Best-Kept Boy in the World (13 page)

A few days after passing out on the bathroom floor
where Michael Wishart and Jean Connolly had found him with the
heroin needle hanging from his arm, Denny had himself admitted to a
clinic. Faithful Peter wired money to cover the expense of his
treatment and the around-the-clock nurses who would be necessary
for some days after the treatment.

Denny emerged from the clinic with two black eyes,
the result of electric shock treatments, and a surly mood. Michael,
who at the same time had given up opium on his own and was trying
to ease the transition with alcohol and barbiturates, was equally
disagreeable.

Peter telephoned and suggested that the two take
some time to go to the country to relax and enjoy the fresh air. He
paid for their stay at Moret in a hotel that overlooked the River
Loing.

It was late autumn, with mists over the river and
leaves of gold, and Denny and Michael savored the good food at the
hotel and the exhilaration of riding horses through the forests. It
seemed as if they had regained their Eden, this time a healthier
one. “The weeks I am describing were so intensely happy,” Michael
remembered, that I would not for anything have interrupted their
pure joy wondering what was to become of our more than friendship
on return to Paris. It is the privilege of the young, and of the
stupid, to give no thought to the morrow.”
⁹

On one of their excursions, the two went to the
Chateau de Fontainebleau, where Michael wanted to paint the ancient
carp that had been swimming the garden pools since the days of King
Louis XIV. While walking around the chateau, Denny dropped a gold
pill box. Its white powder contents spilled on the cobblestones:
heroin. Michael realized at once how completely Denny’s addiction
had consumed him—”it requires great cunning to conceal a heroin
habit from someone with whom one is living
intimately.”
¹⁰
The two returned to Paris to Peter’s flat
at 44 Rue du Bac and even before the luggage was unpacked, Denny
had taken out his opium pipe from its hiding place behind one of
the wall panels, and “smoked furiously” as if to make up for lost
time.
¹¹

Another year of all this was quite enough. In March
of 1947, Peter returned to Paris to remove everything from his flat
so that he could terminate the lease. He was concerned about this
mission, both because he was never sure if, in the presence of
Denny, his determination would falter, and because he would have to
tell Denny about his own new affair. Ten days before he was to
leave New York to return to England, Peter had been invited to a
dinner party. There he met Waldemar Hansen, a twenty-four-year-old
aspiring poet who had the clean, crew-cut look of an American
college student and who was fascinated by literature and art.
Hansen later remembered that evening: “Peter had a wonderfully
engaging way about him, a winsome way of smiling, a way of making
people feel that he was absolutely on their wavelength. Early in
our first evening together it was quite clear that something was
transpiring between us. In the course of dinner we had both fallen
quite silent, with [the host] doing all the talking, and Peter was
simply looking at me mutely, and I was looking back at him. It
really was love at first sight. Suffice it to say that Peter stayed
the night.”
¹²
Peter asked him to come live with him in
London, though Waldemar was reluctant to leave his friends and
family. “Then come stay with me at least for the summer,” Watson
pressed. “If you do only that, I will give you a summer that you
will never forget.”
¹³
Waldemar agreed and would join
Peter in London later in April.

It was time for Peter to tell Denny it was over. As
he wrote to Waldemar, “I am rather worried about his reactions as I
must tell him everything, and he is still more attached to me than
to anyone else and is likely to stay so.” Predictably, Denny was
devastated, whether because of losing Peter’s love, or losing
Peter’s financial support. “Poor Denham,” Watson updated
Hansen:

The situation is tragic. He senses that the worst
for him has happened as I told him that I really cared about you. I
have plenty of guilt about him, although it is not justified. I
cannot love people I do not really respect, and I cannot respect
the life he leads here. He still loves me, probably more than ever
now since I have gone beyond his reach, and I suppose he will until
we have been completely separated for a year or so, which must
happen I think now.
¹⁴

Over the course of three weeks, Watson had his
furnishings crated and removed from the apartment, so that all that
was left were six Venetian shell chairs, and in Denny’s bedroom the
massive bed, the Tchleitchev painting, and the red-shaded lamp.
Even then, Denny did not believe that Peter would carry through on
his threat to terminate his lease. Peter did. Denny refused to
leave. The landlord lost no time taking the matter to court to have
his troublesome tenant evicted, but month after month the matter
remained mired on the court’s docket.

