Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  He may not have been quite as loud as a shotgun, but Truman did make his voice heard, much more than freshman playwrights usually do, in the maneuvering that precedes any large theatrical enterprise. He stipulated that The Grass Harp had to have a “topflight production,” and he insisted that topflight people be in charge. Shy and soft-spoken, Saint regarded him with some awe and usually let him have his way, just as Linscott did. Clearly, the director had to have imagination and insight, and Truman wanted Peter Brook, who, though only twenty-six, had already demonstrated the remarkable range of his invention to the British theater and opera world. He also wanted Cecil to design the sets, Virgil Thomson to compose the incidental music, and Alice Pearce, a nightclub comedienne, to play Miss Baby Love Dallas. Saint concurred on all four, and they both agreed that the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, would be perfect as Dolly and Verena.

  Cecil, Thomson, Pearce, and the Gish sisters all said yes, but Brook declined, and his refusal caused a key part of Truman’s cherished plan to unravel. His replacement, Robert Lewis, had a long history on Broadway and had recently made a success of another play with a fantastical theme, the Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon. But Lewis did not want the Gish sisters, and Saint, taking the recommendation of an experienced director over that of an inexperienced playwright, dropped them from the cast list. The central role of Dolly went instead to the accomplished Mildred Natwick, the part of Verena to the less well-known Ruth Nelson.

  Hiding his chagrin, Truman tried to convince himself that after Brook, Lewis was the best choice for director. “Between us, he has a certain vulgarity,” he wrote Cecil, “but, kept within check, I am perfectly certain he is the right director for us—he does really understand the play, has a very real sensitivity and also a strong realistic sense—which, as you pointed out, is so necessary to a play such as this.” A certain vulgarity Lewis did have—he startled Truman by informing him that he knew his play better than Truman did himself—but he also knew how to direct. Invited to the final rehearsal before the play was sent on the road, two hundred guests were enchanted, “crying buckets” at the end, according to Virgil Thomson, just as they were supposed to. Saint was so encouraged that he moved the New York opening up a week to beat the March 31 deadline for Pulitzer Prize consideration.

  Few audiences ever cried again. The first indication that something was wrong came during the tryout in Boston, where Cecil’s sets—Dolly’s kitchen and the tree—were unwrapped. With no regard for budget, Cecil had bought lavishly at Madison Avenue antique shops, packing Dolly’s kitchen with everything he thought an old maid might have, including upholstered Victorian furniture and red velvet draperies for the windows; Escoffier could not have been better provided for. “Honey, you know,” said Alice Pearce to Andrew Lyndon, whom Truman had got a job as Lewis’ assistant. “Is that what a kitchen in the South looked like?” Cecil’s tree was even more impressive: twenty-four feet high, thirty-four feet wide at its broadest point, it might have been a soaring sequoia rather than a humble Alabama chinaberry, so completely did it dominate the stage of the old Colonial Theater. By comparison, commented one awed newspaperman, all other stage trees he had seen looked like shrubs. In Lewis’ eyes, that was precisely the problem. “Cecil, this is not a play about a tree,” he tartly observed, but Cecil gave him only a haughty stare in reply.

  Lewis was also displeased with Truman’s creation of Miss Baby Love Dallas. Her comic routine, he maintained, interrupted the mood of the play. “Tell y’ what,” Truman said reassuringly. “It needs an audience. If it doesn’t work in Boston, I’ll change it. That’s why we go on the road, isn’t it?”

  Unfortunately, the Boston tryout, which began March 13, did not give a clear signal as to what worked and what did not. The local critics were evenly divided. “A moving and tender drama,” said one of them; “thin, vague and unconvincing,” said another. Variety, the show-business weekly, ominously predicted that “without a pretty extensive rewrite, the sound of The Grass Harp will probably not be long heard in the land of Broadway.” But there was no rewrite. Back in New York before the official opening, Truman ran into his old friend Paul Bigelow. How was his play going? Bigelow asked. Marvelously well, Truman said; nothing had to be changed. “I was astonished,” recalled Bigelow, “because I was used to working in the vulgar Broadway theater. And to have a playwright come back into town and say that nothing had to be changed! I remember walking back to my office, thinking: you know, that play is going to fail.”

