Best-Kept Boy in the World (6 page)

As Stephen Spender so well recognized, this was the
fun part of being with Peter, the magical part, and Denny must have
felt the career Glenway Wescott had launched him on had reached its
zenith. Thereafter, though the two became co-dependent, Peter’s
relationship with Denny never was easy. Denny, Peter came to
understand, “had no confidence in anyone—this stimulated me and [I]
thought if I took trouble he would in me.”
³⁰
Peter may
have recognized something of himself in Denny. He once confessed to
a friend that “without some money I would have acted worse than
you. I can’t do anything and I hate
doing
things.”
³¹
And this recognition about himself may have
led him to keep trying with Denny, to want to help him reach the
potential he saw in him, to inspire him to do something more than
sit around being beautiful, to make him realize his worth lay in
more than his looks.

No matter how much beauty, self assurance, and
confidence they project, those select few who look like a god may
feel the same insecurities and self doubts as everyone else,
sometimes even more if they are unsure, as was Denny, as to just
what it was they possessed that drew another’s attention or love.
Exactly what was it that he could do with his life? What was his
purpose? Denny, Peter discovered, was “terribly neurotic (his
drawings are nightmares of frustrations and
obscenities).”
³²
Although only six years younger than
Peter, Denny, at twenty-one, still looked like a teenager, and
Peter, at twenty-seven, like an adult, and those in fact were the
roles they assumed. “I became for him of course the responsible
parent who just provided him with money.”
³³
As hard as
Peter tried, he found, to his disappointment, that “we never shared
any intellectual interests whatsoever and he always resented that
side of me.” And the sexual side of their relationship disappointed
Peter, too. “Going to bed is a physical act with him, no more, he
is stuck at 16 years old and resists any attempt to grow. And yet I
feel it must be my fault, somehow.”
³⁴

And yet, Peter could no more move beyond Denny,
despite repeated sessions with German émigré psychiatrist Dr. Karl
Bluth, than Cecil could get over Peter.

Cecil Beaton, of course, hated Denny with “an
unconsumed passion,” and when he heard through his friends of “the
appalling dogfights that Denham had with Peter,” he noted with
delight in his diary that “they were just what Peter
needed.”
³⁵

The dogfights typically began with Peter’s concern
about Denny’s opium habit, a habit that had begun when he joined
the world tour with Lord Tredegar and his wife and with them
visited the opium dens in China. Peter always had been frightened
of drugs and was distressed at what he saw them doing to Denny. He
tried every stratagem to get him to quit—love, reasoning, nagging,
threats—nothing, of course, worked against the power of Denny’s
addiction. Every once in a while, Peter was able to get Denny into
a rehabilitation clinic but those “cures” proved temporary, very
temporary, at best. And so their fighting continued.

After such fights, when the two separated, Denny was
never at a loss finding room and board. Peter learned later that
Denny once had gone and “joined the Hitler Jugend in Germany and
was a boy friend of Richtofen, the Nazi ace” with whom he attended
Nazi rallies in Berlin.
³⁶
Richtofen was Wolfram Freiherr
von Richtofen, almost twenty years older than Denny, married, with
three children and was the cousin of Manifred von Richtofen who was
Germany’s most famous ace, and is still today considered the ace of
aces and a legend as the “Red Baron.” Wolfram had served during the
First World War and himself achieved the designation of flying ace
for the number of enemy aircrafts he shot down; when Hermann
Goering formed the Luftwaffe in 1933, he joined, and later became
one of only six Luftwaffe officers to become a Field Marshall. It
was during his stay in Germany with Richtofen that Denny met Adolf
Hitler, which led to Truman Capote’s conjecture, which he loved to
repeat, that “had Denham Fouts yielded to Hitler’s advances there
would have been no World War Two.”
³⁷

Other times after Peter and Denny fought, Denny
would go back to Prince Paul, but now, with the national plebiscite
in Greece in 1935 that had called for a return of the monarchy,
Crown Prince Paul was no longer in London; he had joined his
brother’s triumphant return to Greece, and there, in Athens,
obtained for Denny a suite of rooms in the Grande Bretagne
Hotel.

