6/8/2023 0 Comments Truman capote harold halma![]() ![]() He loved the West and he had a fantasy about buying a gasoline station in Arizona, the sort of place that has a sign saying, 'Last Chance for Gas for Fifty Miles.' I was going to write, and he was going to run it and be cured of all the things that were wrong with him." This fantasy they spun together was a variation of one of the plans Peter and Denny had contemplated before the War, of moving to Arizona and growing oranges. I wanted to get him off drugs, and he also wanted to get out of the life he had been living all those years. I was young, and I didn't plan to get involved in any of that. But I was frightened of him and the drug scene. But he was not a nodder I never saw him drug-dazed or enfeebled." The two became friends. Those first days of June, Truman stayed with Denny in the "high-ceilinged dusk of those shuttered, meandering rooms." Often in the afternoon, they would go to Champs-Elysees movies, "and at some juncture always, having begun slightly to sweat, hurried to the men's room and dosed himself with drugs in the evening he inhaled opium or sipped opium tea, a concoction he brewed by boiling in water the crust of opium that had accumulated inside his pipe. He was beyond being good-looking: he was the single most charming-looking person I've ever seen." To watch him walk into a room was an experience. Whatever he had done the night before, or the day before, or the week before, he always looked as if he had just awakened on the freshest and most beautiful morning in the world. Like everyone else, Truman was smitten: "Denny radiated a quality that was the exact opposite of what he was, extraordinary health, youth, and unspoiled innocence. Truman spent hours lying with Denny on the massive bed beneath Tchelitchev's Adonis, gossiping and listening to his stories. though he wanted us to share the same bed, his interest in me was romantic but not sexual." Denny's libido had been damaged by his addiction, but he was content just to have Truman worship him as he entranced Truman. Truman found that Denny "was more conversationalist than sensualist. He wanted to be taken care of forever." Keep your distance, Waldemar had cautioned his visitor, words that of course made Truman all the more eager to make the pilgrimage to 44 Rue du Bac. "Even when he was perfectly well," Christopher Isherwood's friend Bill Harris recalled from their Santa Monica days, "Denny would often be propped up in bed, like a little boy who's sick and waiting for friends to come and visit him. Waldemar had warned Truman about Denny, about how much of a burden he could become. "Truman wasn't interested in seeing things like the Tower of London," Waldemar remembered rather, he wanted to meet everyone who was anybody, and, together, they made the rounds, visiting Cecil Beaton, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, and Noel Coward. Waldemar met him in London and introduced him to the luminaries he had come to know through Peter Watson. Capote set sail on the Queen Elizabeth on May 14, joining the throng of Americans flocking to Europe after the War. Waldemar, who had met Truman in New York City, knew his friend well. That photograph! That photograph of 24-year-old Truman Capote that appeared on the dust jacket of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in January of 1948, a few days after the publication of Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar that photograph which Denny had seen in Life magazine and cut out and kept next to his bed under his opium pipe that photograph that showed the young author reclining on a Victorian sofa, looking ten years younger than his actual age, drilling the camera with smoldering eyes, his right hand touching himself suggestively that photograph that Capote had carefully staged, which became perhaps the most famous, infamous, photograph ever to grace a book jacket and drew endless attention to the novel and its ambitious author: that photograph had captured the imagination of Denham Fouts. ![]() The book is available now from Magnus Books. But in short order he befriended (and bedded) the rich and celebrated and in the process conquered the world. ![]() The first book ever written about Denham (Denny) Fouts (1914-1948), the 20th century's most famous male prostitute Fouts was a socialite and muse whose extraordinary life started off humbly in Jacksonville, Florida. Truman Capote's jacket photo by Harold Halma for 'Other Voices, Other Rooms' via WikipediaĪn excerpt from Best-Kept Boy in the World, by Arthur Vanderbilt.
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