White Girls

by Hilton Als

  What happened was this: it was already too late for the colored people I wrote about and celebrated in alternative weeklies and art magazines to feel the pitiful connection I offered on the page, partly out of obligation, and partly out of hope: their careers came first. Why would they want love to strip them bare via my words, or anyone else’s? That didn’t make sense, but when did need ever make sense? Perhaps Marie was similarly confused by the script I wrote for her, a world that had been her world but reimagined by me, the lover who didn’t want to spoil her presence with his own. I’m trying to remember now how she responded to those pages. I remember that, as she read, she lit a Newport—another ethnic giveaway—and I remember sitting at her feet on the floor, looking up at her as she read those pages, wondering if this girl only New York could have produced felt as Holly Golightly, patron saint of so many of Manhattan’s bachelor white girls, felt as Holly listened to the narrator of Truman Capote’s novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s read one of his stories aloud:

  As I read, each glimpse I stole of Holly made my heart contract. She fidgeted. She picked apart the butts in an ashtray, she mooned over her fingernails, as though longing for a file; worse, when I did seem to have her interest, there was actually a telltale frost over her eyes, as if she were wondering whether to buy a pair of shoes she’d seen in some window.

  It was not inconceivable that, like Holly, Marie would unintentionally try to upstage my efforts by affecting boredom with my script; after all, she was a great actress, but only in real life, and in real life it was all about providing Marie with attention. But I didn’t find that effortful. Maybe one day she would like my play. Maybe one day I would love her the way SL loved Mrs. V. Maybe. During my Marie time, I felt as though I would live in the fairyland of possibility forever. In that land love would happen and wholeness would happen and trust would happen and bodies would be kind and fathers would be kind and flowers would grow out of our eyes.

  As Marie read my story, I watched her toes; her feet were curled near the edge of her bed. Her toenails were all chipped red varnish and dirt. I wanted to put them in my mouth, all of it. But to want any of it was to allow the witch of need to enter Marie’s bedroom and frighten us half to death. That witch was scary and white, spoiled and terrible; she was a fire draft over my world of possibility, mowing all those Technicolor hearts and flowers down, burning all that hope down and for what, for something called the truth, erotic and otherwise, okay, how would that help anyone, okay, I wanted Marie’s peeling varnish and white dirt in my mouth, what was the truth of that and what would be the truth of Marie’s reaction if she suddenly found herself in my mouth? Would she hate it? She would hate it. Would she consider herself defiled? She would consider herself defiled. So said the witch of need. She knew everything about me, including the fact that I would not impose on another body what I felt about my own body, or believed had been imposed on me, which is to say my own body. By the time I knew Marie, I already had my mother’s body, with its rounded shoulders shaped by too much tenderness and defeat and bewilderment over the world’s cruelties and anger that this happened the way it happened. But my twin during my Marie time was different. His name was Vincent and he was beautiful, not a pound of fish scales. He went to our high school, and there was nothing he wanted more than to be an actor. His approach to acting was less cinematic, which is to say less internal, than Marie’s. He liked making a show of his blondness—of everything. Vincent was my first white-boy twin outside the movies. He lived in Queens with his patient mother. He loved A Chorus Line, Barbra Streisand, spandex, Shirley MacLaine, high kicks, and a chorus boy named Kevin. In our junior year of high school Vincent kept taking me to a bad Broadway musical, I can’t remember what it was called, because he was in love with a strawberry-blond boy in the chorus. That boy had a hard, fixed smile, and after the show Vincent would wait at the stage door with so much hope for that older boy dancer, and they always talked and as I watched them do so one afternoon, I saw Vincent looking at everything he wanted to be—his twin. Later, Vincent slept with that dancer, and I blushed when he told me the news because how was that beauty possible, but there was a baffled look around Vincent’s eyes when he told me about that boy. He wasn’t as white as he looked. The dude was into some fairly dark shit, and Vincent had obliged him because he loved him. Vincent died of AIDS, baffled by the fact that Broadway never made a home for him as a chorus boy let alone a star. He was always looking for what show business would not give him, which is to say love, as well as the drama or show business in love. Which is one reason I introduced him to Marie after that chorus boy showed Vincent things he did not want to see: here was Marie, and here was my self, and here was our love, which I could not subject her to, thus exposing her to the witch of need. But there’s no keeping a bad woman down; that witch would not shut up. Two or three months after I introduced them, Vincent and Marie were kissing on the fire escape outside our school—a half-Jewish Maria with a gay, Polish Tony. And it seemed to me it was the least I could do to myself.

