Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  In fact, the clouds had been long gathering. For years she and Joe had been spending more than he made as treasurer of his firm of Wall Street textile brokers, and the luxuries upon which they depended came from the profits of another textile concern he owned secretly with Nina’s brother-in-law James Rudisill, the husband of her sister Tiny. Over the years, their enterprise, the Rudisill Textile Company, did more than $550,000 worth of business with Joe’s Wall Street employers, Taylor, Pinkham and Company, whose other officers knew nothing of his involvement. That arrangement might have continued undetected had Joe not also begun gambling in the highly volatile textile commodity market. In that endeavor he was not so fortunate. He lost heavily, taking money from Taylor, Pinkham funds to cover his shortfall. When Taylor, Pinkham was purchased by the giant J. P. Stevens Company in 1952, his improprieties were discovered: close to a hundred thousand dollars was found missing from its books. He was dismissed, and the Manhattan district attorney began to investigate.

  To escape jail, he needed to repay what he had taken. Using what little capital he had left, he went into business with a Cuban manufacturer of sewing threads. “We’ll come back either broke or very rich,” Nina told Andrew shortly before they left for Havana, and they soon returned to New York, even poorer than when they had left. The best job Joe could find was an accounting job that paid only seventy-five dollars a week, and if it had not been for Truman, who sent them much of the money he had earned working for the movies, he and Nina would have had to move to a cold-water flat in the Bronx. “Everything would be fine, except for the terrible and constant worry about my mother and father—but I will not burden you with that,” Truman wrote Mary Louise in June, 1953. In October he elaborated to Newton: “Odd, I seem to think about money all the time; I used not to ever. But the whole Nina-Joe situation has given me such a jolt; and it goes on and on—and I have to pay straight down the line because I don’t know what else to do.”

  As long as she had had money, Nina was able to maintain the pretense that she was a Park Avenue society woman. When the money disappeared, that facade was shattered, and during the weeks before her death, she avoided most of her old friends, too depressed and embarrassed to enjoy their company. “Do call her,” Joe urged Andrew. “She always enjoys your conversations.” But the last time Andrew saw her, walking down the street, he received the distinct impression that she did not want to see him or anyone else. Eleanor Friede, who had lunch with her at the Plaza, was surprised to find her acting wild and distracted, as if she were close to a nervous breakdown. Pretty Nina suddenly looked terrible, Eleanor thought. She was too thin, and her hair, which had always been so expertly dyed that Friede had assumed that she was a natural blonde, was showing both its darker roots and traces of gray—the beauty parlor was a luxury she could no longer afford.

  A few days before New Year’s, her brother Seabon, whose wife was recovering from surgery in a Manhattan hospital, came to stay the night at 1060 Park. Nina was already drunk when he arrived, and when Joe went to bed, brother and sister sat drinking for another hour or two, until Seabon also said good night and retired into Truman’s room. In no mood for sleep, Nina then woke Joe, accusing him once again of infidelity and screaming that she had hired a private detective to follow him, which, according to Seabon, she in fact had done. Joe retreated into Truman’s room with Seabon, but her rage followed him there as well. Unable to escape her in the apartment, both men dressed and left about two o’clock. “Get out, both of you!” she yelled. “Get outta here!” Seabon drove Joe to the best hotel poor Joe could afford, the West Side Y.M.C.A, and then proceeded to Queens, where he worked, and bedded down on a couch in his office.

  No one can know what went through Nina’s alcohol-befuddled mind after they left, but her future could scarcely have appeared bleaker and more hopeless to her. As she had done before, she swallowed a lethal dose of Seconals. She apparently had second thoughts about killing herself, however; when Joe discovered her the next morning, the phone was off the hook, indicating that she had tried to call for help, and the windows were open, as if she had hoped that the cold December air would prevent her from lapsing into oblivion. It did not, and she was lying unconscious on the floor when Joe unlocked the door in the morning. She was taken to Knickerbocker Hospital, where she lingered for several days. She died on the morning of Monday, January 4, 1954, a few weeks before her forty-ninth birthday. That night Joe asked Andrew to join him for dinner in a restaurant near the apartment. “Don’t stop talking,” Joe commanded. “Talk about anything, any subject in the world. Don’t worry about whether it will interest me or not. Just talk so I won’t break down.”

