All the while, Denny Fouts clocked that all these back roads would eventually lead him to the ultimate fertile hunting ground, where famous aristocrats, writers, poets, painters and other creatives roamed. But that’s after many meanderings through the world of lowly employment, serving amongst others as a clerk in an ice cream factory and stock boy in a grocery store after having been expelled from school. His father was a Yale graduate from a humble middle-class family, the president of a broom factory Denny would eventually follow in his father’s academic footsteps and study medicine at UCLA. At age 12, he already showed a confidence and assertiveness way beyond his years when he wrote to Time Magazine protesting the use of animals in films. His bizarre antics (he once shot flaming arrows from his hotel room onto the bustling Champs Élysées) and his self-destructive heroin addiction were out of control, but all of it further bolstered the mythical figure that was Denny Fouts. Born Louis Denham Fouts in 1914 in the Deep South of Jacksonville, Florida, he died young, at age 34, on Decemin Rome. In fact, so mesmerised was Capote with Fouts’ spellbinding antics, he famously claimed that “ had Denham Fouts yielded to Hitler’s advances there would have been no World War Two.” Denham Fouts by George Platt Lynes, 1944ĭenny Fouts’ flame shone brightly, and momentarily illuminated everyone in his orbit, but burnt out in his prime. Capote ignored the money but couldn’t resist the call, and ended up listening to the stories of the “best-kept boy in the world” for hours on end in a dark apartment on the Rue du Bac. Added to this fool-proof arsenal of looks and personality was a cocky and cavalier attitude: who in their right mind have the nerve to send a blank cheque to writer-god Truman Capote, summonsing him with a one-word edict, “ come”? This happened in Paris shortly after WW2 and was triggered by Fouts spotting an image of Truman Capote on the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Once he had homed in on them, moths to a flame they were, putty in the hands of the irresistible Denny Fouts. That he was ridiculously good-looking perhaps also needs to be said, and also that his ‘pulling’ prowess was without peer: he could literally snag and bag any celebrity he set his sights on. To boot, he was streetwise and intelligent. Denny Fouts exuded a carnal mojo of the kind that compelled a Greek king, German baron and a British viscount to pursue him to the ends of the earth. He was blessed with more natural-born charisma than Leonardo Di Caprio, Brad Pitt and The Talented Mr Ripley put together. Whatever that intangible ‘It’ factor is, the gods bestowed it on Denham ‘Denny’ Fouts in disproportionate quantities.
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