With Denny’s heroin addiction came a consuming
paranoia. He paid men to buy drugs for him, which of course led to
extortion and the receipt of diluted drugs. In his eyes, everyone
was an informant and he was sure the police were trying to trap
him. An unexpected knock on the apartment door would cause him
almost to faint, and he only answered if he heard the correct code
of knocks. He realized that the fact that he was with teenagers as
young as Gerard and Michael further increased his exposure to
arrest.

Yet even as his troubles grew, so did his
reputation, and celebrants continued to come to meet the legend in
person. Tony Watson-Gandy, a British Royal Air Force officer during
the War, had joined Michael and Gerard as Denny’s latest live-in
worshipper, taking up residence in Peter’s apartment. And a stream
of visitors arrived at 44 Rue du Bac for a chance to meet the
famous Denham Fouts. Among them came twenty-two-year-old Gore Vidal
to observe this curiosity in his habitat.

In the preceding decade, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal,
Jr., had transformed himself into Gore Vidal: young literary
lion.

Ten years before, into Gore’s rather lonely and
unhappy adolescence dominated by a hard drinking, caustic,
unpredictable mother he detested, who divorced his father when Gore
was ten, (and whose periods, he later wryly commented, had been
“more excruciating than those of any other woman in medical
history”)
¹⁵
, into the gray Gothic world of St. Albans in
Washington, D.C., where his mother sent him as a boarding student,
a school where bullies would stampede a student into a locker, lock
it, and leave, into this world of adolescent uncertainty and fear
had walked a schoolboy god “and the first human happiness that I
had ever encountered.”
¹⁶

It was the winter of 1937, mid-term, when
twelve-year-old Jimmie Trimble started at St. Albans. Gore checked
out Jimmie’s pubic hair in the communal shower—”bright gold
curls”—and “as I looked at him, he gave me a big grin and so it
began, likeness drawn to likeness, soon to be made whole by desire
minus the obligatory pursuit.”
¹⁷
In class, “Jimmie and I
would signal each other when a hard-on had arrived
unbidden.”
¹⁸

Gore’s mother was relieved when on occasion her son
brought his new friend home for a weekend visit to “Merrywood,”
Gore’s step-father’s Georgian mansion set on forty acres above the
Potomac River in McLean, Virginia, with tennis court, squash court,
swimming pool, and woods, delighted that at last her bookish son,
who spent all his time reading, had any friend. It was at
Merrywood, on the white tile floor of a bathroom out of view of the
butler, that “there we were, belly to belly, in the act of becoming
one,” where “we simply came together.”
¹⁹

Jimmie would become the golden boy of St. Albans. He
was captain of the basketball team, a star of the football team,
and a legend of the baseball team, the ace pitcher who strung
together a record of no-hitters with his fastballs and curve balls,
thrown at such speed that the catcher had to get extra padding for
his glove. Jimmie was handsome at twelve, a grown-up, according to
Vidal, at fourteen, downright striking at seventeen. There he is in
a photograph at seventeen looking remarkably contemporary in a
light-colored boat-neck sweater, no shirt underneath. Is he aware
how perfectly that sweater set off his chest and broad shoulders?
The thrust of his athlete’s neck? The square jaw? The knowing grin,
that smile like Gatsby’s “with a quality of eternal reassurance in
it,” that smile that, according to another friend, “would just
knock the birds out of the trees,”
²⁰
those blue eyes
that seemed to look at the humorous side of life, that seemed to
intimate that he saw right into everyone? The wavy blond hair? “Did
you ever tell a man that he was
beautiful
?”
²¹
a
shocked Jimmie asked his mother after a girlfriend had used that
word to describe him. He exuded a definite sexual energy, a
masculine magnetism that pulled everyone into his world. He was
like Phineas of John Knowles’
A Separate Peace
, with no one
immune from his pull. A retired English master from St. Albans who
had taught there when Jimmie Trimble was a student recalled that
Jimmie “usually, at 17, moved through the Lane Johnston halls
briskly, but when he idled along, he had a generous roll of the
hips—the flexible hips of the athlete—that promised, like the
Anglican definition of faith—‘the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things unseen.’ But I was too much the unsure 27
year-old master to do more than cast my eyes demurely down,
probably not too far down, as he passed by.”
²²
Clearly
when Jimmie walked by, there were masters and students, male and
female admirers, silently staring.

