Jackie looked divine in a sheath of Nattier blue, wide obi belt at her waist. Lee wore red brocade. A troupe of players from the American Shakespeare Theater performed various works of the Bard. Jerry Robbins’ company followed with a ballet and Oleg Cassini introduced the Twist.
It was during the after-dinner dancing that it happened.
Jackie was sitting on a chaise in the Green Room when Gore— several tankards of Mai Tais in—kneeled to have a word. Some say he leaned in close and slurred something rude—about Jack or Lee or her mother.
‘Gore, I think you should leave,’ Jackie said, in her wispy baby voice.
‘Fine then,’ slurred Gore, who rose to stand, tipsily losing his balance. He flailed to steady himself, grabbing for the first thing in reach—which happened to be the knot of the obi belt at Jackie’s waist. As he grasped and pulled, he untied it, marring her perfection.
In an instant, Bobby’s hand gripped his shoulder, pulling him off Jackie, snarling—
‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’
Gore matched his vitriol, firing back—‘Fuck you!’
‘Fuck you, buddy boy! Get the hell out—and never come back!’
White House Security bundled Gore out, where he then proceeded to— —
TRUMAN—WHO HAD NOT been present the evening in question— usually went for a hybrid of versions when reveling in the tale. Yet while he relished the narrative options when discussing his foe’s disgrace, he defaulted—more often than not—to one take in particular, for it was tailor-made for his pleasure, simply dripping in hyperbole.
As Truman told it, that very night he received a call from his darling Lee, eager to dish the dirt. She naturally would have embellished, knowing that Tru fed off such tales like a happy hobo, starving for such morsels.
‘Truman,’ Lee enthused on the line, as she stepped from her evening dress and poured herself a Scotch, ‘you’ll never believe what I just saw at la Maison Blanche…’
IT WAS THUS truman found himself in the amber glow of Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, telling that very tale to a Cub reporter from Playgirl, second-rate skin rag.
‘Weeeelllll, you seeeeeee, Gore was drunk as a skunk, quelle surprise, at a dinner at the White House no less. Lee was there, so I have this on very good authority. Gore went right up to Jackie—in the middle of the East Room—and cupped her ass with his rat-paw. He proceeded to insult her mother, whom he’d never met in his life! Well, Bobby—who always had a thing for Miss Jacks, sis-in-law or otherwise—simply wasn’t having it. He picked li’l Gore up, right off the ground, and carried him to the door, where he hurled him out onto Pennsylvania Avenue!’ Tru paused to giggle gleefully. ‘Isn’t it perfect? Poor little Vidal—bodily ejected from the White House, never to return?!’
He drained his last sip of martini, popping a gin-soaked cocktail onion in his mouth. ‘I’m due at Lee’s in an hour. You can walk with me if you like.’
The author and the Playgirl Cub had stepped from the Carlyle and strolled down the block, the former en route to Lee’s brown-stone for dinner, the latter tagging along.
‘Of course Gore-the-Whore came crawling from the woodwork when Jack was elected President, when their status suited his purposes. He was invited to the White House just once— and was never invited back. Even that, methinks, was generous, given all the smack he’s talked about La famille Kennedy…’
As they approached Lee’s building on the quieter reaches of upper Fifth, the Cub ventured, ‘But you began as friends, when you were young, didn’t you? You and Gore… ?’
Truman looked out onto the leaves of Central Park, taken with their beauty, shimmering like flames, lapping at the branches. It was in such moments that he most loved New York. When he tended to wax nostalgic. In a flash he remembered his youth, when he’d first encountered Vidal. Two young bucks, staking their claims in the Oak Bar at the Plaza. A shared coterie in Venice, not big enough for the both of them. Vying to see who might emerge as leader of the literary pack.
As the cool breeze ruffled Truman’s remaining wisps of hair, he shook his head.
‘Gore was always harder than me. He’d do anything to claw his way to the top. He’d sell his own mother—to the wolves—not that that’s saying much. Both of our mamas were drunks. In fact that’s the only thing we ever had in common… He’d sacrifice anyone to get where he was going. I value the people in my life.’ And with a tiny shudder at a gust of wind, Truman crossed the street and waved, trotting toward Lee’s building.
