American socialite and sex worker Denham Fouts was BOTD in 1914. Born Louis Denham Fouts in Jacksonville, Florida to a wealthy industrialist family, his father sent him to Washington in his teens to start work. After working briefly as a stock boy for the Safeways supermarket chain, he relocated to New York City, quickly becoming well-known in Manhattan’s literary and artistic scene and attracting a series of wealthy male and female patrons. His admirers (and clients) included Glenway Wescott (who described him as “absolutely enchanting and ridiculously good-looking”), George Platt Lynes, Paul and Jane Bowles, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, who called him “the Best-Kept Boy in the World”. In the early 1930s, he accompanied a German baron to Europe, quickly switching his affections to a Greek shipping magnate and making his way to Capri. On the point of arrest for not paying his hotel bill, he was spotted by Evan Morgan, Lord Tredegar, who commanded the police, “Unhand that handsome youth, he is mine.” After visiting opium dens in China, Morgan brought Fouts to his family estate in Wales, hosting riotous weekend parties attended by H. G. Wells, Luisa Casati, Aleister Crowley, Lord Alfred Douglas, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Aldous Huxley and Henry “Chips” Cannon. Another guest was Crown Prince Paul of Greece, who became infatuated with Fouts, taking him on a cruise around the Mediterranean. In 1935, Fouts began an affair with socialite Peter Watson (earning him the eternal enmity of Cecil Beaton, Watson’s spurned lover). The relationship was short-lived, due to Fouts’ increasing opium use. Watson introduced Fouts to his friend Michael Wishart: the two had an affair, and in turn, Fouts introduced Wishart to opium. Fouts remained in Paris, having a brief affair with Brion Gysin, through which he met Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Salvador Dalí. As World War Two broke out, the devoted Watson paid for Fouts to return to the United States. He registered as a conscientious objector, relocating to California in 1940 where he moved in with Christopher Isherwood to “lead a life of meditation”. To everyone’s surprise, Fouts completed his high school diploma and studied medicine at the University of California Los Angeles, returning to Europe in 1946. He settled in Paris, entertaining Gore Vidal (who called him “un homme fatal”) and Capote (who later quipped “had Denham Fouts yielded to Hitler’s advances there would have been no World War Two”). After gatecrashing the premiere of Jean Cocteau‘s play Les parents terribles in his pyjamas, he had a brief affair with Cocteau’s lover Jean Marais. He relocated to Rome, where he became the lover of English socialite Anthony Watson-Gandy. Fouts died of a drug overdose in 1948, aged 34. His life inspired the Unspoiled Monsters chapter of Capote’s novel Answered Prayers, Vidal’s short story Pages from an Abandoned Journal and Isherwood’s novel Down There on a Visit. Wishart’s memoir High Diver provided a graphic and less sentimentalised portrait of his time with Fouts.