But what went wrong? we’ll ask when we see her, fishing for details like determined pescatori. Did something ghastly happen?
‘Did he get sloshed and act an ass?’ asks Lee, polishing off her own lunchtime Scotch, in a private chat with Marella. (Lee’s third round, we’re quick to note, from our adjacent tables.)
Marella shakes her head, and holds her terror close.
The most that she will say is, ‘He told me something harmful—about someone I love—specifically to hurt me. Something… unforgivable.’
But what? What is it that he said?!
Surely Gianni’s flagrant dolce vita conquests would have ceased to shock by this point, even were Marella in denial.
What could possibly be that bad… ?
‘I dare not say,’ Marella holds firm, for fear that Truman’s sordid words might contain an ounce of truth, or at least that in repeating them, she might will them into being.
AT LEAST SHE’D set the scene.
It was in an antiques shop in Genoa, she tells those of us who prod. It was an autumn day, off-season, a day dense with split-pea fog. The first bone-rattling day of the season. It had just started to rain.
Marella and Truman had ducked into the shop, coats held high above their heads to block the icy droplets. It was one of the finest antiquaires in Europe, owned by a little old man with a limp. A cavernous place—thick with dust, packed with rarest booty.
They’d wandered through the space, glorious pieces polished and stacked high on every side, the lure of past lives lingering in their fibers.
Like a boy in a toyshop, Truman squealed when he spotted an elaborate red-lacquer sideboard, peeking through a pair of rococo wing chairs.
‘Uno—just look at that candy-apple treat! Wouldn’t she look divine in my parlor, under that stuffy ole Fosburgh? Lord knows it could use a splash of color!’
Marella confirmed the sideboard would indeed look sublime beneath Jimmy’s portrait of Tru, Babe’s brother-in-law having painted him in that ephemeral state between Boy Wonder and Enfant Terrible, looking uncharacteristically sober.
Truman had summoned the proprietor, ‘who shuffled with the vigor of a three-toed sloth,’ according to his prospective buyer, who with rapture began the haggling process.
Those of us who’d heard this had rolled our eyes and laughed, each with our own canon of Truman bargain-hunting tales. The Victoriana sofa, its stuffing poking through in cotton tufts, which he and Babe had bought for a song—and which she’d lovingly helped him re-cover in a delicious sherbet brocade. The chinoiserie he’d found with Lee, when they stalked jumble sales in rural France, to launch her fledgling decor biz. Slim’s taxidermy cobras, wrapped and shipped from Spain, all the way to Truman’s doorstep.
He had the ruthlessness of an ancient pawnbroker, with the gift of bluff and slick-jaw when it came to dropping a price.
In the combination tongue of pidgin and pantomime, Tru had asked the old man of the sideboard: ‘How much?’
The sloth took his own sweet time pulling out a pair of bottle-thick specs, so clouded they themselves seemed a Chippendale relic. In an unintelligible dialect, the old man named a price that, whatever it had been, was unacceptable to Tru, on principle alone.
‘Grazie, Signore Sloth! But that sounds molto high!’
The old man had grunted, shrugged, and stood his greedy ground.
‘Uno, don’t you think our friend is being raw-ther stingy?’ Truman dropped to his hands and knees, inspecting the cabinet for flaws. ‘The travesty is, he doesn’t appreciate the beauty of this gem, as you or I might do. He’s just trying to make a quick dol-laro.’
‘Sì, sì… dollaros…’ The old man squinted through his glasses.
‘Sì, sì…’ Truman mocked his accent, as he had done with Marella’s. ‘You know, miele…’ Tru continued, still looking at the sideboard, tossing out figures to the seller, his offerings plummeting in value, to the wrinkled prune’s dismay, ‘… he’s just like a European male—the most vile of all the species.’
Marella watched as Truman almost leaped with glee upon discovering the tiniest flaw in the centuries-old varnish—the thing that connoisseurs would find the most romantic, the proof of life and history. He motioned to the proprietor, pointing at the blemish.
‘What about this here?’ he demanded, American hands on hips.
Then, returning to Marella, a deliberate aside—‘I mean, the European male—as a tribe, if you will—the pay-dirt species in particular—let’s be honest: They are cunts. Cunts, the whole damn lot!’
