No one calls until ten. It just isn’t done.
Her mind races… The asylum? Has Billy pulled another prison break? If so, should she contact Leland, or should she wait… ? He and horrid whore-ed Pam have neglected Billy awfully. She herself has tried to intervene, but then, as we’ve reminded her, it isn’t her responsibility; he isn’t her son any longer, if a stepson ever was.
When the phone goes quiet, she feels the relief of reprieve. Probably just some rat in London who hasn’t had the decency to check the time.
Then—a fresh round of ringing punctures the stillness.
It must be Billy. Or Bridget? The Hayward brood gone hay-wire. It wouldn’t be the first time, and Slim doubts it will be the last. She feels a sharp stab of anxiety, the same she felt when the phone went at sunrise years ago, with grim news about Papa. Ernest had not been well. ‘I’m sick of it all, Miss Slimsky,’ he’d said when she last left Havana, and he’d meant it. They’d been dove shooting one last time, she later confirmed, with the very gun he’d used to— —
Christ. Not Billy too…
Bracing herself for the worst, Slim reaches for the receiver. Before she can answer, Babe’s voice, strained—higher than its usual smooth, silvery perfection.
‘Have you read it?’
Thank God—just Babe.
With a wash of relief, Slim reaches for the papers. ‘Times or Post?’
She’d already flipped through Suzy and Charlotte’s gossip columns, scanned picayune slings and arrows hours before. The usual birdbrain socialites jostling for see-and-be-seen preeminence. Par for the course.
No Paleys. No Haywards. Nothing to warrant an 8 a.m. alarm.
‘Truman’s piece in Esquire,’ says Babe, in an un-Babe-like rush. ‘Have you read it… ?’
‘Esquire… ? No.’
‘Well, get it right away. Read it and call me back.’ Click. Click? From the Queen of Manners? Decidedly un-Babe-like… What could possibly—?
Slim rings for her maid, hands her some change from the vanity drawer, and sends her scampering down to the corner newsstand.
AN HOUR LATER, Slim Sits at her kitchen table nursing a bottle of Scotch, the pages of Esquire spread open before her, confronting her fictional doppelgänger.
Lady Slim Keith, meet Lady Ina Coolbirth…
Both carefree, Californian broads, thrice divorced. Both damn good-looking, yet one of the boys. Sultry gals-next-door, whose laid-back cool makes trousers and suede jackets and slip-on flats alluring. Both poster girls for the man’s-man’s ideal woman. A woman who drinks deep and lives large, who fishes, rides, and shoots big game. Who’ll spin a helluva yarn once the cocktails start flowing… Trouble is, the booze and the spiel tend to flow together.
And there they all are. Our precious, protected secrets. Shared in hushed voices among members of our set, bandied like tennis balls at our most exclusive clubs. Courtside, poolside small talk. Harmless enough. But guarded with hawklike vigilance from anyone outside.
We’re all there. The whole goddamn cast. Some of us appearing under our real names—Babe and Betsey, Jackie and Lee—others under thinly veiled pseudonyms. All at our signature tables at La Côte Basque, unknowingly weathering the barbed insults of the fictional Lady Ina… clearly Slim, dishing the foulest dirt with a gigolo queen named ‘Jonesy’… obviously Truman.
But it’s not ‘Jonesy’ from whose lips the slander drips… It’s hers.
Slim feels a cold chill run through her body… the arctic chill of panic.
Oh, Truheart. You little motherfucker. What have you done?!
That’s before she reads the worst of it… When she gets to the bloodstained sheets, she fumbles for the phone. Babe answers on the first ring.
‘Well?’
‘I feel like I just got punched in the gut.’
‘Yes, but what did you think… ?’
‘Pure garbage. Bitchy, catty trash,’ Slim says unequivocally. She tries to sound dismissive, but they both know this is bigger than that.
It’s a declaration of war.
‘That story…’ Babe pauses. ‘Do you think that it’s true?’
Slim holds her breath, knowing exactly which one Babe means…
The Sheets.
Slim can’t bear to tell her. With her cancer… with the treatments. We all know about Bill’s women. But with Babe looking death in the eye, to mention them seems exceptionally cruel. ‘Truman’s a fantasist. I’ve always told you that.’ Cannot tell her… Can’t…
‘But there’s always some truth in what he says,’ Babe persists. ‘Clearly “Ann Hopkins” is Ann Woodward. The pretend intruder, the dead husband…’
‘Okay, so that bit’s true. My God, to dredge that up…’
‘What was he thinking?’
