Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  For a few days, while he was feigning polite indifference to Watson, Waldemar had time to show Truman the only monuments Truman wanted to see: Le Boeuf, of course; the Café Flore, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sat arguing existentialism; and La Vie en Rose, an all-male club where, under a twirling ball of spangled mirrors, two middle-aged Hungarian transvestites sang and danced as Les Sisters B. Soon, however, Waldemar had no time to play tour guide. Truman’s analysis of Watson had been both accurate and acute. Watson was an emotional masochist who was aroused not by affection, but by rejection. Whispering directions from behind the scenes, Truman choreographed a passionate reconciliation, the tango he and Waldemar had coyly referred to in their cable. “Truman gave me very good advice,” said Waldemar, “and I think he prolonged my relationship with Peter by about a year.”

  Despite his ignorance of the language, Truman did not really need Waldemar to guide him around Paris, where his name and face were almost as well known as they had been in London—the Other Voices picture of the writer recumbent was rapidly becoming as famous as the Mona Lisa. The tabloid France-Dimanche sent two reporters to interview him at the Pont Royal, and even intellectuals like Jean Cocteau, the master of all arts, were curious about him. Hearing that his friend Karl Bissinger had an assignment to take photographs on the set of Cocteau’s new movie, Les Parents Terribles, Truman insisted on tagging along, trailing behind him, despite the season, one of his long Bronzini scarves. “You don’t haul your friends along to see a famous director,” said Bissinger, “and if I had been more sophisticated, I wouldn’t have taken Truman. But that Other Voices photograph had dominated the year’s gossip, and, as it happened, Cocteau was fascinated by him. He called him ‘the infant.’” Cocteau later introduced the infant to others, who, following the pattern set in New York and London, introduced him to still others, so that in just the month he was there, Truman again met a gallery of literary and artistic celebrities: from Colette, bedridden but still noticing everything with her catlike, kohl-encased eyes, to the designer Christian Dior, whose New Look of 1947 had forced fashionable women the world over to drop their hems almost to the ankle.

  Truman had many well-positioned sponsors in Paris. “The other day at Natalie Barney’s Mrs. Bradley was full of the new young Parisian hero—Truman Capote,” Alice B. Toklas, who had been Gertrude Stein’s companion, reported to friends in America. “Gallimard is launching his novel with immense publicity and as Mrs. Bradley is his agent she has every interest to make the most of the sensation he is causing.” An elderly Frenchwoman of formidable presence—her last name came from her American husband, who had died before the war—Jenny Bradley was more than an agent. She had been on first-name, often intimate, terms with many of the century’s great writers, a list that only began with Joyce, Pound and Proust. (“Ah, poor Marcel,” she said. “Those sad Jewish eyes. I found him slightly ridiculous as a human being. There was no common measure between the man and his work, which is often the case.”) She still represented the best American writers to French publishers and the best French writers to American publishers. Every Saturday afternoon, she served champagne to a select group in her apartment on the Ile-St.-Louis, in a house that had belonged to Louis XIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu.

  “I can see Truman now, sitting near the mantelpiece,” she said. “He would tell his stories and meet very interesting people, whom he would sometimes charm. He reminded me a little of Ford Madox Ford in that one could not very well distinguish between what was true and what was not true. He was making up his stories as he told them. They had nothing to do with reality, and that rather charmed me. There was something naive about him, which was probably half natural and half put on. He had a kind of simplicity, which was a real gift. He was what we call sur-doué, an overly gifted young boy. He looked about sixteen, and at moments he could be childish. He went to the flea market one day, for example, and came back with a leather belt, which had copper locomotives running around it. Extraordinary idea! But he was so proud of it. ‘Look at my belt,’ he would say. ‘Isn’t it a beauty?’”

  Through Mrs. Bradley, Truman became friendly with Natalie Barney, one of the several rich and exceptional American lesbians who had settled in Paris around the turn of the century. Miss Barney also had known many of the century’s great poets, writers, and musicians, some of whom had read or performed from the steps of the small Greek temple in her garden on the Rue Jacob. Forty years previously her many love affairs had been thought a scandal. When Truman met her, she was in her early seventies, but she was still, wonderful to say, finding new romances. Anyone who did not know her might have mistaken her for a society woman from Dayton, Ohio, which is where she and her money came from. “She was plump, pigeonlike,” said Truman, and “very small, shorter even than I am. She had lovely skin, fine features, and beautiful, cool blue eyes. She always wore gray—dark gray shoes and little gray suits with a flower in the lapel; even her car was gray.

