Best-Kept Boy in the World

De: Arthur Vanderbilt

Narrado por: FR Springer

"Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me, a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.” (Truman Capote)

Denham (Denny) Fouts, the 20th century's most famous male prostitute, was a socialite and literary muse whose extraordinary life started off humbly in Jacksonville, Florida. But in short order he befriended (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 was more to the point: he called Denny “the most expensive male prostitute in the world.”

In his short life, Denny achieved a mythic status, and Best-Kept Boy in the World for the first time follows him into his rarefied 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. Arthur Vanderbilt is the author of many books of history, biography, memoirs, and essays. He lives in New Jersey and Massachusetts.

©2014 Riverdale Avenue Books (P)2023 Riverdale Avenue Books

Fun, Brief and Gossipy

“Best Kept Boy in the World” by Alexander Vanderbilt tells the story of the life of Denham Fouts, a young man from Florida who was "kept" by several men (and women), and wondered around Europe and New York Cafe Society with well-to-do guys and even the future king of Greece as well as with some very famous authors like Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.

Fouts’s life inspired characters in the works of Isherwood, Vidal, and Capote; the lives of these authors as they intersected with Fouts; and the lives of other luminaries whose patronage Fouts enjoyed.

In the end this is the story of a promiscuous gay man, who became the muse for many of our greatest gay male authors. But alas, another Prometheus that flew too close to the sun. In Fouts short life he ended up a self-destructive, opium & heroin addict that people sometimes found hard to get rid of.

It’s not very substantial but it is fun, gossipy, salacious, and brief.