Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  The top floor had two bedrooms and a bath; the living room, dining room, and kitchen were on the floor below; a partially detached tower contained a small room for guests; and the ground level was occupied by the owner. Plenty of space it had, but the Fontana Vecchia was far from luxurious. There was no phone or refrigerator; the two-burner stove always seemed to run out of fuel at dinnertime; hot water was dispensed by a wood-burning heater; and the only space heating came from fireplaces. Not much of a drawback in May, that was a considerable hardship during the winter, which was short but so cold that Truman sometimes wore gloves to write. A stone shack was what Cecil, who usually was entertained by grander hosts, was to call the house, and he was not altogether wrong. “With any one else [but Truman] the discomfort would have been unbearable,” he would complain. “As it was, the daily trek to buy provisions in town, and lugging the heavy packages back in the heat of the day, was quite an ordeal. My bedroom possessed no furniture except a pallet on which to sleep and it was best never to use the bathroom.”

  The view from the huge windows and broad terraces was as wonderful as Truman said, however, a more than adequate reward for the hike up that steep and stony path: down below, a valley of olive and almond trees, the blue Ionian Sea beyond, and, in the distance, the miragelike outline of the Italian mainland. “It is very like living in an airplane, or a ship trembling on the peak of a tidal wave,” said Truman. “There is a momentous feeling each time one looks from the windows, steps onto the terrace, a feeling of being suspended, like the white reeling doves, between the mountains and above the sea.”

  A girl in her late teens, Graziella, was paid seven dollars a month to clean and cook lunch, usually minestrone, and the new tenants happily returned to the productive schedule of Ischia and Tangier: work in the morning, lunch and a swim, and often more work in the afternoon. Toward evening, Truman walked into Taormina to buy meat for dinner. The undernourished brats who lived in caves on the outskirts of town invariably screamed at him as he walked by. He learned just enough Italian to reply that he planned to boil them alive if they did not shut up, and the exchange of insults became as much a part of his daily routine as the stops at the post office for mail, the tabacchi for newspapers and magazines, and the Americana Bar for a martini.

  The new arrivals were quickly introduced to the peculiar Sicilian mentality. Graziella often came to work with loud bruises and once even a split lip, results of beatings by her brother, who objected to her going out by herself. When Truman expressed shock at his brutality, she politely told him to mind his own business. “He is good-looking and has many friends,” she said. “Only to me is he brute.” In late summer there was a werewolf scare. Someone claimed to have been attacked by a human on all fours. “You don’t believe in werewolves, do you?” Truman asked the boy who delivered ice. “Oh, yes,” the boy gravely replied. “There used to be many werewolves in Taormina. Now there are only two or three.” In the fall Etna erupted, an awesome sight, and Truman joined the crowds who packed baskets with food and wine and picnicked as close as they dared to its fiery rivers. Only one group of revelers was hurt, beaten up by peasants whose homes had been swallowed by the lava and who were furious to see their neighbors making holiday out of their tragedy.

  A martini was not all Truman wanted at the Americana Bar: it was a meeting place and the center of gossip for Taormina’s small foreign colony. Andre Gide, who was then in the last year of his long life, was in town when Truman and Jack arrived, for instance, basking in the sun and finding pleasure in the company of the compliant boys he paid to visit his hotel room. Eugene O’Neill showed up later (“a nervous little man at loose ends and lonely; but rather likable” was how Truman described the great playwright to a friend), and so did Jean Cocteau, Christian Dior, Emlyn Williams, Orson Welles, Gayelord Hauser, and an M.G.M. film crew that was shooting a B movie, The Light Touch, with Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli. At Truman’s request, Richard Brooks, the director, placed him in a street scene. “I can just imagine Tennessee’s face when he sees this!” Truman rejoiced. But his acting career was soon derailed. Screening the rough cut in Hollywood, the producer spotted his face and demanded its removal. “Isn’t that Truman Capote?” he asked Brooks. “You can’t use him! Cut him out!”