Signore Sloth creaked to a bend, examining the surface through his glazier-fitted lenses, as Truman continued in a language Marella felt relieved the old man didn’t understand.
‘They either fail to realize the worth in what they have, or they overvalue something tawdry.’ Tru tapped his nail impatiently on the sideboard’s glossy top—
‘Più economico,’ he demanded. Then bluntly, in English— ‘Cheaper.’
The signore relented, Marella thought—if only to be rid of the brash little tightwad. As they followed him back to the front of the shop to pay, Truman had mused, removing a wad of bills from his pocket—‘The only species worse is the European feeee-male, who allows herself to be bought and sold, like flesh-whipped ass in a livestock show.’
Was that it? Was that what he said, to make you disown him? we press, when we’ve coaxed this from Marella.
Again she shakes her head—‘It was worse. Something vicious, that’s all I can say. Something… letale. I saw a killer in those eyes… That like his amico Perry Smith, Truman could slice any of our throats and not lose a moment’s sleep.’
Back on board the Agneta, she’d ignored him for three days; had spent the remainder of the journey hiding in her cabin. Finally, in the moments before they reached their final port, as with relief she watched the safety of land draw closer by the minute, she sat down beside him on the prow.
‘Why did you tell me… ?’ She’d asked him, unable to resist. He stared at her, blankly. ‘Why did you say what you did… ?’
‘I thought that you should know,’ he said, simply. ‘Everyone knew, except for you…’ then, with a vestige of the old tenderness, he reached out to stroke her alabaster cheek—
‘I love you, and I thought that you needed to know.’
Marella, having said this much, goes silent yet again, the look of a hunted fawn hanging around her eyes. Try as we might, we cannot persuade her to unburden her fears, to trust us with whatever threat or insult Truman had leveled against her amid the antiquaire’s treasures.
All we know for certain is that Marella now shudders at the mention of his name.
MARELLA’S NOT THE only one allowed a glimpse into the mire in which Truman is about to sink.
Lee is granted access next.
Lee, his protégé, his paramour.
Lee, who hides behind a veneer of indifference—beneath Cassini suits and tawny locks, and a wicked nature to rival Tru’s. Lee, who, kissed by the aura of halcyon Camelot, was propelled to fame by relation rather than merit.
Lee, who harbors a rage in her darkest soul—perhaps only matched by Truman’s—incited by her envy for a sister who stole her place in history, leaving little Lee with nothing but the shallow sandboxes of society in which to play.
Lee confides in very few—and certainly not in us. Nearly a decade younger than Truman and lacking our assurance, Lee keeps to herself. Her sister was her confidante, until she stole too much for Lee to bear. That’s why Truman is so prized.
He has his own ax to grind, mind you, having first been close with Jackie—when Jack was, according to Tru, ‘Nothin’ but a knife-sharp senator, with his Daddy’s bootlegger eye on the White House prize.’
He’d been proud of his bond with Jackie; hooking the First Lady was quite the coup indeed, and Truman loved to let folks know just how close they were. When Jackie’s infant son Patrick died, it’s said Tru wrote her a missive so thoughtful, she’d
saved it ever since.
‘Jackie trusts me,’ he’d run his mouth to the press. ‘She tells me everything. Absolutely everything.’ We wondered at the time if Jackie ever broached the topic of Truman’s ‘dear friend’ Marilyn, who—after cementing herself in public minds as the Other Woman with a breathy, doped-up ‘Happy Birthday, Mister Prezzzident’— must have cried on Truman’s shoulder too. (‘Why, Norma Jean, did those Kennedy boys fail to love you?’ we can almost hear him ooze.)
‘Jackie knew what Jack was up to—as I say, she is no dummy. But Jackie’s not the kind of girl you simply knock one off in. Jackie is a thoroughbred, meant for show and breeding.’
It was then that Truman learned—or failed to learn—the lesson that might have saved him.
Cardinal rule numerus unus— never, ever talk out of school.
The transgression in this case was fairly tame—really nothing more than admitting their shared bond. But the moment he began to run his mouth in public, Jackie’s calls to Truman ceased; his calls to Pennsylvania Avenue went tellingly unanswered. Perhaps sensing danger long before the pack, Jackie pulled away, with-drawing her courtly favor with the same bemused indifference with which she had bestowed it.
