PINK TRIANGLE

Son of a baker, a Jacksonville, Florida cracker, Denham Fouts, nicknamed “Denny,” fled from home as a teenager. In Washington, D.C., he worked as a stock boy for only a short time before one of the executives at Safeway promoted him to “The Best Kept Boy in the World,” a title that would follow him for the rest of his short life.

His first patron claimed “Denny was thin as a hieroglyph, with dark hair, light brown eyes, and a cleft chin.” He also possessed something that Denny defined as “my impressive money-maker.”

In time, this extraordinary youth would provide literary inspiration for characters created by Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, and Gavin Lambert, among others.

The novelist and critic, Glenway Wescott (1901-1987), linked “beer, piss, and sex” together. When he seduced a young man, such as Fouts, he defined it as “an act of darkness.”

Stifled by the boredom of Washington, Denny escaped on a train to New York to continue his career as a kept boy. He found that his body and sex appeal were all that was needed to launch himself in an even bigger city than Washington. At Manhattan’s Astor Bar, he met the writer and critic, Glenway Wescott, who later said, “He was absolutely enchanting and ridiculously good looking.”

Later, Wescott claimed “the only thing I like about Denny was that he had the most delicious body odor. I once swiped one of his handkerchiefs after he’d wiped his sweaty brow.”

The poet and painter, Brion Gysin, invited Denny Fouts to Morocco, where they would drop acid before visiting the tomb of the Merinides kings in the ancient city of Fez. “I’m a saint,” Gysin told the young man. “But occasionally, I float down to earth to be a king.”

Wescott was one of his early sponsors, introducing him to George Platt Lynes, the American photographer whose pictures had appeared in such magazines as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He also photographed many movie stars and was known for his pictures of nude males. Denny posed in the buff for him, and copies of those photos were shopped around to some of the wealthiest homosexuals in the world, some of whom subsequently sought out Denny’s sexual charms.

Born in 1914, Denny was in his early 20s when he descended on Paris for a series of conquests, often with famous men.

One of his early sponsors was Swiss-Canadian Brion Gysin, the famous painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist. Among other achievements, he invented the “Dreamachine,” a flicker device designed as an art object and “mystical stimulant” whose patterns of light were intended for viewing with one’s eyes closed. The flicker device used alpha waves in the 8-16 Hz range to produce a change in consciousness in receptive viewers.

Gysin also collaborated with his close friend, William Burroughs, before he became world famous after the publication of The Naked Lunch.

As Ted Morgan, the biographer of William Burroughs, wrote: “Gysin was a tall, broad-shouldered man with thick sandy hair and the ruddy, bony, narrow-eyed face of a Swiss mountaineer, cold and imperious. He had a glacial geniality.”

Truman Capote told Tennessee, “Your friend, Paul Bowles (right figure in photo above), has finally got around to seducing Denny Fouts. Who hasn’t? Paul seems to have put on fat and is filled with remorse that his lesbian Jane (left figure in photo above) is being committed to a mental hospital in Málaga. Paul is still plagiarizing the writings of his Arab boy lover and passing them off as his own.”

As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana fudge to a cookbook being compiled by Alice B. Toklas. It was included in her cookbook and became known all over the world as Alice B. Toklas’s brownies, the most famous recipe to ever emerge from the hippie era.

In Paris, Denny introduced his new lover, Gysin, to his newly minted friends, the composer Paul Bowles and his author wife, Jane Bowles, both of whom indulged in homosexuality on the side.

Paul Bowles later reported that Denny had just returned from Tibet after Gysin and Denny visited the Bowles couple in their hotel room in Paris’ 8^th arrondissement. “In Tibet, Denny had practiced archery and had brought back some huge bows with him,” Paul said. “The arrows were made with built-in tampons of cotton, to be soaked in ether before use and ignited. To demonstrate his prowess with the difficult bow, he began to shoot arrows from our hotel window down into the evening traffic of the Champs-Élysées. Fortunately, there were no repercussions.”