  For months the patrons of the Americana were captivated by the continuing soap opera of Bobby Pratt-Barlow, a moneyed Englishman and a decades-long resident of Taormina who sometimes stopped by to see Truman and Jack on his way to his own house in the hills. “He liked beautiful boys, and he turned them into very good and accomplished servants,” said Truman. “When he was ready for a new one, the hill families around Taormina would vie for him to consider their sons for adoption. Then a rich Texan came to town, bought a big house, put in a swimming pool, and drove around in a large car. At the time Bobby had a boy of thirteen, Beppe, who was the greatest love of all the boys he had ever had. The Texan spied him and stole him away—the kid was just undone by the swimming pool and the car. After that, it was open warfare in that town! People were outraged that the boy had gone off and left Bobby, and they tried all kinds of voodoo to kill off the American. But none of it worked. The boy stayed with him and was eventually married in his house.”

  But the only soap operas that really interested Truman were those involving his friends and enemies in New York. He wrote letters, he pointedly informed one laggard correspondent, only so that he could receive them, and the visit to the post office was the most exciting part of his day. “Such a newsy letter,” he purred to Pearl Kazin after receiving one of her fact-filled dispatches. “You are the only person who writes the kind of letter I really enjoy.” The Cerfs, on the other hand, received a reprimand for not writing more often. “Many’s the night I’ve trudged down to the post office, then trudged back empty handed,” he wailed, “thinking, a fine lot they are, whirling from one gay event to another, never giving a thought to poor Truman: far off there on a windswept hill with nothing but the sound of the sea to cheer him up. Oh chilluns, it do get mighty powerful lonesome here.”

  Even Pearl’s news was stale by the time it reached Taormina, and frustrated by the lack of fresh gossip, Truman resurrected old gossip and used it in a new way, in a parlor game, his own version of Monopoly, which he played with almost anyone who made it up the goat path. “It’s SO educational,” he bragged to the Cerfs, “and you can slander people right and left, all in the interest of le sport. It’s called IDC, which stands for International Daisy Chain. You make a chain of names, each one connected by the fact that he or she has had an affair with the person previously mentioned; the point is to go as far and as incongruously as possible. For example: this one is from Peggy Guggenheim to King Farouk. Peggy Guggenheim to Lawrence Vail to Jeanne Connolly to Cyril Connolly to Dorothy Walworth to King Farouk. See how it works? Peggy Guggenheim had an affair with L. Vail who had an affair with J. Connolly etc. Here is another, and much more difficult, not to say raffine, example: from Henry James to Ida Lupino. As follows: Henry James to Hugh Walpole to Harold Nicolson to the Hon. David Herbert to John C. Wilson to Noel Coward to Louis Hayward to Ida Lupino. Perhaps it all sounds rather dreary on paper; but I can assure you that, with a few drinks inside you and some suitable folk to play with, you’ll be amazed.” Later he added: “P.S. forgot to include my most favorite IDC: Cab Calloway to Hitler. Cab Calloway to Marquesa Casamaury to Carol Reed to Vanity Mitford to Hitler. Get Moss and Kitty [Hart] to play this game; I bet they’d be wonderful at it. If you get any good IDC’s, please send them along.”

  Seeing his friends was even better than corresponding with them, and he began issuing invitations almost as soon as he had unpacked. “It is terribly quiet and pretty and cheap and we want awfully for you to come here. Why don’t you, Bill?” he pleaded with Bill Goyen. A like request was directed to Cecil, who, to Truman’s consternation, was considering vacationing in France instead of Italy. “But why are you going to Brittany?” he asked. “Absolutely you must take a holiday here.”
A similar courtship was carried on with Pearl Kazin. “Pearl Lamb,” he wrote in June. “La vie Taormina est la vie en Rose—except, of course, that there is no Pearl.” And later: “Honey, why are you going to the south of France? Why not Italy! So much warmer, nicer, cheaper. Or here, Sicily. At least, before settling anything, come down and visit with us.”

  Goyen ignored his pleas, but Cecil and Pearl succumbed, Cecil staying two weeks in August, Pearl for a full three months during the fall and winter. “Truman was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, generous to a fault,” she said. “I was running out of money, and he said, ‘I’ll support you.’ And he meant every word of it.” Scarcely had she put down her bags, however, when Peggy Guggenheim, the millionaire art collector, descended on them from her palazzo in Venice. “With that incredible generosity of Truman’s, he had simply thrown out the suggestion that she come down to Sicily,” recalled Pearl. “I moved out of the tower and slept in the living room, but she still found it absolutely impermissible that there should be another woman around. She insisted that we all had to accompany her on her ‘giro’—it’s what the Sicilians called an automobile trip—around the island. So off we went for five or six days.

