By July 6, when he joined Mr. Jack and the two dogs on Fire Island, Truman was rested and eager to begin writing once more. At least some good had come from all his wasted efforts in the theater: he now knew what road his career should take. Bob Linscott had been right all along; his talent did shine brightest on the printed page. An apostate no longer, he worshiped once again at the altar of prose. “Now, true to my word, I’ve settled down to work,” he wrote his old editor, “and hope that I will have something interesting to show you come September.”
The something interesting was the novella that he had already titled Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Before he could get very deeply into it, his attention was diverted anew, however, this time not by the theater, but by a form of prose that had long excited him: journalism. For years he had wanted to test his skills at it, and now Harold Arlen suggested an almost irresistible subject. Arlen’s friend Robert Breen was the director of a company, the Everyman Opera, that had performed George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess, around the world. At Christmastime, Arlen said, Breen’s mostly black troupe was going to make its most daring expedition of all. Taking advantage of a thaw in the Cold War, it was going to carry the Stars and Stripes into the center of the enemy camp, becoming the first American company to perform in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution. Truman should go along, the composer said, and write an account of the group’s adventures. Truman agreed; Breakfast at Tiffany’s would have to wait.
The New Yorker, which promised to publish the story he brought back, paid his expenses; Babe Paley presented him with cold-weather gear from Abercrombie & Fitch; and to repel the fierce Arctic winds, he bought himself a yellow cashmere scarf, three or four times the ordinary width. All bundled up, “he looked just like a little bunny,” said one of Breen’s troupe. Thus attired, he crossed from West Berlin to East Berlin on December 19, 1955. There, along with more than ninety other nervous Americans, he boarded the Blue Express which was to convey them to the frozen heart of Muscovy: first to Leningrad, where Porgy was to open the day after Christmas; then to Moscow itself, where performances were scheduled to begin January 10, 1956.
Breen, his wife, Wilva, and most other members of their hardy band regarded their trip as a historic event that would raise the Iron Curtain for further Soviet-American cultural exchanges. The Russians seemed to share their hopeful opinion. “Your visit is a step forward in the march toward peace,” proclaimed their chief host, a representative of the Ministry of Culture. “When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent; when the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”
But Truman was not interested in writing an account of a historic event; indeed, he was probably constitutionally incapable of such a portentous undertaking. Almost immediately, probably before the Blue Express had left the East Berlin station, he realized that in Breen’s history-making enterprise there was also material ideally suited to his comedic talents. Writing later, he said that he imagined The Muses Are Heard, which is what his chronicle was titled, as a brief comic novel. “I wanted it to be very Russian, not in the sense of being reminiscent of Russian writing, but rather of some Czarist objet, a Fabergé contrivance, one of his music boxes, say, that trembled with some glittering, precise, mischievous melody.”
It was in that spirit of mischief that he observed his fellow travelers, beginning with the performers themselves, who were exuberant, uninhibited and, not unpredictably, more concerned about getting ahead than in improving East-West relations. Truman shared a compartment with two of them, Earl Bruce Jackson and Helen Thigpen, who planned to be married in Moscow. “Bound to be a big story,” predicted Jackson, who had purchased a special wedding suit, brown tails with champagne satin lapels, before he left Germany. “The first couple of Negro Americans married in Moscow. That’s front page. That’s TV.”
Next Truman cast his eye on the Breens, who viewed their role as cultural ambassadors with exaggerated gravity, and on Leonard Lyons, the columnist of the New York Post, who, in an unconscious parody of the old-fashioned newshound, saw banner headlines everywhere he looked. Despite a serious space squeeze aboard the train, Lyons commandeered an entire compartment for himself, evicting his erstwhile roommates. “I can’t write with a lot of characters sitting around,” he announced. After Lyons, Truman shifted his gaze to the wife of Porgy’s coauthor, Mrs. Ira Gershwin, in whom he saw a flighty arriviste who indiscriminately sprinkled her speech with such terms of endearment as “darling” and “love” and who never appeared, even at breakfast, without her diamonds.
