Closing the book with the dramatist’s flair, Tru looked to his audience, expectant.
‘Truman, that’s extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary,’ said Kay, wiping tears from her eyes.
Tru had hesitated, then leaned in close. ‘Can I tell you a secret, Kay-Kay… ? Deep down, I think I know… I’ve finally written my masterpiece. And it scares the living shit out of me.’
‘But why in the world—?’
‘What’s left?’ he’d asked, forlorn. ‘I’m scared to death I won’t be able to do anything nearly as good again, and that this is the beginning of the end.’
Kay says she had dismissed this as preposterous, yet somewhere in the pit of his gut, Truman knew that he was right.
At night they smoked a hashish pipe furnished by islanders in turbans and collapsed woozy on the cushion-strewn deck, giggling in earnest for the first time since death had kissed them both. They lay cradling one another, staring into a star-littered sky.
AT THE TOP of the invitation card, Truman neatly writes: ‘In honor of Mrs. Katharine Graham’ in blue ink, shifting the phone receiver to his other shoulder as he slides it into an envelope.
‘I’m sealing your invite as we speak—it’s too late to say no.’
‘Truman, I’m not depressed. I don’t need—’
‘Now Kay-Kay, I won’t hear another word. You’re having a ball and that’s final.’
He hangs up, cutting the call unceremoniously short before his honoree has time to object. Satisfied, he turns focus and fountain pen to the next invitation, ready to insist four hundred and ninety-nine more times in his neat script that his dance has nothing to do with In Cold Blood, or feting his own Arrival. For those of us who know him, he isn’t fooling anyone.
As we say, Truman’s throwing a party for himself.
YESSIR, HE’S GONNA give little ole manhattan a night it won’t soon forget.
He’s made a special trip to Woolworth’s and bought a brand-new ten-cent composition book, the kind he uses for his work, black-and-white confetti-flecked, its pattern calling to mind the marble floor in the Paleys’ foyer. He’s written a single word— ‘DANCE’—on the cover, and has, for the better part of three months, carefully recorded the name of everyone he knows. Writers. Film stars. Politicians. Intellectuals. He’s weighed with consideration his feelings for each, and either starred their name or drawn a line through it. He’s relished assembling the perfect cast, like playing God at an Elysian cocktail party.
He’s been benevolent—hadn’t he listened sympathetically to an acquaintance who called to say his wife refused to leave her bed, so devastated was she not to have been included? There was something in the husband’s sad dignity that moved Truman. Something about the wife’s desperation that reminded him of Lillie-Mae-Nina-Capote. He had bandaged their wounded pride, spinning the omission into a mistake. ‘Why honey, did your invite not arrive? Mercy me. It must have gotten lost in the mail. I’ll have my secretary send another straight away. I would simply looooove to have you at my party.’
In equal measure he’s used his list to settle old scores, having added Ann ‘Bang-Bang’ Woodward’s name for the sole pleasure of striking her off for calling him ‘a horrid little faggot’ at El Morocco years ago. Just a graze now… he’s saving his big guns for a later date.
He’s carried his notebook everywhere. To the Colony. La Côte Basque. To 21, where he eschews his usual prime table for a booth in the corner, holding hushed meetings, shielding his precious pages from curious eyes. He brings it like a prized pet to our various swimming pools through those humid summer months.
‘Lee, should we have Jackie, or is she playing ‘Widow’ all November… ?’ We all know he can be a little bastard and have learned to keep our distance when he’s on a jag. We can see him toying with us, a tomcat with a garbage pail of mice. Enjoying the panic that flickers across our carefully made-up faces when he cuts another name from his list. Being the inner, inner circle, we doubt we have to worry that we’ll actually be axed, but you never really know with Truman.
The acquaintances, outsiders to our set, are practically tripping over themselves to get in his good graces. They send him Mont Blanc pens and theater tickets and five-figure checks as offerings. ‘Why thank you, sugar,’ he says with a smile. ‘But my party’s just for cloooose personal friends… and I don’t waste time on folks I don’t admire.’
Now a man of means, the boy can no longer be bribed.