  “It was a ghastly trip in some ways. Peggy was flirting with Jack, which didn’t interest him at all, and, failing that, with the driver of the car, whom she was also trying to cheat on the number of kilometers that she was supposed to pay him for. He was about thirty-five and Peggy herself was fifty-two. I remember her age because Truman sneaked a look at her passport, ran to me, and said, ‘Guess how old she is!’ At that point fifty-two seemed awfully old to both of us. The journey ended with a violent outburst on Jack’s part in the lobby of the hotel in Palermo. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he gave her a dressing-down the likes of which I don’t think she had ever had in her life. He was also angry at Truman because he didn’t appreciate at all the carte blanche invitations Truman was always giving people. We made the return trip to Taormina in rather stony silence.”

  One invitation Jack could not object to was that extended to Truman’s mother. Touring Europe for the first time since the war, she and Joe showed up at the beginning of September. Although Truman did not know it, Nina had a reason for making a detour to Sicily, and before leaving New York she had told Phoebe Pierce what it was. “She telephoned me and asked me if I could have lunch with her,” said Phoebe. “She was completely sober and less ‘Southern belley’ than I had ever seen her. She said that she had always hated me, but that she was sorry she had been unkind to me. ‘I was wrong and I know you loved Truman,’ she told me, ‘and I don’t know why I hated you.’ Somehow she made me feel worse after she had apologized than before: that was the ambiguity of Nina. Then she said to me, ‘I’m going over to Europe to see Truman. I want to put things right. I don’t think I have behaved very well.’”

  In Taormina she did behave well—though it was too late, of course, to put things right. She was on the wagon, drinking nothing but endless cups of coffee, as she had for many months, and she treated Jack, whom she detested, with elaborate courtesy. Jack was equally polite to her, though he disliked her with at least equal intensity. “She was nothing but a hillbilly from the South, a pushy climber who only wanted to be in the New York Social Register,” he declared. “She hated the fact that she had a talented kid, and she hated Truman all the time, I’m sure. And he hated her. That poor little boy! He came from the mines.” If Nina and Jack had remained together much longer, there might have been an explosion—they were both primed bombs with short fuses—and Truman and Joe must have been relieved when after three or four days, the two of them went their separate ways: Jack to visit a friend near Naples, and Nina, along with Truman and Joe, to take in the beauties of Venice.

  Local Color was published while Truman was there, and before heading home to America, Nina and Joe gave him a party in the roof garden of the Danieli, which was then, as now, one of the best hotels in the city. A few weeks later, the reviews, which were mostly favorable, reached him in Sicily. “At least the great chest-pounding he-men spit less venom than usual,” he wrote Linscott. “God forbid they should ever take me to their hearts; when that time comes, I’d best retire.” At the end of the month he also celebrated another birthday: he was now too old ever to be called a kid. “Dear God, I am 26,” he lamented, probably only half in jest, to Mary Louise. “I wanted always to be 25.”

  Another visitor to Taormina was Robert Horan, whom Truman used to see at Capricorn, the Menotti-Barber house in Mount Kisco. Horan’s relationship with the two composers was rapidly disintegrating, and Thomas Schippers, a strikingly handsome nineteen-year-old who was to become the golden boy of American composers, was taking his place in Gian-Carlo’s affections. Devastated by the downward turn in his life, Horan was, in his own words, “drunk most of the time, in a kind of fog, just falling apart.” Finally, in December, he did fall apart. He became seriously ill and sardonically—such was his mood—told the hotel doctor that he had tried to commit suicide. The doctor, along with Truman and most others, believed him. For several days, Truman was nurse, companion and fixer, using all his power of persuasion to summon other doctors, who did not want to become involved in an attempted suicide, and to keep away the police, who did. Unable to work, under attack from Jack, who wanted him to stay away from “that son-of-a-bitch black Irishman,” as he called Horan, Truman desperately wired Gian-Carlo, who was in Milan, to come and get his young friend. When Gian-Carlo said that he could not take time from rehearsals at La Scala, Truman packed Horan aboard a train and delivered him to the maestro in person.

