Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Yet while he was dining with Cole, lunching with Babe, or sitting through Jackie Kennedy’s Mozart evening at the White House, Truman was thinking about, and usually talking about, his book. “If only I could empty my soul and heart and head of it for a while,” he lamented. But that he could not do—nor did he want to do. In Cold Blood had become part of his life: he could put it aside, but he could not forget it. “Eventually it began to own him,” said Phyllis Cerf. “Emotionally, it became something bigger than he could handle. Those boys began to own him, and the town [Garden City] began to own him.”

  One night, at a dinner party given by Diana Vreeland, he spoke briefly about what he was writing, then, seeing the fascinated faces around him, continued, describing Holcomb and Garden City, the people who lived there, the Clutters, the killers—everything. “He spoke the way he wrote,” recalled D. D. Ryan, his old friend from House of Flowers days. “He was writing, but orally. It was all formed in his mind. This went on for two hours, maybe even three or four. Nobody said a word. Nobody moved all that time. It was the greatest tale-telling I’ve ever witnessed.”

  The magnetic attraction of Kansas soon pulled him west again. In mid-April he set off in his Fabergé on wheels, detouring first to Monroeville to visit his remaining relatives—Jennie, the last of the Faulk cousins, had died in 1958—and to pick up Nelle Harper Lee, who was joining him again. On their way, they passed through Shreveport, Louisiana, where Arch now lived. “Well, should I?” Truman asked. “Why not?” Nelle answered, and they both giggled. Registering at a motel, he called his father, whom he had not seen since Nina’s death, nine years before. “My wife Blanche had never met him,” said Arch. “Never, not in eighteen years of marriage; and we had a lovely visit.”

  It is impossible to know which of those tellers of tall tales, father or son, told more lies during their hours together, but the honor probably belonged to Truman. The Queen Mother’s words of praise, which would have turned anyone’s head, still rang in his ears like the chimes of Big Ben. In the months since November, Cecil’s lunch had been transformed into a royal tribute to Truman himself. As he recounted it, it had taken place not in Cecil’s house, but in Buckingham Palace—he even altered Cecil’s carefully chosen menu—and the Queen, not her mother, had been the hostess. (“I was in London last week, and the queen asked me to lunch,” he had written his grandmother. “She was very bright and charming, and very pretty!”) A version of the story found its way back to Cecil, who was understandably annoyed.

  Arch had a photograph taken of Truman standing proudly beside his new car in the Persons driveway. Never one to overlook a promotional gimmick, Arch then had it printed on postcards, which he sent to his friends and customers. The caption underneath read: “Truman Capote, beloved only son of Arch Persons, owner of the Dixie Scale Co., on a recent visit to his father at Shreveport, La., in his new 1963 Jaguar Special. Author of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ ‘Other Voices Other Rooms,’ ‘The Grass Harp,’ ‘House of Flowers,’ and many other famous books, he is ranked among the first three of his profession throughout the nation. He was recently a guest at both The White House and at Buckingham Palace.”

  Truman’s most important destination in Kansas was the State Penitentiary, a forty-minute drive from downtown Kansas City. Built in 1864, it resembled a turreted English castle; there was no disguising its grim purpose. Inside its walls, on the second floor of a small two-story structure, was Death Row, twelve cells, each of which measured seven by ten feet and was furnished only with a cot, a toilet and a basin; burning twenty-four hours a day, a bulb of low wattage emitted the glow of a perpetual twilight. The world outside was seen through a sliver of a window, which was barred and covered with black wire mesh. Inmates were let out just once a week for a three-minute shower and a change of clothing; during the summer, when temperatures inside sometimes reached 110 degrees, they were disgusted by their own odor. Although they were allowed newspapers, magazines and books, residents were not permitted radios or television sets. Perry and Dick could talk to each other from their adjoining cells—not that they had much to say to each other—but they had to be cautious in their conversations, which could be overheard by guards and other prisoners.

