Best-Kept Boy in the World (5 page)

Drink and drugs fueled these circus-like gatherings.
“He’s one of the very few people I know who
can
throw a
party,” one of the guests, Aleister Crowley, recorded with
admiration in his diary.
³²
Another guest, the socialite
Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, MP, wrote in his diary that Tredegar
House had “the feel and even smell of decay, of aristocracy in
extremis, the sinister and the trivial, crucifixes and
crocodiles…”
³³

Among the guests at Evan’s weekend parties was Crown
Prince Paul of Greece, living in exile in England since 1924 when
the Greek Assembly had abolished the monarchy and declared Greece a
republic. From that time, members of the royal family were
forbidden to live in Greece, and twenty-three-year-old Paul and his
older brother, King George II, had sought refuge in London. Paul,
an athletic man, tall, broad-shouldered, with a jovial laugh and
ready smile, on a lark had assumed an alias and found a job in a
London factory constructing airplanes, though most of his time was
spent moving in the upper social circles. And one weekend, at a
party at Tredegar House, the Prince met Denham Fouts.

As captivated by Denny as was Lord Tredegar, Prince
Paul took Denny with him on a cruise around the Mediterranean. “We
had some great times together on a yacht,” Denny always would
remember as he took out photograph albums to show his friends. And
there he was, looking “very glamorous in belted white swimming
trunks, leaning with merited narcissism against a lifebelt, upon
some swaying Aegean deck.”
³⁴

Back in Jacksonville, Florida, Denny’s mother
worried about her son. According to one of Denny’s cousins, “he
sent continual postcards from all over the world. Sometimes he
would send photos of him with a glamorous woman or a handsome man:
‘Traveling here with Lady So-and-So in Malay. She thinks she’s
Marlene Dietrich and so do I.’ But he never would give anybody an
address to write back.”
³⁵

“A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR”

A baron. A shipping tycoon. A lord. A prince. Denny
had mastered Glenway Wescott’s lessons very well indeed, and was
prepared for his next conquest.

To be young, handsome, bright, and rich were the
blessings bestowed upon Peter Watson, and he wore those blessings
lightly, with grace and style. He was the youngest child of Sir
George Watson, Lord of the Manor of Sulhamstead Abbotts, who had
invented margarine and made a fortune when butter was rationed in
Great Britain during the First World War. Peter was educated at
Eton and Oxford and studied in Munich where his interest in modern
art awakened and where he purchased his first Picasso drawing. When
his father died in 1930, Peter at twenty-two was the beneficiary of
trusts, which gave him the wealth to be a gentleman of leisure and
to pursue his passion for art. The world became his
playground—letters written on stationery of the finest hotels,
postcards from the best resorts, spewed forth to his friends, and
if, for instance, it happened to be raining when he was in
Salzburg, he simply packed up and headed off to Venice. Everyone
who became his friend considered themselves fortunate. Alan
Pryce-Jones, a classmate from his Eton days, described Peter as
“slow-speaking, irresistibly beguiling ...from fourteen or so
onwards, one of the most sophisticated beings I ever knew: rich,
funny, and wise . . .”
¹
Cecil Beaton found that Peter’s
“wry sense of humor and mysterious qualities of charm made him
unlike anyone I had known,”
²
that he was “an
independent, courageous person, on terms of absolute honesty with
himself, with the world and with everybody he talks
to.”
³
The poet Stephen Spender thought Peter “quite
unsnobbish, completely generous, quite unvulgar.”
⁴
Spender recalled his first encounters with Peter: “When I think of
him then, I think of his clothes, which were beautiful, his general
neatness and cleanness, which seemed almost those of a handsome
young Bostonian, his Bentley and his chauffeur who had been the
chauffeur of the Prince of Wales, one wonderful meal we had in some
village of the Savoie, and his knowing that the best food in
Switzerland is often to be found at the buffets of railway
stations.”
⁵

Peter was tall, imperially slim, debonair, with a
smile that “was so disarming that people could not but like him,”
as Cecil Beaton described it.
⁶
Beaton called him “the
best person at the art of living I know.”
⁷
He was, in
Beaton’s judgment, “a completely fulfilled, integrated person;
someone who has been through many vicissitudes and has now
discovered himself.”
⁸
Beaton also described Peter’s
thick brown hair as being “sexily lotioned” with
brilliantine,
⁹
a choice of words that pretty much summed
up the problem: Peter was so perfect that woman, and men, kept
weaving their fantasies around him and falling in love with him.
And Beaton, who would become the famed society photographer, fell
very hard indeed.