  “One winter, a year or two after I met her, she said she wanted to take me to lunch and then show me something that few people had even seen. After lunch, she took me to an ordinary-looking apartment house near the Eiffel Tower, and we walked up four flights of stairs. She made me stay outside while she went into a room and turned on the lights. Finally I was let into an enormous room with perhaps a hundred pictures on the walls, each covered by a curtain: it was the studio of her lover, Romaine Brooks. We went around to each picture, and she pulled back the curtain, explaining who the woman was—only two of them were men—and what that woman’s relationship was with the women in all the other pictures. It was like reading a fabulous novel. There was a portrait of Miss Barney too, but she wasn’t this cozy little Miss Marple type that I knew—she was a wild thing with one hand on her hip and the other carrying a whip. I had never heard of Romaine Brooks before, but her paintings were wonderful, and we stayed up there about two hours looking at them. Miss Barney had a lot of stories to tell.”

  Truman claimed to have had a brief affair of his own in Paris: with Albert Camus. “He was a homely little thing,” he said of the future Nobel Prize winner, “but attractive, with sensitive eyes and a compassionate face. He was my editor at Gallimard, and he took me to dinner. One thing led to another, and one afternoon he came to my room and we just went to bed. It was as simple as that. I don’t think he was homosexual in any way. But that was the period when I looked my best. When he met me, he was sort of startled. I must have touched some nostalgic nerve in him, reminded him of something that happened in adolescence.” That Truman knew Camus there can be no doubt; whether he went to bed with such a renowned womanizer is a question that can never be answered. It may have been one of the tales he made up; or, despite hoots of disbelief from both friends and enemies, it may have been true. In matters of sex there is only one guide: almost anything is possible.

  As Waldemar had predicted, Truman wasted no time in looking up Denham Fouts, whose check he had politely returned, but whose invitation to visit he had eagerly accepted. One of those people whose only ambition was to attract other people, Denny was superb at his job, affording it no more thought or effort than a flower gives to enticing the bees that buzz before its fragrant blossoms or than a tropical fish gives to those who admire its peacock fins from the other side of the aquarium glass: he was a male whore from Jacksonville, Florida, the grand courtesan Waldemar never was, nor hoped to be. He was so fascinating a figure, as dark angels always are, that he has achieved minor immortality in several works of fiction, including Isherwood’s novel Down There on a Visit, Vidal’s short story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” and “Unspoiled Monsters,” which relates Truman’s own, sometimes inaccurate version of the Fouts saga. “Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me,” Truman wrote, “a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.”

  Unlike many in his profession, Denny chose his career. When he was growing up, Jacksonville still considered itself part of the un
reconstructed South. His family thought of itself as part of the Southern aristocracy; it was upright, conservative and intolerant of all those who did not accept its ossified codes—a group of outcasts that included Denny, who rebelled and shocked in every way he could. Had he lived in England, he would have been sent off to one of the colonies, some hot place in Africa, and reports of his indiscretions would occasionally have been passed around the dinner table. Not having that option, Denny’s father did the next best thing: he sent him north, asking an uncle who was president of Safeway Stores to give him a job in Washington.

  So it was that in 1932 or 1933, when he was only eighteen or nineteen, Denny began his wanderings, leaving Washington after a few months for Manhattan, where he found a job as a stock boy and shared a small apartment with a friend. His extraordinary good looks brought stares wherever he went: nature had “breathed upon him beauty of hair and bloom of youth,” as Virgil said of Aeneas, “and kindled brilliance in his eyes, as an artist’s hand gives style to ivory.” Thin as a hieroglyph, he had dark hair, light brown eyes, and a cleft chin and “was about the most beautiful boy anybody had ever seen,” said Jimmy Daniels, who sang at a Harlem nightclub Denny frequented. “His skin always looked as if it had just been scrubbed; it seemed to have no pores at all, it was so smooth.” Adding his own distinctive colors to the portrait, Glenway Wescott observed that “he was absolutely enchanting and ridiculously good-looking—unattractively good-looking from my point of view. The only thing I liked about him was that he had the most delicious body odor; I once swiped one of his handkerchiefs.”

