Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Truman had only one other real companion, and that was Harper Lee, the youngest daughter of the family next door. By local standards, the Lees were considered bookish. Mr. Lee, who was a lawyer, had once been part owner and editor of the Monroe Journal, and he had also spent some time in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, as a state senator. His wife, the same Mrs. Lee who had played the piano at Arch and Lillie Mae’s wedding, was a crossword-puzzle whiz, a woman of gigantic proportions who sat for hours on her front porch, intently matching words and boxes. Her mind was not altogether right, however. She wandered up and down the street saying strange things to neighbors and passersby, and twice she tried to drown Harper—or Nelle, as she was then called—in the bathtub. “Both times Nelle was saved by one of her older sisters,” said Truman. “When they talk about Southern grotesque, they’re not kidding!”

  Harper survived the dunkings to become the tomboy on the block, a girl who, as Mary Ida phrased it, could beat the steam out of most boys her age, or even a year or so older, as Truman was. Indeed, he was one of her favorite targets. But that did not stop them from becoming constant companions, and a treehouse in the Lees’ chinaberry tree became their fortress against the world, a leafy refuge where they read and acted out scenes from their favorite books, which chronicled the exploits of Tarzan, Tom Swift, and the Rover Boys.

  The bond that united them was stronger than friendship—it was a common anguish. They both bore the bruises of parental rejection, and they both were shattered by loneliness. Neither had many other real friends. Nelle was too rough for most other girls, and Truman was too soft for most other boys. He was small for his age, to begin with, and he did not enjoy fighting and rolling in the dirt, as most boys around there did. Without meaning to do so, Lillie Mae, who sent him his clothes by mail, dressed him too well, and his freshly laundered shirt and crisp linen shorts made him as conspicuous as Little Lord Fauntleroy. People often remarked that with his white-blond hair and sky-blue eyes, he was pretty enough to be a girl. He was, in short, regarded as a sissy.

  There are photographs of Truman at that age—a tiny towhead with a huge grin—but Harper provided the best picture thirty years later. She modeled one of the characters in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird after him, and described him as a true curiosity: “He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us [an] old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead…. We came to know [him] as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”

  Although he was not much appreciated by most of his contemporaries, he was an affectionate and beguiling child, this pocket Merlin, and if they did not take to him immediately, as Sook had done, Jennie and Callie soon did so. “I fear if there is such a thing, we all love him too much,” Callie confessed in one of her reports to Arch’s mother. “He is a darling sweet boy,” she added later. “We do enjoy having him. He is the sunshine of our home.” He was uncommonly bright, and Callie, the old schoolteacher, took pride in his budding mind, remarking that she and Sook read to him every night—and he to them. “I just love to see his little mind developing and taking in things,” she said.

  As the self-appointed guardian of morals on Alabama Avenue, Callie also assured his grandmother that he was doing well in Sunday school—had, in fact, been promoted with honors—and that he was receiving proper spiritual guidance at home as well. “We give him every pleasure that we can,” she wrote, “but of course we do try to teach him that there is a right way to have pleasure. I tried to get him interested in memorizing the 23rd. Psalm, also the Ten Commandments. So I told him (he almost knew it anyway) that it was a low standard of teaching, but if he would memorize the 23rd. Psalm perfectly, I would give him 25 cents—but not to do it just for the 25 cents, but for the love of God and the love he had for God. So he readily agreed that he would memorize it because it was right for him to do so. He did perfectly and I gave him the 25 cents and Sook added a bit to it. Now, he has commenced on the Ten Commandments. I told him just to take one each day and it wouldn’t seem so hard.”

  Despite Callie’s assurances, Truman was not happy. His own descriptions of his life in Monroeville are almost grim, and Callie might have been surprised at how unfavorably she was remembered. Compared with Sook, both Callie and Jennie were viewed as cold and unloving, as purse-mouthed and pinchpenny spinsters. He probably expected too much from them, or he may have been misled by Jennie’s gruff manner and wearied by Callie’s righteousness; his own memory of his religious instruction saw him constantly being marched off to church, with no more choice than the prisoners who worked in chain gangs on the roads outside town. Still, it is hard to imagine what more the Faulk sisters could have done for him. Although Lillie Mae and—on rare occasions—Arch paid most of his expenses, it was that peculiar family that actually took care of him.

  Truman’s complaint was not that Jennie was short-tempered, that Callie was a nag, or that there was not enough money for all the tantalizing things he saw in store windows in Mobile. It was that none of the Faulk sisters, even the beloved Sook, could take the place of his real parents. Lillie Mae, it is true, would appear occasionally from some distant place, her stylish, expensive clothes exciting envious glances from her friends. But she soon disappeared in a fragrant cloud of Evening in Paris, her favorite perfume. Truman was always desolate when she drove off; once, finding a perfume bottle she had forgotten, he drank it to the bottom, as if he could bring back the woman with her scent. On one visit he convinced himself that she was going to take him away with her. “But after three or four days she left,” he said, “and I stood in the road, watching her drive away in a black Buick, which got smaller and smaller and smaller. Imagine a dog, watching and waiting and hoping to be taken away. That is the picture of me then.”