  “The rest of the story is just too sad and sordid,” Truman reported to Bill Goyen several days later. “When we finally got to the hotel in Milan, G-C wasn’t there. He was at a rehearsal. I could have killed him. But Bob, for his part, was dramatizing the situation as much as possible. When G-C at last turned up, Bob was incredibly insolent to him—made him out to be a monster of ambition and stupidity. And there was G-C jumping around pretending it was all a joke. Then came the really sickening denouement. G-C came to my room, his face white as cold cream. All in a burst he said: Bob was ruining his life, that he’d spent $2,000 a month since he’d come to Europe and B’s extravagance was taking all his money—but that none of this mattered so long as he did not have to go to bed with him, that for the last few years B forced him to make love and afterwards he, G-C, had to go and throw up. He also said that he was terribly in love with somebody else—some young American boy—and he was terrified of B’s finding out.” Disgusted with both of them, Truman returned to Sicily the next morning. “Have been going through a terrible experience,” he told Linscott. “As a result am quite, quite exhausted.”

  Shortly into the New Year, 1951, Jack’s father died. Jack decided that it would be too expensive and too complicated to return home for the funeral, but he paid his own kind of homage. His father was such a clean man, he told Truman and Pearl, that the greatest tribute he could pay his memory was to take a bath—it was not bath night. He lit a fire under the water heater, and when he had dried off, Truman and Pearl used the rest of the precious hot water to take their own baths. “Little things keep coming at me, remindful and barbed,” Jack wrote his sister Gloria. Chief among them was his regret that his father, with whom he had maintained a kind of truce in recent years, had not seen him write a best-seller, as his father had said he wanted him to do.

  26

  PULLING Summer Crossing together would take a monumental effort, Truman had warned Linscott, and in the end it was either too great an effort or one he was unwilling to make. Nor did he receive any encouragement from Linscott, who was unimpressed by what Truman showed him of the first draft. It was the kind of novel any good writer could have produced, Linscott said; it did not have Truman’s distinctive artistic voice. Jack did not like it either; he thought that it was “thin”—an adjective that causes shivers to dance up the spine of any writer. Reluctantly, Truman came to the same co
nclusion. “I read it over maybe two or three times, and one day I just decided: I don’t really like it. I think it’s well written and it’s got a lot of style, but I don’t really like it. And so I tore it up.”

  Despite his cool analysis of how he wanted to build his career, Truman had chosen the wrong subject nonetheless, and it had cost him at least a year. He had to find another theme, and quickly. Now, sitting on the terrace of the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina, his gaze shifted homeward, to Alabama and a subject that had never failed him: his childhood. If Other Voices had been an attempt to exorcise demons, his new novel, The Grass Harp, was an attempt to raise the bittersweet spirits of remembrance and nostalgia. “Those were the lovely years,” his hero, Collin Fenwick, says of his youth in a town that sounds very much like Monroeville. If Joel Knox represents one half of his character, then Collin represents the other half. The Grass Harp is the bright, obverse side of Other Voices, and Collin is the sunny, happy side of Truman Capote.

  “It is very real to me, more real than anything I’ve ever written, probably ever will” was the way he described the new book to Linscott. “Satisfying as, in that sense, it is, it keeps me in a painful emotional state: memories are always breaking my heart, I cry—it is very odd, I seem to have no control over myself or what I am doing. But my vision is clear, and if I can half execute that vision it will be a beautiful book.” Indeed, The Grass Harp bears much more factual resemblance to his life than does Other Voices. Sook is the model for his heroine, Dolly Talbo, who makes and sells a dropsy cure from secret ingredients she collects in the woods. Callie and Jennie are combined in the character of Dolly’s sister Verena, the richest, meanest woman in town. Anna Stabler, the black woman who helped Sook with her chores, is Dolly’s best friend, Catherine Creek. Truman is of course Collin, the boy who is sent to live with his old-maid cousins after his mother dies.