Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Those fierce prairie winds had followed him across the Atlantic, and they howled in his ears through the soft Spanish nights. “Alas, I am rather too much involved emotionally with the material,” he confessed to Newton. “God, I wish it were over.”

  There were, of course, a few pleasures on that Mediterranean shore, and in June he and Jack changed addresses, moving down the beach to a grander house, staffed by a cook, two maids, and a gardener. “I’ll think 3 times before taking on such a responsibility again,” he grumbled to Donald Windham. From time to time a boat dropped anchor offshore, and fancy friends like Noël Coward and Loel and Gloria Guinness paid their respects. “Every once in a while friends of Truman’s come in on a yacht,” wrote a surprisingly genial Jack, “and so I’m forced to meet people I would not ordinarily even see. I really don’t mind any more, though, about that sort of thing. Most of the time if I’m asked I go. It’s the least I can do. I suppose I used to take it all seriously. I know now that these people are like hummingbirds, feeding here and there off flowers they really don’t take in at all. All they ask is that you behave. Then—as far as I’m concerned anyway—it’s out of sight, out of mind.”

  With Truman Jack was not always so mellow. After a visit in May, Cecil, who was always fascinated by their paradoxical relationship, described it in his diary: “It was sometimes embarrassing to hear Jack lambasting T. for his duchesses & his interest in rich people & his being considered a genius by the Mrs. Paleys. Jack lashes out with Irish articulation & American violence. Sometimes it must hurt T. very much. But it teaches him also. He learns when not to argue, when to let Jack have his own way. He knows when Jack is right, & accepts the healthy criticism, but if Jack is unfair then he will fight bitterly & courageously.

  “It is interesting that these two should have found one another, that they should recognize the fact that each gives the other an essential that would be otherwise lacking in their lives. This was a true glimpse of both of them, & it was very touching to see, despite the banter & tough onslaughts from Jack, how when anything serious occurred they were together closely knit as one unit. Jack had received a letter of despair from his sister Gloria. She was in hospital suffering from hepatitis (jaundice) & after 2 days her sister had had Gloria’s pet, a Pekinese, & another dog destroyed. T. was so upset that he trembled: ‘We must send Gloria a ticket to come out & stay with us & we must have Gloria to live with us always.’”

  Jack liked to ski, Truman enjoyed cold weather, and at the end of October they traded the seashore for the mountains, driving to Verbier, a Swiss ski resort where Loel Guinness’ son Patrick had found them a small apartment. It was cold, dark and raining when they arrived, and their car became mired in the mud. So inauspicious was their first night that Jack was afraid to wake up the next morning, dreading that they might be stuck in a place they despised. But when they woke up, the sun was shining, the thin air tasted delicious, and the apartment was just what they had hoped it would be. “It is rather like living on the side of a moss-green bowl whose rim, zigzagging sharply up and down, is covered with snow,” Jack wrote Gloria. “I asked, where do you ski? and was told—everywhere.”

  The apartment had already been rented for the Christmas holidays, unfortunately, and they spent three weeks in Munich, where, almost without warning, their bulldog Bunky died. Freud, who learned to enjoy canine companionship late in life, declared that an owner’s feeling for his dog is the same as a parent’s for his children, with one difference—“there is no ambivalence, no element of hostility.” Truman and Jack felt that way about Bunky, who had been with them since the making of Beat the Devil. “Last week we found out Bunky had leukemia, and yesterday he died in my arms,” Truman told Donald Windham. “I know you know how much I loved him; he was like my child. I have wept till I can weep no more.”

  Back in Verbier, Truman put aside In Cold Blood for a few weeks to write a movie adaptation of another dark tale, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The story was one of Truman’s favorites: a psychological thriller about an English governess who believes she is battling two ghosts for the souls of her young charges. When the director, Jack Clayton, who had worked with him on Beat the Devil, begged him to do a rewrite of the script, he could not refuse. “He did it in the most unbelievable speed,” recalled Clayton, “most of it in eight weeks, with a little bit of touching up afterward.”