The Harlem singer, Jimmy Daniels, was also introduced to Denny at a Left Bank night club. “Denny’s skin looked as if it just had been scrubbed. It seemed to have no pores at all. It was so smooth. He was just adorable, so very fuckable.”

While in Paris, Denny also became the lover of Jean Marais, the French actor and director more famously associated with Jean Cocteau. Cocteau, in fact, had considered (but later rejected) Marais as the lead, Stanley Kowalski, in the French-language production of Tennessee’s A Streetcar Named Desire, in Paris.

The strikingly handsome French actor, Jean Marais (photo above), numbered among his lovers both the celebrated author Jean Cocteau and Denny Fouts. Cocteau introduced the young Marais to Tennessee when he was considering casting him as Stanley Kowalski in the Paris production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Cocteau told Tennessee, “When I fell in love with Jean, I was searching for a beautiful effigy of my young self, and he was an actor in search of an author.”

At the time of his affair with Denny, Marais was yet to make his reputation. He would later star in 100 roles in French films and on television, notably in Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) (aka Beauty and the Beast) and Orphée (1949). In the 1950s, Marais, the star of many swashbuckling pictures, became known as “the French Errol Flynn.”

Marais and Denny made a striking couple on the Parisian nightscape. Once, they were photographed together emerging from a theater off the Champs-Élysées.

Before the outbreak of World War II, a story spread among tout Paris that Adolf Hitler had seen this photograph of Marais and Denny and had sent an offer through his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, for Denny to visit him in Berlin.

Denny turned down the offer. “Who in his right mind would trade the muscular arms of the gorgeous Jean Marais for the embrace of a beast like Hitler?”

Years later, Truman told Tennessee and anyone else who knew Danny that if the handsome young man had yielded to Hitler’s romantic overtures, “there would have been no World War II.”

Did Adolf Hitler become mesmerized by a photo of Denny Fouts and have Josef Goebbels invite him to Berlin? The jury is still out on that one. Dr. Lothar Machtan, professor of modern history at Bremen University, was the author of Hidden Hitler, published in 2001. In it, he documents “the homosexual milieu in which the young Hitler lived and thrived from his early years in Vienna and through the beginning of his poltical career in Munich.”

Machtan also documents a succession of homosexual men among Hitler’s most intimate friends. “His homosexual past was his Achilles Heel. It threatened him politically and left him open to blackmail by his most intimate former associates. The assassination of Ernst Röhm sent a chilling message to all with knowledge about the Führer’s past life.”

Almost no one believed such a ridiculous assertion. Gore never believed that an overture had ever come in from Hitler at all. When Gore got to know Denny years later, he asked him about Truman’s claim.

“Denny produced a 1938 letter from Goebbels, inviting him to Berlin as the personal guest of the Führer,” Gore said. “Not only that, but Goebbels was holding out a contract with UFA that would have made Denny a star in German films, with his voice dubbed in German, of course.”

“For once in his life, it seemed that Truman was telling the truth,” Gore said. “Ever since the 1920s, there had been rumors of Hitler’s closeted homosexuality, even a book or two written about it.”

Paul Bowles eventually introduced Denny to another artist who became his lover and sponsor, Gavin Lambert. The British-born author was a screenwriter, novelist, and biographer.

Lambert and Denny had a torrid affair. Lambert was ten years younger than Denny when they met and was more his sexual type since he was only a teenager. Although he slept with older men, Denny actually preferred young boys.

Denny never lived to know that Lambert would one day become famous, first as a screenwriter, personal assistant, and lover to the Hollywood film director, Nicholas Ray. With Ray, he co-wrote the film script for Bitter Victory in 1947. The director had previously sampled the youthful charms of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, each of whom he’d seduced during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause (1955).

Lambert would also adapt for the screen Tennessee’s novella, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), starring Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty.

The Viscount Tredegar (photo above, depicting him at a garden party he hosted in 1935), was Fouts most bizarre lover. The parrot he carried around with him had been trained to crawl up his leg and stick his head out of the Viscount’s fly.