  Truman had telephoned his mother just before Christmas. Then, in quick succession, came the calls from Joe. Truman left Paris for New York the next day. Jack described his sorrowful departure to Gloria: “When the night maid came in to make up the bed, he was in the bedroom and I was out here at my table. She asked him who was going to America—which of the two of us—and he said ‘me—I’m going.’ He sounded so little—so sad. He seemed to want her to know everything just by looking at him. I put him on the bus to the airport—he was the only one—all the other passengers had driven out, presumably in their own cars. The driver said: Look, Mr. C., you have a bus to yourself. Truman was holding his dog. He looked at the driver, then at me, and then, to please the driver, he said something he would never say if he’d not been so desolate: ‘That’s because all the other passengers are so rich,’ he said—making a joke. Then he drove away in that big blue bus. It began to snow. It sounds like a story, but it really did snow—and the wind rose—and it was freezing cold.”

  Saint Subber met his plane in New York and drove him to 1060, where Truman immediately went back to his room to lie down. “Truman’s in the back,” Saint said when Andrew arrived a few minutes later. “You’re the only person he wants to see. Go on back there.” He had been crying, Andrew said, and he was so tired—transatlantic flights took more than fifteen hours in those pre-jet days—that he had not even bothered to take off his overcoat. “She didn’t have to do it,” he told Andrew. “She didn’t have to die. I’ve got money.” Andrew lay down beside him and held him, as he had done so many times before.

  The funeral was on Thursday, January 7, at Manhattan’s best-known funeral parlor, Frank Campbell’s, on Madison Avenue at Eighty-first Street. Two of Nina’s sisters, Tiny and Mary Ida, came North for the services, but cousin Jennie, who, at eighty, was the last survivor of the house on Alabama Avenue, stayed in Monroeville, angry, it was said, because Nina’s body would not be brought home for burial. In fact, there was to be no burial; to the dismay of her Baptist relatives, who did not believe in cremation, her remains were cremated and the ashes were placed in a crypt in a Westchester County crematorium.

  Except for Joe, who had been drinking so steadily since her death that he was scarcely able to walk, everyone appeared composed, and the service proceeded so quickly and quietly, without outward signs of grieving, that Leo Lerman was almost shocked. “I’m a Jew,” he said to Andrew. “Is that how Christians bury people?” Afterward, some of those in attendance walked back to 1060 for a somber wake. Dorothy Kilgallen, one of the Hearst chain’s top gossip columnists, infuriated Mary Ida by immediately asking for a drink. “People don’t ask for a drink after a funeral,” said Mary Ida. “Even if I come out of the backwoods, I know that that’s not good manners. Not to me, it isn’t!” Jennifer Jones, on the other hand, won her heart by bringing homemade cookies. “I was so astounded that a movie star would make cookies!” While they were all there, a reporter from The New York Times called to ask if it was Truman Capote’s mother who had died. “Hang up!” Joe ordered, and the phone was put back on its cradle.

  Although most people knew better, outsiders were told that Nina had died of pneumonia. “Well, I’ll eventually find out the true story,” Harper Lee said to herself, and she did. For years to come, Truman almost never talked about the way his mother had died. He
mentioned it just once to Phoebe Pierce, and then only after Phoebe’s own mother had killed herself. Yet, as with all children, including Phoebe, who have lost a parent to suicide, the manner of her death never ceased to bother him. “I don’t think Truman has ever written a word about Nina,” said Phoebe. “I don’t see anything of her in any of his characters. But I know that when my mother killed herself, it almost killed me as well. You can bury such a thing miles deep, miles and miles and miles deep, but it must be a central experience in your life.” Lyn White, Nina’s best friend, was one of those privy from the beginning to the family’s secret. “You know, Lyn, my mother loved you more than anybody but Papa and me,” Truman told her. “But this is all so sordid.” White barely held herself back from making a sharp reply. “I didn’t think it was sordid,” she said. “I thought it was a tragedy.”