  For years, I didn’t think SL and Mrs. Vreeland was something I had “done” to myself, so much as their story of love was something they accomplished. I thought of their love as one of the things the world needed, and, when it comes to love, is the world not oneself? Love makes a home and what was I doing in their home after they built it slowly and fast? Still, they made a place for me there; they didn’t take my no for an answer, they lifted me away from my world of garbage bags and stage sets, how could they offer me love like that, as Björk, another white girl sang, once, and Mrs. Vreeland, despite or because of all the push and pull she liked engaging in—like many people, tension defined her—she made room for my twinship with SL, God bless her, I’ll love him eternally she said on her deathbed, cervical cancer, she wasn’t even forty-seven when she diagnosed her own symptoms in 2006, reports said many women who had grown up in or near Toms River, New Jersey, where she was from, suffered the same fate, Jesus help the women of Toms River, New Jersey. In 2007 she asked me to help her with her medical stuff once she backed down and got the Western doctors involved, but I couldn’t do it without SL even though we were all drifting apart, the world had not loved him enough and I could not love him enough but together we could do it, make her well. We stayed in her little house by the sea, actually it was her then boyfriend’s, one of the relatively few white men she could ever bear to look at even though I couldn’t. In that house, SL made me become an I, he was renting the fabric of our frayed we, by saying in response to me saying, At least we’re not alone, But I want to be alone. He was leaving as she was leaving. I knew he couldn’t do it any differently. Oh, Marlene! Most nights I didn’t stay with them in that house. I stayed at a friend’s house, it was near the bay and, at night, not sleeping, I could hear the waves, it was as Virginia Woolf corny as that, they lapped up to the shore of Mrs. Vreeland’s illness, one after another, becoming myself as the world inevitably becomes yourself as you lay there in love, and your love is dying.

  There were other people, Mrs. Vreeland’s friends, they came to help me and SL. To them we were really very evil. We had loved her and then abandoned her. We were black and she had been martyred by blackness. We had been among the black men who offended her body, leaving it with illness. We really hated women and were probably okay with her dying. We really despised white women in particular and we didn’t even know it. We were as terrible and vengeful as August Snow standing near the catafalque where a white woman lies in state, covered in flowers, some of them marigolds, in Jean Genet’s 1959 play The Blacks. We heard the waves lap on Long Island as Mrs. Vreeland prepared to die and SL and I were as big and lonely as the bay and the shore, and we remembered the feel of Mrs. Vreeland sitting on the left or right of us at St. Peter’s Church where Arto Lindsay sang for Jean-Michel Basquiat and later Mrs. Vreeland and I stood at Jean’s grave and she said, “Poor baby, poor baby.” We sat on either side of her dying bed, and what I remember then, before we were more or less asked t
o leave because our presence was considered disruptive, and I left, and SL tried to see her and then he disappeared himself because he felt he was a burden to me, our love, there was no way he wouldn’t identify with her leaving, what I remembered sitting on one side of her bed was sitting with her in the center of a cab, SL on one side of her, me on the other, and Mrs. Vreeland trembling for no reason we understood but feeling protected for every reason she couldn’t explain but wanted us to understand. We tricked children like this into loving us, despite the fact that, as the years went on, SL and I took, each now in his own I, in different parts of the country, other white women to movies like The Central Park Five, featuring Linda Fairstein and Elizabeth Lederer, two white women who, during the 1989 Central Park jogger case, worked in Manhattan’s criminal justice system as the head of the district attorney’s sex-crime unit and the prosecutor who handled the trials, respectively, two white women sanctioned by God and law, but who trafficked in lies that helped destroy a number of lives, all in an effort to prove their twinship with Lady Justice.

  THE WOMEN

  TRUMAN CAPOTE BECAME a woman in 1947, the year this photograph was taken. Much has been made of it since its appearance on the dust jacket on Capote’s first novel, 1948’s Other Voices, Other Rooms.

  Actually, it is not a photograph, but a shadow ground through publicity, coming out the other side as something else. The mind cannot be blank in the face of it. It is an image that is an assertion, a point, asserting this: I am a woman.

  In 1947, women did not publish books. So determined to be authors were they—Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers, Marguerite Young, say—that they buttoned themselves up on dust jackets in some Hemingway influenced image of a male American author. Truman Capote became a woman in 1947 just when “real” women would not or could not. And the woman he became in this photograph—itself better written than Other Voices, Other Rooms—wanted to be fucked by you and by any idea of femininity that had fucked you up.

  In his writing, Capote addressed this issue only once—in the “factual” short story “Dazzle,” which appeared in his last collection of writings, Music for Chameleons (1980). The story is sentimental because Capote could never write of himself—of what he wanted rather than what he imagined for others—without being sentimental. Another form of lying. In “Dazzle” he wrote, “I had a secret, something that was bothering me, something that was really worrying me very much...‘I don’t want to be a boy. I want to be a girl.’”