‘Christ. I hope Ann’s okay…’
SLIM DOESN’T YET Know, but Ann is not okay. Someone smuggled her an advanced copy of Truman’s article days ago. Needless tosay, poor Ann Woodward was horrified by the prospect of having her long-buried demons revisited, sickened by the thought ofbeing dragged through the mud, branded ‘BIGAMIST’ and ‘MURDERESS’ in blazing scarlet letters, all over again.
She’d always admitted to shooting her husband, mistaking him for a prowler. She’d certainly set up the idea, The Prowler being the Woodwards’ sole topic of conversation at the dinner they’d attended for the Duchess of Windsor the very night in question—Ann in particular having banged on about it (Truman’s sardonic pun). They’d been worried about the break-ins in their Oyster Bay hamlet. Had taken to sleeping with shotguns by the bed. What they failed to mention were the separate bedrooms, so broken was the marriage, hanging at that point by a thumbnail. Ann had heard an intruder and shot without looking. But there was something fishy in the position of her husband’s naked body when police responded to her frantic call.
Truman relished the salaciousness of it all, and had a new detail to share each time he told the tale around an enraptured luncheon table, as if he peeked into the Oyster Bay police files on a regular basis.
‘She says she’d grabbed her musket—à la Annie-Get-Your-Gun—and unloaded that bespoke baby into blackest pitch. Bang! Bang!’ Truman enthused. ‘Then she flipped the light switch on, and who should she find—quelle surprise—but her dear, departed Billy, positively riddled with buckshot. Only this unlucky buck was lying limp in the hallway, stretched between their boudoirs. The sheriff arrived to find li’l Miss Oakley poised atop the body—a position she so often occupied in life,’ (he loved to add with a smirk.) ‘She sobbed those great big crocodile tears, still sporting her blighted nighty, splattered with blood like a crimson Jackson Pollock.
“I did it! I killed him! It was dark—I couldn’t see!” At a measly twenty-foot distance?! Ha! Well, the cops didn’t need but two brain cells to rub together to suss out in a jiff that that didn’t add up. The hall was a fine story—mighty fine. I give Annie an ‘A’ for effort. Excluding one small point: that wasn’t where he was killed…’
When we’d asked Tru how he could be so sure, he retorted, with forensic zeal, tidbits that had been withheld from the press. ‘Honey, the police found the corpse inside a glassed-in shower. Naked for Chrissakes! The water was still running and the door was shattered with bullets. Now you tell me… ? How did he die… ?’
He’d then slurp a spoonful of soup, or drain a martini, satisfied.
The scandal had faded, to Tru’s dismay, with Ann’s acquittal, her mother-in-law Elsie having refused to press charges. She was a vestige of the Gilded Age of Astors and Vanderbilts, when one didn’t taint the family name with shame, even if it meant setting a murderess free. Elsie Woodward believed one should only see one’s name in print twice—once at one’s birth and once at one’s death (not even marriage currying favor, its lifespan being so fleeting.)
For Truman, however, the more ink the better. For him a good story never died, and he’s waited with the patience of Job to resurrect this gem. Truman’s a great one for grudges and
for almost two decades, Ann’s been at the top of his hit-list.
‘Look at Capote, that horrid little faggot,’ he’d told us Ann had sniped at a party in St. Moritz in the early Fifties. Other times he’d said he’d bumped into her on the packed El Morocco dance floor, stepped on her clodhopper toes in a frenzied, tipsy jitterbug.
‘Watch it, Fag…’ she’d hissed.
‘Watch yourself, Bang-Bang,’ he said he’d fired back.
Whichever version, however vicious or not, she’d gotten her comeuppance, on the knifepoint of his pen. She’s the main attraction in his Esquire sideshow, the production simply dripping in Truman’s malice. She’s billed as ‘Ann Hopkins’, a flame-haired widow in a black Mainbocher suit and veil, sitting with a Gibson-swilling priest, who consoles her over the death of a husband called ‘David’.