  Arch appeared several days later, sniffing around, or so it appeared, to determine if there was any estate he could share in. There was none, of course, and Truman angrily told him so. “There’s nothing here for you,” he said. “You’re not my father. Joe’s my father. He’s taken care of me.” It was a brutal but accurate statement of fact, and since Nina had conveyed him North in 1933, Truman had seen very little of Arch, who had remarried, been widowed, then remarried again. In 1941 and 1942, Truman spent parts of two summers with him in Mississippi and Louisiana. They got along well, but, true to his nature, Arch disappointed with a promise he had no intention of keeping. He gave Truman a white Cadillac convertible, then snatched it back a week later. “He was always one with the grand and hollow gesture” was Truman’s bitter comment. “He never did anything for me.” When he was living in New Orleans two years later, struggling financially while he was working on Other Voices, Arch was one person he did not call upon for help.

  Whatever Truman thought of him, Arch was his father, his nearest blood relation now that his mother was dead. After those initial harsh words, he relented, took Arch to dinner at the Colony, and—like father, like son—bragged about his conquest of Europe, which must have sounded, by the time the dessert cart was wheeled around, only slightly less impressive than the D-Day invasion. Arch believed every word. Like all inventive liars, he appreciated the tales of other inventive liars. “He told me that he had been going out with Princess Margaret and that he had had dinner with Queen Elizabeth,” Arch recalled. “I looked at him and said, ‘You mean to tell me that if I were to go to London today and check in at the Dorchester Hotel, you could call Princess Margaret on the telephone?’ And he looked at me like he thought I was crazy! ‘Hell, I’ll get her from here,’ he said. ‘Do you want to talk to her?’ And he meant it, too!” Truman had in fact been introduced to Princess Margaret, but of course they had not gone out, and the dinner with the Queen had taken place entirely in his imagination.

  In the weeks following Nina’s death, Joe walked around in a drunken daze. Trying to revive his spirits, Truman took him to parties and nightclubs, and for several weeks they were rarely seen apart. His efforts were in vain. Undone by all the calamities that had befallen him, Joe acted more and more erratically, running up big bills on Truman’s charge accounts, forging checks in his name, and gambling away the proceeds. “Truman is having a bad time with Joe—who implies he’s in bad trouble,” Jack told Gloria. “I think he spends all his money as soon as he gets it, like a boy. Takes some dame to Atlantic City (Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, no less), hires cars, etc. During the week he’s desperate enough to murder, I think.”

  The district attorney at last concluded his investigation into Joe’s activities at Taylor, Pinkham, and on December 21 he was indicted on several counts of forgery and grand larceny. On January 5, 1955, a year and a day after Nina’s death, he pleaded guilty, and on March 30 he entered Sing Sing Prison, from which he was released on May 14, 1956.

  Truman visited him several times and gave him money while he was there, and still more money after his release. Joe was his father, in his eyes, and he did his duty as a son, and perhaps a bit more. In the late sixties, however, Truman complained about pesky phone calls from Joe’s latest wife, who suffered from paranoid delusions that she was being persecuted by the Mafia and the F.B.I. Joe reacted angrily, and they did not speak again. Joe managed without him, living in near-poverty until his death, at the age of eighty-two, in 1982. “You sometimes have to perform a little lobotomy and cut people out of your mind or they will drag you down,” Truman said by way of explanation. “I cut my father out long ago. He never did anything for me and he was not my responsibility. I finally cut Joe out too. I gave him a lot of money and saw him through two marriages after my mother died. But after a year-and-a-half of this current crazy wife, I said, ‘Enough!’ There have been a lot of people who have tried to take me—and a few have—but I got to the point where if they were found in the East River, with a note tied around their necks saying, ‘Truman Capote did this to me,’ I could say, ‘They were not my responsibility.’”

  31

  NOT long after Nina’s funeral, Truman turned once again to House of Flowers, which now seemed well on its way to Broadway. Harold Arlen, the composer of such popular classics as “Stormy Weather” and “Over the Rainbow,” had been hired in November to write the music and collaborate on the lyrics—Truman confessed to knowing nothing about how a song is put together. They began work immediately, exchanging ideas by mail and transatlantic telephone, and by the time Truman returned to New York, they had finished the title song. There was a setback in February, when Arlen was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers. But even before the intravenous tube had been taken out of his arm, he invited Truman up to his room, where he used a spoon to tap out rhythms on a dinner tray. Only when they started singing the chorus together did the nurses call a halt.