  Early on opening night, March 27, 1952, Truman and Andrew sat in a bar near the Martin Beck Theater and leafed through a thick stack of congratulatory telegrams. “All good wishes for tonight from your admirers,” said Lynn and Alfred—the Lunts. “Good wishes for your great and glowing success tonight and our love,” added Vivien and Larry—the Oliviers. “We are all thinking of you and praying for your success tonight. All love, Daddy”—Arch. Half an hour or so before curtain they walked back to the theater. “My, my, I think something’s happening down the street,” Truman said in mock surprise when they spied the glittering crowd that was beginning to gather on Forty-fifth Street. “Let’s see what the excitement’s about.” Forbidden by Lewis from going backstage—the presence of the author upsets the actors, he claimed—he then joined Saint across the street, where the two of them watched a regiment of celebrities step out of their limousines. Mingling with that glamorous throng were Jack and Newton, who did not meet, and Joe and Nina, who looked beautiful in a formal gown and mink coat.

  When the curtain had descended, Linscott rushed to a pay phone to tell Bill Goyen what all those famous people had thought. “Well, it’s not going to work,” he declared. “I walked through the lobby and I heard voices saying, ‘It’s too thin,’ and ‘The characters are not really believable.’ I think Truman’s in a lot of trouble.” Truman and Newton nervously waited for the reviews in the Beekman Place apartment where Newton was staying. The Times was the first and most important paper to be delivered, and its critic, Brooks Atkinson, contradicting all that Linscott had overheard, quickly decorated the room with smiles. “Out of good impulses and sensitive perceptions Truman Capote has written a beautiful play,” he said.

  But the other papers, which arrived all too quickly, erased those happy smiles. Several other critics also saw merit in the play—and promise in the playwright—but none shared Atkinson’s enthusiasm. “Seeing The Grass Harp is like coming across a handful of flowers in an old scrapbook,” said Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune. “The flowers have been pressed into attractive patterns, but they are quite dead.” The critic of the Times can sometimes kill a play, but he cannot save one, and Truman’s nostalgic little drama lasted only thirty-six performances.

  Every lost battle is refought by the defeated generals in their memoirs, and each of those involved had his own explanation for the failure of The Grass Harp. Thomson blamed Cecil’s overpowering sets. Lewis faulted both the sets, particularly “the goddamn tree,” and what he thought was the disruptive inclusion of Miss Baby Love Dallas. Saint accused Lewis for not having used the Gish sisters and himself for not having demanded them. “I didn’t serve Truman well, because I should have insisted on them,” he said. “I believe if they had been in it, the play would have been a success.” Truman also criticized Lewis, who, he concluded, had never understood his work at all. Most of all he condemned himself. “Frankly, I don’t think it was a very good play,” he later confessed. But it had ardent fans who did not agree, selling out the Martin Beck on April 26 to yell, scream, and cheer at the final performance.

  28

  TWO weeks before The Grass Harp closed, Truman went backstage to say goodbye to the cast. Hours later, he, Jack, and Kelly were aboard ship once more, on their way back to Europe. Stopping first in Paris, where they bought a tiny red Renault, they then drove to Italy and south again to Sicily. “Well, here we are back in Taormina,” Truman wrote Pearl Kazin, “and I’m delighted to be here, believe me.” Unfortunately, the Fontana V
ecchia had been rented, but they became the only tenants of a newly completed hotel that was not otherwise scheduled to open until winter. “There are two long spooky hallways—more than twenty rooms, and, as far as I can make out, hundreds & hundreds of doors, all of which have to be locked and barred at night,” Jack told Mary Louise. “We want you to come—we have a room and bath—lots of them in fact—and we think of them as waiting mostly for you.” Truman, characteristically, painted a somewhat grander picture of that ghostly residence. “We could not get Fontana,” he reported to Donald Windham, “so have rented an entire hotel—22 rooms and six baths, all super moderne.”