Finally, with far more affectionate amusement, he examined Breen’s secretary, Nancy Ryan, who also shared his compartment. A tall blonde, three years out of Radcliffe, she was the ideal Capote woman, bright, brash, and somewhat scatty. By curious coincidence she possessed many of the traits of Holly Golightly, the heroine of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was also almost as attractive as her mother, Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, one of Manhattan’s most famous society beauties. When she had read Other Voices as a teenager, Nancy had shown her mother the picture of the author reposing on the dust jacket. “I think he looks capable of deviltry,” that formidable woman had said. Watching Truman watching everyone else, a worried Lyons had the same impression. Taking Nancy aside, he asked, “Is Truman planning something really evil?”
Truman is also a protagonist in The Muses Are Heard, which he wrote in the first person, as he did all of his comic, sunlit works. He injects himself so far as to note that his presence caused stares on Soviet streets, but he leaves the reader with the impression that any American would have received the same attention. Of all those who reviewed the book, only the English critic Kenneth Tynan, who knew him, guessed that the Russians were not staring at just any American, but at one in particular. “I think it only fair to point out,” Tynan wrote in the London Observer, “that his somewhat unusual appearance—elfin, diminutive and extravagantly animated—has often created similar commotions in his native land.”
If he was not wearing his yellow stole, Truman was trailing the flaming red scarf that Lenore Gershwin had given him, or covering his head with it, as if it were a babushka. On at least one occasion pedestrians tittered when he walked by. “Laugh, you dreary people,” he replied. “But what will you do for laughs next week, when I’m gone from here?” One day Breen was talking with his Russian hosts in the lobby of Leningrad’s Astoria Hotel, where the company was staying, when Truman appeared at the top of the operatically grand marble staircase. Conversation stopped in mid-sentence. Mesmerized, the Russians followed his stately descent. Without giving any indication that he even knew he was being observed, much less that he was being spotlighted, Truman walked majestically past them and through the revolving door. Then, just when they thought they had seen the last of him, he reappeared, having made a full circle with the door, kicked up his right heel in their direction and disappeared for good. After that eloquent exit, there was a long silence, which was broken at last by the somber man from the Ministry of Culture: “Ve have them like that in the Soviet Union, but ve hide them.”
Not everyone laughed or stared at him. Although none of his work had been translated into Russian, his writing had been read surreptitiously by a few people, who greeted him with discreet enthusiasm. His most ardent fan, an English professor at the University of Leningrad—Boris the Bunny, Truman called him—took him drinking. That night Nancy found them sprawled in Truman’s hotel room, which was connected to hers by a common bathroom. “Found them totally potted in his room, both of them somewhat disheveled,” she wrote in her diary. “Incoherent tales of vodka, caviar, ‘the most absolutely divine restaurant.’ Morning after, T crawled into my bed and was fed Alka-Seltzer. Felt ghastly all day.” Describing Boris to Newton, Truman said he was “witty and charming and fun: qualities rarer than platinum in the Soviet.”
In Moscow he addressed the Soviet Union of Writers, declaring that his primary concern as a writer was not content but style. In the Soviet Union, replied the head
of the union, the order was supposed to be reversed. “We think every poem and song should be a bullet and a banner,” he said. “I was quite silenced by that,” Truman told reporters when he returned to New York.
He was also taken up by the sons and daughters of prominent members of the Soviet hierarchy. “His contact was a young man named Victor,” said Nancy. “Truman referred to him, very frivolously, as his Moscow beau. He was a rich, good-looking layabout who came up to him at the theater one night and introduced himself in perfect English. The next afternoon Truman got a mysterious call telling him to be in his room at three thirty. He was then picked up—I was furious with envy because I wasn’t asked—and driven to an elegant Southern-style mansion where the Russian jet set was out in force. It turned out that Truman was a great sort of literary figure to these young people, and they took him to their dachas, where he saw that they all subscribed to The New Yorker and led a very Westernized life. ‘Only in a culture where refinement is valued do trousers narrow,’ said Victor, who was trying to look Western, but didn’t quite pull it off. One of his friends, referring to ordinary Russians, said, ‘The humbles are so dreary.’ That was such a wonderful expression! ‘The humbles are so dreary.’”
