Denham Fouts: The Best-Kept Boy in the World
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Truman Capote once joked that if Denham Fouts had accepted Adolf Hitler's advances, the Second World War might never have happened. It's the kind of outrageous claim that sums up Fouts perfectly: a man who left behind almost nothing of his own making, and yet somehow ended up at the centre of some of the twentieth century's most extraordinary company. He never published a novel, painted a canvas or held a job for more than a few months. Instead, he became a muse to Capote, Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, was kept in turn by a German baron, a Greek prince and a British lord, and briefly had a real Picasso hanging in his own apartment. He died broke, addicted and largely forgotten, at 34.
Quick Answers
Who was Denham Fouts? An American who became one of the most famous 'kept men' of the 1930s and 40s, moving through Europe's wealthiest and most artistic circles as a companion to a string of rich patrons.
Why is he remembered today? He inspired characters in the work of Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, and remains a fixture in gay cultural history despite never producing any creative work of his own.
How did he support himself? Almost entirely through wealthy benefactors, men and women, who paid for his apartments, clothes, travel and, eventually, his drug habit, in exchange for his company.
How did he die? He died in Rome in December 1948, aged 34, officially of a heart defect, after years of heroin and opium addiction.
A Grocery Clerk with an Unusual Gift
Louis Denham Fouts was born on 9 May 1914 in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of a Yale-educated broom factory president, with a younger sister, Ellen, and brother, Frederic. Even as a child he showed an odd, precocious streak: at just 12, in 1926, he wrote a letter to Time magazine protesting the mistreatment of animals used in film production. It was a conventional, comfortably middle-class upbringing, and Fouts spent little time living up to it. Expelled from school, he was first sent north to Washington, D.C. by his own father, who called in a favour from a relative running Safeway to try to set him up with respectable work. It didn't take. Fouts drifted on to Manhattan during the Depression instead, taking whatever work he could find, including a stint bagging groceries and another at an ice cream factory. It didn't take him long to notice that his looks opened doors ordinary employment never would.
On the advice of a mutual friend, the young Fouts sought out the novelist Glenway Wescott, fresh off winning the Harper Prize for The Grandmothers, and asked him with characteristic directness how exactly one went about getting kept. Wescott obliged, and Fouts spent the rest of his short life putting the lesson to extravagant use.
A European Education
Fouts crossed the Atlantic not long after and began a nomadic run through the European aristocracy that reads more like invented fiction than biography. He travelled through Europe with a German baron until the two quarrelled in Berlin, at which point Fouts simply packed a bag and started hitchhiking towards Venice. A chauffeured car belonging to a Greek shipping magnate spotted him on the road and delivered him straight to the man's private yacht. Fouts promptly fell for one of the yacht's sailors, and the pair jumped ship together after robbing the safe, holing up on the proceeds at the Hotel Quisisana in Capri, then a well-known refuge for Europe's gay community.
When the money ran out and the sailor left, Fouts kept dressing for dinner each night regardless, hoping to be noticed by someone who could pay his bill. Eventually the hotel had him escorted out by police, at the exact moment the British aristocrat Evan Morgan, second Viscount Tredegar, happened to be arriving with his wife. Morgan reportedly took one look and announced that the handsome young man belonged to him. At a party at Tredegar's house not long after, Fouts met Prince Paul of Greece, heir to the Greek throne, who swept him off on a Mediterranean cruise for the rest of the summer.
The Man Who Might Have Stopped a War
In 1933, through a connection to the brother of the First World War flying ace known as the Red Baron, Fouts found himself briefly introduced to Adolf Hitler. Nothing came of the meeting beyond the anecdote itself, but the story stuck, and it eventually gave Truman Capote his most quoted line about his friend: that had Fouts only yielded to Hitler's advances, the Second World War might have been avoided altogether. It was a joke, obviously, but the fact that it circulated for decades among serious literary circles says something about the scale of the myth that had already grown up around Fouts in his own lifetime.
Peter Watson and the Picasso That Got Away
Fouts's longest and most consequential relationship was with Peter Watson, a wealthy British arts patron whose fortune came from his father's margarine business. Watson funded and edited the literary magazine Horizon, moved in the same circles as Cyril Connolly's set of writers and aesthetes, and installed Fouts in a Paris apartment surrounded by genuine Picassos, dressed him in suits from the same tailor as the Duke of Windsor, and gave him a taste for a level of luxury he'd chase for the rest of his life.
