Best-Kept Boy in the World (14 page)

As for Gore Vidal, from that day he last saw him
“and left Jimmie to time and chance,”
²⁹
his world never
again was the same. He would think of him the rest of his life.
Hanging on the wall beside his bed was a life-size reproduction of
a portrait of Jimmie as a teenager. Now and then, Jimmie would
appear to him in visions, as “completely present, as he had been in
the bedroom of Merrywood”: Jimmie “opened his blue eyes and smiled
and yawned and put his hand alongside my neck.”
³⁰
And
“for years, whenever I was in a numinous place like Delphi or
Delos, I would address the night: Jimmie, are you anywhere? And
almost always the wind would rise.”
³¹
Late in his life,
Vidal bought a small plot in Rock Creek Park Cemetery in
Washington, D.C., just a few yards from where Jimmie Trimble lay in
the shade of a copper beech. “Was there ever so furious and
restless a ghost?” Gore Vidal asks in his memoirs, “or is it that
we, the survivors, are so traumatized to this day by his abrupt
absence from our lives that we are still trying to summon his
ghost?”
³²

Looking back from the vantage point of his seventh
decade, Vidal realized that when he knew Jimmie Trimble, he was
whole “for what proved to be the last time ...I not only never
again encountered the other half, but by the time I was
twenty-five, I had given up all pursuit, settling for a thousand
brief anonymous adhesions ... Quite enough, I think if the real
thing has happened.”
³³

“I am neither a believer in an afterlife nor a
mystic,” Vidal wrote further in his memoirs, “and unlike Santayana,
I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like. Yet I still want
Jimmie to
be
, somewhere, if only on this page.”
³⁴
And indeed he was. Jimmie appears time and again, in one guise or
another, in many of Vidal’s novels,
The Season of Comfort,
Washington, D.C., Two Sisters, The City and the Pillar, The
Judgment of Paris, The Smithsonian Institution
, and throughout
his memoir
Palimpsest
.

Vidal’s emergence as a prominent author had been all
but instantaneous. He graduated from Exeter in June of 1943,
entered the Enlisted Reserve Corps of the Army the next month,
became the first mate of an army supply ship in the Aleutians, and
on his night watches began drafting in pencil in an accounts book
his first novel. He completed his book nine months later.
Williwaw—
an Eskimo term for the violent storms that bore
down on the Bering Sea—was based on his own military experience in
the Aleutians, published in 1946 by Dutton, and hailed as one of
the first war novels, and by a nineteen year old author, no less.
Vidal immediately assumed a place among those perceived as the next
generation of American literary lions.

“With the finishing of this book, my life as a
writer began.”
³⁵
Books tumbled out of him. The next
year, he published
In a Yellow Wood
, a coming-of-age novel
in which the main character had to choose between a predictable
life and an unconventional lifestyle, perhaps reflecting the
tensions Vidal was feeling between the pull of a political
life—following in the path of his grandfather Senator Thomas
Gore—or a more bohemian, literary life. (“I ... was brought up by a
politician grandfather in Washington, D.C. and I wanted very much
to be a politician, too. Unfortunately, nature had designed me to
be a writer. I had no choice in the matter.”)
³⁶
Whatever
its origins, it was a minor book Vidal later in his life would call
his “worst novel.”
³⁷

His next more than made up for this lackluster
performance. Published less than a year later, on January 10, 1948,
The City and the Pillar
was dedicated “For the memory of
J.T.”, and was, as Vidal described it, a novel in which he
described what might have happened had he and Jimmie met again
after the War. Vidal knew he was moving into uncharted, dangerous
territory with this book. “I knew that my description of the love
affair between two normal all-American boys of the sort that I had
spent three years with in the wartime army would challenge every
superstition about sex in my native land.”
³⁸
After he
read the new novel, Orville Prescott, the influential book reviewer
for the
New York Times
, told Vidal’s editor that he would
never again read, much less review, a book by Vidal. The
Times
refused to advertise it, as did all major newspapers
and magazines. “In freedom’s land,” Vidal wrote years later in
describing the shock caused by his new novel, “what ought not to be
is not and must be blacked out.”
³⁹
But within two weeks
of publication,
The City and the Pillar
was riding the
New York Times
best seller list along with Truman Capote’s
Other Voices, Other Rooms
and Norman Mailer’s
The Naked
and the Dead
, and a triumphant twenty-two-year-old Vidal was
off to Rome.

