Fouts Denham - The Best-Kept Boy in the World: The Life and Loves of Denny Fouts

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Print ISBN: 978-1936833-41-2

Digital ISBN: 978-1-62601-125-0

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It was a pity, Gore Vidal once remarked, that DenhamFouts never wrote a memoir. For Vidal, Denny was un hommefatal.1

Truman Capote found that to watch him walk into aroom was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking; he wasthe single most charming-looking person Ive everseen.2 Capote loved to conjecture that had DenhamFouts yielded to Hitlers advances there would have been no WorldWar Two.3

Jimmie Daniels, the nightclub singer who performedat his own Harlem club that bore his name, thought Denny was aboutthe most beautiful boy anybody had ever seen. His skin alwayslooked as if it had just been scrubbed; it seemed to have no poresat all, it was so smooth.4

To King Paul of Greece he was my dear Denham orDarling Denham, and the Kings telegrams to Denny from the RoyalPalace always were signed love, Paul.5

Peter Watson, the wealthy financial backer of thepopular British literary magazine Horizon, had an erectionwhenever he was in the same room with Denny.6

The artist Michael Wishart met Denny for the firsttime at a party in Paris and realized instantly he was in love andthat the only place in the world I wanted to be was in Denhamsbedroom.7

Best-selling author Glenway Wescott thought Dennyabsolutely enchanting and ridiculously good-looking ... He had themost delicious body odor; I once swiped one of hishandkerchiefs.8

Lord Tredegar, one of the largest landowners inGreat Britain, saw Denny being led by the police through the lobbyof an expensive hotel on Capri, convinced the police to let him paythe bills Denny owed, and then took Denny to accompany him and hiswife as they continued on their tour of the world.

Novelist Christopher Isherwood, who Denny consideredhis best friend, called him the most expensive male prostitute inthe world.

Today, someone who projects such an instant andpotent power of attraction could forge a successful career, perhapsas a male model, as a character in a daytime soap opera, as atabloid celebrity, as a television or movie star, maybe even as anacclaimed actor. But Denny was born in 1914 in Jacksonville,Florida, when such options were not yet available to those rareindividuals endowed with this sort of sexual magnetism. He neverdid write a memoir that would have told his strange story, that mayhave explained how it felt to possess those magical powers, tooccupy the thoughts of another, to become the obsession of theirlives, to live well off of their wealth and infatuation. How wouldit feel to be Aschenbachs Tadzio in Thomas Manns Death inVenice? To be Humberts Lolita in Nabokovs masterpiece? JayGatsbys Daisy in The Great Gatsby?

The mass of men, Thoreau was brave enough andhonest enough to write in Walden, lead lives of quietdesperation. Most of us come, go, and are gone, our lives lived inshades of gray no more distinguishable, no more memorable, than thesquirrels in a park on a coming of winter morning. Denny was one ofthose rare individuals who, whatever his faults, brought color intothe black and white etchings of everyday life.

Denny never did write his own story, but he doesmove through many memoirs of the times. And for some of the mostrenowned authors of those times, he was a muse, and that color hebrought into a squirrel-gray world inspired them to capture him intheir prose. Denny is Paul in Christopher Isherwoods DownThere on a Visit. He is a character in Gore Vidals novelThe Judgment of Paris, and in his short story Pages from anAbandoned Journal. He appears in Truman Capotes infamousAnswered Prayers on which the author was working, or notworking, when he died. Denny was proud to find himself a characterin Somerset Maughams The Razors Edge.

To be immortalized in a story by a famed authorwould be enough to earn a footnote in literary history. To haveinspired the body of work Denham Fouts did is to become a legend.Who was this man, this enigma, who died at thirty-four, whose looksand personality so charmed and intrigued some of the wealthiest menand some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century?This is his story.

UN HOMME FATAL

It had been a long six years since Peter Watson sentDenny to the United States as the Nazis marched toward Paris. Dennyhad made his way to California, lived in Santa Monica withChristopher Isherwood with whom he practiced Eastern mysticism,became a conscientious objector and served in a forestry camp, andwas studying to become a psychiatrist. Now, at last, in the springof 1946, as weary and war-wounded Europe was beginning to recover,Denny returned to Paris, heading straight to Peter Watsonsapartment at 44 Rue du Bac.

It was a sombre faubourg apartment with theeighteenth century windows, as one friend describedit,1 where, in paneled rooms that before the War hadbeen filled with sculptures and antiques, Watson had hung themodern masterworks he had been acquiring, a collection of what hefelt were the most significant paintings of each of the artists hewas collecting, the best of de Chirico, Gris, Klee, Miro, andPicasso. Six servants had managed the enormous apartment which wasin an elegant eighteenth century townhouse right off the BoulevardSaint Germain, close to the Seine. It was set back from the streetwith a private garden behind it, and through the large windows andFrench doors leading out to a terrace wasParis: the Eiffel Tower,the Grand Palais, the roof of the Louvre, the Sacre Coeur, and notfar away, Notre Dame and the Jardin du Luxemburg.

Peter had not been prepared for what he found when,after the War, he and his friend, the famed literary critic andessayist Cyril Connolly, returned to Paris in July 1945. When theyunlocked and opened the door, they were shocked. My flats ashambles, Peter wrote to a friend really heartbreaking and sofilthy.2 His extraordinary art collection (which todaywould have been valued at hundreds of millions of dollars) haddisappeared. What furniture remained was broken, dirty draperieshung in shreds, everything of value was missing, including whatlittle he had hidden before evacuating as the Nazi tanks approachedthe city. Connolly found the once grand quarters very dilapidatedand buggery3 and terribly depressing, empty ofeverything, no hot water, no clean sheets ...My bed is a sofa inthe dining roomnowhere to unpack anything, and I have to gothrough Peters room whenever I want to go to the bathroom. It isso strange that Peter, who once had a genius for gracious living,now comes to symbolize morbid discomfort to me.4 ForConnolly the flat was heavily mined with reminders of his ex-wifeJean; there, still hanging where Jean and Denny had nailed it forChristmas in 1938, was a scraggly piece of dried outmistletoe.5