By Arthur Vanderbilt, $19.99; Magnus Books; 189 pages
Before the ease of sites like RentBoy.com, male hustlers relied on word of mouth. But legendary "un homme fatal" Louis Denham ( Denny ) Fouts managed to command a worldwide presence before there was even a World Wide Web.
If you haven't heard of him, know that pretty much everyone wanted to drink his bathwater, from tycoons to the prince ( later king ) of Greece. With few pictures out there as a reference to his indescribable magnetism, Denny's famous and rich admirers were aplenty.
Born in 1914 in Jacksonville, Flordia, to a conservative family, Fouts moved to Manhattan to work as a stock boy after getting expelled from school. Fast realizing the power of his looks, he enlisted gay novelist Glenway Wescott to mentor him on how to "get kept." Before long, Foutswas traveling through Europe with a German baron, yachting with a Greek shipping magnate and ending his first nomadic stint with a British lord, hitchhiking and stealing along the way.
One of his most consistent benefactors was Peter Watson, whose father made a fortune during WWI by inventing margarine. Watson set him up in an apartment in France, surrounded by the original works of Picasso and Klee, and soon Fouts became accustomed to handmade suits by the same tailor as the Duke of Windsor, Faberge cigarette cases, luggage decorated by Salvador Daliand as much coke, heroin and opium as he desired.
Best-Kept Boy is full of grandiose descriptions of times of excess, elegance and the prerequisite questionable behavior of the late '20s to the '40s. Denny's story is mostly told through the words of his admirers. But with all of the descriptions included"enchanting," "beyond being good-looking" and with "the most delicious body odor"Denham Fouts himself remains elusive.
It is known that he was the muse of many literary giants, including Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, forever immortalized in their minds and on their pages. Capote is even quoted as saying, "Had Denham Fouts yielded to Hitler's advances there would have been no World War Two." It's a wonder any of them had time to write anything else, what with the amount they wrote about Denny in their journals, memoirs, fictional works and letters to each other. Author Vanderbilt seems to have dug up every bit of it. But even they, masters of the written word, had a hard time identifying what it was that kept them so enthralled. Drug addict Denny is often described as sour, temperamental, lewd, paranoid, and confrontational with a penchant for young boys between the ages of 14 and 16. By his own admission, he lost his virginity to his brother: "Under the stars. That's where I screwed my beautiful brother. Oh boy! Was he beautiful." He walked through the world merely tolerating, if not outright antagonizing, his companions while they utterly adored him.
However, there are always people with "it," whatever "it" is. You might be left shaking your head and wondering how you got there, but at least you had a good time. Although Denny's "it" can't be pinpointed, Best-Kept Boy makes it obvious that he mastered playing on the savior complexes of others, spinning fantasies and being whatever his current benefactor needed him to beDenny lived celibate as a yogi with one of them, when he wasn't going to school to be a psychiatrist, serving time at forestry camp or composing a novel.
Crafted as yet another, more comprehensive love story to this enigmatic character, if Best-Kept Boy looked to answer the question of who Denham Fouts was, it need only look at a blank page.