Best-Kept Boy in the World (2 page)

Truly words to live by. And live by them Michael
did. Throughout his life, his affairs with women were as passionate
as those with men, and he moved back and forth between the sexes
and between partners with abandon.

The onset of the War created for Michael something
of a holiday atmosphere, a time, like summer vacation, when
society’s rules seemed to go by the wayside. Whenever school was
out, he traveled to London. By day, he pursued his art and met
other artists. By night, the streets of London were black, an inky
darkness shattered by the wail of air raid sirens, by bursts of
batteries of anti-aircraft artillery, by the fearsome drone of the
doodle bugs, the whine and thud of bombs, ambulance sirens, fire
engines racing to conflagrations. Stephen Spender remembered
“streets full of glass like heaped-up ice, the fires making a great
sunset beyond the silhouette of Saint Paul’s, the East End houses
collapsed like playing cards.”
¹²
The basement clubs and
pubs—the Sunset, the Moon Glow, the Caribbean—served as shelters
for Londoners, and a youth of Michael’s age was as welcome as
anyone, was served liquor like anyone, could buy marijuana like
anyone. Everyone knew that the next bomb could be a direct hit, and
Michael found that as a result “everyone dropped his inhibitions
and prejudices in the gutter, where they belong, and indulged in a
non-stop
danse macabre.
”
¹³

Michael was in his element. In the clubs he met
pimps and prostitutes, phony “counts” who claimed they were kings,
Dylan Thomas measuring his penis with a ruler to an admiring
audience of ladies interested in poetry. “Tin hats and gas masks
were worn, which resembled those beauty products to be found in the
sex shops of Amsterdam.”
¹⁴
Michael became something of a
favorite of the clubs’ habitués. Whenever he came down the grand
staircase of the Gargoyle Club at 69 Dean Street in Soho, the band
leader would strike up his favorite song, “Stay as Sweet as You
Are,” and Michael would dance with Pauline, the daughter of the
Club’s owner:

“Stay as sweet as you are,

Don’t let a thing ever change you.

Stay as sweet as you are.

Don’t let a soul rearrange you.”

Through his artist friends, Michael had met Peter
Watson who soon became his first patron. When seventeen-year-old
Michael found himself in Paris in July of 1946, Peter invited him
to his party for Denny.

Michael arrived at 44 Rue du Bac as the grand salon
was filling with men “and their expensive-looking toy-friends” and
“champagne bottles were exploding, punctuating the familiar shrill
chatter of the parrot house.”
¹⁵
All that was missing was
the guest of honor, that legend from the pre-war party scene in
Europe. The usually unflappable Peter seemed concerned, then
annoyed, then agitated, shouting at Denny who had locked himself in
the bedroom. The evening wore on. “Some unsteady American boys whom
I had no wish to know better were drenching one another with soda
siphons, laughing inanely.”
¹⁶
Guests started drifting
away, and finally, disgusted, Peter stalked out. Michael alone
stayed, perhaps hoping finally to meet the infamous Mr. Fouts,
perhaps because, young and alone in the city, he had nowhere else
to go.

He began admiring the salon, running his hands over
the paneling, looking out the tall windows at the city of
Paris.

While lost in thought, the bedroom door swung open.
There stood Denham Fouts.

To Michael, he appeared to be about twenty-one. “In
other circumstances one would have imagined him to be the
best-looking boy at a West Coast college. He wore nothing but
cream-coloured flannel trousers and had the torso of an athlete.
Along his beautiful shoulders and golden forearms ran snow-white
mice with startled pink eyes, which he stroked with the backs of
his hands.”
¹⁷
It was vintage Denny.

“Trotsky,” Denny called, and an enormous black dog
gamboled in and “rubbed a dark head against Denham’s pale, flannel
thighs,”
¹⁸
the dog Denny had adopted while doing service
as a conscientious objector at a forestry camp outside Los Angeles.
Side by side, Denny and Trotsky walked back into the paneled
bedroom, illuminated only by a small, orange-shaded oil lamp set in
the center of a large bed. Mesmerized, Michael followed. Over the
bed hung a painting, an oil by Pavel Tchelitchev, the Russian
émigré artist who at the time was collected as avidly as Picasso,
Matisse, Léger, Dali, and Rouault. It was a life-size canvas of a
naked Adonis, painted from the perspective of between his splayed
legs with the focus on the crotch. Sometimes Denny hung this on the
ceiling over his bed, sometimes he hung it upside down.