‘Ann was a two-bit Showgirl—Call girl, more like,’ Lady Ina tells Jonesy in Truman’s tale, sinking a spoon into her Soufflé Furstenberg. ‘Desperate to grind her way out of the chorus, Ann found a patron in David Hopkins Senior before moving on to Junior, who married her for her… talents. But when David found out that his Daddy’d beaten him to the punch, the marriage went south quick…
‘David wanted out, without the hefty price tag, so he hired a crack P.I. to see who else’s bones were hiding in Ann’s closets. And before you could blink, he had photographic proof of Ann mounting each member of the Piping Rock Polo Club (one-by-one-by-one, then the whole team, tous ensemble…) Enough to warrant an arrest, not to mention a divorce! But in a twisted turn of fate, clever Private Dick decided to poke around Ann’s old homestead—
‘He interviewed her toothless relatives, who had never known her in the highfalutin’ role of Mrs. David Hopkins—’ Lady Ina relishes this bit in particular— ‘But as Angeline Lucille Crumb, tomboy brat of a taxi-rank Madame, operating from the men’s room of the movie palace of her shit-kicker midwest town. Little ‘Angie’ got hitched fast to get outta Mama’s house—child bride to one Joe-Bob Barnes, a hillbilly leatherneck, promptly shipped to Okinawa. But no sooner had Joe-Bob’s convoy set sail, Angie fled the scene, turning up in Manhattan, repackaged as ‘Ann Eden’. Years hence, Clever Dick dredged up those ancient marriage scraps and unearthed said Joe-Bob Barnes, and got him to testify that he’d married one Angeline Crumb, never divorced her, and that the last time he checked she was still his Missus. Billy threw down, having learned Ann’s dirty secret, which rendered their marriage null and void. He threatened to leave her shamed; he would’ve taken the children. She’d worked too hard to fall back down to the bottom of the heap. That must’ve been what did it… Backed into a corner, bigamy exposed: her first rung on a mile-long ladder out of the inbred gutter. What was left for Ann but to shoot him? La matadora, she was dubbed by the press—the woman who kills. A fate beyond her control, poor dear, determined by an accident of birth; a lethal cocktail of trash and ambition, a gold-digging, shameless whore of a — —’
‘But I never met Truman Capote, and he never met me!’ Ann had insisted when she was told about the article. Whatever the truth, after reading Tru’s sordid Esquire tale, Ann marked the date of its release in her pocket diary. She had retreated to her Fifth Avenue prison and drawn the curtains, her maid Miss Reever would later tell our maids. She’d asked Reever to hold her hand and pray with her.
That night, in a blue-flowering nightgown, Ann fished a notepad from the bedside table, ‘DON’T FORGET…’ printed in typeface as its heading. She scrawled ‘Ann Woodward’ beneath, and placed it by her beige Bakelite telephone. Instead of the mask of cold cream she usually slept in, Ann, still the showgirl of her youth, painted her face, applying pancake base, rosy cheeks, and gobs of green mascara, as if going on stage for a final, grotesque curtain call.
Then, grappling with the ghosts of her messy, guilt-racked past, Ann Woodward went to bed, took a fatal dose of Seconal and never woke up. (The same drug that killed Lillie-Mae-Nina-Capote, we’ll later remind one another, gobsmacked by the irony.)
Punished for an insult spat eighteen years earlier, Ann is Truman’s first victim.
A PAUSE FROM the Other end OF the Line. Babe’s slightly labored breathing. Forty years of L&Ms, finally taking their toll. When she speaks again, it’s careful…
‘That story… The Sheets. Who do you think it is… ?’
‘Who knows. Could be anybody,’ quips Slim, a little too quickly.
Another pause, soft wheezing, then, ‘I can’t figure out who the woman is, but I think I know who the man might be…’
Slim downs her drink… Here we go.
Babe pauses, then, cautiously, ‘Slim… do you think it could be Bill?’
Slim, with feigned certainty, ‘It’s fiction, Babe. Half-baked fiction at that. Don’t waste a minute more on it.’ Changing the subject, ‘Where are we lunching? Quo Vadis?’
‘But he’s Jewish, “Sidney Dillon”…’
‘So is half of Manhattan.’
On the line Babe calms her breath. ‘It can’t be. Truman wouldn’t do that… Not to me. Not to us.’ The thought seems to mollify her.
At the St. Pierre, Slim pours another Scotch. She wishes she could agree.
He’ll pay, that sick little fuck. He’ll pay for selling our secrets like some cheap back-alley pimp. For putting his bile in her mouth.
‘Like I’ve said—Truman’s out for Truman.’
‘But you love Truman.’
‘I love him. But I’ve never trusted him.’