  By becoming the most famous woman author—not writer, an important distinction—of his generation, Truman Capote sought to limit or cock block other women writers in their quest to be popular, admired, celebrated. He did not want to share the female stage. At the same time, he thought of himself as the model of potential for women who wrote, and an image of what they might become if they continued to write: popular, admired, celebrated.

  The Other Voices, Other Rooms photograph, which also shows Capote as an American woman of style—the vest as opposed to a jacket, his translucent, flat fingernails, the watered or greased hair flattening the top of his head with the light hitting it just so, his eyebrows plucked or raised in mild astonishment, something to be fucked somehow—was too much for a number of his peers who did not possess the kind of will it took to deconstruct their bodies and make them thought-fodder for the camera.

  Capote’s career as a woman author made a more interesting narrative than Other Voices, Other Rooms. And his generally male writer friends realized that what separated them from Truman Capote was his drive to create a self that existed apart from the isolated, nowhere world of writing, the better to become an image accessible to publicity, a story in himself. Donald Windham’s peevish response to this: “The publishing world is what I was aware of Capote’s being in. We were both writers. Still, although I was twenty-seven and he was only twenty-three, he was in the publishing world and I was not.”

  We were both writers. A sentence that beats against Capote’s concept of what the author’s body means in the world—a narrative for other writers to write about. Windham again: “His defense in person was never camouflage; it was always boldness. Once, on a New York street, when he was telling me an anecdote in a high voice accompanied by expansive gestures and saw a burly truck driver glowering at him, he sassed, ‘What are you looking at? I wouldn’t kiss you for a dollar.’”

  Truman Capote lied about this photograph in which he appears to be a woman. He lied about the photograph’s intent, claiming in some instances that it had been sent to his publishers upon request by a friend while he was away, or that he was unaware of what he projected in the image. This was the first instance of the disjunction between Capote’s image of himself and the meaning he ascribed to images of himself. It was also the first instance of Capote refusing to hear the weight of his affect as he effected it, a trope he would repeat within subsequent identities.

  Perhaps he was aware of this: how images effect words in the contemporary world of publishing. “This subject [publishing] fascinates me, and I know so much about it I could talk for seven hours. Nonstop. About how publishers work and why you should do this and why you should do that.”

  As he wrote less and less from 1966 until his death, in 1984, women authors—images of the new feminism—began to be packaged as such and, as such, they became the publishing world’s new custodians of “other” language. (Elizabeth Hardwick “confirms her stature...[and] has as much to say about women in the world as...women on the page,” reads part of the jacket copy of her book Seduction and Betrayal [1974].) Capote was left no other recourse than to become a man.

  He became a man with the publication of his “big” book, In Cold Blood (1966), a book that focuses on one man, Perry Smith, a murderer consumed by vanity like the woman Capote believed he had been once. Which is to say that In Cold Blood set out to prove, in part, that Truman Capote was no longer a lyrical authoress (of Other Voices, Other Rooms, he explained: “What [I] had done has the enigmatic shine of a strangely colored prism held to the light—that, and a certain anguished, pleading intensity like the message of a shipwrecked sailor stuffed into a bottle and thrown into the sea”), but a writer validated by his experience in the world of fact—In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences—a primarily male literary tradition.

  In Cold Blood means a number of things to any number of people; by adopting the non-fiction novel as a form, Capote also wanted to usurp male authority, or at least one man’s authority: non-fiction novelist Norman Mailer’s. In the nineteen fifties Mailer had called Capote “as tart as a grand aunt.” This statement, a caricature and a diminishment of Capote’s role as a powerful woman author, marked how Capote’s self-perception, and hence the public perception of him, would have to change. While grand aunts can be powerful, they are not generally perceived as such in the world of publishing. And as women writers eventually became what publishers could sell, albeit with reservations and marginally, Capote could, if asked, advise them why they “should do this and why [they] should do that.” (Of course, Capote spent a great deal of his time advising significant women on how to become themselves, or his image of themselves. There was, for instance, Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, in whose honor he threw his famous Black and White ball. And, to a greater degree, he advised, molded, resented and loved Barbara “Babe” Paley—“She was the most important person in my life and I the most important in hers”—a woman made powerful through her association with her husband, media chief and CBS chairman William S. Paley.)

  The image (or reality) of the maiden aunt is one that male power revolts against or finds revolting. Masculinity defines itself against such images, let alone realities. Capote was not a maiden aunt in the presence of male power; he was, however, a fashionable person in his attraction to, and fear of it. In a letter to John Malcolm Brinnin, Capote wrote, as he started to try on the role of the male writer: “Maybe I ought to...get drunk and play Prometheus like Norman.” Whic
h is to say that Truman Capote the woman realized that Truman Capote the man would eventually have to adhere to the publishing world’s perception of the male writer if he were to occupy a place in it and be of continued interest to the press.