He dressed like Shelley; he seduced page boys at the Royal Court at Windsor; he ordered frequent working class rent boys delivered to his bedroom every week; and he kept rabbits in his bed.

It was estimated that he seduced more men than any other “old sod” in England.

Virginia Wolff described him as “a little red absurdity with a beak of a nose, no chin, and with the general likeness of a callow but student bantam cock that has run to seed.”

He was constantly in search of newer, darker sensations and fatally attracted to dangerous people.

As Denny’s circle of admirers enlarged, an invitation to visit England came in from one of the richest men in England, Evan Morgan, 2^nd Vis count Tredegar, who was born into what the Duke of Bedford described as “the oddest family I ever met. His father owned the largest yacht in the world, and his mother built bird nests big enough to sit in to hatch eggs.”

The eccentric Viscount was a Welsh poet and author who devoted a great deal of his time to his kangaroos, whom he had taught to box at his private zoo. When Denny arrived in the aftermath of his invitation, it was “love at first sight” on the viscount’s part.

Soon, Denny, appearing nude except for a fig leaf, became a featured attraction at the Viscount’s notorious weekend house parties, which drew such distinguished guests as Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, and the painter Augustus John.

The most notorious guest was Aleister Crowley, noted in the British tabloids as “the world’s wickedest man.” He had been known for arriving with an entourage of six young boys willing to sacrifice their virginity. When Crowley spotted Denny, he told his host, “I’ve got to have him all night. I will release him only in the morning. Before the rooster crows, I want to have performed every known sexual act—and some unknown ones—on this beautiful American.”

Paul of Greece is depicted in the left photo as a teenage prince, and in the right photo, as King of the Hellenes (ruled 1947-1964).

Denny Fouts gave His Highness “the greatest sex of my life.”

[Later, Evan Morgan’s private eccentricities were revealed in a book, Not Behind Lace Curtains: The Hidden World of Evan, Viscount Tredegar, by William Cross. The book exposed not only his homosexuality, but his flirtations with the occult and with the “Black Masses,” inspired by Crowley and his teachings.

Cross estimated that when Morgan came of age, the Welsh estate his family had owned since the 14th century was bringing in what’s estimated as today’s equivalent of £65,000 a day, or £24 million a year.]

Denny soon fled that bizarre world and returned to Paris, where an invitation was waiting from Prince Paul of Greece. He included air tickets to Athens, where he wanted to cruise the Aegean Sea “with this American beauty.”

The prince functioned as titular head of Greece from 1947 until his death in 1964. The third son of King Constantine of Greece, Paul—a handsome, dashing figure in his own right—had been trained as a naval officer. During that Aegean cruise, however, he spent more time in bed with Denny than he did directing his crew.

The prince had been born in 1901 and was not as young as Denny usually preferred.

After that cruise, the two lovers may have as many as three subsequent rendezvous, but details are lacking. During World War II, when Greece was under Nazi occupation, Prince Paul lived in exile in London and Cairo.

Peter Watson, “the Oleomargarine King of England,” was among Denny’s last lovers before the outbreak of World War II. “I could not be in the same room with Denny without getting an erection,” Watson told friends. During the course of their affair, he became so enthralled with Denny that he presented him with a large Picasso painting called Girl Reading (1934). Denny once lent the painting to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, but later sold it to the Samuel Marx Collection.

Watson also introduced Denny to Cyril Connolly, the British journalist and critic, who also fell in love with him. With Watson’s money, Connolly had founded Horizon magazine in 1939. Connolly later told his patron, “Denny comes in dripping with all that Deep South charm, enough to make you drop your trousers and bend over for him. But he’s got a very nasty temper if provoked. I hear very dark stories about him, some of which must be true. His behavior is erratic, and I understand that some of his past deeds, especially when in residence with Evan Morgan, our Viscount friend, were bloody dangerous.”

As France was about to be invaded by Nazi Germany, Watson shipped Denny off to Hollywood. “I could not stand the idea of that beautiful porcelain skin being damaged by one of Hitler’s bombs.”

