It was a pity, Gore Vidal once remarked, that Denham Fouts never wrote a memoir. For Vidal, Denny was “un homme fatal.”1
Truman Capote found that “to watch him walk into a room was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking; he was the single most charming-looking person I’ve ever seen.”2 Capote loved to conjecture that “had Denham Fouts yielded to Hitler’s advances there would have been no World War Two.”3
Jimmie Daniels, the nightclub singer who performed at his own Harlem club that bore his name, thought Denny “was about the most beautiful boy anybody had ever seen. His skin always looked as if it had just been scrubbed; it seemed to have no pores at all, it was so smooth.”4
To King Paul of Greece he was “my dear Denham” or “Darling Denham,” and the King’s telegrams to Denny from the Royal Palace always were signed “love, Paul.”5
Peter Watson, the wealthy financial backer of the popular British literary magazine Horizon, had an erection whenever he was in the same room with Denny.6
The artist Michael Wishart met Denny for the first time at a party in Paris and realized instantly he was in love and that “the only place in the world I wanted to be was in Denham’s bedroom.”7
Best-selling author Glenway Wescott thought Denny “absolutely enchanting and ridiculously good-looking ... He had the most delicious body odor; I once swiped one of his handkerchiefs.”8
Lord Tredegar, one of the largest landowners in Great Britain, saw Denny being led by the police through the lobby of an expensive hotel on Capri, convinced the police to let him pay the bills Denny owed, and then took Denny to accompany him and his wife as they continued on their tour of the world.
Novelist Christopher Isherwood, who Denny considered his best friend, called him “the most expensive male prostitute in the world.”
Today, someone who projects such an instant and potent power of attraction could forge a successful career, perhaps as a male model, as a character in a daytime soap opera, as a tabloid celebrity, as a television or movie star, maybe even as an acclaimed actor. But Denny was born in 1914 in Jacksonville, Florida, when such options were not yet available to those rare individuals endowed with this sort of sexual magnetism. He never did write a memoir that would have told his strange story, that may have explained how it felt to possess those magical powers, to occupy the thoughts of another, to become the obsession of their lives, to live well off of their wealth and infatuation. How would it feel to be Aschenbach’s Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice? To be Humbert’s Lolita in Nabokov’s masterpiece? Jay Gatsby’s Daisy in The Great Gatsby?
“The mass of men,” Thoreau was brave enough and honest enough to write in Walden, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” Most of us come, go, and are gone, our lives lived in shades of gray no more distinguishable, no more memorable, than the squirrels in a park on a coming of winter morning. Denny was one of those rare individuals who, whatever his faults, brought color into the black and white etchings of everyday life.
Denny never did write his own story, but he does move through many memoirs of the times. And for some of the most renowned authors of those times, he was a muse, and that color he brought into a squirrel-gray world inspired them to capture him in their prose. Denny is “Paul” in Christopher Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit. He is a character in Gore Vidal’s novel The Judgment of Paris, and in his short story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal.” He appears in Truman Capote’s infamous Answered Prayers on which the author was working, or not working, when he died. Denny was proud to find himself a character in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.
To be immortalized in a story by a famed author would be enough to earn a footnote in literary history. To have inspired the body of work Denham Fouts did is to become a legend. Who was this man, this enigma, who died at thirty-four, whose looks and personality so charmed and intrigued some of the wealthiest men and some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century? This is his story.