Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages

Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince - 2014

A long, meandering title for a long, meandering book, a 700-page, tabloid-style tome focused loosely around three of the most important and colorful writers of the mid-20th century. The fact that they were gay is incidental to their careers and legacies, as they prospered well before the Stonewall era, but it is central to the lascivious agenda of this book. Don’t expect much exploration of the artistic process or intellectual struggles; this is strictly a gossip-padded fantasy about the sex-lives of celebrities, in particular Hollywood stars. The first thing to understand is that - in the world imagined by Porter and Prince - every single famous or quasi-famous person you can possibly think of was either homosexual, bisexual or, at the very least, dabbled in same-sex escapades now and then. Many laborious paragraphs describing imagined orgies and other decadence can only be laughed at, but only if you’re not too bleary-eyed from reading the twelfth one within the same chapter. Then you flip through the hefty remaining 600 pages real quick to see if this is what the entire book is like, and finding that it is, you have to decide how much more you can take. What kept my interest most of the time was the book’s bizarre and schizophrenic ambitions. Buried deep is a genuinely well-researched and interesting triple biography of three literary titans of their day, and a portrait of the literary and theatrical worlds of the 1940s and 50s. Despite the impressive scope of the book, the authors sabotage themselves on every page with their lack of citations, flat prose, maddeningly excessive typos, barely concealed puerile obsessiveness, and most of all the odd lack of interest and knowledge of Williams’, Vidal’s and Capote’s major works. They briefly run through descriptions of various books and plays, but with even less insight than a quick glance at Wikipedia can offer. If there is a fatal flaw, it’s the quality of writing, including a lack of any imagination when conjuring dialogue for their famous cast of characters. Celebrities in every age group and from diverse continents all have the exact same wit and speech patterns as the authors of the book. It is sometimes claimed that direct quotations originate from second-hand reports the authors had with participants, and just as often it’s clear that the tales have scant credibility, being third or fourth generation gossip and libel against the dead, or even pure fabrication from Porter’s and Prince’s imaginations. If the book was a fifth the length, it would qualify as harmlessly silly light reading, but its sheer volume is what makes you keep wanting, in vain, to take it seriously.