THE PAPERS SAY it’s out of control. New York’s been struck with Black-and-White fever, ever since Truman mailed his invites. ‘In one day I made five hundred friends and five thousand enemies!’ he relishes telling the press. Truman’s roster of ‘personal friends’ reads like a new aristocracy—Sinatra, Mailer, Warhol, Bacall. CAPOTE’S COURT—AN INTERNATIONAL LIST FOR THE GUILLOTINE! Such is the fodder that dominates the headlines, comprised of six daily papers, plus Vogue, Bazaar, and Esquire. Even the New Yorker, who once fired the effete copyboy with the big ideas, now wants in on the act.
He’s waited for this moment, waited since he first arrived in the wheat-fed Kansas wasteland, patiently befriending detectives and killers alike, he having a rare gift for walking delicate tight-ropes of loyalties. He’s invited his very close Kansas friends to his dance—the ones who are still alive, that is—immortalized after six long years as characters in his masterpiece. And now they have been summoned, all the way to New York City.
‘I was taken to the Plaza for the very first time,’ he’ll remind them when they’ve checked into the big hotel and tucked into lunch in the Oak Bar, ‘not by Nina, not by my Daddy—but by the men in suits with their IQ tests.’ A lifetime ago, when kids lined up for Chinese boxes and apple-bobbing in the Faulks’ Monroeville yard, orchestrated by a midget outcast, hiding behind a Fu Manchu mustache.
The boy-turned-man has waited ages to celebrate his wild success. To show every moron teacher, every dimwit bully, everyone who ever doubted him just how wrong they were.
He’s metamorphosed into Truman Capote, Great American Writer. And he got there on his own special merit. It only confirms what we already knew, the thing he’s said over and over to anyone who’ll listen: that he’s a bona fide genius, as long proclaimed by science.
SIX
1970/1974/1975
DUETS
LOOKING BACK, MARELLA had seen the Storm Brewing.
That’s why she’d stopped speaking to him months before. European Swan Numero Uno—as Truman long ago christened her—is fortunate that Manhattan is not her natural habitat. She visits, of course, but what better excuse than being isolated on a yacht in the middle of an ocean to escape the lunch requests Truman continues to bombard us with. Invitations that, post-Esquire, largely go unanswered.
It happened on board the Agneta in the last days of August, as they sunbathed on the polished deck, sipping iced prosecco and nibbling plates of antipasti.
‘Uno, you simply must read my latest chapter.’ He had brought a stack of pages from his cabin. She’d been excited, Marella. Long before she’d met Truman she had read his work and thought him a genius. She was his fan before she was his friend, having devoured translations of Breakfast… and Other Voices… before he’d infiltrated her sphere. As he’d done with each of us, he’d read her excerpts of In Cold Blood before its release, and she’d listened, moved by the beauty of his prose.
‘Bellissimo, Truman. Sei Michelangelo,’ she’d said, believing him a modern master of his craft. Reading a sliver of his long-awaited Answered Prayers would be a thrill for any of us, but Marella took the charge as seriously as a Medici glimpsing the Pietà in progress. She started the chapter, which was set neither in the gothic South of his childhood, nor the barren plains of Kansas, but amid the cramped tables at La Côte Basque. After the first ten pages, Marella began to question her abilities as a reader. English was not her first language. Perhaps she’d misunder-stood… ? Someone called ‘Lady Ina’ seemed to be spitting insults at everyone in sight, at
people that we knew. Marella had to wonder, was she missing something… ? It sounded like one of Truman’s catty gossip sessions. Worse, in fact. (We’ve all noticed that Truman is generally on slightly better behavior around Marella. Call it the Princess Factor.)
Reclining on her stomach on a lounger, the graceful slope of her exposed back absorbing the midday heat, Marella had struggled through the text like a remedial schoolgirl, straining to grasp the nuances of a foreign tongue. Even so… surely this wasn’t literature?
She turned to the author, who sat gnawing at a ribbon of Prosciutto, flipping through a paperback potboiler.
‘Truman, stai scherzando?’
‘What’s that, Uno?’
She joined him at the table. ‘Is this a jest? Where is your novel?’
His thin grin spread as he popped an olive into his mouth. ‘You’re looking at it.’