There, at a dinner party in February, he met and
befriended the famed thirty-seven-year-old playwright, Tennessee
Williams, whose
A Streetcar Named Desire
was then a national
sensation and a year later would win a Pulitzer Prize. The two
traveled around Italy in an old Jeep that Tennessee had bought, and
Gore remembered never laughing so much with anyone in his life.

From Rome, the two friends in April drove to Paris
where “there were Bellow and Mailer and Capote and Baldwin and
Bowles, while Tennessee and I shared a floor of the small Hotel de
L’Universite”.
⁴⁰

This amazing assemblage of young authors eager to
experience Europe after the War was soon augmented by the arrival
of Christopher Isherwood, who, with Bill Caskey, landed at Le Havre
on April 22. They immediately made their way to Paris, past the
many reminders of the War—”small military graveyards, smashed
houses, provisional half-rebuilt bridges over which the train moved
cautiously”—straight to the Rue du Bac to Peter Watson’s flat to
see Denny.
⁴¹

It was a Saturday evening, April 24, 1948.
Christopher recorded his thoughts in his diary:

It is a huge shabby place with traces of the
splendor of his pre-1939 period, in which he leads a nocturnal
Proustian life with the tattered curtains always drawn. He lies
most of the day in bed, with Trotsky and the pipe at his side,
reading and dozing, often eating nothing but a plate of cooked
cereal. When he can’t afford opium, he drinks a kind of tea made of
the dross, which gives him stomach cramps. He is as pale as a
corpse, but quite unchanged, slim as ever, and a sort of waxen
beauty. He did not seem at all vague or stupefied, as [Bill] Harris
had told us and he welcomed us both warmly. He is liable to be
thrown out of the apartment before long, and doesn’t know where
he’ll go.
⁴²

Denny introduced Isherwood and Caskey to some young
French friends who were there that evening. Writing in another
diary entry thirty years later, Isherwood described the scene:
“They began what sounded like a parody of Frenchified intellectual
conversation. One of them made a sneering reference to those dupes
who believe in a life after death. What I can still hear as I write
this [three decades later] is the withering tone in which Denny
silenced him, exclaiming, ‘You little
fool
!’ Denny’s scorn
was quite uncannily impressive. It was as if he
knew
.”
⁴³

The next day, Isherwood and Caskey were sitting in
the Café les Deux Magots when Gore Vidal walked by, recognized
Isherwood, and stopped to introduce himself. Earlier in the year,
Vidal had sent him an advance copy of
The City and the
Pillar
seeking an endorsement, and the famed author had praised
it. When he sat down to talk, Gore asked Christopher advice on how
to manage his writing career, and the two struck up a friendship
that would last for years, each appreciating the other’s sense of
humor. (Both later admitted that in this first encounter, each felt
the other was flirting, but neither made the first move, then or
ever.)

The next evening and the next, Isherwood, Caskey,
and Vidal dined together. It was that second evening that this
group joined up with John Lehmann, Isherwood’s publisher; through
Isherwood’s introduction, Vidal had engaged Lehmann as his English
publisher. As Vidal described him, he had “a tiger’s grin, liked to
call people Ducky” and “sexually, it was his pleasure to beat
working-class boys; otherwise, he lived a life of perfect domestic
virtue ...”
⁴⁴

After dinner, the friends took Vidal to 44 Rue du
Bac to visit Denny, into that room with the great bed and the
“magnificent Tchelitchev painting hanging over
it.”
⁴⁵

Vidal noted that “Denham’s legendary beauty was not
visible to me.”
⁴⁶
This may have been because Denny was
the anti-Jimmie. If Jimmie was the all-American boy next door, then
Denny was a walking orgasm. Gore saw Denny as “very pale, with dark
lank Indian hair and blank dark eyes, usually half shut: ... He was
slender and boyish, with a markedly asymmetrical
face.”
⁴⁷

Gore sat on the side of Denny’s bed with John
Lehmann, with Trotsky sprawled on the other side. Denny went
through his ritualistic ceremony of preparing his opium pipe,
“inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly blue medicinal-smelling
smoke.”
⁴⁸
Trotsky greedily inhaled the smoke.