  Such attributes sometimes propelled young men to Hollywood, but Denny, whose announced intention was never to work, did not want to be famous; he wanted to be taken care of in grand style. Knowing that, his roommate asked Wescott, who often browsed in the bookstore where he worked and who seemed to know the ways of the world, to sit down and give Denny advice. Wescott happily agreed, and Denny immediately came to the point. “Now, Glenway,” he said, “you know everything. I want you to tell me: how does one manage to get kept?” Wringing his hands and clicking his tongue at such a naive and blunt question, Wescott told him that such an objective must be approached indirectly, so that the prospective keeper is made to feel like a generous benefactor rather than a customer who is being billed for services rendered. “To begin with,” he said, “you must never use that word—‘kept.’ Think of something you want to do that takes money to learn. Then ask someone for help and guidance. You’ll get much more money that way than by coming at it straight on.”

  The first to offer such help was a German baron who took him to Europe, where Denny jumped from one titled bed to another—Prince Paul, later King of Greece, was his highest-ranking conquest—and from there he traveled the world. Writing home to his family, he said that he was engaged in secret missions for an unnamed Daddy Warbucks, some great financier with global interests. “He invented himself,” said one of his friends, John B. L. Goodwin. “If people didn’t know his background, he would make it up.”

  His last lover before the war was none other than Peter Watson, whose affections he possessed in a way that Waldemar was not able to do. Watson, it was said, could not be in the same room with Denny without getting an erection. To save that porcelain skin from being damaged by one of Hitler’s blockbusters, in 1940 Watson sent him back to America. It was then that he met Isherwood in Los Angeles. “His handsome profile was bitterly sharp, like a knife edge,” wrote Isherwood of his Denny character in Down There on a Visit. “And goodness, underneath the looks and the charm and the drawl, how sour he was!” More than sour, Denny appeared to live at the bottom of a well of cynicism so deep that to him the sun was like a star at the ragged edge of the universe, which even the largest and most powerful telescopes must squint to see. “He thought that the world was made up of whores,” said his friend Bill Harris. “To be a successful whore was all, he said. Though he didn’t brag, he felt he had done pretty well at it.”

  His fondness for pubescent boys was doubtless what prompted him to extend an invitation to the boyish-looking author on the dust jacket of Other Voices. Deeply addicted to opium by the time Truman paid his respects, Denny lived in a state of near somnolence. He sometimes slept most of the day and left his apartment on the fashionable Rue du Bac only at night. A maid kept order and walked Trotsky, the huge mutt he had found in California. Though Watson, who had a horror of drugs, had given up on him as a lover, he was still fond enough to send him money and pay his rent. Aware of how powerful Denny’s grasp could be, Waldemar warned Truman to keep his distance. Denny, he said, was like the feeble old man who asked Sindbad for a lift in The Arabian Nights. Feeling sorry for him, Sindbad took him on his back; but once he was on, the old man was on to stay and Sindbad could not get him off.

  Truman nodded but did not listen. How could he pass up an opportunity to meet Denham Fouts? Fascinated by Denny, he spent hours lying beside him in Denny’s darkened bedroom, talking to him, reading to him, and listening to his stories. Sex was not considered; drugs had destroyed Denny’s libido. Otherwise, Denny showed no ill effects from his years of drugs and debauchery; he looked much younger than his actual age of thirty-four and retained still the well-scrubbed glow of youth. “Denny radiated a quality that was the exact opposite of what he was,” said Truman, “extraordinary health, youth, and unspoiled innocence. Whatever he had done the night before, or the day before, or the week before, he always looked as if he had just awakened on the freshest and most beautiful morning in the world. To watch him walk into a room was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking: he was the single most charming-looking person I’ve ever seen.” Oscar Wilde had written his biography before Denny was born: Denny was Dorian Gray.