Denny Discovers New Lovers In Both Truman & Gore. Ultimately, Opium Wins The Battle For His Affections

In Hollywood in 1940, Denny became involved in an affair with Christopher Isherwood, who had maintained a long-time, widely publicized desire for involvement (some say possession) of the best of both German and American youth. With oceans of pain and regret, he’d been forced to sever ties with his German lover in Nazi-occupied France. Later, he found the object of his obsession for the ideal American male in the flesh of Denham Fouts.

In addition to “hot sex,” Denny also would inspire Isherwood’s Down There on a Visit (1962), which contains the novella Paul, whose titular character was based on Denny.

After the war, Denny returned to Paris, where Watson paid the rent on Denny’s apartment in rue du Bac and even gave him a large painting by Tchelitchev to decorate it.

Watson introduced Denny to Michael Wishart. “I was warned by Jean Cocteau, of all people, that Fouts was a bad influence and an opium addict. Imagine Cocteau warning someone against an opium addict. I was besotted with Denny,” Wishart later confessed. “It’s true he was an opium addict. Perhaps Cocteau was right in warning me. I, too, became an opium addict.”

Wishart was an English painter who specialized in neo-romantic landscapes and hidden faces captured in bravura swatches of oil. After an exhibition of his paintings in 1956, art critic David Sylvester wrote of Wishart’s “sensibility that is at once shamelessly romantic and deeply sophisticated, and which endows the wide open spaces of the great outdoors with a sort of hothouse preciosity . . . he is one of the select band of English romantic painters who are truly painters.”

Wishart’s affair with Denny was written about in his autobiography, High Diver, published in 1977. “Denny wore nothing but cream-colored flannel trousers and had the torso of an athlete,” Wishart said. “Along with his beautiful shoulders and golden forearms ran snow white mice with startling pink eyes, which he stroked gently with the back of his hands.”

After the war, Denny had picked up this eccentricity of having white mice run up and down his arms.

In that wardrobe, shirtless, Denny made frequent appearances with Wishart, who often wore “a full Bonnie Prince Charlie kilt with a lot of écru lace and half my grandmother’s pearls and rubies.”

[By 1988, Wishart’s passion for Denny had long ago been buried upon the young man’s death in Rome. In its place, he “conceived a searing passion for Michael Jackson. He wrote to friends, “How I am to live apart from Michael is an appalling quandary.”]

While still in Paris, Denny received an advance copy of Truman Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. He was especially intrigued by the provocative photograph on its back cover. Truman looked like the type of young boy he preferred sexually. Denny, by then a figure of myth and legend within international homosexual circles, sent Truman a blank check with just one word written as a notation on the bottom—COME—which of course, had a double meaning.

Denny’s reputation had preceded him, and Truman was eager to meet him. When he arrived in Paris, he headed at once for Denny’s shoddy, heavily curtained apartment on rue du Bac, where the young novelist soon discovered that Denny was addicted to opium.

Even so, he and Truman became lovers. When not making love, Truman spent hours in bed reading stories to Denny, and listening to fascinating tales of his romantic escapades.

“Even though a druggie, Denny looked fifteen years younger,” Truman later said, “Actually, he was thirty-four. He radiated health, youth, and an unspoiled innocence, although he was none of those things. He was beyond being good looking. He was the single most charming looking person I’ve ever seen. Had Denny known Oscar Wilde, he would have been the inspiration for Dorian Gray.”

One of Denny’s closest friends, John B. L. Goodwin, warned Truman that “Denny invents himself. If people don’t know his background, he makes it up.”

Truman didn’t quite agree with that. “Denny had led a fascinating life. He didn’t have to make up romantic adventures with men. He’d actually experienced them.”

Alarmed by Denny’s large-scale consumption of opium, Truman eventually fled from the scene, promising Denny he would meet him in Rome, but having no intention of keeping that commitment.