  Truman had visited there twice before. But to finish In Cold Blood, the last part of which was mainly a history of their lives in those tiny cells, he needed regular communication with them. Gaining that right was not an easy task. Usually only relatives and lawyers were granted the privilege to come and go and exchange letters with condemned men. Prison authorities refused to cooperate with him, and finally, in desperation, he bribed his way in, he said, paying a powerful political figure to pull the right strings. “If I hadn’t got what I wanted, I would have had to abandon everything. I had to have access to those two boys. So I went for broke and asked for an interview with this behind-the-scenes figure, who was a man of great distinction and renown in that state. ‘I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can arrange this,’ I said. I didn’t know if he was going to accept the money or not. He could have said, ‘The hell with you! Now you’ll never get inside that penitentiary!’ But I guess my offer was very tempting, and he just nodded his head.”

  However the deal was managed, Truman was allowed to visit Perry and Dick almost at will and, beginning in June, 1963, to correspond with them as well. Their letters to him number in the hundreds—his to them were destroyed, alas—and they document more graphically than could any movie or play the endless tedium of hell, which is what Death Row was. Aside from their never-ending legal battles, Truman became the chief focus of their lives, their main contact with what Dick called “the free world.”

  His correspondence started first with Perry, who immediately requested Webster’s New World Dictionary, which, along with the thesaurus that followed, became the source for the high-flown words he loved to use—and often misuse. To Perry a letter was an epistle, good weather was salubrious, and to be fat was to be adipose. He was fascinated by everything about Truman, the master of words. “Amigo mio, I have a multitude of questions I’d like to ask you,” he said, “and many diverse subjects I am desirous to discuss.” Constantly advising Truman to be careful, he would end his letters with such comments as “If you’re driving be extra cautious. Lots of crazy people on roads.”

  A photograph of Truman with his Harrods bulldog touched him almost to the point of tears. “I have your picture with Charlie before me now. It packs a lot of affection. That half smile is infectious and I can’t seem to keep from smiling myself whenever I chance a glance at it. I cannot believe that I have ever seen a more pleasing and contented expression—it appears to have an effect on me similar to an anodyne and it would be useless for you to ask me to return it. (smile). A little poem comes to mind—please allow me to insert it here—it may help you to understand me and I must put it down on paper before it escapes me.

  Far beyond the distant hills,

  The plaintive sounds of whippoorwills,

  Reverberates the rocks and rills,

  ’Tis such a plaintive cry.

  Is the Mockingbird so often heard,

  Intent to make himself absurd,

  Or just a melancholy bird,

  In truth, as sad as I.”

  His compliments were more effusive than the Queen Mother’s. “I like talented personalities very much and I feel that you are a very perspicacious homo sapien.” Truman was father, mentor, perhaps even surrogate lover.

  Perry scarcely tried to hide his jealousy at the fact that Dick was also receiving epistles from such a perspicacious homo sapien. He liked to point out to Truman that while he was requesting volumes of real literary value—works by Freud, Thoreau and Santayana, among others—Dick was asking for the potboilers of Harold Robbins. “This kind of literature is only degenerating minds that are already degenerated & perverted,” Perry angrily asserted. To Dick himself he sneered, “If you had any sense, you would realize that [Truman] thinks twice as much of me as he does you.”
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  His own letters from Truman Perry kept secret, but he expected Dick—“Ricardo,” he called him—to share his. When Dick once declined, Perry went into a deep sulk. “P. has another ‘madon’ at me because I won’t let him read your letters!” reported Dick. “Every time he knew I had heard from you, he asked to read it. To keep from hurting his feelings I would let him. Finally I got tired of his crust, and refused. It shows ignorance, ill-manners and no home raising to request the privilege to read someone’s mail—especially their personal mail. I would never have the gall to request the reading of P’s mail. I suppose I should over-look P’s faults, because he is kind of ignorant and stupid. He has a very low I.Q., and it is difficult for him to understand a lot of things.”