Oh, but Slim had. She hadn’t meant to, but Truman had a way of getting you talking. Getting you drinking and getting you gabbing. Slim racks her brain to separate fact from fiction. Had she told Truman the rumor of Bill’s attempt to bed the Governor’s Wife while Babe was out of town, only to have the lady in question menstruate vats of blood onto the Paleys’ marital sheets? When Babe had called and announced her early return, Bill, in a darkly slapstick turn, had stripped the bed in a panic and thrown the linens in the bath. The idea of the great Bill Paley, CBS mogul, at tub’s-edge on all fours scrubbing bodily fluid from fine Egyptian cotton like an old Russian washer-woman had seemed amusing at the time, as long as it was kept from Babe. More amusing still was Bill’s alarm—after depleting multiple bars of Guerlain’s Fleurs des Alpes guest–soaps—that the bedding might fail to dry in time. The lauded laundryman had stuffed the sheets into the oven, baking their restored pallor to a vanilla linen crisp.
Surely it was Tru who had told that tale to Slim—or had it been the other way around? Oh God… ‘Lady Ina’ feels a pang of remorse for not remembering.
They had shared so much, the pair of them, having told each other tale after tale with competitive zeal, it all seemed to bleed together.
And Jesus, had they talked. They’d talked through hundreds of lunches over twenty years. Over cognac chicken hash in the Oak Bar at the Plaza. Over the Colony’s lobster Thermidor and boeuf à la mode. Past the cast-iron lawn jockeys in their jewel-toned silks on the way into 21. Across smoggy tables at the Stork Club. At dinner parties, over quivering aspic. At galas, shunning banquet fare. In loungers, sipping gimlets, on poolside terraces and shipboard poop decks. They’d talked in taxis stuck in traffic. On Vespas whizzing through Madrid. At thirty thousand feet on board transatlantic flights, smoking at the bar to pass the time. On freezing trains through barren Russian landscapes, clinging to each other for warmth.
It was after those surreal days in Moscow—after a vodka-drenched rail journey to Leningrad, sinking shot after shot, wrapped in multiple coats to stave off the ferocious cold, singing folk songs they’d been taught by the locals Truman had befriended, toasting ‘Na zdorovye’ with each toss-back of succor, enjoying the feeling of crystal-clear Mama-juice as it trickled like lava down their throats—that Truman suddenly cocked his head and stared at Slim.
‘You never confide in me, Big Mama,’ he’d mused, a twinge of hurt in his voice.
‘Truheart, please. We talk all the time! I tell you everything.’
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br /> ‘Yes… But you never confide in me. About you.’
Slim had smiled, ‘No, I don’t, darling, you’re right.’
‘Why don’t you confide in me?’ he pressed, Stoli stripping defenses like paint thinner.
‘Well, Truman,’ Slim slurred, ‘it’s very simple. I don’t trust you.’
Papa had always told her, ‘Miss Slimsky, you have a first-rate, bona fide bullshit detector,’ and Slim had detected early on that Truman was a master of the art. She’d in short order spotted what most of us denied: If Truman could run around blabbing to each of us about the others—‘in the strictest confidence, sugar!’—it was pretty damn certain he was liable to be blabbing to everyone else about us, in an endless round-robin of chat.
We were his creations, whether rendered by mouth or pen, the Miss Golightlys no less real than the Mrs. Paleys or Guinnesses or Keiths—the Mrs. Keiths and Guinnesses and Paleys no more. The details of our lives supplied base metal for his tales, which through some strange alchemy he turned to shimmering, narrative gold, spanning themes and genres. We’d see shades of ourselves in his work; nothing you could pinpoint—we wouldn’t stand for that. It was our essence that peopled his text. We floated in and out in different guises… Babe drifted through his tarnished fairy tales. Gloria’s covert past stalked his thrillers. Marella’s foreign cadence metered his librettos. Lee’s long-stifled envy simmered beneath his rivalries. The bridles and florals of C.Z.’s sporting life pervaded his pastorals. Slim spawned heroines in stark western gothics: Steinbeck-tinged seediness meets little girl lost.
‘Big Mama had a brother who looked exactly like me. Same tow hair, same cherubic face. The spitting, spitting image. Edward was his name (after their Daddy—a big fish who owned half the sardine canneries in Cannery Row—) but folks only ever called Ed Junior “Buddy”—the very name my old cousin Sook called me as a boy… Buddy.’
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