“How could I say I never planned to see him again?” Truman asked. “It wasn’t just the drugs and chaos, but the funereal halo of waste and failure that hovered over him. The shadow of such failure seemed somehow to threaten my own impending triumph.”

It could be argued that Truman saw a foreshadowing of his own drug-addicted future reflected in Denny’s dissipation.

Denny would appear as a character in Truman’s unfinished novel, Answered Prayers upon which he was working—or not working, as the case may be—during his final opium-sodden days. Denny’s Paris is evoked by line in the book: “When I think of Paris, it seems to me as romantic as a flooded pissoir, as tempting as a strangled nude floating on the Seine.”

In the novel, Denny’s answered prayers “lead eventually to nightmares of emptiness and abandonment, lived out at “Father Flanagan’s All Night Nigger Queen’s Kosher Café” a kind of Shangri-La for those who have lost hope.”

Following in Truman’s footsteps, Gore made his own literary pilgrimage to Paris. The first person he wanted to meet was Denny. John Lehmann, the English publisher, escorted Gore to Denny’s rue du Bac apartment.

Gore sat on the edge of Denny’s bed and smoked from the pipe offered him. “The opium made me deathly ill, and I never tried it again,” he later said.

More of a historian than the ever-gossipy Truman, Gore wanted to verify some of the more outrageous stories spread about Denny, mostly by Truman. After verifying the authenticity of letter that Goebbels had written to Denny from Berlin in 1938, Gore then asked about Denny’s alleged affair with the King of Greece.

Denny showed Gore a crumpled telegram from a stack of papers on the floor beside his bed. The letterhead was definitely from King Paul. It read:

So thrilled to hear from you. I am much better than papers report. Hope you can come to Athens.

King Paul was the cousin of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. At the time of that communication with Denny, the king was suffering from typhoid fever and was too ill to attend the 1947 marriage of Philip to Princess Elizabeth.

In Paris, Gore made six different visits to Denny’s apartment, always finding him lying nude on the bed, usually smoking his opium pipe. “His body appeared in fabulous shape,” Gore claimed. “He was still slender and boyish, a southern Penrod who still spoke with a North Florida cracker accent. His dissipation was not reflected in his asymmetrical face, which was like a ghost who would soon be dead of a malformed heart.”

Gore later claimed that during his visits, Denny was in no condition to have sex. But to Tennessee and privately to gay friends, he relayed a different story.

Gore (photo above): “By the time I finally got around to Denny, he’d been had by every rich man on two continents, and was a bit used up. About all I could do at that point was to tell him to turn over and take it like a man.”

“Denny was impotent, but I went to his apartment several times and sodomized him. It was such a thrill to rape the young man called the ‘most beautiful boy in the world.’ His body still could offer sexual satisfaction.”

The experience left such an impact on Gore that he used Denny as inspiration for his short story, “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” which later appeared as a subsection of his A Thirsty Evil: Seven Short Stories, published in 1956.

Gore paid his final visit to Denham just before he left Paris. Later, he said, “It is a pity that he himself never wrote a memoir. What a story he’d have to tell.”

When Peter Watson quit paying the rent on Denny’s apartment in the rue du Bac, Denny went to Rome, where he found cheaper lodgings at the Pensione Foggetti.

Denny’s last and final lover was Anthony Watson-Gandy, a writer and translator. “Denny spent his last days dissolute, lying in bed like a corpse, sheet to his chin, a cigarette between his lips turning to ash. I had to remove that cigarette before it burned his lips.”

At the age of thirty-four, Denny died on December 16, 1948 of heart failure and was buried in the First Zone, 11^th Row, of Rome’s Protestant Cemetery.

Amazingly, according to his lover, his body “still looked like that of a Greek god.”

A rumor persists that his corpse was violated at the funeral parlor in Rome to which it was sent. Placed nude on a marble slab for “viewing, fondling, or the release of semen,” that perfect body was violated in death as it was in life, fulfilling some necrophiliac fantasy of a member, or members, of Rome’s gay community who never got to enjoy the pleasures of his flesh when Denny was alive.