Beaton knew exactly the moment it happened. It was
late summer, 1930. Cecil was twenty-six, four years older than
Peter. They were in Vienna, each with his own friends, when they
met. Peter went with Cecil to antique shops to help him select
furnishings for Ashcombe, his new country estate. Cecil could not
understand why his friends were making such a fuss about this young
man until several days later, as they went down on the same
elevator from their hotel rooms, “he shot me a glance of sympathy,
of amusement—it may have been a wink—but it did its work—it went
straight to my heart—and from that moment I was hypnotized by him:
watching every gesture of his heavy hands, the casual languid way
he walked.”
¹⁰
As they got out of the elevator, “we burst
into laughter, and arm-in-arm walked off into the Vienna
side-streets to become the greatest of friends.”
¹¹

Cecil was a man obsessed. He began molding himself
to be just like Peter, buying the same clothes, using the same
cologne, combing his hair the same way, imitating his walk, the way
he talked—to the extent that Cecil’s family could not distinguish
Cecil from Peter on the telephone. Hoping that he could make Peter
fall in love with him, he invited Peter to join him on a tour of
the southern United States, of the Bahamas, Haiti, Havana, Vera
Cruz, Mexico City, and Honolulu. Peter, who in spite of his wealth
had never been abroad, thought it might be fun.

It was quite a voyage across on the
Aquitania
that January of 1931. As Cecil wrote in his diary: “My eyes were
glued to him throughout the day and as he lay asleep. The sea air
knocked him out most of the time and as he lay, big hands clasped
on his chest with his head thrown to the side, I would get out a
sketching book and make drawings of him. It was the most heavenly
experience in the world to live here in this cabin with him, to
dress together in the morning and evening, to play the gramophone
... to have baths together.”
¹²
Peter seemed unaware of
the longing eyes locked upon him until the moment Cecil made the
mistake of giving words to his fantasy and saying to Peter, “One
day when we are lovers ...”
¹³
Cecil instantly knew from
Peter’s annoyance that the object of his desire did not feel the
same way about him. Cecil already had arranged for an enormous
bouquet of lillies-of-the-valley and violets to be delivered to
Peter when they landed in New York City, to be accompanied with a
note: “To Peter who I love so much.”
¹⁴
The arrival of
the flowers led to Peter initiating a frank conversation about the
nature and boundaries of their friendship, though this discussion
did little to cool Cecil’s infatuation. For the remainder of the
trip Cecil played the role of friend, while internally going
through soaring highs and plunging lows, times when Peter’s “dirty
handkerchiefs, his every belonging possessed a glamour,” and other
times when he concluded that Peter was “independent, selfish, rude,
insolent, conceited, young and silly and completely
unimportant.”
¹⁵

Peter certainly didn’t make it any easier for Cecil
and seemed oblivious to the powers he held over his traveling
companion. Often on their journey they slept in the same bed. As
Beaton confided to his diary: “How we gossiped. We giggled ...We
fought gaily in bed, completely upsetting the bedclothes. We
tickled each other, lay in one another’s arms and I was completely
happy—as completely as I ever will be with this poppet because he
is the most unperturbed bastard, uninfluencible and I shall never
alas become his lover.”
¹⁶
This realization could not
stop Cecil from spending “half the night looking lovingly and
longingly at him in his poses of profound unconsciousness. I loved
his big fat veiny hands and would clasp them around me in his
sleep.”
¹⁷

Truman Capote knew both Watson and Beaton. He and
Cecil were lifelong friends, but Capote was one of the very few who
had no use for Peter. Capote felt Watson had a sadistic streak, and
brutally portrayed this voyage abroad the
Aquitania
in
“Unspoiled Monsters,” a chapter of his never-completed,
long-anticipated novel,
Answered Prayers
. “Once,” Capote
wrote in a parenthetical remark in this chapter, “Watson
deliberately set forth on a sea voyage halfway round the world with
an aristocratic, love-besotted young man whom he punished by never
permitting a kiss or caress, though night after night they slept in
the same narrow bed—that is, Mr. Watson slept while his perfectly
decent but disintegrating friend twitched with insomnia and an
aching scrotum.”
¹⁸