Denny was well aware of the power he held there,
even after Prince Paul on January 8, 1938 married Princess
Frederica of Hanover, a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria
and the granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the bar in the
Grande Bretagne Hotel, Denny in 1938 had met twenty-two-year-old
surrealist artist Brion Gysin, whose acquaintances, including
Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas,
all agreed he looked like a young Greek god, perhaps Apollo, maybe
Dionysus or Narcissus. Denny spotted this classically handsome
young man sitting at the bar and took him up to his rooms. There,
he picked up the telephone, called the front desk and asked to be
put through to the Royal Palace. When Prince Paul was given the
telephone, Denny asked that he immediately send over “one of those
royal guards in ballet skirts with something for us to smoke.” The
Prince did, Denny and Brion did, and as Brion recalled, “we got
royally stoned.”
³⁸

Brion Gysin was fascinated by everything about
Denny, from the suitcases that Salvador Dali had decorated for him
with labels like “Hotel Sordide” and “Midnight Motel,” to the
expensive sports jackets Peter had brought for him, which appeared
to be “itchy tweed but felt like cat’s fur woven into
cashmere.”
³⁹
For a while they enjoyed each other’s
company and together migrated back to Paris. The two were like
brothers in their desire to live well, and in their ability,
through the largesse of admirers, to live well without working.

In Paris, newlyweds Jane and Paul Bowles befriended
Brion at a Left Bank Café, and Brion introduced them to Denny. One
evening, Brion and Denny drove the Bowles to dinner and then to the
premiere of Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks Concerto.” Bowles learned
that Denny on his journeys with Peter had been to Tibet but could
not determine what he had done there except for his story that he
had been practicing archery and had brought back with him some
large tribal bows. To show off the skills he had developed, Denny
took an arrow, which had a built in tampon that he soaked in ether,
lit it, aimed out the hotel window, and shot into the night traffic
on the Champs-Elyées. Brion found this amusing, though Paul Bowles,
who had no use for Denny, found this conduct astounding, and noted
in his memoirs that “fortunately there were no
repercussions.”
⁴⁰

There are those whose personalities are so addicting
that, for all their faults, life is richer, more fun, with them;
without them, the world beats empty and hollow. Denny had this
power to addict, and Peter, the addict, could not be separated for
long from what he had to have. Denny had become addicted to being
desired, and, in being the object of desire had found his self
worth. The two needed each other and invariably reunited.

Although Peter said that he couldn’t do anything and
hated doing things, he had quietly become a forceful presence in
London’s art world. He orchestrated major art exhibitions that drew
thousands of visitors, organized concerts, and behind the scenes
helped many young artists. John Craxton, who became a prominent
neo-Romantic artist, was, as a teenager, living in a small flat
with his parents and six siblings, with no room to paint. He
received a letter from Peter Watson, who had seen his work: “I have
been reading an article by Miro called
‘je reve d’un grand
atelier
,’ and it occurs to me that you must need a studio. Find
one and send me the bill.” Craxton came to consider Peter “a second
father in a way, tremendously generous, a great catalyst and
encourager.”
⁴¹
Craxton set up a studio in Abercorn
Place, which he then shared with another young artist, Lucien
Freud, who would become a lionized British realist painter. Peter
later paid for Craxton and Freud to visit Greece so that they could
see more of the world than London. Peter in 1938 funded the
publication costs of Charles Henri Ford’s first book of poems,
The Garden of Disorder
, and repeatedly helped Dylan Thomas
pay off his debts. He introduced young artists to more established
artists and took them together to dinner. Stephen Spender called
Peter “the last of a rare disinterested, pure and questing human
species. No other patron was so individual, so non-institutional:
even the word ‘patron’ seems wrong for him—perhaps a better word
would be ‘friend.’”
⁴²

He was, Spender felt, a knight in shining armor, a
characterization that the Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchev had
understood when he painted Peter as a knight.
⁴³