  Arch created a stir of his own in Monroeville. When one of his schemes was going well, he would pull into town in a fancy convertible, announcing his arrival by honking the glittering, trumpetlike horns that preened themselves on the hood. Caesar himself could not have asked for a louder or more triumphal fanfare. When his plans were not working, on the other hand, which was increasingly the case in those dark Depression years, he would slink in and quietly make his way to the Faulks’ so that no one, particularly his creditors, would know that he was there. Even in that effort he was usually unsuccessful. One night at eleven o’clock, long after everyone had gone to bed, a marshal knocked on the door to serve him with a warrant; fortunately for Arch, he had left after dinner. Whether he was noisy or silent, however, he was not able to impress many people in Monroeville: they knew a con man when they saw one. “People made fun of him,” said Mary Ida. “He was always after that million dollars just beyond his reach, something too big to grasp. And that caused what I reckon you would call psychological problems for Truman. Even when he was a little boy he felt there was something wrong with his daddy.”

  As he had everyone else in his life, Arch dazzled Truman with promises, and when he felt that he was not being properly treated on Alabama Avenue, Truman would defiantly mention his daddy, who he said would come to rescue him from his woe. Arch said he would buy him a dog and books, both of which Truman desperately wanted. But neither the dog nor the books ever arrived. More than once Arch swore that he would take him down to one of the beaches on the Gulf Coast. “Truman would be so excited that he would skip,” said Mary Ida. “He would jump up into the air he would be so happy, and he would get a new swimsuit and be all ready to go. But Arch wouldn’t come through. He never took him down there once.”

  Eventually even Truman saw through his father and realized how empty all those promises were. The day of revelation came when Arch, bestowing smiles and How-do-you-do’s on everyone in sight, drove into town in one of his big cars and offered to take Truman and a co
uple of his friends to lunch in Mobile. Truman gathered his friends, Sook gave him two dollars—a fairly substantial sum at that time—to buy some books, and Arch, as good as his word, piled everybody into the car and set off for Mobile. Disappointment was delayed until they were in the restaurant, where Arch, whispering into Truman’s ear, asked him for the two dollars Sook had given him. “I never trusted him again after that,” Truman said.

  6

  AS rarely as they saw Truman, his parents saw each other even less, and by the fall of 1930 the story of Arch and Lillie Mae was rapidly approaching its conclusion: after six years of their strange, twilight marriage Lillie Mae wanted out. She had many reasons, but the deciding incident, the one that convinced her, seems to have been the discovery that he had tricked her into driving a carload of bootleg liquor into Monroeville.

  She had, in fact, probably done the same thing many times before without knowing it; because he was night-blind as well as near-sighted, Arch often asked her, or anybody else who was around, to sit behind the wheel when he wanted to go anywhere after dark. But he did not tell her what was in the trunk, and when she found out that she was engaged in such a common, low, and even hazardous pursuit as carrying illegal hootch, she was furious and unforgiving. “That was the final straw for her,” said Mary Ida. “She couldn’t stand for him to disgrace her like that in Monroeville. A bootlegger was beneath anybody’s nose.”

  He had finally gone too far, but Lillie Mae’s problem was what it had always been: a lack of money. She had never earned her own living, and Arch’s income, unsteady and increasingly irregular as it was, was all that separated her from total reliance on Jennie’s charity. Twice before, first in Selma, then in Bowling Green, she had attended business schools in hopes of preparing herself for a career, and both times she had dropped out. Now she tried once again. The Elizabeth Arden School of Beauty in New York had offered her a scholarship, and in a moment of uncharacteristic generosity, Arch, who had recently come into some money—compensation for injuries he had suffered after falling into a ditch in St. Louis—promised to send her forty dollars a week for expenses. “The only reason I consented was because my brother Sam was living in New York,” he later explained, “and I figured he’d more or less keep an eye on her. The course was only supposed to take three months, at which time she was supposed to come back to Monroeville.” With that understanding, Lillie Mae left for New York on January 15, 1931. Sam, the third of the three Persons brothers, had no use at all for Arch, and not much more for Lillie Mae. “Seems to me she is always studying something or taking some kind of course, but not actually going to work,” he wrote John. He nonetheless played the good brother and met her when she arrived the next morning.

  It is certain, in the light of what followed, that Lillie Mae had not been candid with Arch and, one way or another, hoped to stay on past her allotted three months. New York had always been her eventual destination, and once there, she was in no hurry to rush back to Monroeville. And she did in fact remain. Indeed, she had little choice. As he had on their honeymoon, Arch ran out of money, this time leaving her stranded far from home. In difficulty with the law in Alabama, he began sending her bad checks or persuaded his mother to wire the forty-dollar allowance. It was at that point that John, who saw himself as his mother’s defender, stepped in. He explained the situation to Lillie Mae—“Arch is headed for immediate serious trouble”—and pointedly suggested that she look for support from some other source than the Persons family. “I can well understand why you are so desirous of finishing your course there—now more than ever,” he wrote her. “But apparently Arch can’t be depended upon for the regular expenses, and Mother hasn’t the money for any more telegrams, even if it were right for her to send it.” A few days later, on March 16, John telegraphed the sequel: Arch was in jail in Birmingham, charged with writing bad checks and extortion.