  Dick’s own letters were more in keeping with those that might be expected from someone in his situation. They began in a fairly good humor—he had had a bedmate like Holly Golightly, he joked—and they became progressively darker. “Forty two months without exercise, radio, movies, sunshine, or any physical means of occupation, is a steady strain on a man’s nervous system,” he said in September, 1963. “Add the mental strain of facing a death sentence, and you have a man—or men—who slowly becomes an animal—or human vegetable.” He was, or said he was, sorry that the Clutters had been murdered, though, he claimed, probably accurately in Truman’s opinion, that it was Perry who had actually fired the fatal shots. “I doubt if hell will have me,” he declared at one point. “I’m feeling lower than whale manure, and that is at the bottom of the ocean,” he said at another. In April, 1964, he marked the fourth anniversary of his arrival on Death Row: “At times it seems forty years instead of four.”

  After all those months without sun or exercise, prisoners 14746 (Dick) and 14747 (Perry) began to suffer from the illnesses of old age. Perry complained of excruciating pains and occasional paralysis of the shoulders and discussed possible cures with Truman, who was suffering from the similar symptoms of bursitis. In one or another of the many magazines Truman sent him, including Science Newsletter and Nature & Science, he had discovered a remedy for everything except what ailed him. At the same time, Dick’s eyesight began to deteriorate, and he was bothered by fainting spells. What seemed to cause him the most anguish, ironically, was the possibility that he might grow bald. “My hair line, at my forehead, has receded a full inch,” he said in September, 1964. “I’m almost frantic with worry about it. I certainly do not wish to be bald headed; I am ugly enough. Also, no one in my family was ever bald headed. If you have any suggestions, please state them in your next letter.” Truman, who was losing his own hair at an equal rate, was of no help.

  Perry and Dick also wondered and worried about how they would appear in Truman’s book. One concern was practical. Their appeals rested on their claim that the Clutter murders had not been planned, and they were afraid that Truman would tell a different story—as, indeed, he did. Another was, in a sense, esthetic. They did not want to be remembered as psychopathic killers. “My concern is that the info, you have collected is accurate, correct, and not perverted by the relator to his or her purpose for any ulterior motive,” Perry said in one letter. “What is the purpose of the book?” he asked in another. Truman danced around the subject, pretending, until the day they were executed, that he was barely half-done and, in fact, might never finish.

  When they discovered his title—which said, in three words, that they had planned the murders—Truman lied and informed them they were wrong. But they knew better, and Perry indignantly told him so: “I’ve been told that the book is to be coming off the press and to be sold after our executions. And that book IS entitled ‘IN COLD BLOOD.’ Whose fibbing?? Someone is, that’s apparent. Frankly, ‘In Cold Blood’ is shocking to the conscience alone.” Truman continued his fibs, and with an unhappy sigh, Perry wrote Donald Cullivan, “Sometimes it’s hard to know what to believe.” Dick was no less concerned, telling him that any suggestion of premeditation “has me extremely disturbed because, as I have repeatedly informed you, there was no discussion at any time to harm the Clutters.” In a nine-page letter, Dick laid all the blame on Perry.

  As 1963 passed, and then 1964, their hopes drained away, slowly at first, then faster and faster, like bathwater swirling down a drain. They watched while another inmate, whose last appeal had been turned down, was taken away for a ride on the “Big Swing.” Perry dispassionately described the aftermath. “After we heard the trap door sprung, it was quite awhile there after [eighteen minutes, in fact] that he was lowered to the ground, layed on a stretcher & carried out in a hearse.” With his usual thoroughness, he looked up the medical definition of death by hanging and sent it to Truman: “Death by hanging produced by asphyxia suspending respiration by compressing the larynx, by apoplexy pressing upon the veins & preventing return of blood from the head, by fracture of the cervical vertebrae…”