Marella frowned. ‘Well, perhaps my English isn’t good enough…’
‘Oh yes, of course, sugar… It’s molto colloquial. Here.’ He wiped his greasy fingers on the tablecloth, extending an eager palm. ‘Let me read it to you.’
He snatched the pages from Marella’s lap. Then impulsively tossed them aside.
‘Actually, I don’t need that. It’s all up here in my brain-box,’ this, tapping his head. And with that he cleared his throat, and in the high, melodic voice the princess had come to love, almost as much as his old cousin Sook in Monroeville had, Truman began:
‘Bill— oops! I mean Dill…’ he gave Marella a conspicuous wink, ‘… couldn’t come. Despite the gusto in the sack for which he was renowned (for what he lacked in technique he made up for in ambition…) he couldn’t get a cock-hold. It felt as if he was drowning in a slick, soupy void. There was nothing about the Governor’s wife that could be vaguely described as “tight”, except perhaps the purse of her lips as she endured his efforts with a mix of disdain and ennui. If only he could rouse that dull, cadaverous form… He withdrew his flaccid snake from its hole, moving down the bed towards her snatch. That roused her, alright, though not in the manner he’d hoped. ‘STOP!!’ she commanded, tugging his hair like a pair of flimsy reins.
‘You sure you don’t want a nice licking?’ Dill offered, solicitous, like a Good Humor ice cream man, throwing in a cone. ‘CHRIST, no!’ she snapped. He hoisted himself back up and said, ‘Well then perhaps you’d care to suck me off and we’ll just call it quits… ?”
By the time the stewards arrived with lunch, Truman had moved on to the moment in his narrative when the Governor’s Wife rose to dress, leaving as a parting favour, he gleefully reported, a blood spot the size of Sumatra amidst the smooth, blue ocean of sheets.
‘Ohhhhhh how perfect is that…’ Truman enthused as cloche lids were lifted to reveal steaming plates of Spaghetti Puttanesca. ‘Whore’s Pasta!’
Marella had long lost her appetite.
‘Isn’t it a scream… ?’ he laughed, digging into the pungent tomato sauce. ‘You see Dill only wants that blue blood bean-flicker to prove that he can have her. Because they’d kept the Yids out of their fundraisers and their country clubs … Ironic, given that he’s just about the only atheist Jew in Manhattan!’
She had watched him, Marella told us, repulsed, when he’d asked her between greedy mouthfuls, ‘So Uno … What do you think of my ditty… ?’
‘I think it’s vile, Truman. Pettegolezzo.’
That had straightened his spine. The Great Author bristled at the unfamiliar sting of criticism. Marella said it was as if something snapped, and the lapdog bared his Rottweiler teeth—that he’d turned in an instant from toy-pup to butchers’ dog, bred to pull meat to the market.
‘Well you wouldn’t really know, would you? You can’t even speak the fucking language.’
‘I’ve read what you’ve written before, and this is beneath you.’
‘What the hell do you know. You’re just a paid-for princess. Principessa Puttana,’ he laughed. ‘I’m gonna do to America what Proust did to France. It’s utterly brilliant— it’s bold and it’s brave. You wouldn’t know brilliance if it hit you in the faccia.’
Marella felt dizzy. She looked to her plate to avoid his grimace.
Why had she never noticed his teeth before, how the gums receded, how the canines tapered to sharp little points? She placed her napkin over her untouched Puttanesca, covering the pool of tomato sauce, Kalamata eyeballs staring up at her. Truman’s manuscript pages fluttered in the breeze beneath her butter knife.
‘What don’t you like about it?’ he demanded. ‘Be specific.’
She’d reached for a page, reading slowly in her thick Italian accent, ‘Why would a nouveau riche, narcissistic, sizably-packaged Jew go for a cardiganed, corduroyed giantess who wears spiked golf-shoes and reeks of tuberose and tal—talcum powder?’
‘Talllll— taaaall— tallllcum powder…’ Truman mocked her accent.
Marella pressed on, ignoring him. ‘Particularly given that his wife was Cleo Dillon, the most sublime specimen of female perfection the world has ever known?’