  Lillie Mae had guessed that something was wrong when his checks began to bounce, and in early March, even before she had received John’s warning letter, she had taken a job in a restaurant on lower Broadway. Still, she was shaken when John wired her that Arch was actually behind bars, and on a tiny dime-store notepad, the only stationery at hand, she breathlessly replied: “Please excuse this paper, etc. Your wire just received and I’m too nervous & upset to write. Your letter more or less prepared me for your wire—there’s just nothing to say. Why—Why—Why? Do you know anything? I just can’t write you I’m so nervous. As soon as [he] started letting checks come back on me I knew something was wrong. I haven’t heard from him in 2 wks. I only make enough to exist on but I believe I will try it for awhile as there is nothing I could do if I came back as I have no money. What would you advise? Please write me fully.”

  The panic was soon over. Arch was still in trouble, but for the moment he was out on bail. As she had done so many times before, his mother had come to his rescue, pledging a month’s salary to pay his hundred-and-fifty-dollar bond. “When he gets in trouble, she would mortgage her life, if necessary, to get him out,” explained the exasperated John to Lillie Mae. “This has been done, as you well know, for many, many years. It isn’t fair, and it is most inconsiderate of Arch to force these situations on her, but inasmuch as she always gets him out, I suppose he feels she will so continue, and goes right ahead to his next difficulty.” Indeed, far from feeling shamefaced, Arch complained that the authorities in Alabama had something against him, and in hurt, petulant tones he threatened to leave the state, perhaps even the country.

  When they are forced to, people who have depended on others are often able not only to manage but to thrive. Such was the case with Lillie Mae, who was belatedly learning that she could take care of herself. She was well regarded by her employers, and by the middle of June she had been promoted to branch manager, at a salary of thirty-two dollars a week. Though much of that was sent home to Monroeville to cover Truman’s expenses, she still was able to scrape by in New York. She was clever, as well as attractive, and if she had steadfastly pursued a career, she might well have succeeded. But her basic goal was what it had always been: home, security, and a place in society. Sometime that winter or spring, not long after she had arrived, she discovered—or rediscovered—the man who was to give her all three.

  His name was Joseph Garcia Capote, and he was another of the Latins she favored. His father, a colonel in the Spanish army, had arrived in Cuba in 1894, when it was a Spanish colony, and had fought against Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill. He became a landowner, returned to Barcelona to marry, and then came back to Cuba to raise three boys, of whom Joe was the oldest, in solid middle-class comfort. Educated at the University of Havana, Joe left for New Orleans in 1924, when he was twenty-four, to look for a job in the United States. It was in New Orleans, during the summer of 1925, that he met Lillie Mae in the lobby of the Monteleone hotel.

  Captivated by her vivacity and beauty, he instantly fell in love with her, just as Arch had done. She liked him because his accent reminded her of her absent lover, the jealous Central American. They had dinner together and they may even have made love; but if they did have an affair, it did not last long. She already had one lover, not to mention a husband and a baby, and Joe was not in a financial position to stay around. Unable to find work in New Orleans, he transferred his job hunt to New York, where he soon married a secretary in one of the offices he visited. He corresponded with Lillie Mae even so, and it is possible that he encouraged her, and perhaps even gave her money, to come North. However it was arranged, they did meet in New York, picking up their romance where they had left it in New Orleans.

  They had both matured in the five intervening years. When they had first met, she was just twenty, still a wild and unsettled girl, and he was a youth himself, uncertain what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. When they saw each other the second time, she was twenty-six and somewhat chastened by experience; he was an aspiring young executive with a promising future on Wall Street. For four ye
ars, while he was working as a shipping clerk during the day, he had spent his nights studying accounting and business administration at New York University, and by 1931 he was earning a comfortable income as the office manager of an old and respected textile-brokerage firm, Taylor, Clapp and Beall.

  Lillie Mae could not have fallen in love with a drudge, and Joe was a lively man with a sense of humor and fun, who enjoyed spending money even more than making it. He liked having a good time; he appreciated fine food and wine; he dressed well, in the conservative way of Wall Street; and he was fastidious in his personal habits. “I never saw a man who was any cleaner than Joe Capote,” said Lillie Mae’s brother Seabon. “He would take a bath in the morning before he went to his office, then take another one and put on clean underwear and a clean shirt before he would have his dinner.” Short, round, and bespectacled, with dark, slicked-back hair, he was not handsome in any conventional sense. But Lillie Mae was not the only woman who found him attractive, and bigger men soon learned not to provoke him. Underneath his dark suit was the build of a boxer: strong, muscular arms, a thick neck, and a big, powerful chest.