Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) Read Free Page B

told Gore and Truman that he was an actor named Frank McCowan, and that he’d appeared in five movies—“Just small parts.” He claimed that Alan Ladd had discovered him, and he bragged that Ladd would be arriving in New York to spend four days in the city with him.
    “The implication was clear that Ladd and he were lovers,” Gore claimed.
    After Frank and Gore said goodnight to Truman, Gore learned that his newly minted friend had less than fifty dollars to live on for four nights. That’s why he was sleeping at the Everard, because it had the cheapest bed in town. Until Ladd flew in, four days hence, Gore invited Frank to live with him at his apartment.
    “I’ll stay with you if you’ll give me all the sex I demand,” Frank said.
    Gore gleefully agreed to those terms.
    As he told Stanley, “The next morning, I got to enjoy the taste treat that Truman had greedily swallowed for himself.”
    During the next four days, Gore and Frank bonded and would become longtime friends, seeing each other infrequently during Gore’s trips to Hollywood.
    He learned a lot about Frank during their time together in Manhattan. When he was only thirteen, he’d stolen a revolver and was later arrested with it. A judge sentenced him to the California Youth Authority’s Preston School of Industry Reformatory at Ione, California.
    A very inventive young teenager, he plotted his escape and pulled it off one night when there was a delay in the change of guards. He went on a rampage, robbing three jewelry stores before making his escape in a stolen Ford. He drove the car north toward Oregon, where he was arrested.
    This spree involved crossing a state line, which elevated the caper to a federal offense. Frank was eventually recaptured and sentenced to three years in the penitentiary at Springfield, Missouri.
    When he finished his sentence there, he was transferred to San Quentin on other charges that had been lodged against him during his rampage. He would be an inmate at San Quentin until he was paroled shortly before his twenty-first birthday.
    He told Gore that in 1943, he’d gone horseback riding in the Hollywood Hills. There, he met Alan Ladd, who was just becoming famous as a movie star, after having appeared as the laconic gunman in This Gun for Hire (1942), co-starring with Veronica Lake. A closeted homosexual, Ladd was married to his agent at the time, Susan Carol Ladd.
    The next time Gore heard of Frank, he’d changed his name to Rory Calhoun, and was seen escorting Lana Turner to a premiere. Frank (Rory) had been cast in movies which included That Hagen Girl (1947) alongside Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan.
    A bisexual, Rory would also become known for seducing his leading ladies, appearing in two movies with Marilyn Monroe, How to Marry a Millionaire and River of No Return .
    By 1948, he’d married Lita Baron, and had become the father of three daughters. When she sued him for divorce in 1970, she named Betty Grable and Susan Hayward as two of 79 women with whom her husband had engaged in adulterous relationships.
    At a Hollywood party after his divorce, Gore met up with Calhoun once again. Speaking of his divorce, he confided, “Heck, Lita didn’t even include half of them. For the sake of my masculine image, I’m glad she didn’t namemy all time favorite squeeze, Guy Madison.”
    At that point in his life, Calhoun had delivered his most famous line: “The trouble with Hollywood is that there aren’t enough good cocksuckers.”
Gore, with Truman, Savor The Taste of Their First Mandingo
    Anaïs Nin, in Volume Four (1944-47) of her famous diary, claimed that “Gore has a prejudice against Negroes.” In later years, the very liberal author would vehemently deny such an accusation.
    In a memoir, he did admit that when he was growing up, his contact with African Americans was limited to servants. “The Gores were Reconstruction Southerners, and they got on well with our dusky cousinage in master-servant relationships,