Denny stretched luxuriously across the bed, and, as
Michael watched, picked up an opium pipe, impaled an opium pill
with a gold needle, and mashed it around the base of the pipe’s
bowl, then heated the pipe over the oil lamp on the bed, inhaled
the smoke deeply and held his inhalation as long as he could. He
tapped the pipe into a dish on the floor next to the bed to satisfy
Trotsky’s addiction. It must have been quite a scene for a young
artist’s eyes: “Lit from beneath, his handsome Pacific face assumed
the air of a Mandarin prince.”
¹⁹

In his memoirs, Michael noted that he had been in
love three times in his life and that on average it took him about
forty-five minutes to realize it. That night, he beat the
averages.

“Don’t go. I don’t want to be alone tonight,” were
the first words Denny spoke in his magnetic voice of midnight,
Denny’s first acknowledgement that someone else was there.

Michael sat down on the bed beside him, and,
noticing how beautiful his bare feet were, held his ankle. Denny
heated another opium pill in his pipe and handed the jade
mouthpiece of the pipe to Michael.

“Now inhale hard,” he instructed.

The teenager did exactly as told and rushed to the
bathroom to vomit into the mauve marble sink with its gold
swan-head faucets.

But Michael came back to the bed, and tried again.
The next time was better. Much better.

Denny put some long playing records on a turntable.
He drank half a bottle of whiskey. He paged through the
Herald
Tribune
to check the financial markets. He showed Michael a
telegram he had received that read: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVE PAUL.”

“Know who that’s from?” Denny asked Michael. “The
King of Greece. He never forgets. We had some great times together
on a yacht before the war.”
²⁰

Like Gatsby showing Nick Carraway his medal from
Montenegro, Denny took photograph albums from a cabinet and paged
through them with Michael. Michael was awestruck as he looked at
the photographs of Denny in his white swimming trunks, standing
with Prince Paul “upon some swaying Aegean deck.”
²¹

The phonograph records ran down. The photograph
albums were put aside as the first light of dawn appeared behind
the worn draperies. “The whisper of summer rain upon the gravel
courtyard below lulled me to sleep, Denham’s mouth, an artificial
flower, crushed against my shoulder.”
²²

The two slept through the day and were awakened in
the evening by Denham’s maid bringing in a tray with breakfast and
the
Herald Tribune
.

“I detest the morning,” Denny said as he drank
calvados and offered Michael coffee. “Call me sometime.”

Michael finished his breakfast, dressed, and said
goodbye.

Denny said nothing; he was studying the financial
pages of the
Tribune
.

Michael was under his spell, riding the wave of a
dopamine rush. “When I reached my hotel,” Michael remembered, “I
knew that the only place in the world I wanted to be was in
Denham’s bedroom.”
²³

The next day, Michael moved in a haze. He couldn’t
paint. He walked through his favorite museums and “everything
looked dull.”
²⁴
He couldn’t concentrate. He couldn’t
sleep. More than anything, he wanted to call Denny, but was
terrified to dial the telephone, paralyzed each time he looked at
it.

Three days later, he reached a breaking point,
picked up the telephone, and, around midnight, trembling, dialed
Denny’s number.

“Come over this time tomorrow,” Denny responded.

The next day, Michael bought a violet satin tie and
made cufflinks with golden bells on them that tinkled when he
moved, to project, he hoped, an air of maturity beyond his
years.

Michael couldn’t help himself—he arrived early,
before the appointed midnight hour. It was a mistake: Denny hadn’t
yet started the drinking that eased his transition from his opium
dreams. He took one critical look at Michael, head to toe, and
shook his head.

