Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  TWO

  11

  SIX months after Pearl Harbor, in June, 1942, the Capotes abandoned Connecticut and, with a collective sigh of relief, moved back to New York. They had had good times as well as bad in Greenwich, but all in all, their three years there had not been a success for any of them—and for Nina they had been calamitous. “Goodbye, girls, I’m going back to the city,” a jubilant Truman yelled to the Jaeger sisters as his train began to pull out of the Greenwich station. Then, in his excitement, he accidentally pulled the emergency cord, bringing his departure to a lurching halt. “Let’s go before anybody sees us,” Lucia said to Marion. “How many times can Truman embarrass us?” He eventually reached Grand Central Station nonetheless, and the Capotes quickly established themselves in an apartment at Park Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  The happy part of Truman’s Greenwich life had ended that month, in any event, when high school graduation ceremonies sent his little Millbrook band scattering off to college or into the armed forces. Truman, whose bad grades prevented him from receiving a diploma with the rest of the class of ‘42, did neither. After a trip south to see Arch, who had finally found his gold mine—marriage to a woman of means in Louisiana—at Nina’s insistence he began his senior year all over again at the Franklin School, a private school on the West Side. Catering mainly to students who could not get into better places, Franklin gave him a light schedule, allowed him to come and go as he pleased, and indulged him by looking the other way when he skipped classes, which he did frequently, without guilt or regret.

  He had never paid more than passing attention to school or grades, of course, but even if he had, how could he study when everything he wanted, all that he and Phoebe had talked about and dreamed about in their Greenwich exile, was at his doorstep? “In New York,” said Phoebe, who was in Manhattan herself, attending Barnard College, “Truman was happy and free for the first time in his life.” The little boy from Monroeville who had been terrified of sidewalks and tall buildings when he arrived ten years before had grown into a young man who had a romantic attachment to the city, “this island, floating in river water like a diamond iceberg,” as he was soon to write.

  He had an immense capacity for friendship, Phoebe had said, and he demonstrated it soon enough. He met a girl, Eleanor Marcus, who introduced him to her sister Carol. Carol, a “licensed screwball,” in Phoebe’s words, was enchanted by him and introduced him to her own best friends, Oona O’Neill and Gloria Vanderbilt. For the next several months, through the end of 1942 and well into 1943, they were a foursome: Carol, the blond madcap; Gloria, the most famous heiress of the era; Oona, the daughter of the country’s greatest playwright; and Truman, the amusing newcomer from the suburbs. Truman had lost Phoebe, but he had gained three substitutes, each unusual and each remarkably attractive in her own, quite distinctive way.

  Now he was at El Morocco or the Stork Club all the time. Sherman Billingsley, the Stork Club’s owner, was delighted to welcome three girls who were so often in the columns and offered them—and Truman too—free lunch. In the afternoons they would go to a favorite bar on East Fifty-third Street, where they would ask the piano player to play Cole Porter’s least popular songs. At night they might return to the Stork Club or El Morocco. “We thought we were being terrific,” said Carol, “and we thought that the Stork Club was a terrific place for us to be.” Truman finally felt at home, just where he wanted to be. New York was fun, exciting, and glamorous, and he now loved the very things that once had made him hate it—its crowds, its frenzied movement, its intensity. But the nightclubs and amusing people were only part of its appeal. Most of all, he had learned to appreciate the opportunity waiting for him on that glittering but dangerously slippery chunk of ice.

  Armed with an almost religious vision of his career as a writer—no martyr to the Cross had ever been more certain in his faith—he could almost touch his brilliant future as he walked down Fifth Avenue. It was all but within his grasp, that idealized future, casting its spell on him, leading him onward as surely as the promise of riches had once led Arch on. But Truman would not deceive himself with crazy schemes, as his father had done, or sit back and wait for fortune to smile. He would ruthlessly seize his glorious future the way a condor does its prey, and in a poem, “Sand for the Hour Glass,” that he wrote for the Franklin literary magazine, he boldly said so. Constructed out of metaphors of violence—he compared himself to that condor searching for its dinner—the poem is a young man’s manifesto, a declaration of war against a world not so much hostile as indifferent, which was, in Truman’s eyes, almost worse. He planned to be famous:

  Like the mighty Condor,

  Its vulture wings

  Against a copper sky,

  I have waited and watched,

  For my prey!