Little did Truman realize that running his mouth to Mr. Playgirl would unleash the wrath of Vidal and his lawyers. Little did we know mere days later—in that fall of’ 75—that Tru’s Esquire smut was about to hit the stands; that he was about to betray our trust. Less still could Truman know what Lee had in store for him… She who would, in time, give the little traitor a taste of his own medicine, though whether administered with intent, or by accidental overdose, is difficult to discern.
LEE SAT IN a sea of packing boxes, the fragments of her life scattered chaotically around her. A cool ripple of velvet draped the walls; the cerulean carnival tent atop which hung the prized work in the Radziwill collection: Francis Bacon’s Man in a Cage. Stas had bought the painting for next to nothing, to cover the painter’s gambling debts. He had given it to Lee when she left him, as generous in defeat as he had been when he’d won her. It had been five years since she’d left Stas, after fifteen years of marriage. A midlife crisis, she supposed it could be chalked up to, though at the time it felt like more. Even the illusion of wealth her dear Stas had provided was revealed, upon his death, to be exactly that. Illusion.
Lee looked to the sparse, modernist figure, trapped in a reflective space within the painting, and felt a certain kinship with him.
She too felt trapped—by increasingly limited options. She thought of Stas as she looked at Man in a Cage.
It would have to go of course. She needed the cash that the Bacon could yield—if only she could manage to unload it for the right price… Whatever it would take to keep her world afloat, for years now adrift on seas of uncertainty.
‘LEE RADZIWILL DESIGNS,’ a voice on the line.
‘Any calls, Sally?’
‘Oh hello, Ms. Radziwill. Yes—Mr. Vidal’s lawyer regarding the deposition.’
Lee sighed heavily. Fucking Gore. She’d always loathed the little creep, the little that she knew of him, he being related only distantly through their mother’s second marriage. She and Jackie had long ago agreed that Gore was bad news—a climber. A snob. A pseudo-intellectual. The single most sinister man she knew.
‘And there were thirteen calls from Mr. Capote. He left messages. Would you like them?’
Christ, Truman.
‘No.’ Lee allowed herself a pause. ‘Thanks, Sally. I’ll be in tomorrow. Please book lunch at Vadis for noon.’
‘Very good, Ms. Radziwill.’
Lee hung up, and fingered a tortoise card case from her collection on the desk. She’d given one to Tru years ago—the most prized in the bunch, a Victorian gem that might or might not have belonged to Oscar Wilde, according to her dealer. She’d had it inscribed, To Truman—My Answered Prayer. His eyes had welled with tears and he had held it to his cheek.
‘Oh Princess dear, this means more than you could ever hope to know…’
Goddamn Truman! How dare he get her involved in his mess! If he wanted to run his mouth and fuck his own life, so be it.
But, as Jackie had reminded her, she simply couldn’t afford to get involved.
TRUMAN—IN HIS OWN odd way—had been in love with Lee from the start.
‘Oh, the Princess Radziwill,’ he’d gush to anyone who’d listen, ‘she’s the most feminine creature you’ll ever meet—yet she’s lithe and tough like a young garçon. There’s nothing the Princess cannot do. She can act. She can write. She’s just so terribly gifted!’
If only he’d kept his little trap shut, Lee often thought.
�
��Darling, we can make you worlds bigger than Jackie… We’ll make you an actress! The greatest star the world has ever seen…’
Hadn’t he been the one who insisted she was a genius, pushing her toward Everest leaps, when she would have been happy with baby steps? He’d forced her to the precipice long before she was ready. Just because he was a prodigy… or so the little shit said. He had doomed her to fail before she began.
He had not, of late, been the Truman she once knew.
He’d arrive at her house, clutching his black doctor’s satchel. He’d sit down to dine, remove a handful of pills at random, organizing them around his plate according to hue, a circular narcotic palette. He’d then proceed to swallow them, one by one. Sometimes he’d move from light to dark (‘like retreating into a cozy cave’), other times from dark to light (‘like basking in the sun’). Sometimes he’d recline on the sofa, lining the pills on the island of his belly, as if traveling up the slope, reaching a peak at his navel, and back down the other side. Lee would observe as the children watched Truman with fixed, frightened eyes.