  Dick began to complain that he could not sleep at night, and Perry wrote less frequently, confessing in February, 1965, that he had been “pretty well depressed & broken in spirit lately.” His once precise handwriting had become a scrawl. “My Dear Friend,” he said, “what a pair we are? Yes what a pair of poor wretched creatures we are!” Left tantalizingly unclear was who the other half of his pair was, Truman or Dick. On January 27, 1965, came a new execution date, February 18. “Well, the fat’s in the fire!” said Dick. He was only slightly premature. They received another stay of execution—their fifth—and then, as Perry wrote Truman, a new date was set: “April 14 you know is the date to drop thru the trap door—in case you haven’t been apprised.”

  41

  FOR the better part of two years Truman’s life was in a state of suspended animation. He could not finish his book until he had an ending, but neither could he put it aside and go on to something else. Although he was no longer consumed with putting words on paper, his work continued in dozens of nagging chores, not least of which was the composition of two letters a week, the maximum permitted, to Perry and Dick. “The writing of the book wasn’t as difficult as living with it all the time,” he said. “The whole damn thing, day by day by day by day. It was just excruciating, so anxiety-making, so wearing, so debilitating, and so… sad.”

  His frustration was made worse by his knowledge that, lying in front of him, missing only thirty or forty pages, was the best-seller that would alter his life irrevocably, that would make him rich and bring him what he coveted above all else: recognition as one of the foremost writers in America—indeed, the world. At that point such a conviction was a matter of fact, not opinion; the success of In Cold Blood was as predictable as the future movements of the planets. All those who had read the first three-quarters—and there was a large number of such people—confessed to being mesmerized. Everybody in the publishing world knew about his new work, and so did many others, all across the country. It was mentioned frequently in syndicated columns; in 1962 Newsweek had even run a story, complete with a picture of the author, on “the overwhelmingly factual book he has been working on for more than two years.”

  Such publicity could not have been purchased, particularly for a book that had yet to be completed. In Cold Blood had been touched by a magic wand. At both Random House and The New Yorker, where all copies were locked in Mr. Shawn’s office, there was the thrill of anticipation, the excitement that comes with the possession of a sure thing. But nothing—nothing at all—could happen until the courts had at last decided the fates of the two Clutter killers.

  So Truman watched and waited and went on, as best he could, with the normal business of living. Following his return from the Midwest in 1963, he and Jack went out to Long Island, to the same beach house in Bridgehampton they had shared with Oliver Smith six years before. “The house is divine, and I am working on my endless task,” Truman wrote Cecil in July. “But I am very restless—waiting for final developments in Kansas. It’s all so maddening.” Two months later he added: “I am in a really appalling state of tension and anxiety. Perry and Dick have an appeal f
or a New Trial pending in Federal Court: if they should get it (a new trial) I will have a complete breakdown of some sort.” Although they were not granted a new trial, the appeals continued, and in November, still tense and anxious, Truman made yet another trip to Kansas.

  He went first to California to visit Cecil, who was designing the sets and costumes for the movie version of My Fair Lady. They met in San Francisco, where Cecil was eager to introduce him to his new, thirty-year-old lover, who was everything that Cecil had ever desired. He was tall, blond and athletic; he had been a member of one of the American teams at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. An art historian who was studying and lecturing at Berkeley, he was also far better educated than Cecil himself; he had attended both Harvard and Princeton, where his roommate had been his lover and where belly-rubbing was so common that it was named “First Year Princeton.” By some miracle, this handsome all-American was as enthralled by Cecil as Cecil was by him. To Cecil’s gratification, Truman heartily endorsed their May-December romance, telling him that his athlete was “adorable, intelligent, appreciative, very fond of you, an important addition to your life.” Glowing in the reflected praise, Cecil added, “Felt very proud of my choice, who today seemed more delightfully gay & intelligent than ever.”