  Titled The Innocents, the picture, which starred Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave, contained his best film script, Truman thought, better even than that of Beat the Devil. “I thought it would be a snap because I loved The Turn of the Screw so much,” he said. “But when I got into it, I saw how artful James had been. He did everything by allusion and indirection. I made only one mistake. At the very end, when the governess sees the ghost of Miss Jessel sitting at her desk, I had a tear fall on to the desktop. Up until then it wasn’t clear whether the ghosts were real or in the governess’ mind. But the tear was real, and that spoiled everything.” Few of the critics agreed. “A beautifully turned film,” said the New York Herald Tribune reviewer, “one of the most artful hauntings to come along on film in a long time.”

  After the cold and drizzle of a London winter, Verbier looked more appealing than ever. “Oh how glorious it seems here,” he exclaimed when he returned in February, 1961. “Such sun, skies, silence, air. I really do like it.” He liked it so much, in fact, that he used part of the money he had earned from The Innocents to buy a two-room condominium. After moving from one rented place to another, he and Jack enjoyed the feeling of permanency. “Today I stood in back of the little church with the men folk—farmers,” Jack wrote his sister. “It was a comfort. The strangest people go to church, rich and poor, dumb and bright. The priest was a big man with a long grey beard. I have to walk a mile or so to the church, which has a rooster on its steeple. I like that.”

  The pattern of their lives changed hardly at all during the next two years: spring and summer in Palamós; fall and winter in Verbier. Truman worked on In Cold Blood; Jack persisted with his plays. Kelly, the Kerry blue terrier that had been with them since 1950, also died, causing more pain. Although he had vowed that he would never go through the agony of love and loss again, in July, 1961, Truman bought another bulldog. In London for last-minute chores on The Innocents, he heard a familiar-sounding bark in Harrods. “Is there a pet shop here?” he asked, and was taken down a corridor to a room that held a macaw, a parrot, an owl, a fox terrier, and, as he told Cecil, “the most adorable, cuddly little bulldog pup you’ve ever seen.” Marching over to the saleswoman, he said, “I’ve bought that bulldog.”

  “No, that’s a special order,” she replied. “That dog’s not for sale. We can order you another.”

  “No,” said Truman. “That dog is mine. I wish to buy that dog. Here’s my checkbook.”

  “You can’t buy that dog,” she insisted. “Besides, he costs fifty-five pounds!”

  “My dear woman. I’ve come all the way from Spain and have been directed straight to that dog. It is my destiny to have that dog.” After an appeal to higher authority, destiny prevailed. When he returned to Palamós, the puppy—Charlie, he was called—was with him. “Charlie J. Fatburger is (as Diana V. [Vreeland] would scream), deevine,” he wrote Cecil that fall.

  In January, 1962, Truman returned to the United States to interview Perry’s sister, whose testimony was crucial to an understanding of her brother’s character, and to visit Perry and Dick on Death Row—“an extraordinary and terrible experience,” he told Cecil. While he was in New York, Babe Paley gave him a large welcome-home party. But the sight of a hundred famous faces turned in his direction, which would have thrilled him not long before, now left him almost numb. Back in Verbier, he described his feelings to Cecil: “Somehow they, it, the whole thing seemed quite unreal, remote. The only thing that seemed real was Kansas, and the people there—I suppose because of my work. Actually, it is rather upsetting—the degree to which I am obsessed by the book. I scarcely think o
f anything else. The odd part is, I hate to work on it: I mean, actually write. I just want to think about it. Or rather—I don’t want to; but I can’t stop myself. Sometimes I go into sort of trance-like states that last four or five hours. I figure I have another 18 months to go. By which time I should be good and nuts.”

  After two summers in Spain, he and Jack planned to spend the summer of 1962 in Corsica. Within hours they realized their mistake. The other tourists were loud and pushy, and Jack watched with disgust as one group noisily drove off on a boar hunt. “Of course they all arrived back at the hotel the next morning not speaking to one another,” he gleefully recounted, “and without so much as a Boar Turd amongst the lot of them.” Describing their stay as a nightmare, Truman added that the Corsicans “combine the worst characteristics of both the wops and the frogs—ugh.” Back to Palamós they scurried, to the best house yet, with a private beach, a large garden, and a cottage by the sea. Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill, came in the middle of July; she was followed by the Paleys. When the Paleys left, Gloria Vanderbilt arrived, accompanied, Truman informed Cecil, “by a lady-in-waiting in the form of Tammy Grimes—who wears mink eyebrows and a leather bikini.”

