Best-Kept Boy in the World Read Online Free

a god. Exactly what was it
others were seeing? Had he become the reflection or was he still
himself? Who was that?
     
     

CHAPTER TWO

    “HOW DOES ONE MANAGE TO GET KEPT?”
     
    How had it all begun?
    There are just two glimpses of Denny’s childhood
growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, but both especially
revealing.
    Deeply moved by an article he had read in Time magazine about a German film director who had killed
two horses to capture their death on film, Denny wrote a letter to Time which appeared in the June 21, 1926 issue:
     
    Sirs:
    I am but twelve years old, but I always have, and
always will, detest any being (or fiend, as Subscriber Marlborough
put the German, Schwarz) who would for the sake of anything, make
life miserable for any dumb beast or animal. When I read the
article on “Horses” [TIME, May 31, GERMANY] where the German moving
picture producer, Schwarz, sprung a trap under two horses to make
them tumble down the cliff onto the rocks below for the sake of
making moving pictures of their agony, I felt as one would if
someone would suddenly tell you that a certain man had tortured
every baby in the world to his death. I felt like writing to TIME
and telling to TIME how I felt, but I said to myself “TIME has no
place for little boys” and I dropped the subject, but when I read
the letter of Karl Busch [TIME, June 7, LETTERS] [Busch had opined
in his letter that Americans seemed “unable to appreciate the
artistic honesty of director Schwarz”] I could not restrain. I say
“Let Busch have his own opinion, everyone has, but it is my opinion
that not many will agree with Mr. Busch.
     
    DENHAM FOUTS
     
    Jacksonville, Fla.
     
    For a twelve-year-old boy to be reading Time in 1926 was remarkable enough; for that twelve year old to be moved
to compose and send a letter of that maturity says so much, both
about Denny’s intelligence and about his compassion. The boy who
felt so strongly about two horses being killed for the benefit of a
film is the same man walking along a Santa Monica beach eighteen
years later in December of 1944, where happening upon a seagull
with a broken wing, he amputated the wing to make the bird more
comfortable.
    The other glimpse of his boyhood is just as
revealing. Denny was raised in a family of moderate means but
imbued with the old Southern aristocratic tradition, with all that
implied about adherence to custom, traditions, conservative
thought. Denny’s paternal grandfather was vice president of a
railroad, his maternal grandfather founded the Atlantic National
Bank and the Timuquana County Club. Denny’s father, Edwin Louis
Fouts, graduated from Yale in 1910, worked in his father-in-law’s
bank in Boca Grande, then moved the family to Jacksonville where he
was employed at the Florida Broom Company and later started Fouts
Manufacturing, an asbestos awning business, but never quite
measuring up to his father’s high expectations for him.
    Denny’s love of thumbing his nose at tradition, of
doing whatever he pleased, surfaced in his teenage years. An essay
he wrote for his school newspaper, a strident defense of socialism,
may well have been the least of the infractions which got this
teenager—who had “screwed my beautiful brother” outdoors under the
stars—expelled from high school. This was not the sort of son
parents would want to have around their daughter, Ellen, a year
younger than Denny, and their son, Frederic, four years younger
than Denny, if alternatives were available. Denny’s father asked
his uncle, who was president of Safeway Supermarket Stores, to find
a job for his wayward son in Washington, D.C.
    Not much more was happening in Washington in 1933
for an intelligent, restless, hormonally supercharged nineteen year
old than in Jacksonville, and after a few months Denny had made his
way to Manhattan, found a job in those bleak Depression days as a
General Foods stock boy bagging groceries and wrapping packages,
and shared a small apartment