
because in a strange way he relies on me to do his praying for him;
and he would love to be able to believe in my
belief.
⁹⁴

When they were apart, Christopher had “a gnawing
desire to go and see Denny and cry on his shoulder. He’s the only
person I can discuss the situation with, quite
frankly.”
⁹⁵
And then there was always that added
benefit, knowing Denny was “waiting at home to cook a tasty evening
meal.”
⁹⁶

So Christopher visited frequently. Tacked to the
living room walls of Denny’s small, two bedroom and bath apartment
were Army posters warning of the dangers of venereal disease. One
showed a prostitute with the admonition: “She may be a bag of
trouble.” The other poster was “a diagram of the penis, with dotted
red lines to show the spreading of gonorrheal infection up the
urethra and into the bladder.”
⁹⁷
Dominating the wall
over the sofa was the huge Picasso that Peter Watson had entrusted
to Denny before the War, “Girl Reading at a Table,” the portrait of
Picasso’s twenty-four year old mistress so vividly described in
Down There on a Visit
. The rich colors of this large oil and
enamel painting seemed illuminated by the light of the lamp on the
table in the painting, with the deep shadows around the girl
bending over the table to write giving a sense of quiet
concentration to the scene. Denny was well aware of the beauty of
this work, and, of its value, and once had stopped Christopher from
throwing darts at it (Christopher had slept on the sofa under the
painting and had a vivid nightmare about Nazi Germany, which he
blamed on the girl in the painting),
⁹⁸
and had stopped,
also, a reveler at one of his parties from slashing it with a
broken glass. Christopher noted in his diary that “the frame of the
Picasso is a bit more chipped,” and speculated “a
fight?”
⁹⁹

Denny’s college career proved short-lived. Ten years
older than his fellow freshman, he naturally excelled in his French
courses, but the science and math classes he was required to take
were beyond him. One of his classmates remembered: “at first he was
very serious about his studies, saying that someday he wanted to go
on to medical school. But after living adventurously in Europe, he
simply couldn’t settle into the college routine. He was really too
restless, too independent for college and, I think, already too old
to change.”
¹⁰⁰
After a year, he dropped out with vague
plans to resume his studies later.

It was not surprising Denny had a hard time
concentrating on studying. His apartment had become the
headquarters of a continuing party, with young friends coming and
going all day and night. Jeff and Curly, who liked pot and porn and
who Isherwood believed were capable of blackmail; Wallace and
Howard, who lived in another of the upstairs front apartments who
were always ready to participate in Denny’s schemes; Ken Angermayer
who Isherwood described as “a strikingly attractive
boy”
¹⁰¹
who would become the acclaimed filmmaker and
author of
Hollywood Babylon
, Kenneth Anger.

With Denny the host/circus master, these parties
were bound to press the limits. At one, a naval officer and an army
lieutenant were persuaded to strip and have sex on the couch under
the Picasso as the other guests watched and
critiqued.
¹⁰²
Once, Christopher received a call from
George Cukor, the film director, to come to his house at once to
speak with Somerset Maugham who at the time was staying there. The
author looked up from writing and said in his stammer, “I think,
C-Christopher, you’d b-better warn your friend Denham that his
apartment is b-being watched by the p-police.”
¹⁰³
Apparently someone had alerted the police that teenage boys were
entering and leaving Denny’s apartment at all hours. This report of
the famed author’s warning delighted Denham, for he had bragged
that in Europe, before the War, Maugham had been one of his
admirers. When not at the apartment, Denny and his friends would
drive up the coast to Thelma Todd’s, a notorious restaurant—part
eating establishment, part casino, part brothel—frequented by
Hollywood executives interested in meeting call girls in the
establishment’s curtained alcoves.

One day Denny came to visit Christopher, bringing
two friends with him. Isherwood recalled looking out his window and
seeing the three get out of the car and the effect of his first
glimpse of one of the young men, Bill Harris, an artist in his
early twenties with a shock of blond hair and a swimmer’s physique,
as “like a shot from an elephant gun” that made him “grunt” with
desire. “When Denny and I were alone, I accused him of having
maliciously introduced me to this beautiful temptation in order to
seduce me away from the Vedanta Center. This was meant as a joke.
Nevertheless, I knew that the young man’s image had been stamped
upon my mind and would reappear at inconvenient moments, in the
shrine room and elsewhere. It would be all the more disturbing
because I realized already that he himself wasn’t
unattainable.”
¹⁰⁴

On reflection, Christopher believed what he felt for
Bill Harris was what he called “a sort of compulsive craze. Bill
represented the Forbidden.”
¹⁰⁵
Isherwood was able to
resist this temptation until some weeks later he happened to find
himself standing next to Bill, pressed closed together in a crowded
trolley car. When Denny took a trip to San Francisco and asked Bill
to paint the living room of his apartment while he was gone,
Christopher stayed there with Bill and so began their affair.
Christopher rationalized his break with the mandates of Vedanta by
regarding Bill as “one of the Seven Deadly Sins, which had to be
overcome by temporarily yielding to it. ‘Let me go to bed with you
so I can get tired of you.’”
¹⁰⁶

Looking back, years later, Christopher realized that
Denny was a “myth figure” to him.

As he wrote in his diary:

he was Satan, the tempter, the easy-as-an-old-shoe
friend who is so comfortable to be with because he knows the worst
there is to know about you; the captive audience which holds its
entertainers captive, demanding relentlessly to be surprised and
amused. Christopher’s Satan held Christopher in his power by
provoking Christopher to indiscretion. Having dared Christopher to
start an affair with someone—”I bet you can’t get him,” Satan
says—he wheedles and flatters Christopher into talking about the
new lover. So Christopher finds himself giving a blow-by-blow and
word-for-word description of their affair; and thus the affair
turns into a theatrical performance.
¹⁰⁷

After Bill Harris moved to New York City,
Christopher had an affair with Steve, his studio’s mail department
messenger boy who was studying to become an actor. Denny rendered
his pronouncement on Steve—”I think he’s quite beautiful, but let’s
face it, he’ll always be a department store
queen”
¹⁰⁸
—and set about finding a suitable partner for
his friend. Denny introduced him to Bill Caskey, just discharged
from the Navy. Denny challenged Christopher to flirt with Caskey
and see how far he could get. At a party at Denny’s apartment to
celebrate Bill’s twenty-fourth birthday, Christopher took Bill away
from the party to a store in town to buy a shirt for him as a
birthday gift and then returned to the party, reporting to Denny
that Bill had said he would come to Christopher’s home as soon as
he left the party. He did and they spent that night together.

Isherwood admired Caskey’s outspokenness. At a
dinner party at Charlie Chaplin’s house, Bill was seated next to
Natasha Moffat, the wife of screenwriter Ivan Moffat. When she saw
who her seating partner would be, she exclaimed, “Oh good, Billy! I
always like sitting next to a pansy.” The room grew silent. “Your
slang is out of date, Natasha,” Bill responded politely and with
greater volume, “we can’t say ‘pansy’ nowadays. We say
‘cocksucker.’”
¹⁰⁹