  My victim is immortality—

  To be somebody and be remembered—

  Is that not, too, your idle dream?

  For in remembrance we hold life itself

  Cupped tenderly in aged hands.

  You say—“He’s a fool and a dreamer.”

  I laugh and let my laughter,

  Like a bright and terrible knife,

  Go tearing through your hearts!

  For you know and I know,

  No matter how young, how old,

  We are only waiting,

  Waiting to see our names in Scriptures of Stone.

  So it is today and so it will be tomorrow!

  How could the world resist a will so determined, an ambition so pointed?

  Even a young condor does not find its prey the day it leaves the nest, and Truman’s first step into New York’s literary world was also that of a fledgling. Sometime toward the end of 1942, or perhaps the beginning of 1943, while he was still attending Franklin, he found a part-time job as copyboy on The New Yorker, a magazine he and Phoebe only months before had been talking about in the hushed tones of worshipers at a shrine. Reading it every week in Greenwich, they thought it the ultimate in wit and sophistication, and to Truman, as well as many other young writers, its dingy offices on West Forty-third Street seemed like the best possible place, perhaps the only possible place, for a sensitive writer to find congenial employment. At last one of his dreams was coming true.

  Working in that strange and eccentric place was not as enjoyable as he had envisioned, however, and there was none of the conviviality of a newspaper city room along those chilly and unfriendly corridors. Many writers never came into the office at all, and those who did seldom spoke. Introductions were rarely made, it was considered a grave breach of etiquette even to speak in the elevator, and people could see one another every day without exchanging so much as a nod. For years Edmund Wilson, the magazine’s literary critic, mistook the art editor for the fiction editor, for example, and one of the female staffers believed that a middle-aged messenger to the printer, who wore a black derby and carried an air of shabby gentility about him, was Wilson himself. When Truman arrived, much of the staff had gone or was going off to battle, and the atmosphere in those nineteenth-floor offices was even more rarefied and peculiar than it had been in peacetime. “The New Yorker is a worse madhouse than ever now,” complained E. B. White, “on account of the departure of everybody for the wars, leaving only the senile, the psychoneurotic, the maimed, the halt, and the goofy to get out the magazine. There is hardly a hormone left in the place….”

  Although Truman probably did not know it when he walked in that first morning, aglow with excitement, New Yorker copyboys had never been looked upon as potential writers or reporters, as they often were at other publications, and with the war, they were held in even lower regard than before. They tended to be either old and decrepit, thieves, or whistlers—Harold Ross, the magazine’s editor, could not stand whistlers—and for one reason or another, many were hired and fired in the same week. Those who stayed were supposed to be silent and, if at all possible, invisible. Hiring Truman, then, was a sign of
wartime desperation: by any measure, he was the most visible, least silent copyboy the magazine had ever had in its employ—or probably has had since. Indeed, those supposedly sophisticated people he and Phoebe had admired from a distance might just as well have been farmers from Iowa the way they gawked at him as he sharpened pencils and carried manuscripts. They were accustomed to odd-looking writers—the halt and the goofy, as White had called them; but they were not accustomed to odd-looking copy boys, particularly one who, in the words of William Shawn, then the nonaction editor, seemed “like a small boy, almost like a child.”

  Shawn’s description was not an exaggeration; at eighteen, Truman could have passed for a boy of twelve. He had no visible trace of a beard; he was still unusually short, perhaps not even as tall as his adult height of five feet, three inches; and he remained unnaturally pretty, with wide, arresting blue eyes and blond bangs tumbling over his forehead like a thatch of straw. If his appearance did not shock, his childlike voice did—it was so high, went one unfriendly joke, that only a dog could hear it. Truman may have thought of himself as a bird of prey, but to his new colleagues he seemed like an exotic breed of canary. “For God’s sake! What’s that?” Ross himself demanded when he peered out of his office and saw him drifting down the hall.