When in several years’ time Tru was introduced to Lee, we wondered if his fervor was colored by her sister’s slight.
Their first lunch date, a four-hour tryst at La Grenouille, in short order turned into a Jackie-bashing fest of epic proportions. Lee let rip the years of stifled fury—it all came tumbling out.
It was she who was the brilliant one, she assured him.
Lee who had the flair for style, the elegance, the taste. Lee’s was the love of books, the artist’s soul. It was Lee who had the knack for decorating a room; Lee had been the visualist, with her paints and pens, when they were girls, not Jackie and her horses! It made her blood boil watching Jackie lead TV crews through the White House, bragging in her dishrag voice about her renovations, as if French rococo revival was something she’d invented!
It was Lee the writer; Lee the actress; Lee the femme fatale, who men adored in more than just a distant way. It was Lee who was the genius, who should have had the spotlight—not be doomed to a life in the chill of Jackie’s shadow, forever linked to a lesser being.
Yet oddly, in her vitriol, Truman found a kindred soul.
HE STEPS OFF the Aeroméxico plane in the Yucatán with renewed conviction.
Now that he has lost—and found—his precious pages, he’s sure that it’s happened for a reason. He’s been high on relief ever since, doped to the gills with gratitude to the unseen forces that be. This transcendental state proves a greater opiate than the uppers, downers, or in-betweeners he totes in his black doctor’s bag.
His driver tells him, en route to the remote resort, that ‘Yucatán’ is taken from a Mayan name for language. A retreat in the land of language is something he sees as an omen.
Not only that—the landscape of the region speaks to Truman’s soul. Its shallow, rocky earth giving rise to stunted trees, as diminutive and resilient as he sees himself as being. He likes its rust and ocher hues, its slow tequila sunsets. It’s like Palm Springs, without the pain. Without days of empty pages, of loneliness… of terror. ‘Hope’s End,’ his Jack had called the Californian desert, and it was there that Truman’s hope had finally hit rock bottom.
Yet here, lying on a private beach in the Mayan Riviera, with lovely Lee beside him in matching insect shades, listening to the surf lapping gently in-and-out, with its steady, liquid breath—he is happy. Giddy, even. Because he’s sure (or so he thinks…) that the thing that he’s been doubting will trouble him no longer.
To publish or not to publish, that has been the question. Now at least he knows he has no choice. He’s been relieved of the burden; fate has chosen for him.
As he and Lee sun themselves before clear-cut turquoise waters, sipping frothy piña coladas from coconut shells, Truman calls to his companion: ‘Princess-Dear’ (his name for Lee), ‘would you like to hear a tidbit of my chapters… ?’
Not bothering to stir, Lee lazily purrs, ‘Mmmmmmmm.’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ He clears his throat, then begins to orate:
‘La Côte Basque, that unrivaled temple of French cuisine, is a dining establishment in Midtown Manhattan, situated on East Fifty-fifth, directly opposite the St. Regis Hotel. It opened its doors in 1940, helmed by the venerable Henri Soulé, the Leonardo of the luncheon, famous for launching Le Pavilion at 57th and Park, frequented for their famed Beluga Caviar and Louis Roederer rosé champagne trysts. M. Soulé’s demise would occur in the gentlemen’s washroom of Basque (a stroke it was thought, for the great restaurateur was portly to say the least …) only to be found by the clean-up crew, the very next morn— —’
‘Wait,’ Lee interrupts, turning her head just enough to allow full view of the adjacent lounger. ‘You’re not reading … You’re just talking.’
‘Sugar—I have ninety-six percent total recall. That’s a scientific fact.’ Truman points to his enormous head. ‘It’s all here—the whole thing! All eight-hundred pages, seared in my noggin. Where was I … ? Ooooooo wait! I have the most maaaarvelous idea! I’ll pitch you some characters and you guess who they are!’
Lee allows the flicker of a smile to play at the corners of her lips, the closest to excitement one might hope to wrench from her. ‘I’m game.’
‘Goody! What fun!’ Truman pauses, dizzy with options.