“Take off that God awful tie and unbutton your shirt
down to your navel for Christ’s sake” was how he greeted the
infatuated teenager who had been desperate to detect some small
sign of reciprocation of his love. Devastated, Michael
wept.
²⁵

After ten years of effortlessly charming some of the
richest, most celebrated men in the world, it was clear that Denny
could appear to others as something beyond the species “man,” as a
god, and was treated accordingly, pampered and spoiled; but all the
worship could become wearisome when, despite his reputation and the
legend growing around him, most of the time he felt like a mere
mortal, if not a fraud, uncertain as to what inspired such
other-worldly adoration. Whatever the inspiration, Denny had become
dependent on this devotion for his sense of self worth.

In a little while, after bathing and putting on a
white silk kimono that helped him get into character, Denham was
himself again, wrestling with Trotsky on the bed, then bringing out
and smoking jeweled opium pipes, offering each to Michael,
beginning to talk with his young guest.

He told Michael how he had had a face peel to look
younger, ten years younger by his own estimation, but “I couldn’t
go outdoors even in a light breeze without my face [becoming] one
big bruise.”
²⁶

Denny drew back the drapes and gazed at the night
sky. “I love the stars today,” he said, describing to Michael how
they reminded him of the first time he had had sex, in
Jacksonville, Florida. “Under the stars. That’s where I screwed my
beautiful brother. Oh boy! Was he beautiful. I never had it so
good.”
²⁷

Peter rationalized the affair Denny had begun with
Michael, not surprised that Denny at thirty-two was living with a
seventeen-year-old. Peter knew that “sexually he always liked and
still likes boys about 14-16, which I could never understand and
which horrifies me now. . .”
²⁸
Peter had always been for
him, he believed, “the responsible parent,”
²⁹
and as the
responsible parent, Peter was appalled that Denny, upon his return
to Paris, immediately lapsed into his old ways, that his drug
dependence and bizarre life, of staying out at the clubs all night,
of returning in the morning with strangers, of not awakening until
dark when the cycle would begin again, was ruining his life. Peter
had tried every method to persuade Denny to seek help for his
addiction, to go to a detoxification clinic. “I have implored him
to do something, appealed to his conscience, my wishes, everything,
have done every [thing] except stop him from having money, as my
god, I do really believe in freedom and free decision. I am racked
by wondering what I could have done that I didn’t do.”
³⁰
After a month of living with Denny, Peter couldn’t take any more
and was quite happy to leave the apartment to Denny and Michael,
and spend the rest of the summer in Cannes.

Michael, too, knew Denny’s lifestyle was self
destructive, that his life was a form of escape, a slow suicide,
perhaps “mocking the threat of maturity,”
³¹
and that “by
addicting me to opium had imprisoned me within his dangerous
life.”
³²
Michael was haunted by his fear of addiction,
by his continuing questions about his sexuality, by his horror that
he was frittering away his talents as an artist. He stumbled
through his dream-like love-drugged days with Denny, sometimes not
even aware if it was day or night. It made no difference. “I loved
him so much that I only wanted to die in his
shadow.”
³³

There was no doubt about it, Denny could be as
addictive as opium. When he had gauged well his anesthetic dosages,
he was that rare individual who drew others into his orbit, who
raised the sun and the moon and the stars for them whenever they
were with him. Intelligent, humorous, charming, he made whoever he
was with feel as if they were the center of his universe. For those
with Denny, everyday was a special day, a holiday, a day of wonder.
Michael followed Denny “willingly along the glassy arcades which
led us to a lazy playground of waking dreams. I grew to adore
nights, weeks, even months with him in that synthetic Eden, where
there was no Eve, nor yet the viper with its entourage of judges,
cruel school-teachers, pimps, interfering neighbors, disapproving
parents, loveless clerics . . .”
³⁴
In reflecting on
Denny, Michael commented that “like all gigolos, and perhaps
chameleons, he simply longed to please, which is to say to do his
job well.”
³⁵

Sleeping by day, the pair frequented the clubs and
bars in the Bastille quarter by night. Denny would dress up—in an
American sailor’s suit, or white tie and tailcoat, or sometimes,
when he didn’t feel like dressing, in blue silk pajamas. Seeing
Denny in what appeared to be costume, a patron of one of the clubs
asked him at which theater he was performing. “La Vie” was his
reply.
³⁶