  Graziella came back to work, and they picked up life where they had left it the year before. The hotel, like the Fontana Vecchia, sat high on a hill above the town, but the car made it easier to travel to the beach; hiring a boat for the summer, they learned to swim underwater, with snorkels and masks. Joining Kelly as a dependent was Lola, a black bird—whether a crow or raven, no one could say—that liked to hide small objects, such as keys and fountain pens. “She adores Jack—but is a good deal less fond of me,” Truman told Jack’s sister Gloria. “I guess because I try to discipline her. Only how do you discipline a bird?” Renewing old friendships, he soon caught up on the latest news of the piazza. “It seems all so much the same,” he told Donald, “except there are more cafes, more tourists, and Carlo Panarello has opened a nightclub. The Panther no longer parades the beaches: he got involved in a great scandal by trying to blackmail one of Gayelord Hauser’s guests, and the police told him to stay out of Taormina.”

  When he was asked in New York what he would do next, Truman had said that he planned to write short stories, a new novel, and more plays—just about everything, in short, but nothing in particular. “When one of them seizes me, I’ll do that one first,” he informed one questioner. In fact, though he may not have known it himself, he had been seized. The actors at the Martin Beck, who recognized all the symptoms, said that he had become completely stagestruck. Despite the failure of The Grass Harp, he wanted to write another play. Saint Subber, who had not given up on him, saw the makings of a musical in “House of Flowers,” his amusing, touching story about a Haitian bordello, and again approached him about an adaptation. This time Truman did not hesitate. He said yes.

  Saint hoped to begin preliminary work on the production in the fall of 1952, but Truman, still panting from his months of exertion on The Grass Harp, was not yet willing to enter another round-the-clock writing marathon. Although he worked fairly hard, reaching the halfway point of his first draft in early September, he was in no rush to finish the rest; not willing to give up prose entirely, he found enough spare hours to write a short story and at least forty pages of a novel. By the time he returned home after Christmas, he told Linscott, he expected to have completed not only the play, but a hundred pages of the novel as well. He was overly optimistic. He found it too confusing to try to concentrate on two large projects at once, and the novel was soon put aside. “Sometimes I wish I did not have this urge to write for the theater,” he told Jack’s sister. “Life was so much simpler when I just wrote stories.”

  And so much quieter too. Accustomed to the frantic pace of Broadway, “the mad Saint,” as Truman nicknamed him, expected a more single-minded dedication and dispatched telegrams inquiring about his progress. To Truman’s annoyance, he even threatened to come to Taormina so that they could talk in person. “Had a two-page cable from the Saint yesterday,” he complained to Cecil in July. “He is very anxious to come over here and seems to feel he needs a visa from me. Christ! But I just don’t want to see him until I have done enough work to feel less vulnerable.” Worse yet, from Truman’s point of view, was the likelihood that Saint would bring along his companion, Robbie Campbell, the young black who had attracted so much attention singing “Nature Boy” at Le Boeuf sur la Toit in 1948. “I rather fear he [Saint] will be headed this way toward the end of the month, and I strongly suggest you put up storm windows at 8 Pelham Place,” he advised Cecil in August. “For my own sake, I pray to God he doesn’t bring the Tar Baby with him. Because I will not, no never again, put up with the boredom of that.” He did not have to. Saint stayed home and Campbell did not show his handsome face.

  In mid-September, Truman and Jack stuffed their belongings into the little Renault. With the pugnacious Kelly barking out the window at goats and donkeys and the regal Lola perched commandingly on one or the other’s shoulder, they said farewell for the last time to Taormina, whose appeal had depended, more than they had thought, on the charms of the Fontana Vecchia. Leisurely driving north, they picnicked in the Calabrian mountains, sunbathed on the remote beaches of Cape Palinuro, and slept on the ground amid the surf-soothed ruins of majestic Paestum before settling in Rome, in a three-room penthouse on the Via Margutta.

