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Cargando... The Best-Kept Boy in the World: The Life and Loves of Denny Foutspor Arthur Vanderbilt
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I guess the author did the best he could with the few sources available to him. Much of the information is taken from works of fiction, and the biographer quotes extensively from these works as though they are primary source accounts of actual encounters. Really, the book is more about Peter Watson, Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote than it is about Fouts. Includes lots of extraneous details, like Capote's famous Black and White Ball, his work on "In Cold Blood," and Vidal's romance with Jimmie Trimble. ( ) As a reader who follows breadcrumbs, this book is a wonderful addition to my collection of biographies that all interconnect. From 1900 to 2019, links between the famous and infamous, between the fascinating and the boring, the lives lived and shared by people who left an imprint. I enjoyed this book because I had already read biographies of so many of its denizens and what was particularly interesting about Denny was that he was a nobody, from nowhere, that touched the lives of so many of the rich and famous who folded him into their art. He has been immortalized in print by some of the 20th century's most famous authors and is noted in countless published diaries. In the end, he was pathetic and they never did say what happened to his dog Tolstoy when he died. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
The Best-Kept Boy in the World is the first book ever written about Denham (Denny) Fouts (1914-1948), the twentieth century's most famous male prostitute. He was a socialite and muse whose extraordinary life started off humbly in Jacksonville, Florida. But in short order he befriend (and bedded) the rich and celebrated and in the process conquered the world.No less an august figure than the young Gore Vidal was enchanted by Denny's special charms. He twice modeled characters on Denny in his fiction, saying it was a pity that Denny never wrote a memoir. To Vidal he was "un homme fatal."Truman Capote, who devoted a third of Answered Prayers to Denny's life story, found that "to watch him walk into a room was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking; he was the single most charming-looking person I've ever seen."Writer Christopher Isherwood, who Denny considered his best friend, was more to the point: he called him "the most expensive male prostitute in the world." He thus served as the source for the character Paul in Isherwood's novel Down There on a Visit and appears as himself frequently in his published diaries.But Denny's conquests were not limited to the US alone.Somerset Maugham in England has Denny in his celebrated novel The Razor's Edge.To King Paul of Greece he was "my dear Denham" or "Darling Denham," and the King's telegrams to Denny from the Royal Palace always were signed "love, Paul."Peter Watson, the wealthy financial backer of the popular British literary magazine Horizon, had an erection whenever he was in the same room with Denny.The artist Michael Wishart met Denny for the first time at a party in Paris and realized instantly he was in love and that "the only place in the world I wanted to be was in Denham's bedroom."And Lord Tredegar, one of the largest landowners in Great Britain, saw Denny being led by the police through the lobby of an expensive hotel in Capri, convinced the police to let him pay the bills Denny owed, and then took Denny to accompany him and his wife as they continued on their tour of the world.It was because of lofty connections such as these that Capote echoed Isherwood's remark by quipping that Denny was the "best-kept boy in the world," thereby coming up with the title of the chapter in Answered Prayers about Denny.In his short life, Denny achieved a mythic status, and this book follows him into his rarified world of barons and shipping tycoons, lords, princes, heirs of great fortunes, artists, and authors. Here is the story of an American original, a story with an amazing cast of unforgettable characters and extraordinary settings, the book Gore Vidal wished Denny had written. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)306.743Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love Sex work Male sex workersClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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