Best-Kept Boy in the World (15 page)

Gore had read in that day’s paper that King Paul of
Greece had pneumonia, and as the evening wore down, he mentioned
this to Denny.

“I must send him a telegram,” Denny said, and
together, Gore and Denny located on St. Germain a Western Union
office still open and Denny sent the telegram.

The day after the telegram was sent, Denny showed
Gore the reply telegram he received from King Paul:

“Darling Denham, so wonderful to hear from you. Why
haven’t I heard from you before? Much exaggerated about my illness
... Love, Paul.”
⁵⁹

Gore realized at that moment that all of Denny’s
stories were true.

By then, Vidal was visiting Denny regularly.
(Isherwood wrote in his memoirs that “Denny treats Gore with the
slightly sarcastic tolerance of an elder uncle.”
⁶⁰
) “At
sundown,” Vidal recalled, “like Dracula, Denham would appear in the
streets leading his dog down St.-Germain-des-Prés.”
⁶¹
Here, certainly, was a character in search of an author, and Vidal,
consciously or not, filed in his memory-bank his encounters with
Denny. It was not long, just two years, before Denny appeared in
his fiction.

It was in the summer of 1950 when Vidal was
twenty-four. He had just bought “Edgewater,” a Greek revival
mansion on the Hudson River in Dutchess County, New York, ninety
miles from New York City, a home that has often been regarded as
one of the most beautiful in the United States. It was built in
1820 for a member of the Livingston family, a Palladian villa with
a monumental classical portico of six massive two-story Doric
columns on the river side, and a lawn that rolled one-hundred-fifty
feet down to ancient weeping willows which lined the water’s edge.
The home had its drawbacks. The mansion had been deserted for years
and needed every imaginable repair, its lawns had grown waist high,
and worst of all, the New York Central’s railroad tracks ran
twenty-five yards behind the house, with trains rumbling by each
hour. But the River was a mile wide there and the sound of the wind
waves drifted through the open French doors, and the views of the
Catskill Mountains, purple in the distance, were magical. With a
ten thousand dollar mortgage and six thousand dollars borrowed from
family members, it was his, and Gore moved in in July of 1950.

The book he wrote in the soaring twenty-six foot
high octagonal library at Edgewater was
The Judgment of
Paris
, a book he always regarded as one of his favorites and
sometimes called his best book, “the novel in which I found my own
voice.”
⁶²
This picaresque novel centers on the
wanderings of Philip Warren, a twenty-eight-year-old American, a
graduate of Harvard Law School, who travels around Italy, France,
and Egypt after the Second World War, just as Vidal visited Rome,
Paris, and Cairo in 1948 and 1949. One of the characters Philip
encounters in Paris is Jim. Vidal later confirmed that this Jim was
the same Jim Willard from
The City and the Pillar
, who was
based on Jimmie Trimble, only now Jimmie had morphed into Denny.
“High romantics who fall from the heights make very good drug
addicts. I suppose, unconsciously, I was grafting onto him ...some
characteristics of a marvelous southern whore named Denham
Fouts.”
⁶³

How close to the mark was Vidal’s portrayal of Denny
as Jim in
The Judgment of Paris
? Who better to assess his
accuracy than Denny’s friend, Michael Wishart, who characterized as
“brilliant” Vidal’s vignette of Denham, with Denny appearing in the
novel “very much in character.”
⁶⁴
As Vidal sat on the
side of Denny’s bed, as he dined with him, the young author was
exploring the thoughts of so strange a character, gathering
material, and the essence of their conversations found their way
into this novel.

In
The Judgment of Paris
, Philip Warren when
in Paris meets Jim, with his “low Southern voice” and “slow
engaging smile,” and, dressed “like a conservative schoolboy in
dark grey trousers and a sports coat,” just as Denny dressed. Vidal
gives this character “golden hair and dark blue eyes,” essentially
fusing Jimmie Trimble’s physical characteristics onto Denny. Jim
invites Philip to join him the next evening at an outdoor café.
They meet, and in a coming storm, Jim takes Philip to his apartment
where the bedroom is very much like Denny’s with “a large carved
bed of dark wood with four posters” in the center of the room and
on the mantle “unframed drawings of Tchelichew and Picasso,” and
outside the window, the same courtyard where Michael Wishart heard
the rain on the gravel when he awoke with Denny.