  “We decided to spend the winter here in Rome and have found, I must say, a beautiful apartment, a dream really,” Truman wrote Cecil. “We have a first-rate cook! Everything is so different from Taormina—I guess this is the first time in my life I’ve ever lived the way I really want to—such a pity that I can’t afford it.” Mary Louise, who was still at Harper’s Bazaar, heard much the same tale of joy mingled with woe. “[Our apartment] is very sunny and charming, and I would be a very happy boy if it weren’t so outrageously expensive, and I am next-door to penniless. If you hear of anyone who wants an article about Rome (or horticulture, hair styles, Famous People I Have Known) send them my way.” Though he had been in Rome only a few days, already he had managed to snub or be snubbed by several of their mutual friends. In a wickedly amusing, but probably accurate aside, he added: “Heaven knows there are enough old acquaintances about—I am going to buy a heavy veil to wear in the streets. Sister (the famous Carson McCullers, you remember her?) and Mr. Sister are frequently to be observed staggering along the Via Veneto, where they are now established members of the movie crowd (she is writing a movie for David Selznick); but of course Sister and Mr. Sister are too exalted, and usually too drunk, to recognize my poor presence. The Cow (the not so famous Marguerite Young) is still here, but quite easy to avoid if you go nowhere near the lobby of the Inghilterra, where she broods all day with a cup of coffee.”

  Actually, Truman had been offered Carson’s movie job first—or so he informed Cecil in November—but had deliberated so long that Selznick gave up on him. “Now I’m just a little sorry,” he confessed, “if only because it would have put an end to my financial straits, which grow increasingly serious. But it would have been dishonest of me to have accepted, for I did not feel at all sympathetic to the story they outlined, and besides I must, must get on with my own work.” Writers, particularly those with empty bank accounts, should not be bound by such rash promises of artistic purity, however, especially when large sums are offered for little toil. Before the month was over, he had temporarily abandoned his own work and assumed the job from which Carson had just been fired. Again transformed into a frantic scribbler, he was in a constant huddle with the illustrious Selznick, the producer of King Kong, Rebecca, and the greatest of all Hollywood spectaculars, Gone with the Wind. “Capote will be rich someday,” Jack jokingly told Mary Louise, “so we must all stay friends with him.”

  The movie was titled Stazione Termini, and it was the result of an unnatural collaboration between Selznick, who wanted his wife, Jennifer Jones, to star in a prestigious European production, and Vittorio De Sica, one of the leaders of Italy’s postwar film renaissance. Jones was to play an American housewife on a visit to Rome, Montgomery Clift was to play her Italian lover, and the story of their adultery was to be told with De Sica’s characteristic simplicity inside Rome’s new railway station—hence the title. But the picture was doomed from the start. As shooting began, it became clear that Selznick had only imagined he wanted the unvarnished quality of Italian neorealism. What he really wanted was the kind of Hollywood polish for which he was famous. He compulsively supervised every detail, as was his habit, and tried
several writers besides Carson in his search for what he considered a workable script.

  His latest scriptwriter he did not fire—“David absolutely adored him,” said Jones—and Truman worked at furious speed, sometimes running into one room of the station to write the lines the actors were waiting to recite in another. In the end his contribution was small, and he could neither claim credit nor receive blame for the picture that rolled across American screens a year later. Both credit and blame belonged to the producer. When he returned home, Selznick added a saccharine love song by Patti Page and cut what De Sica had shot by nearly a third, to an extraordinarily short sixty-three minutes. Even at that abbreviated length, Indiscretion of an American Wife, as he retitled it, was a flop. “Lousy” was Truman’s one-word judgment, and both the public and the critics concurred. “Indiscretion is, for the gifted men who made it, an indiscretion indeed,” said one reviewer, reflecting an apparently universal opinion.

  Truman had known one of the picture’s two stars, Montgomery Clift, in New York, but only in Rome, in the hermetically sealed world of a film set, did they become close. “Monty was really gifted,” said Truman. “He was serious about only one thing, and that was acting. He was an exception to my theory that a movie star has to be ignorant to be good. You have to be smart to be on the stage, but a film actor is just a conduit for the writer, the director, and everybody else who puts something into a picture. He has to react to what they do. If he’s too smart, he resists them and then he’s no good. Brando never really made it as a movie star—he always resisted. Garbo, on the other hand, never had a thought in her head and she was fabulous! She was the perfect instrument for the writer and director. Monty was smart and good, but that was because he was also very shrewd: he knew just what he was doing. I once asked him why he wanted to act in movies, why he didn’t do something more interesting. He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s my life! This is what I know how to do.’ He was an artist, with all of an artist’s sensibilities and flaws.