“Here,” he said to Gore, handing him the long opium
pipe.

Gore protested that he couldn’t even inhale
cigarette smoke, but, good guest that he was, gave it a try, had a
“coughing fit” and was “deathly ill.”
⁴⁹
Other than
politely offering his visitors a chance to smoke, Denny never
pressed anyone to keep trying. As Isherwood remembered the evening,
“he let us all take puffs at the pipe, scolding us for our
awkwardness and saying we should never make real smokers. It tasted
like incense and had no apparent effect whatsoever.”
⁵⁰
As the others watched, Denny continued his ritual, his eyes half
shut, then closed, and then, after a while, began to speak, his
lulling voice now a run-on jumble of a monologue of people and
places and thoughts:

“Cyril was just here. His first trip to Paris since
the war. Peter and I took him to a restaurant down the street where
he ordered a huge lunch—he’s very fat and greedy, you know—and he
ate it all up very fast and then he ordered a second lunch and ate
that, too. Then he fainted. The waiters carried him back here and
put him over there on the floor. I want to meet Truman Capote. I
have his picture here.”
⁵¹

The
Life
magazine with the famous photograph
of the young Capote rested under one of Denny’s opium pipes. Gore
told Denny he was sure they would get along.

Denny continued: “I’ve just had a telegram from
Prince Paul—only he’s King Paul now. We lived together—well,
traveled a lot together before the war, but then he had to get
married to Frederika and so we stopped seeing each other because I
was living in Santa Monica by then anyway and working in that
bookshop and seeing Chris and Gerald . . .”
⁵²

Fascinated by what he was hearing, Gore was
skeptical. Were all the names, all these stories, a result of the
opium haze? As he soon learned, Denham never had to fabricate or
embellish.

It was a few days later, on April 29, when the group
met Denny for cocktails at the Ritz. Isherwood described Denny as
looking like “Dorian Gray emerging from the tomb—death-pale and
very slim in his dark elegant suit, with black hat and umbrella. He
looks like the Necropolitan ambassador.”
⁵³
After he sat
down, Denny asked Bill Caskey to take some money and get a package
of opium from a “connection” who was waiting outside the
restaurant. Isherwood thought this request outrageous and refused
to let Caskey go, afraid the police could be watching the pusher
and that Caskey would be arrested. He felt that Denny’s suggestion
“was an entirely characteristic act of aggression.”
⁵⁴
(After Christopher left Paris at the end of April, Denny sent him a
letter: “I hope you and Billy will go on being as happy as you seem
to be.” Isherwood noted that “Denny obviously didn’t hope
it.”)
⁵⁵

Isherwood found that Denny seemed to be quite
himself, not in the least “depressed or debauched or down-at-hell.”
But his stomach cramps may have been acting up that evening for he
merely picked at the caviar and watched the others eat “with an air
of controlled distaste, as though our addiction to solid food were
a far more squalid vice than his. Now and then, his manner became a
trifle vague, but his wit was as sharp as ever.”
⁵⁶

(This dinner found its way into “Paul,” Isherwood’s
chapter about Denny in
Down There on a Visit
. In “Paul,”
Christopher, the narrator, goes to visit Paul in Paris at his
apartment on the Rue du Bac. Propped up in bed, “he was
corpse-white, and his face looked as though it had the firmness of
hard wax and was semitransparent. There was an air about him of
being somehow preserved and, at the same time, purified: his skin
seemed to be absolutely without blemish. Indeed, he was
marvelously, uncannily beautiful. He wore a heavy skiing sweater
over pajamas. Gigi lay on the bed at his feet.”
⁵⁷
Paul
told Christopher that he used opium and said, “I hear you’ve been
working in the movies a lot lately, so perhaps you can give me some
money?” Paul proposed that they go for dinner at The Ritz. “The
Paul who appeared that evening had a sinister, sepulchral elegance;
Dorian Gray arisen from the tomb. He wore a perfectly tailored
black suit with a black hat and a neatly rolled umbrella. Gigi was
at his heels.” He ate only caviar. Again, he asked Christopher for
money to buy opium, and Christopher gave him thirty thousand
francs.)
⁵⁸