Gathering through their conversation the nature of
Jim’s profession, Philip, curious, begins inquiring about his
lifestyle, whether he likes the men he is with.

“I don’t like any of them.”

“They like you.”

“Yes ... funny, isn’t it? I’ve often wondered
why.”
⁶⁵

Men with extraordinary looks often cannot recognize
or understand the power of their own attraction, and this was the
case with Denny. He knew he was beautiful, but as Jim says in the
story, anyone could “get a better-looking piece of flesh with a
bigger thing for a dollar in any street in this town.”
⁶⁶
Jim’s aura of attraction is clearly something more, which mystifies
him and fascinates Phillip, what accounts for that instantaneous
flash of magic that inexorably draws others to him so that they
look at him with thirsty eyes and became fixated on him.

Philip asks Jim about payment for his services. Jim
explains that it’s not just the money. “I get everything,” he said,
waving his hand around to encompass the apartment and all that was
in it, including the drawings. “One old guy settled a hundred a
month on me for life ...Get property ...that’s the thing. So many
kids, when they start in, just go around chiseling drinks until
they get fat and nobody wants them anymore. But I get cash if I can
... or jewelry or pictures. I’ve learned a lot about painting these
last few years. I once spotted a phony Degas some old guy tried to
get me to take.”
⁶⁷

Philip clearly is intrigued.

“You make the deal in advance?” he asked.

“I’m not that crude. I get things without asking.
That’s what I mean when I say I don’t know what it is that they
see. I’ve often thought that if I knew what it was, I’d really be
able to cash in.”
⁶⁸

Philip—here perhaps Vidal himself—gives his theory
of the power of Jim’s/Denny’s appeal: “I suspect,” said Philip,
“that the fact you don’t know may be your charm. Self-consciousness
often produced great art but I doubt if many find it a loveable
trait, in others. The secret to wide popularity is a kind of
mysterious negativity ... something that can’t be imitated. Not
that I mean you’re actually negative, or mysterious (though you
may, for all I know, be both), but you give that
appearance.”
⁶⁹

As they talk and drink more Pernod, Jim asks Philip
if he likes boys. When Philip answers no, and, upon the next
question—”not even once, in school?”—responds no, Jim then inquires
“would you like to?” to which Philip responds no, that he’s too old
to change his habits, and upon further pressing—”you wouldn’t like
to try?”—declines again the invitation.

They discuss their theories of what men and women
are looking for in relationships, and Jim concludes by saying
“Damned if I know. I haven’t got any theory. All I know is that
it’s one thing to love somebody and another thing to have sex with
somebody you don’t know or don’t care about, the way I do all the
time.”
⁷⁰
Jim continues: “I suppose I’ve been mauled as
much as anybody can be but in spite of all that I think it’s
possible to care about one person and to forget the acrobatics and
think just of him and not the two bodies. But I suppose I’m
romantic because I’m just a whore and know how little sex has to do
with loving.”
⁷¹

The rain has stopped and the two go across the
street for dinner.

“They got wonderful snails across the street,” Jim
said.

“I don’t like snails.”

“Have you ever tried any?”

“No.”

“Well, how do you know?” They both
laughed.
⁷²

After dinner, Jim takes Philip back to his
apartment, “just for a moment ... I have to practice my
vice.”
⁷³

From a cabinet Jim takes “a yard-long wooden pipe,
brightly decorated with Moorish designs,” and a thin metal spoon in
which he places a single dark pellet and heats it over a Bunsen
burner, then pours the heated residue into the pipe, inhaling “so
deeply and so long that his face grew red and his eyes stared.
Then, slowly, he exhaled a cloud of smoke. Oh, that’s good stuff,”
he said happily, smiling at Philip. That’s better than anything I
know.’”
⁷⁴
He inhales and holds several more times, then
hands the pipe to Philip . Like Vidal with Denny, Philip explains
to Jim that he doesn’t smoke and doesn’t know how to inhale.

“Well, it won’t work if you can’t inhale,” agreed
Jim. “Anyway you ate the snails. That’s enough for one night.”

“How do you feel?” asked Philip, curiously.

“Like I’m dreaming ... a little like a dream of
flying.”

“Better than love?”

“Wouldn’t you rather fly than make love?”

“Any day.”

“This way I feel like I’m doing both.”

“Shall I go?”

“Oh, no ...not yet. Stay with me until I’m way gone.
It won’t be long.”