  Before his first week was out, he was one of the chief topics of hallway conversation. Two of the elevator men were so confused that they bet a dollar on his gender. “You’re going to lose your money,” Ebba Jonsson, the librarian, told the loser. “It is definitely a boy.” One of the women was so vividly impressed by him that she dreamed that his veins were filled with milk—whole or skimmed, she did not say. Truman added to the chatter, no doubt deliberately, by having his lunch delivered not from delicatessens, as everyone else did, but from expensive midtown restaurants, like “21” and Le Ruban Bleu. A rumor circulated that he was rich, and when someone saw him at a nightclub with one of his celebrated girlfriends, the rumor became established fact. Much of the reaction might have been predicted by anybody who knew him and his many ways of gaining attention. What could not have been foreseen, however, and what really caused heads to turn, was something that was in fact remarkable: Truman, almost alone on the staff, had managed to make a friend of Daise Terry, the terrible-tempered office manager.

  A short, elderly woman of notoriously mean and cantankerous disposition, Terry frightened everyone, editors and copyboys alike. Very few on the magazine liked her, and she liked very few of them. “She was a wicked, wicked woman,” said Andy Logan, who had just begun her long career as a reporter for the magazine when Truman arrived. “I once saw a copyboy weeping bitterly after one of her tongue-lashings, and I know a man now who was once an office boy here and who will still, in late middle age, wake up in a cold sweat remembering that awful woman.”

  How Truman tamed her no one knew, but he had always had a knack, like that of a stray dog, for finding and making himself agreeable to those, like his high school teacher Miss Wood, who could help him. “It’s in his stars, or his destiny, or his health line, or whatever you want to call it, that he travel in the right direction,” said one friend at the time. “His instinct leads him to the people who are on his side.” But opportunism was only half of the equation; he also genuinely liked the people who were on his side. He did not pretend to be Terry’s friend because she could help him; she could help him and that made him her friend. It was a perfect marriage of affection and opportunism.

  “She was a very feisty little woman and quite lonely,” he said. “Everybody hated her but me. Even Ross was afraid of her. But she was totally devoted to the magazine, and there wasn’t a thing that went on there that she didn’t know. She thought of me as some sort of child, which I was in a way, and she always used to cover up for me when I did things that were kind of sloppy.” Soon, despite the nearly half-century separating them, that incongruous couple would be seen leaving the office together for lunch, going off to dinner and the theater after work, even meeting on Saturdays, when the office was closed. His friendship was rewarded, and as the other copyboys watched enviously, she became his protector. When it rained, someone else would run errands outside the building; when there was late duty, someone else would be stuck with it. Finally, after only a few weeks, she gave him the best job of all, copyboy for the art department.

  In a very minor way, the art department’s copyboy performed an editorial function, sorting through the dozens of unsolicited cartoons and cartoon ideas that were submitted every week and separating the possibles from the impossibles. The art director would select from the gleanings, then show his own choices to Ross, Gus Lobrano, the fiction editor, Rea Irvin, who had drawn The New Yorker’s first cover, and Terry, all of whom would attach their comments to each drawing. That Tuesday-afternoon conference was always a loud, lively session, and when Ross did not like or understand a cartoon, which frequently was the case, his voice could be heard “baying the moon of despair,” as James Thurber phrased it. “Do women wear hats like that today?” was a question he might ask; or he would complain that a figure that was supposed to represent an army major looked like “a goddamn doorman.”

  “The copyboy’s job was to clean the place, put all the chairs in order, and make sure that Ross’s knitting needle was there,” said Albert Hubbell, who was the art director during much of Truman’s tenure. “Ross would sometimes get very excited and jab at the drawings to point things out. When he used a pencil he would leave marks, and someone thought to provide him with a dull knitting needle, which was harmless. When the copy boy had prepared everything, he gathered all the drawings—there were usually thirty or forty—and held them up on an easel for the editors to look at. Until then the art boys had always been automatons. Not Truman. He would make faces when he didn’t like something, laugh when he did, and react to what the editors said. That was unheard of, and Ross asked me: ‘Who is that boy? Where did he come from?’ Then he said: ‘Tell him not to do that. We don’t need another opinion.’ I told Truman, and he pretty well shut up after that. But he couldn’t resist little asides once in a while.”