Peter went through periods when he found England
depressing, a “dying country”
⁴⁴
as he called it, “a
Victorian period piece,”
⁴⁵
as the world, especially the
world of modern art, moved beyond it. As Peter wrote to Cecil
Beaton: “I am loathing London and can’t wait to get out. The gloom.
The cold. The bad plays.”
⁴⁶
He added: “There is some
terrible psychological pain which gets me every time I get back to
England. It goes back to the times when I used to race abroad to
get away from my family I think.”
⁴⁷
He was considering
founding in Paris a journal of fine arts, and also was sharing with
Denny his idea of buying an orange farm in Arizona where the two of
them would live. Paris won out and Peter leased the large apartment
at 44 Rue du Bac.

It was in the summer of 1937, when Peter and Denny
were staying in the fashionable Austrian ski resort town of
Kitzbuhel, that they met up with Cyril Connolly who had been a
student with Peter at Eton, and his wife Jean, an American
expatriate just like Denny. Jean was beautiful, witty, caustic, a
heavy drinker, sexy, promiscuous, a lover of clubs and late night
parties, and she and Denny instantly bonded and became friends and
confidants. (“Am suffering for
all
my sins at once with the
most beastly (don’t laugh)
WISDOM-TOOTH
while P. climbs
Mts,” Denny wrote to Jean on a postcard from the Hotel Glacier in
Switzerland; “Love from Denham.”
⁴⁸
The Connollys often
stayed at Peter’s apartment when they were in Paris. They were
there during the 1938 Christmas season, a time of typical chaos in
the apartment that another guest remembered: “[It] had the air of a
stage set, an extraordinary collection of people wandering in and
out all day long, dubious friends of Denham’s, English pansy or
café society friends of the Connollys, the actor Jean Marais
...servants, detectives and police inspectors on account of a theft
there at a party on Christmas Eve.”
⁴⁹
(Stephen Spender
and his wife, Inez, when in Paris in 1938 and 1939, stayed at the
apartment with Peter and Denny, always a little afraid of Denny
after seeing several displays of his temper. On one occasion, as
Peter and Denny were arguing, Denny ran down the stairs out into
the garden courtyard, fired a revolver into the air, came charging
back into the apartment, and threw the empty revolver on a
table.
⁵⁰
Another time in a rage he drove a car straight
toward the Seine, jumping clear just as it hit the water.)

As 1939 unfolded, the Connollys were having marital
problems and Jean was spending more and more time in Paris,
“Pansyhalla” as Cyril called it because his wife was seeing a lot
of Peter and Denny and their friends. Peter wrote to Cyril: “Please
get it out of your head that I want to see you and Jean separated.
I do not and I should be very sorry if it happened and I only wish
that a solution could be found and that you could be happy
together, as I am fond of you both.”
⁵¹

At the end of August, Connolly—then, as the literary
critic of the
New Statesman
and the literary editor of the
London Observer
, the most highly regarded and popular critic
in Britain—returned to Paris to talk with Peter. When they sat down
for lunch at a sidewalk café that hot summer afternoon, Peter
realized that the topic on Cyril’s mind was not Jean, but rather
founding a new literary magazine in London. London’s great literary
reviews had gone out of existence—T.S. Eliot’s
The Criterion,
The London Mercury, New Verde
—and since 1938, with the
gathering war clouds over Europe, many of England’s artists and
intellectuals had been seeking refuge in safer countries—W.H.
Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Gerald Heard all
had gone to the United States, Wyndham Lewis to Canada—and England
was feeling, at least in Connolly’s opinion, an intellectual and
social drain.

Peter was cool to funding Connolly’s proposal. He
had no interest in leaving Paris to return to London, and his own
plans for a journal on the fine arts were at last beginning to come
together.

But Connolly’s timing proved propitious. The next
day, September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and France. Two days
later, Neville Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was at war
with Germany. An air raid siren blared within minutes of his
announcement, a warning that proved to be a false alarm though many
fully expected “the sky to become black with bombers” with “the
whole of London laid flat,” as Stephen Spender remembered that
ominous day.
⁵²
An invasion of Paris seemed inevitable.
Connolly returned to London.