There was also time for Truman to indulge his lifelong passion for what Lyons called “foul-smelling, vile places,” and he organized a pub-crawling tour with Lyons, Nancy, and Priscilla Johnson, a Russian-speaking Radcliffe classmate of Nancy’s who served as interpreter. “We kept telling her to tell the taxi driver that we wanted a real low dive, not a tourists’ nightclub,” said Nancy. “Finally we passed a bar and Truman said, ‘There’s our place.’ Just as he said it, the door opened and a huge female bouncer threw a drunk into the street. So that’s where we went.”
In the career of every writer, even one who complains as often and as vocally as Truman did about the pain of putting words on paper, there is a book that seems to write itself, a magical moment when the ink rolls from his pen as smoothly as Old Man River. For Truman that book was The Muses Are Heard, and that moment began as the Blue Express started its slow journey across the plains of Eastern Europe. Looking back, he said, “The Muses Are Heard is the one work of mine I can truly claim to have enjoyed writing, an activity I’ve seldom associated with pleasure.”
What made his task so easy, what gave him such pleasure, was the tone of the writing, which mirrored his lunchtime conversation at its best—observant, gossipy, bitchy, and always entertaining. The Breens hoped that he would concentrate only on high matters; he was more interested in the low. He was an eavesdropper, and he recorded the things people actually said, not the things they wanted history to believe they had said. That style of reporting—the New Journalism, as it came to be called a decade later—is common now, but it was fresh and unusual then. Truman was not the first to experiment with it. Indeed, he was encouraged, if not inspired, in his effort by the example of Lillian Ross, who pioneered the technique in two earlier, much-celebrated New Yorker pieces, “Portrait of Hemingway” and Picture, her narrative of the making of John Huston’s film The Red Badge of Courage. But Truman went a step further. To her skills as a reporter, he added the craft of the novelist, who gives shape and structure to the facts he has gathered.
Like many later New Journalists, he took substantial liberties for the sake of lively reading, sometimes changing the order of events and occasionally bringing separated episodes together. In one case, he even invented a whole scene—a hilarious encounter in the Brest-Litovsk railroad station—and fabricated, or made composite figures of, some of his characters. “He fiddled with things,” said Nancy Ryan. “But he didn’t destroy basic truth or genuine spirit at all.”
Although several of those who made the journey with him across the steppes were offended by his portrayals, no one offered evidence to dispute Nancy’s assertion. Lyons, who felt most wounded, devoted a column to a refutation of some of the silly comments attributed to him; but to judge from the fatuous dispatches Lyons actually did send home, he was probably not misquoted in any substantial way. He retaliated by hitting Truman where he thought it would hurt most, by using his column to shower Gore Vidal with favorable publicity. Truman ignored the columnist’s many flattering references to his favorite enemy until one day Lyons said that the remarkable Gore had written sixteen books—“and he’s not yet thirty.” Truman instantly phoned to correct him. “He’s thirty-TWO!” he shrieked.
The Muses Are Heard, a relatively short work of about 52,000 words, appeared in two issues of The New Yorker in October, 1956; Random House published it in hard cover at the end of the year. The critics, for once, were almost unanimous in their praise, regarding it, as Truman did, as an amusing bauble, “wicked, witty and utterly devastating,” in the words of one reviewer.
After returning to New York at the end of February, 1956, Truman went back to Europe, where he spent several weeks working on The Muses Are Heard in Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian palazzo. “He was very keen on keeping his line and made me diet also,” she said. “Every night he took me to Harry’s Bar and made me eat fish.” He was back in Manhattan in early May, and in mid-June he and Jack set up housekeeping by the ocean again, this time in Stonington, a Connecticut seaport. “You would adore it,” he told Cecil. “The most beautiful trees and old houses. We have a huge, rather amusing house with wonderful views.”
It did not take long, however, for both him and Jack to discover that they did not in fact adore it. There was no beach for swimming; most of their neighbors were elderly; and pugnacious Kelly was in constant combat with the town’s other dogs, one of which locked its teeth so deeply into Truman’s hands that they had to be swathed in bandages. In that otherwise placid setting he and Jack also went to war, a half-serious, half-comic battle in which Truman, for a change, was the aggressor.