  In the process of changing husbands again, Gloria had warned her future Number Four, a sometime editor and writer named Wyatt Cooper, to be discreet in the letters he addressed to Palamós. Truman, she said, was certain to open and read them before she did. What she apparently did not explain to Wyatt was that she did not want Truman to know of their affair while she was telling him about another romance entirely. “Well, Gloria has come and gone and we had a ‘real nice’ visit,” Truman wrote Marie and Alvin Dewey, adding, with the excitement of a reporter in possession of a hot scoop: “There is a new man in her life. It’s supposed to be a great secret, but I will tell you because I just must tell somebody, it’s so fantastic: Nelson Rockefeller. Heaven knows what will come of it—it would certainly be a strange thing if they got married.” Nothing did come of it, and Gloria married Cooper, with whom she had two sons.

  Truman and Cooper later became good friends, and in 1972 they collaborated on a television prison drama, The Glass House. Truman’s friendship with Gloria, on the other hand, which had been tenuous from adolescence, progressively deteriorated. “She was a nasty little girl,” he said. “She lied about her mother during her custody trial, and she was terrible to her until shortly before she died. She had a father complex. Her first husband, Pat DiCicco, was a rough-and-ready type who used to really beat her. She finally got rid of him and married Leopold Stokowski, who was more like a grandfather, or a great-grandfather, than a father. I introduced her to Sidney Lumet, and she only married him because she thought he would make her a movie star. But the only part she ever got was as a nurse in some television thing. When she found out he wasn’t going to make her a star, she dumped him quick.

  “Why she married Wyatt is a mystery. He certainly wasn’t like anybody’s father, although he did tell me that when they had sex together, she would scream, over and over, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’ He grew to hate her, and he was terrified that she would leave him and take their two boys, to whom he was devoted. He was always calling me, asking me what he should do. I think that that anxiety contributed to his death. In fact, I had lunch with him just before he died [in 1978]. He seemed fine, but he kept talking about those boys. ‘If only I can live another ten years,’ he said, ‘everything will be all right. But Gloria just isn’t responsible enough to raise them.’”

  In early October, Truman and Jack were back in Verbier, where, Truman said, he was “bedded down with my book—on which am now heading into fourth year. Maybe one day it will all seem worth it: I wonder though.” In November he interrupted his work long enough for a lunch with royalty in London. The lunch, in honor of the Queen Mother, was given by Cecil, who boasted to his diary that it was “another milestone—the biggest yet perhaps—in my social rise.” Besides Truman, just three others had received invitations to his house on Pelham Place: Frederick Ashton, principal choreographer of the Royal Ballet; June Osborn, a comely widow whom Cecil once had hoped to marry; and that poet with the medieval manner, Edith Sitwell, who profusely apologized for not being able to rise from her wheelchair to curtsy to the royal guest. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Ma’am, I’m so ashamed that I can’t get up to greet you,” she said.

  The conversation was lively and energetic. For his part, Truman told the Queen Mother the latest gossip about the Whitney family—Jock Whitney, Babe Paley’s brother-in-law, had recently retired as ambassador to Britain—and he talked about the book he was writing. By dessert “restraint was far away,” said Cecil. “T was yelping with laughter & gave a great whoop of joy when the summer pudding appeared.” Truman had made yet another conquest. After Cecil had escorted the guest of honor to her car, she pulled down the window to say “she thought Mr. Capote quite wonderful, so intelligent, so wise, so funny.”

  “Yes, he’s a genius, Ma’am,” Cecil gravely replied.

  40

  BY the beginning of 1963, In Cold Blood was three-quarters completed. “I have been rising every morning at 3 or 4 to work—it is now 4,” Truman told Cecil in February. “But yesterday I finished Part Three! I have never worked so hard in my life. But it is done, and I know you will be really thrilled by it. It is all I wanted it to be—which is saying a great deal. But I am exhausted; tense as nine newly tuned pianos.”