She missed who he had once been. She could have used a dose of the Truman who’d arrive for a lunch date breathless with some scheme or another to make her very fortune—to etch her name in the heavens.
Lee had always sensed she was a special soul—an artist—ever since childhood.
Truman had spotted it straight away. He who knew talent saw the glimmer of it in her, and did all that he could to nurture it.
When he decided she’d be perfect to play the Kate Hepburn role in The Philadelphia Story and arranged a production in Chicago, who was Lee to argue? He sat in the darkened theater through each rehearsal, when everyone around them said he should have been writing his next masterpiece. ‘Lee’s my next masterpiece,’ she’d overheard him saying, and when he clapped enthusiastically from the shadows of the empty house, ‘Yeeeeeeeeesss, Lee! But that’s marrrrrrrrvelous, darling!’ she believed him. Of course when the audience came to see ‘Lee Bouvier’ (as she insisted she be billed) in her Saint Laurent costumes, with her lion’s mane by Kenneth, they weren’t coming to see her acting. They were coming to see Princess Radziwill: Jackie Kennedy’s kid sister. No matter. The houses sold out, didn’t they? When her cast-mates rolled their eyes (they thought behind her back…) and mocked her Miss Porter’s prep school accent, she took comfort in Truman’s reassurance, ‘Honey, whaddaya want? They’re jealous of your fame!’
When the critics cruelly declared after opening night: LEE LAYS A GOLDEN EGG and A STAR IS NOT BORN, Truman lovingly convinced her that they’d made up their minds ahead of time. ‘Why Princess dear, they wrote those weeks ago—before you’d even started rehearsals!’ When Jackie managed to be ‘out of town’ (for the entirety of the run), Truman pointed out, ‘She simply can’t stand you having the spotlight!’
When he’d used his notoriety to get her a TV gig, adapting the classic film Laura for the small screen for Lee to play the eponymous role, he’d convinced her that acting for the camera was her birthright. On the night that Laura aired he begged Carson to host a viewing party at his UN Plaza penthouse, just a few floors up from his own. Johnny’s wife Joanne—so desperate to impress—planned a spread fit for a conquering army. Caviar and blinis and champagne on ice. Finest Russian vodka and a cake made in Lee’s image. TVs were set in every corner of the space, three to a room, all tuned to CBS, primed for Lee’s triumph. After a gushing speech by Truman, the guests raised their glasses, and settled in to watch. It took a scene or two to spot… Gene Tierney, Lee was not.
One by one, first in quiet singles and pairs, then in a thin trickle, guests rose to tiptoe out to balconies for cigarettes, leaving Tru, Lee, and Joanne Carson to watch the disaster in silence.
Lee knew that Truman defended her, like he always had. Someone had to believe in Lee. And wasn’t it flattering that the genius of his generation was her champion… ? God love Truman. And then goddamn him! She’d trusted him so, she would have followed him to the ends of the earth. Why did he have to change? Why did he have to become what he had? A ghoul. A bore. Trans-formed into a grotesquerie of all she once had loved about him. The imp had turned twisted goblin, with a dark shade around him that left her feeling queasy.
SHE FIRST CAUGHT glimpses of it during what should have been a purely rapturous summer.
It was when Lee was hot and heavy with the photographer Peter Beard. Beard had been commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine to travel with The Rolling Stones on their 1972 Exile on Main St. tour and document it all. Truman had been enlisted to write about it in a long-form piece of music journalism, tentatively titled ‘It Will Soon Be Here.’ The phrase he took from a painting he had seen. A stark American gothic. A group of farmers, shoveling bales of hay, oblivious as a storm cloud approaches. (‘It’s a perfect metaphor,’ Truman had pitched Jann Wenner. Heady stuff for rock and roll, Lee thought.) Because her two ‘boyfriends’ were covering the gigs, the newly divorced Princess Radziwill was invited along. The trio was to travel with the Stones on board their plane, stay in their hotels. Live alongside them, in order to capture the madness.
For Lee, after the formal courts of Camelot and European royalty, it was like running away with the circus. The Stones liked her—she was pretty and thin and kept to herself. They bestowed upon her the affectionate nickname of ‘Radish.’