“It was the greatest quarrel we ever had,” he recalled, “and it was over Medaglia d’Oro coffee! Jack had a passion for Medaglia d’Oro coffee, but there was no Medaglia d’Oro coffee in Stonington. One day I was going to do errands in Providence, Rhode Island, which was not far away, and he said, ‘Don’t come back until you get Medaglia d’Oro coffee!’
“‘Sure,’ I replied, thinking, ‘My God, of course they’re going to have Medaglia d’Oro coffee in Providence.’ But I went to seven or eight places there, and not only did they not have Medaglia d’Oro coffee, but they had never heard of Medaglia d’Oro coffee! Of course the first thing Jack said when I came back was ‘Where’s my Medaglia d’Oro coffee?’
“‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but they didn’t have it. I went to several places.’
“‘You didn’t go to a single one,’ he said. ‘You forgot it! You don’t care!’ There are certain things that happen in a relationship that lasts a long time, tensions that accumulate. I don’t lose my temper very often, but when I do, watch out! When he said that, I became furious. I went through that house systematically, throwing things around. He was in a state of terror because he had never seen me like that.” A peace treaty was soon signed, and for the rest of the summer Jack drank ordinary coffee.
One of the paradoxes of Truman’s character was that although he was as fond of luxury as a Roman emperor, he usually lived, without quibble or complaint, as simply as a Trappist monk. In the nearly eight years he and Jack had been together, they had moved around like gypsies, without a permanent address in either New York or Europe. Almost all their residences, including the Fontana Vecchia, had been spartan in the extreme; some had been primitive. Their current Manhattan apartment, for instance, two floors in a moldering town house on East Sixty-fifth Street, lacked a component as essential as central heating.
Now, as his thirty-second birthday approached, Truman wanted an apartment that had at least the basic comforts, a place he could call his own and decorate in the way Babe had taught him. He wanted to be able to entertain, as well as to be entertained. It was probably no coincidence that Holly Golightly—Breakfast at Tiffany’s was still much on his mind—had
similar yearnings for permanence and stability. “In some part of his nature he was trying to find a home,” said Oliver Smith. “Where I don’t know.”
The immediate and mundane answer was Oliver’s own house in Brooklyn Heights. Built before the Civil War, it contained as much space, nearly twenty rooms, as a small hotel and had a basement that Oliver had already begun turning into an apartment. In mid-May he invited Truman and Jack for dinner and an inspection. They were delighted with what they saw. The basement apartment that he planned to rent had a large living room, a parlor, a small kitchen, and two bedrooms, one of which had windows and a door opening onto the backyard, where a giant purple wisteria was in fragrant bloom. “I’d like to live here if I could have this room,” Jack declared, and his wish was granted. “We’re very excited,” he wrote Mary Louise. “Truman wants to make ‘a beautiful home.’”
Overjoyed at the prospect of settling down at last, Truman spent much of the summer searching Connecticut for bric-a-brac and furniture, which he then refinished in their Stonington backyard. “He saw a lamp in an antique shop he wanted,” Jack reported to his sister Gloria. “The woman said she couldn’t sell it—it didn’t even belong to her: she kept it because it made the shop cheery. A big correspondence then began between Truman and the real owner. Anyway, Truman got the lamp. He bought me an old brass bed for eleven dollars for my birthday—and is painting and polishing it!”
In time, Oliver’s basement did become a beautiful home. Truman asked Billy Baldwin for advice. Taking advantage of its darkness, rather than trying to overcome it with bright colors, Baldwin picked out a dark green wallpaper, which, combined with bright lights and glittering appointments—such as Battersea boxes, a Fabergé pillbox, and a pair of gold mirrors in the shape of butterflies—created an atmosphere of perpetual Christmas, of winter by the fire. Oliver was willing to lend his own dining room for formal entertainment, and Babe and her sister Minnie visited often, as did Jackie Kennedy and her sister, Lee Radziwill. When Oliver said he would like to meet Jackie, Truman arranged a lunch in Oliver’s dining room. Only later did Oliver learn that Truman had told her, or at least had strongly implied, that the whole house was his. “She laughed about it,” said Oliver, “because suddenly in the middle of lunch she got the idea that it wasn’t his. I suppose I acted as if it were mine.”
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