Back in London, Cecil time and again would resign
himself to their being no more than “affectionate
companions,”
¹⁹
though each time Peter would call him to
go horseback riding, to visit an antique shop or gallery, to play
backgammon, Cecil once again fell under his spell, convinced anew
he could win his love, only to discover anew each time that he
could not. The emotional turmoil was too much for him and through
hypnosis he sought a cure for his addiction to Peter, a procedure
that brought only temporary relief. While going on with his work
and his life, he waited for the telephone to ring, for Peter to
call. When he was ill, he attributed his illness to not having seen
Peter for too long a time. When a friend told him Peter had asked
about him, he was ecstatic and wrote in his diary: “I now feel I
would like to get physically well, my body in good trim, my tummy
muscles tightened, my skin a different colour, my hair thicker and
then go back to the friendship that has cost me so much happiness,
but which on account of its disadvantages I was silly (?) strong
(?) enough to relinquish.”
²⁰

In May of 1935, Peter and Cecil both happened to be
in Paris and made plans to meet for dinner, but Peter did not
appear at the agreed upon time. Cecil later learned that Peter that
night had met in a nightclub a young American named Denham
Fouts.

As Peter recalled the moment: “He took me back to
his hotel where he gave himself cocaine injections.” And there, in
Denny’s hotel room, Peter stayed.
²¹

Stephen Spender once noted that Peter’s education
“had all been through love: through love of beautiful works and
through love of people in whom he saw beauty.”
²²
When
Peter saw Denny in that Parisian nightclub, he had an instantaneous
physical response to what he saw, as though he had discovered
beauty itself, and he knew he had to possess this god-like creature
as much as he had to possess the museum quality paintings of de
Chirico, Gris, Klee, Miro, and Picasso he had been collecting.
Denny may have found himself falling in love, though, more likely,
he sensed he had found himself someone who might be a worthy
acolyte; he played his hand and, as scheduled, a few days later
left on a tramp steamer for New York. Peter was hooked.

Cecil was devastated when he learned of Peter’s
feelings for Denny, “again conscious of my failure,” as he wrote in
his diary, “that my beloved will never be in love with me and will
always fall for strumpets, and that continuously I am going to be
miserable through each intrigue.”
²³
He no longer could
deal with this unrequited love, and drafted a letter to Peter:

My dearest Darling, this is so much the saddest
thing that happened in my life. It is so serious for me to make the
painful wrench but I
cannot
continue being made miserably
unhappy constantly by your peculiar vagaries ...I cannot weep any
more, my eyes are swollen and my face unrecognizable from so many
tears and so much hysteria.
²⁴

Cecil never mailed his letter, but read it to Peter,
who tried to heal their friendship and urged that they remain “sane
and friends again.”
²⁵

Just as Cecil Beaton’s life changed forever when he
met Peter Watson—and, to the end of his life, even after many other
affairs, including one with Greta Garbo, considered Peter “the love
of his life” and still was “sad and sore that it was never a mutual
love affair, a friendship only for him,”
²⁶
—so Peter
Watson’s life was to change forever that evening he met Denham
Fouts. A friend of both Peter and Denny would call Denny “the
great, destructive, love” of Peter’s life.
²⁷
Denny well
knew what he was doing in leaving for New York after he had aroused
Peter’s interest: Peter could not live without him. “We
corresponded and he came back to live with me in
London.”
²⁸

Stephen Spender realized Peter “was too
perfectionist to be an easy person to live with ... He was, as it
were, essentially made for honeymoons and not for marriages. I mean
that the best possible relationship to have with Peter was to be
taken up by him very intensely for a few weeks, and then simply to
remain on his visiting list for the rest of one’s
time.”
²⁹
When Denny returned to London, to Peter, the
honeymoon began, a whirlwind fantasy Denny never could have
imagined. Peter took him to all his favorite haunts in London, in
Paris, Zurich, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, St. Moritz, Milan,
Florence, Rome, Capri, halcyon days visiting museums, galleries,
sightseeing, bicycling, swimming, evenings at the best restaurants
and nightclubs, plays, operas, on to China and the Far East.