‘Okay, ready? Tell me who this is: Wifey numéro deux of a late-night chat-show buffoon, “Jane Baxter” is needy. Christ—she’s even been fired by her therapists for chewing their ears off, leaving’ em a pack of maimed medicinal Van Gogh. And “Bobby Baxter”—he’s a modernist Marquis de Sade, hiding in a three-piece polyester suit! The way he gets around town, poor Janie’s been given a nasty case of the pox, with a robust round of clap-clap-clap—and NOT as in applause …’
‘Joanne and Johnny Carson!’ Lee snickers. ‘Truman, that is talking out of school.’
‘Let’s do another! … Former New York Governor’s wife— thankfully deceased. Positively porcine, with tree-trunk legs, who I reckon wore serge skivvies and looked like she could club you with her driving iron—’
‘Marie Harriman? Couldn’t be anyone else.’
‘Correct again! How’ bout: The Duchess’s tabs run as high as her hairline, covered by her coterie of courtiers—loaded broads who Her Graceless can always rely on to shell out the cash …’
‘Easy—Wallis Simpson.’
‘Notorious cheapskate! I wonder if she’s ever picked up a check?’
‘You’re one to talk …’
Sucking through the straw so quickly he’s hit with a stab of brain-freeze, Truman grasps his forehead. He turns onto his side, facing Lee directly, a gleam in his eye.
‘Perhaps this one’ll hit closer to home. Lady Ina Coolbirth— that’s Slim, by the way—reports: … BLANK and her sister BLANK enter La Côte Basque. You can see those girls have caught a few big fish in their time. Most people I know can’t stand either one of them—’ He checks in with Lee, who listens, expressionless. ‘—Generally fellow females, which I can understand—as they have contempt for other women, and never have a kind word to say about any women but themselves, the Bouviers.’ Lee eyes him as he pauses, sheepishly slurping the last of his colada from its shell.
‘Fair enough,’ she allows, ever one for honesty.
‘But boy, they work magic with the menfolk! Like a pair of sorceresses, they weave their spells on the fellas, as if by some strange voodoo they might put their hex on rich suitors and render themselves indispensable.’
At this, Lee raises an eyebrow.
Truman shrugs, moving on to what he really wants to share, his own true soul, a love letter, from the mouth of Lady Ina: ‘… If I swung that way, I’d be head over heels for Lee. She’s perfectly formed, like a lovely Grecian bronze … a gleaming, gold-brown girl, her whisper-warm voice ever-slightly
vibrating …’
At this, Lee’s lips part in a genuine smile.
Truman, via Lady Ina, continues: ‘… Jackie—not in the same league. She can take a helluva photo, sure, but in the flesh, she hurts the eye. Those features, so … severe. Like a drag queen masquerading as Mrs. Kennedy.’ Truman breaks character, an aside to Lee, ‘You do know she’s their number one pick? I met a sensational Queen at The Anvil who goes by “Jackie Uh-Oh” …’
Lee’s smile widens to a grin. She can’t help but love when Truman takes potshots at Jackie. At least someone can. Someone who, praise fucking Jesus, doesn’t see her as the vaunted widow, nor the grave madonna, but the conniving bitch who stole their Daddy’s love from her—and Ari too, long ago, along with a million other thefts.
Truman returns her grin, conspiratorially.
‘Weeulll darling, what do you think of what I wrote about you… ?’
Lee sits up to sip her drink, tossing her gold-brown hair with indifference.
‘Frankly, I could care less.’ (A lie, we suspect—though she’ll later tell Marella that she meant it.)
‘Anyhoo. That’s the gist of the chapter. Of course I have some fabulous bits you haven’t yet heard: about Cole Porter—remember the time he shook his exposed member at a Portuguese wine steward? And naturally Ann Woodward… who could resist that? And Bill, of course.’
‘Bill… ?’
‘Bill Paley.’
‘Paley… ? What about him… ?’
Tru’s countenance blackens with something like revenge. ‘He needs to learn. He needs to appreciate what he has…’ (Unspo-ken: we know that he means Babe.)
Lee reaches for a magazine, fans herself languidly, veneer of neutrality in place.
‘Truman, I could give a flying fuck what you say about us… but haven’t you considered what you stand to lose… ?’
‘I know what I stand to gain.’
‘Have you thought about how mad they’ll be? And what they’ll do to hurt you?’
‘Oh, honey—it’s art. It’s beautiful… it’s Proust! I haven’t used their names.’
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