It was the chimera of the era—to go on tour with the band. The plane was packed with champagne and cocaine. With girls who serviced the group in a private, fur-strewn compartment, while the entourage pretended to be too jaded to notice. Everyone vaguely involved was in on the action, from the roadies to electricians to bespectacled PR men.
‘It’s such an obvious orgy,’ Tru would grumble to Lee, ‘it’s practically puritan in its prescriptiveness. Yawn-McYawn. Where’s the mystery, for Chrissakes?’
There was a private physician who hailed from San Francisco, a poor man’s Timothy Leary, who served up a smörgåsbord of pills of every color and size—‘from Vitamin A to Sedative Z’—passing them through the cabin on a tray on each flight, as if distributing hors d’oeuvres. At first this delighted Truman, though the relentless regularity soon diminished the pleasure. Like the sex, Dr. Feelgood’s offerings felt so inevitable, so paint-by-numbers, Tru felt they robbed the aficionado of his artistry.
What he did enjoy was the Stones’ cocktail of choice, the unofficial beverage of the tour—the Tequila Sunrise, which they’d recently discovered in a bar in Sausalito. A three-toned delight of tequila, OJ, and grenadine, Truman loved that it mimicked a landscape—a wildly romantic take on his standard Orange Drink.
During the nightly performances, Lee and Truman would stand backstage in their matching shades, she in a tank top and bell-bottomed jeans, or a white jumpsuit, not unlike Mick Jagger’s own. Tru in flagrantly preppy attire, often pastel polo shirts paired with a wide-brimmed fedora. At first, Lee observed, Truman relished the energy of it all. After a few weeks, however, she saw his interest wane. It gradually became apparent that he hadn’t written a syllable of ‘It Will Soon Be Here’ and appeared unlikely to do so anytime soon.
Lee followed as Truman grudgingly climbed into the limousine each night, trailing the band to whatever venue was next. The sameness of it bored him. He began to complain about the noise levels backstage. He would loiter behind the scenes, befriending the stagehands—who he claimed were infinitely more interesting than the band. He took to smoking joints just outside the stage door, talking to the teenage groupies who waited there nightly for a glimpse of their heroes, desperate to be plucked from obscurity. Truman would inevitably sniff out the reporter in the bunch, eager to write a story for her school newspaper. He would get her a pass and give her a backstage tour. ‘Unlimited access, honey.’ Lee thought it ironic that he seemed more interested in their fledgling pieces than his own for Rolling Stone.
The one moment each evening when Truman did perk up was late in the proceedings when Mick would toast the crowd (the same shtic
k each night), slugging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s (which Truman would mimic with his hip flask), take out his harmonica, and the band would launch into ‘Midnight Rambler.’ This never failed to excite.
‘It’s the one thing they do that’s unique. The tempo variations. The narrative. It’s like a mini-opera. Like—dare I say—a novella?’ Indeed, Mick was playing a character, and it was performance art at its finest. The song was meant to invoke the Boston Strangler. Each night at precisely seven minutes into the song, Jagger would remove the belt from his jumpsuit and drop to the floor, after a series of primal screams against a frenzied, blues-soaked guitar duel; at eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, he would become the Strangler DeSalvo, simulating the striking of his victims. The lights would turn the color of blood. When Lee looked to Truman she would find him quite altered, as if in a spell, mirroring Mick’s movements. When the tempo built once more, Truman was like a man possessed, launching into a maniacal jig with an intensity that frightened her. Eyes wild, sweat pouring from his forehead, soaking his shirt. Then, as suddenly and intensely as he had engaged, it was as if a switch flipped and Truman’s indifference would resume. He’d turn and walk back to an empty dressing room and sit very quiet. Pale. Sometimes nursing his hip flask, as if seeking some elusive drop of succor.
Lee often followed him out of concern. One night when he looked particularly shaken, she slipped into the room and sat down beside him.
‘Truman… ? Are you all right?’
He met her gaze in the mirror before them. Trembling.
‘I don’t know…’
‘What is it? About that song in particular…?’
He stared at his reflection, as if searching for something, then cut his eyes back to Lee’s.
‘Perry.’
‘What?’
‘Perry Smith. I feel him in that song, every night. It’s as if he takes me over, and we become the same. The same soul… You see?’
‘Yes, Truman. I see.’
And it was then Lee realized that Truman was not in fact all right.
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