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or what it signified.
    Nor can I recall how the affair ended, other than that The End was a quarrel caused by Denny’s sniffing cocaine in the bar of the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne. But by now Denny, like Porfirio Rubirosa, another word-of-mouth myth on the Continental circuit, had generated the successful adventurer’s
sine qua non:
mystery and a popular desire to examine the source of it. For example, both Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton had, in effect, paid a million dollars to find out if other ladies were lying when they praised that kinky-haired piece of trade His Excellency the Dominican Ambassador Porfirio Rubirosa, groaning over the fat effectiveness of that quadroon cock, a purported eleven-inch café-au-lait sinker thick as a man’s wrist (according to spinners who had spun them both, the ambassador’s only peer in the pecker parade was the Shah of Iran). As for the good late Prince Aly Khan—who was a straight dealer and a fine friend to Kate McCloud—as for Aly, the only thing that Feydeau-farce brigade shuffling through his bed sheets really wanted to know was: is it true this stud can go an hour a time five times a day and never come? I’m assuming you know the answer; but if you don’t, it’s yes—an Oriental trick, virtually a conjurer’s stunt, called
karezza
, and the dominant ingredient is not spermatic stamina but imagistic control: one sucks and fucks while firmly picturing a plain brown box or a trotting dog. Of course, one ought also to be always stuffed with oysters and caviar and have no occupation that would interfere with eating and snoring and concentrating on plain brown boxes.
    Women experimented with Denny: the Honorable Daisy Fellowes, the American Singer Sewing Machine heiress, lugged him around the Aegean aboard her crisp little yacht, the
Sister Anne;
but the principal contributors to Denny’s Geneva bank account continued to be the richest of the double-gaited big daddies—a Chilean among
le tout Paris
, Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, our planet’s chief supplier of guano, fossilized bird shit, and the Marquis de Cuevas, road-company Diaghilev. But in 1938, on a visit to London, Denny found his final and permanent patron: Peter Watson, heir of an oleomargarine tycoon, was not just another rich queen, but—in a stooped, intellectual, bitter-lipped style—one of the most personable men in England. It was his money that started and supported Cyril Connolly’s magazine
Horizon
. Watson’s circle was dismayed when their rather severe friend, who had usually shown a conventional regard for simple sailor boys, became infatuated with the notorious Denny Fouts, an “exhibitionistic playboy,” a drug addict, an American who talked as though his mouth were busy with a pound of Alabama corn mush.
    But one had to have experienced Denny’s stranglehold, a pressure that brought the victim teasingly close to an ultimate slumber, to appreciate its allure. Denny was suited to only one role, The Beloved, for that was all he had ever been. So, except for his sporadic barterings with maritime trade, had this Watson been The Beloved, a besieged fellow whose conduct toward his admirers contained touches beyond De Sade (once Watson deliberately set forth on a sea voyage halfway round the world with an aristocratic, love-besotted young man whom he punished by never permitting a kiss or caress, though night after night they slept in the same narrow bed—that is, Mr. Watson slept while his perfectly decent but disintegrating friend twitched with insomnia and an aching scrotum).
    Of course, as is true of most men sadistically streaked, Watson had paralleling masochistic impulses; but it took Denny, with his
púttána’s
instinct for an ashamed client’s unspoken needs, to divine this and act accordingly. Once the tables are turned, only a humiliator can appreciate humiliation’s sweeter edges: Watson was in love with Denny’s cruelty, for Watson was an artist recognizing the work of a superior