  Dozens, even hundreds of drawings had to be kept in order, and occasionally Truman would be drowned in the deluge. “Sometimes I would get the cartoons all messed up and confused. Then I would just throw them into one of those holes and say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll straighten that out later.’ I managed somehow to lose about seven hundred of them that way. I didn’t deliberately destroy them, and I don’t know how I lost track of them. But I did. Understandably, a lot of people were very annoyed. That was one of those times Daise Terry covered up for me.”

  After the editors had made their decisions, Truman would pass them along to the artists, commiserate with those whose drawings had been rejected, and generally hold their hands. For Thurber, who was almost blind, he had to do a good bit more. It was his onerous duty to lead Thurber around, convey him to his assignations with one of the magazine’s secretaries, and even wait in her living room while the two of them consummated their loud passion in the bedroom. Their lovemaking, he later complained, sounded as romantic as the squeals of hogs being butchered. When the noise had stopped, he would help Thurber on with his clothes. Once he put Thurber’s socks on wrong side out, and a sharp-eyed Mrs. Thurber, who had put them on correctly that morning, noticed the difference. The next morning the artist accused him of having made the mistake on purpose. “Thurber was the rudest, meanest man I’ve ever seen,” Truman said. “He was terrifically hostile—maybe because he was blind—and everybody hated him but that one secretary he was going to bed with. She was the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen, but he didn’t care because he couldn’t see her.”

  For a humor magazine, The New Yorker was a serious, somber place to work, and Truman, who could not suppress his high spirits, betrayed a noticeably cavalier attitude as he went about his humble duties. In a playful parody of his job, he found a big feather duster and made a great show of dusting desks. “Everybody was being drafted at that tim
e,” said Hubbell, “and one night he came to me and said, ‘I’ve got my greetings. I’ve got to go to Grand Central Station tomorrow for my examination, and they may ship me out right after that.’ So we gave him a little party just in case they did. But when I walked in the next morning, there he was, with a cloth around his waist and the feather duster in his hand. ‘I’ve been turned down for everything,’ he told me, ‘including the WACs.’” Truman later explained why he was not sent off to war: “They thought I was quite neurotic. I wasn’t at the examination center even fifteen minutes before they said, ‘We will postpone this.’ And I never heard from them again.”

  Everybody at the magazine seemed to recognize that the art department’s copyboy was more than just unusual-looking, and he made no secret of his intention to be a writer. “He used to stand behind my desk,” said Barbara Lawrence, who had a second-level editorial job, “and one day he said, ‘You know, I write stories.’” He showed her some, and for the next few years she read them, giving support and suggestions, much as Miss Wood had done in Greenwich. “Most of Barbara’s ideas were about cutting things,” he said. “She was a very, very good cutter. At that time I had a tendency to not block my paragraphs properly, to let them run on too long. She was very helpful about breaking them up and that sort of thing.”

  She was the only one who was helpful, or offered encouragement, and in the inexplicable ways of magazines, he was not even allowed a tryout as a writer. “There was a tendency—New Yorker snobbery—not to take office boys seriously,” said E. J. Kahn, a staff writer for many years. “And they thought that Truman was an effeminate, silly little boy.” One of his side duties, after sorting cartoons, was to scour the newspapers for ideas for “The Talk of the Town,” the section of anecdotal items about comings and goings in New York. But when he asked to report and write a few “Talk” pieces himself, he was refused. “Even though we thought that he could probably do it,” said Shawn, “we didn’t see how we could send anybody that young to report for us.” Truman also submitted some of his short stories to the fiction department, which gave them mild praise, but turned them down as well. “Very good. But romantic in a way this magazine is not” was Truman’s memory of one such remark. “It is a scandal that we didn’t publish any of Truman’s short stories,” said Brendan Gill, The New Yorker’s unofficial historian. “But it’s also a scandal that we didn’t publish anything by Hemingway or Faulkner and only one story by Fitzgerald.”