Late spring, 1939. Before leaving for a school trip
to France, Gore remembered, “Jimmie and I made love in the woods
above the roaring river. I remember his almost-mature body with the
squared bony shoulders and rosy skin against bright green ... After
sex, we swam against the swift, deadly current of the forbidden
Potomac River, swam among rocks and driftwood to a special large
gray-brown glacial rock, where we lay, side by side. We’re going to
go on doing this for the rest of our lives, I remember thinking,
tempting—no, driving—fate to break us in two ... Every now and
then, in idle moments, I start to hear snatches of the conversation
of those two boys on the rock that afternoon,” on that “cloudless
sunny day when Europe was ahead of me and all I cared for beside
me.”
²³

After the summer, Gore was sent to Los Alamos Ranch
School in New Mexico, and the following year to Exeter in New
Hampshire, while Jimmie stayed at St. Albans.

The next time, and the last time, Gore saw Jimmie
was during the 1942 Christmas season when the two met at the
holiday dance of Mrs. Shippen’s Dancing School. “We had last seen
each other as fourteen year-old boys. Now we were seventeen
year-old men. Would we take up where we had left off in the spring
of 1939 on a May day, in the woods above the Potomac
River?”
²⁴
It was an awkward reunion when they spotted
each other in their tuxedos in the ballroom with their dates. Gore
had known his date Rosalind for several years, and the two just had
announced that they would marry after Gore graduated from Exeter in
June, before his enlistment in the Army in July. Gore told Jimmie
of his marriage plans. “You’re crazy”, Jimmie said, as the two of
them left their dates and walked downstairs to the men’s room. “
...[O]ur bodies still fitted perfectly together, as we promptly
discovered inside one of the cubicles, standing up, belly to belly,
talking of girls and marriage and coming
simultaneously.”
²⁵

Jimmie’s pitching prowess had caught the attention
of the owner of the Washington Senators who gave him a signing
bonus and a four year scholarship to Duke University. Early in
1944, as soon as he turned eighteen and no longer needed the
consent of his mother, Jimmie enlisted in the Marine Corps. He and
his girlfriend, Christine White, voted the “prettiest blonde” at
her school, agreed to marry when Jimmie returned from service. In
July of 1944, Trimble joined the Third Marine Division in the South
Pacific, and Vidal enlisted in the Army and found himself on a ship
in the Aleutians.

After serving for several months on Guam where he
was the star pitcher for the Third Marine Division’s baseball team,
Trimble volunteered to join a scouting platoon for the landing on
Iwo Jima. The stark statistics bespeak the horror of those bloody
days. Twenty-two thousand Japanese defended the four mile island.
It would take the American forces over a month to control the
island at a cost of seven thousand dead and more than twenty
thousand wounded, with all but one thousand Japanese soldiers
dead.

Eight days after the first landing, Jimmie
volunteered to join a reconnaissance team trying to pinpoint the
location of rocket sites so that artillery could be called in to
take them out. In a midnight attack on his team’s fox hole, a
Japanese soldier with a mine strapped to him jumped in and wrapped
himself around Jimmie, blowing both of them to death.

That spring, the Marine’s Third Division baseball
field on Guam was officially dedicated as Trimble Field, a story
reported in all the Washington, D.C., newspapers. There was a
memorial service held in the Washington Cathedral where Jimmie lay
in state. “I can’t think of how a nineteen year-old Marine private
would merit a ‘state’ burial,” Vidal wondered years later, “but on
the other hand, he was much loved by Washington sports
fans.”
²⁶
One of Jimmie’s St. Albans teammates went into
shock when he learned of Jimmie’s death, was treated for acute
depression, and had to leave college. Christine White, the girl
Jimmie had known for three months before he went overseas and who
later became a television actress starring in movies and appearing
in television series like
Bonanza
,
The Fugitive
, and
Perry Mason
, stayed in touch with Jimmie’s mother for
decades. She kept his letters and photographs all those years and
showed Gore Vidal a snapshot of herself that had been in Jimmie’s
wallet when he was killed. Laying it, curled and rounded, on the
table as she and Vidal dined fifty years after the War, she
explained that “It still follows the shape of his body.” Vidal
could see. “There,” he noted, “on the dining room table in
Willard’s Hotel, was the outline of the curve made by Jimmie’s
buttock.”
²⁷
During the fiftieth reunion of Vidal’s class
at St. Albans, one of the members of the class went to visit
another who was institutionalized. When he mentioned Jimmie, Ted,
(“whom Jimmie had bedded”) “sat up straight, and said, ‘Why, he was
just here. He just now left. If you hurry, you can find him in the
hall.’”
²⁸
Such was Jimmie Trimble’s hold on the
imaginations of those who had known him.