One particular painting tells the story of the relationship better than any anecdote. Watson owned an early Picasso, Girl Reading at a Table, prominent enough to be included in the Museum of Modern Art's landmark 1939 to 1940 Picasso retrospective, one of the most important exhibitions in the museum's history. When war broke out, Watson left the painting in storage at MoMA for safekeeping. In 1945, with the relationship long past its peak, it was Fouts, not Watson, who collected the painting from the museum and sold it. Watson never fully forgave him. The painting eventually passed through several more owners before the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired it in 1995, meaning a piece of art Denham Fouts once controlled the fate of now hangs in one of the world's great museums.
A Failed Escape into Meditation
When the war made Europe too dangerous, Watson sent Fouts to the United States, where he met Christopher Isherwood in Hollywood in 1940. Isherwood, then deep into his own study of Vedanta under the guru Swami Prabhavananda, took an interest in Fouts that went beyond the physical: he invited Fouts to move in with him in the summer of 1941 in an attempt to build a shared life of meditation and self-denial. The guru himself was unconvinced and refused to accept Fouts as a formal disciple, and the experiment didn't last, but it left a lasting mark on Isherwood's own writing; Fouts became the basis for the character Paul in Isherwood's 1962 novel Down There on a Visit, a portrait considerably less flattering than the myth Fouts had built for himself. For another queer life from this same mid-century era shaped, and ultimately undone, by the prejudices of the time, our piece on Alan Turing tells a very different but equally haunting story from the same broader period.
Fouts registered as a conscientious objector during the war and was drafted into the Civilian Public Service programme instead of the military, spending time at a logging camp where he reportedly entertained fellow workers with stories of his European escapades. He later finished his high school diploma and enrolled to study medicine at UCLA, a genuinely conventional turn for a man whose life had been anything but, before eventually drifting back to Europe and away from any settled path for good.
Best-Kept Boy, Literary Muse
Fouts's reputation as, in Isherwood's own words, the most expensive male prostitute in the world, made him magnetic to writers looking for a real-life character too strange to invent. Isherwood himself described first seeing Fouts in his diary in strikingly gothic terms, comparing him to Dorian Gray emerging from the tomb, all death-pale elegance in a dark suit and black hat. After the war, spotting Truman Capote's photograph on the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Fouts sent him a blank cheque with a single word attached: come. Capote ignored the money but couldn't resist the summons, and spent hours in Fouts's dim Paris apartment on the Rue du Bac listening to his stories, later immortalising him in print as the best-kept boy in the world.
Gore Vidal drew on Fouts too, and painter Michael Wishart later wrote about his own affair with him in his autobiography, High Diver. His romantic life crossed paths with French cinema as well: he was said to have had a relationship with the actor Jean Marais, better known as Jean Cocteau's own muse and leading man in films like Beauty and the Beast, and the two were photographed together in costume at the Comte Étienne de Beaumont's celebrated Racine-themed ball in Paris. Isherwood's biographer, Katherine Bucknell, has since noted plainly that myth surrounds Denham Fouts, an admission that even those who knew him well were never entirely sure where the man ended and the legend began.
The Final Years
By the late 1940s, the opium and heroin that had once seemed part of Fouts's glamour had become the whole of his existence. Acquaintances described him spending entire days in bed like a corpse, a lit cigarette permanently at his lips, his companion at the time, socialite Anthony Watson-Gandy, gently removing it before it burned him. On 16 December 1948, Fouts was found dead in the bathroom of the Pensione Fogetti in Rome. The official cause of death was a congenital heart defect, a hypoplastic aorta combined with an enlarged left ventricle, rather than an overdose, though years of hard living had certainly done him no favours. He was 34, and was buried in Rome's Protestant Cemetery, among poets, exiles and other foreigners who never made it home.
A Muse Without a Body of Work
What makes Denham Fouts an unusual figure in cultural history is how little he actually left behind. He wrote no memoir, painted no pictures, built nothing that survives under his own name. Everything we know comes secondhand, filtered through the letters, diaries and novels of the far more famous people who fell for him. Arthur Vanderbilt's 2014 biography, Best-Kept Boy in the World, remains the only book-length attempt to pin the man down, and even it leans heavily on the testimony of Fouts's admirers rather than Fouts's own voice, since he left behind almost none of it. In that sense, his afterlife runs strikingly parallel to another figure whose fame rested entirely on the company she kept rather than anything she made; our piece on Marguerite Alibert covers a Parisian courtesan whose own real story stayed hidden behind the powerful men she moved among for almost a century.
Denham Fouts produced nothing of lasting value in the conventional sense, and yet writers who actually mattered to the twentieth century's literary canon couldn't stop circling back to him. Perhaps that's the whole point of the story: some people leave a mark not through what they build, but through the sheer, magnetic force of what they were.
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