  Although they were separated by almost twenty years, the two collaborators formed an affectionate bond. Every day when he visited Arlen in the hospital, Truman automatically went through the letters and telegrams that had accumulated on the dresser since the day before. That was a closer collaboration than Arlen had contemplated, and he took to hiding them under books and drawers. It did no good. Not at all embarrassed, Truman searched them out. “Dads, where are they?” he would demand. Once Arlen put a message of his own in the middle of the pile: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, you little bastard?” The little bastard did not seem to be. Dressed in sneakers and jeans, he was soon making himself equally at home in Arlen’s Park Avenue living room, curling up on the couch next to the piano while Arlen tested his newest tunes. “We used to work three hours every day,” said Arlen. “He used a little pad and I used a large one. I thought he was a fine versifier, but he needed direction as far as songs go. It’s a special art.”

  Peter Brook had been Truman’s first choice to direct The Grass Harp, and Truman was convinced that if Brook had only agreed, his play would have been a success. Like many others, he still considered Brook the reigning genius of the stage, and he was determined to do whatever was necessary to induce him to direct House of Flowers. By June, Arlen was well enough to fly, and together they flew to London, where they outlined the story and sang their songs for that brash young man, who thereupon consented to take on his first Broadway musical.

  Truman’s original story came out of a trip he took to Haiti in the winter of 1948. In the absence of other nightlife, he spent many of his evenings sitting on the porches of the whorehouses along the Bizonton Road, buying beer for the girls, who told him the local gossip while they fanned themselves and waited for customers. From those nights emerged one of his finest short stories, “House of Flowers,” the tale of Ottilie, a pretty young prostitute from the hills, who forsakes the bright lights and sophisticated men of Port-au-Prince for true love with a country boy, handsome young Royal. Plagued by Royal’s evil grandmother, a famous caster of spells, Ottilie proves she is not so innocent as she seems and turns the spells back on the old woman, who is so shocked and chagrined that she obligingly drops dead, leaving the lovers to live happ
ily ever after.

  That story was the one Truman had dramatized in Portofino. But a play is not completed until opening night, and when he sat down with Saint, Arlen, and finally Brook, it became apparent that what Truman thought was a finished script was only a first draft. “Brook is a very creative force and he’s wonderful at cutting,” he told an interviewer a few months later. “And there was plenty of cutting to be done. I don’t usually tend to overwrite, but in this case I had written a full-length play plus a full-length musical. If we’d kept all of my original script, we’d have been in the theater from eight o’clock until two in the morning.” As the weeks progressed, his plot was revised, his characters were changed, and his script was altered almost beyond recognition.

  The romance between the young lovers took second place to a plot line that was not even hinted at in the original story, a rivalry between the madams of two competing brothels. The evil grandmother disappeared altogether, and Ottilie was transformed from a prostitute into a sweet virgin—who just happened to make her home in a whorehouse. Even the house of flowers changed location. In Truman’s story it had been Royal’s house in the hills, which was covered by wisteria; on Broadway it was to be Madame Fleur’s bordello, where Ottilie lived and where each of the girls was named after a flower: Tulip, Gladiola, Pansy, Violet.

  Truman once again had demanded a topflight production, and he got one. Pearl Bailey took on the part of Madame Fleur; Juanita Hall, who had played Bloody Mary in South Pacific, became Madame Tango, her rival in sin; and Diahann Carroll played Ottilie. The world’s greatest choreographer, George Balanchine, was in charge of a cast of dancers that included Alvin Ailey and Geoffrey Holder. Unpaid, but not unseen, was Arlen’s lady friend Marlene Dietrich, who bought coffee and pastries, helped with costumes—even rubbed Pearl Bailey’s tired feet. On the first day of rehearsals Truman showed up with real blooms for his house of flowers: red roses, which he solemnly distributed to the women in the cast and crew. “Here’s a little rose for you, Pearl, honey,” he said, “and one for you, Juanita, darling….”