  Truman was scared by his addiction to drugs, however, something he had never witnessed before, and he soon tired of Denny’s voracious, childlike demand for attention. “Even when he was perfectly well, Denny would often be propped up in bed, like a little boy who’s sick and waiting for friends to come and visit him,” said Bill Harris. “He wanted to be taken care of forever.” Taking care of him was a chore Truman did not want to assume. “Denny had real magic and I adored him. But I was frightened of him and the drug scene. I was young, and I didn’t plan to get involved in any of that. I wanted to get him off drugs, and he also wanted to get out of the life he had been living all those years. He loved the West and he had a fantasy about buying a gasoline station in Arizona, the sort of place that has a sign saying, ‘Last Chance for Gas for Fifty Miles.’ I was going to write, and he was going to run it and be cured of all the things that were wrong with him. I very foolishly let him go on about it because I knew that none of it was ever going to happen.”

  Even Denny could not have taken that fantasy seriously: the Best-Kept Boy in the World becoming a grizzled old gas jockey on Route 66, while his younger lover wrote best-sellers next to the Coke machine in the dusty back room. But he seemed to be sincere in his desire to be cured, and Truman helped him pack for a Swiss drug clinic. But a drug addict’s or an alcoholic’s zeal for salvation does not usually last long, as Truman should have known from living with his mother. “Our disturbing friend just called,” he wrote Waldemar. “The Switzerland deal seems to be off. It makes me feel like a miserable heel, but what can I do now but wash my hands of the whole affair?” Wash his hands he did, soon leaving Paris for Italy.

  The saga of Denham Fouts did not, in any event, have long to run. He eventually did go to the Swiss clinic, but the cure did not work. Forced out of his apartment on the Rue du Bac, he moved to a pension in Rome, where he was looked after by a devoted young Englishman, who was as captivated by him as Truman had been. “You can sit here as long as you don’t start moralizing,” Denny told John Goodwin, who visited him in his new quarters. “I’m sick of moralizations. Just let me go my own way.” His own way was a fatal heart attack in 1949, when he was thirty-five; his body was buried in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. “I can’t say
what made Denny click,” said Goodwin. “I can only say what his effect was on other people. He had great, great charm, and you always had the feeling that potentially he was something much more than he was.”

  22

  LONDON Truman did not like, then or ever. Paris he loved that golden summer but never again. With Venice, however, which was next on his itinerary, he had a lasting romance, happily returning many times, in all seasons and all weathers. He arrived from Paris on July 4, checked into the Albergo Pilsen, and that evening, walking through St. Mark’s Square, as all tourists do, encountered another young American writer, Donald Windham. They had seen each other at Leo’s parties but never talked. Coming together in a strange city, they discovered that they had much in common, including friends like Tennessee. Donald, a fellow Southerner, a Georgian, had just turned twenty-eight and was trying to complete his first novel; Truman, after his six eventful weeks in London and Paris, was hoping to settle down at last and finish a short story, “Children on Their Birthdays.” Their schedules thus matched exactly, and they became traveling companions; they stayed indoors during the mornings, and occasionally the afternoons as well, and met in the evening for drinks and dinner.

  When he did go out to see the sights, Truman, of course, was not interested in the churches and palazzos, the Titians and Tintorettos in the Accademia. His tourist attractions tended to be places, usually restaurants and bars, where he was made to feel at home. Once he had found such a place, he could rarely be persuaded to go anywhere else. In Venice that spot was Harry’s Bar, and he had dinner there nearly every night. “For him Venice was Harry’s Bar,” declared Donald. Once, Donald prevailed upon him to forsake Harry’s for a night and try a small outdoor cafe” near St. Mark’s Square. Truman reluctantly agreed and ordered his customary martini. He sipped it and, with an I-told-you-so smile, handed it across the table. Donald tasted it and was forced to admit that it was indeed peculiar. “Ask the bartender what goes into a martini,” Truman said. The answer—one-third gin, one-third vermouth, one-third cognac, and a twist of lemon peel—was convincing evidence that in Venice there was only one place to dine, and Donald never again suggested an alternative to the reliable Harry’s.