She lowered the page and looked at Truman pointedly. ‘What do you think Babe will have to say… ?’
Truman met her gaze, then looked away, leaving the question hovering in the air.
‘This is gossip. It’s nasty, vicious talk. Truman… please don’t do this.’
For a moment his eyes glazed, then began to water. A salty sea breeze made him blink, its breath chilling the single tear that escaped down his cheek.
‘Babe’s not Babe when I’m writing.’ He’d rubbed his eyes roughly, reaching for the bottle of prosecco. ‘She’ll understand.’
Marella had leant across the table and grasped his arm, trying to make him see.
‘Truman… I don’t think that she will.’
He ingested this before freeing himself and depleting his glass. ‘Yeah, well, what do you know. Non capisci un cazzo—you’re thick as a fucking plank.’
Truman rose, collecting his manuscript, tucking it carefully under his beach towel.
He looked to Gianni, swimming in the waters around the anchored yacht, skin brown as a butternut. The bronzed skin of privilege.
‘Miele, Gianni’s so rich he buys a new boat each time his old one gets wet!’ Truman, in better spirits, loved to tease.
Heir to the vast Fiat fortune, Gianni had lost no time, it seemed, test-driving hundreds of the flashy bastards, chauffeuring around half the female population of Europe before he was forced to settle down and marry. Scion of an Italian industrialist father and American heiress mother—the latter of whom Marella seemed a slightly faded carbon copy—Gianni had complied. But not without resistance.
He preferred more oomph in his inamoratas, the famed Pam Churchill having tooted his horn with Satchmo-gusto for the better part of a decade. Her enthusiasm legendary, she’d worked her way through the brass sections of the fraternities of worldly men, and while each appreciated her performance, nobody married Pam Churchill. Never one to be deterred, Pam had set her sights on Gianni; had converted to the Catholic faith, enrolled in a crash course at Berlitz and taught herself Italian. (None of us could accuse her of being anything short of a go-getter.)
‘For fucksakes, she even learned to roll his nonna’s meatballs!’ Truman had exclaimed.
That was until Gianni’s famiglia threatened to fling themselves off some picturesque Piedmont bridge if he considered such a scheme. When he’d driven his new’ 53 Fiat Otto Vu smack into a lorry (after a red-hot fight with Pam, it must be said, having been caught by her in flagrante with another of his playthings), he was finally slowed by broken bones, confined to bed rest. His sisters had ensured that Pam was barred from visitation, while Marella was driven past her, waiting at the hospital gates. The domineering sorelle closed ranks, having determined the princess-next-door be given preeminence, as if arranging a marriage of Borgian proportions.
‘You can see why, can’t you? Marella even looks pricey. If sheand Babe were in the window at Tiffany�
��s,’ Truman often analyzed, ‘Babe may be more elegant, but Marella would be more expensive.’
Indeed, with her aquiline profile, neck that went on for days, and pedigree to match, Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto proved a more appropriate matrimonial option than the fast women who’d warmed the seats of Gianni’s even faster cars.
It must be noted that Truman never had cared for speed. The lethargy of his Southern childhood still lingered in his blood, flowing as slow through his veins as tar through a gully.He’d never be as quick as the playboy with his streamlined strokes, cutting through the ocean below, nor as slick… except when it came to words. That’s where Tru’s quickness triple-lapped others, his verbal velocity outpacing Gianni’s breaststrokes and racecars and speedboats combined. As ever, Truman took comfort in his words, which never failed to restore his wounded pride.
Armor and weapon…
As he turned to retreat to his cabin, Truman allowed himself a parting jab. He leaned in close and whispered in Marella’s ear—
‘By the way… the Governor’s Wife? Gianni fucked her too.’
And brushing her earlobe with his prosecco-chilled lips, Truman was gone.
WE OF COURSE noticed that something had altered between them.
Marella, who once so cherished Truman, who had preferred his company to all others, he being her own special travel companion (‘Dar-ling, Marella and I are the only ones ever to sail the length of the Amalfi Coast not once, not twice, but thrice… !’) has gone as quiet as the Sphinx on the topic of her piccolo Vero.
Stranger still, she now seems genuinely frightened of him.
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