  True to his vow, he had stayed in Europe, away from the distractions of Manhattan, so that he could concentrate on his work. He could not do much more until he had an ending, however, until Perry and Dick had either been hanged or given reduced sentences. Neither of those possibilities appeared imminent; after nearly three years on Death Row, they were still bouncing appeals between the state and federal judicial systems. To the Deweys he confessed, not for the first time, his chagrin and frustration: “Will H & S [Hickock and Smith] live to a ripe and happy old age?—or will they swing, and make a lot of other folks very happy indeed? For the answer to these and other suspenseful questions tune in tomorrow to your favorite radio program, ‘Western Justice,’ sponsored by the Slow Motion Molasses Company, a Kansas Product.”

  There was no longer any point in isolating himself. It was time to go home, and in early March, after nearly three years away, he and Jack returned to America and once again took up residence in Oliver Smith’s basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights. For Truman, coming back to New York was like coming back to the world. “I lead such a monastery life,” he had grumbled in Europe. “No news at all.” Now, throwing off his monk’s robe—“I need a rest from my book,” he emphatically explained—he let loose and enjoyed himself, slipping into old routines as easily as he slipped into his old back booth at the Colony. He lunched with his favorite swans, spent weekends at Kiluna Farm with Babe and Bill Paley, and visited the Kennedys in the White House. As an emblem of his liberation, he bought what was to be one of his proudest possessions: a silver-blue Jaguar sports car. “It’s like Fabergé on wheels,” he bragged. “I sailed into the Jaguar place and said, ‘I’ll take it.’”

  He was home in time to say a few last words to Newton, who died of pancreatic cancer at the end of March. Paradoxically, his arrest and the scandal over the pornographic pictures seemed to have strengthened Newton. Not only had he regained his self-esteem, but he had also acquired a stoical serenity he never before had possessed. From wisdom born of torment he said: “The staple of life is certainly suffering, though surely not its real meaning, and we differ mainly in our capacity to endure it—or be diverted from it.”

  Some of Truman’s other friends could do neither. Montgomery Clift long since had descended into a netherworld of drink and drugs. Now he was joined by Cole Porter, whose buoyant spirit had succumbed at last to age, disillusion and the unrelenting pain caused by a long-ago riding accident. In the fifties, when Truman first knew him, Porter was a symbol of the sophisticated world he venerated. Lovingly decorated by Billy Baldwin, his aerie on th
e thirty-third floor of the Waldorf Towers was a cloud-capped citadel of elegance and luxury. The incandescent grin that once had illuminated those concinnous quarters disappeared with the decade, however. Guests who had once jumped at an invitation to dinner now came out of loyalty alone.

  “Cole had a wonderful secretary who kept a revolving list of guests—he couldn’t get that many people to go there,” Truman recalled. “I would go about once every six weeks. I looked forward to dinner there like I looked forward to the guillotine. During his later days Cole wasn’t exactly non compos, but he wasn’t all there either. He was always immaculately dressed—I mean immaculately—and the food was superb. He would have one double martini before dinner, and after that he wouldn’t say a word for the rest of the night. He just sat there, not talking and not eating, and I would talk to myself. After a while I got used to it and really didn’t mind it so much. I would even turn on the television while we were eating. Then exactly at 10:30 his valet would come in and say, ‘It’s time for you to go to bed, Mr. Porter,’ and I would leave.

  “Cole wasn’t always like that, of course. When I first knew him, he was very funny and witty. He used to describe his sex life in great detail—I think it excited him. I used a story in Answered Prayers about a wine steward he tried to get to go to bed with him.5 Cole thought it was amusing, and now every time I see the man, who’s the maître d’ of one of the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan, I just smile. Because I know what his past was. But there was another story Cole told that I didn’t use because it sounded rather unpleasant—and I liked Cole. It was about his long affair with that actor, Jack Cassidy. Cassidy would say, ‘Do you want this cock? Then come and get it!’ Then he would stand away so that Cole, whose legs had been paralyzed in that awful riding accident, would have to crawl toward him. Every time Cole got near, Cassidy would move farther away. This went on for half an hour or forty-five minutes before Cassidy would finally stop and let Cole have it.”