Jim lays down on the massive bed, patting the edge
of the bed for Philip. Like Gore sitting on Denny’s bed, Philip
sits on Jim’s bed as he talks. “But then when he was sure that the
other was no longer conscious of him, he got quickly to his feet
and, blowing out the paper lantern, he left the
apartment.”
⁷⁵

Jim appears one more time in
The Judgment of
Paris
, in a haunting scene written in Joycean stream of
consciousness style to recreate Jim’s thoughts on an opium trip.
Like Denny, Jim has been in a sanitarium and received shock
treatments to try to cure him of his addiction, and has been warned
by his doctors that his addiction will prove fatal. In this scene,
he returns to his apartment after a party, takes out his opium
pipe, which is hidden away, finds his last pellet of opium,
prepares it, and smokes it. Vidal takes the reader into Jim’s
dream-like state, learned no doubt through questioning Denny, of
drifting, “to the nightmare world of the ceiling across which he
must journey, occasionally floating, sometimes running, other times
struggling to move even a hand, a finger, as the dreary shadows
held him tight above the room, embraced his body with a loving
greed, draining it of will and memory ...”
⁷⁶
Two friends
come to visit Jim while he is high and, walking into his apartment
and seeing him on the bed, are not sure if he is unconscious or
dead. Feeling a pulse, they pull a blanket over him, turn off his
Bunsen burner and leave, as he drifts in his haze: “Where was he
going? he wondered lazily, as layer after layer of darkness opened
to receive him.”
⁷⁷
It is not clear if this is Jim’s
final trip, but the certainty of death hangs over this scene.

Denny’s role in
The Judgment of Paris
is of a
minor, secondary character, one of the unusual specimens the
narrator meets in his youthful wanderings. It is in one of Vidal’s
early short stories that a character based on Denham Fouts plays a
more pivotal role.

In his memoirs published in 1995, Vidal reveals that
he never kept a diary or journal, no record of his days other than
“thirteen green pages of notes from 1961 and a diary kept for a
month or two in 1948.”
⁷⁸
The notes from 1961 concerned
his encounters with President John F. Kennedy in his first year in
office, a time when Vidal, who had unsuccessfully run for Congress
the year before, still harbored political ambitions; in short,
encounters he realized at the time were of special interest and
importance. Why would he keep a diary for several months in 1948,
the only other time in a very active life during which he kept
contemporaneous notes of daily events? Their significance deepens
because these were the only pages he would not give to his
biographer and are, in fact, the only pages among all of his papers
given to the University of Wisconsin, and then transferred to
Harvard, to be sealed until “after my death or the Second Coming,
whichever comes first.”
⁷⁹
Certainly this year, 1948,
was, in Vidal’s estimation, an “annus mirabilis” as he called it—a
bestseller to his credit, his emergence as a personality, meeting
such famed authors as Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood,
Paul Bowles, E.M. Forester, Truman Capote—so it would be natural
for him to be recording his experiences and thoughts in a journal.
But these are not the sorts of jottings to be kept secret.

Clues to this mystery may well be found in a short
story Vidal wrote in 1956 in that octagonal library at Edgewater
with its views of the gardens and the Hudson and the Catskills.
“Pages From an Abandoned Journal” (certainly the title of the story
is intriguing: pages from a diary begun in 1948 and put aside after
two months) was published in a collection of his short stories
written between 1948 and 1956, titled
A Thirsty Evil
.

The story opens with the narrator’s journal entry
for April 30, 1948. (It would be interesting if Vidal’s diary
fragment from 1948 started on that exact date, which was, in fact,
five days after Vidal met Christopher Isherwood, and three days
after he first met Denham Fouts.) Peter, an American from Toledo,
Ohio (representative, perhaps, of the norm, of middle America) in
Paris working on his doctorate on Nero and the Civil Wars, has been
at a bar the night before where he “told everyone off” and
apparently rebuffed the advances of Steven, another patron at the
bar. “I said I wasn’t interested, that I didn’t mind what other
people did, etc., just as long as they left me alone, that I was
getting married in the fall when I got back to the states (WRITE
HELEN) and that I don’t go in for any of that, never did and never
will. I also told him in no uncertain terms that it’s very
embarrassing for a grown man to be treated like some idiot girl
surrounded by a bunch of seedy, middle-aged Don Juans trying to get
their hooks into her ...him.”
⁸⁰