Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  She was not happy, however, as Truman quickly discovered. Stas, who was nineteen years her senior, was jealous, moody and unsympathetic to her desire for greater independence. “Understand her marriage is all but finito,” Truman wrote Cecil in 1962, following what was probably his first intimate conversation with her. So it seemed to be. A year later she and Stas spent much of the summer on the yacht of Aristotle Onassis, and she appeared to be deeply in love with the golden Greek, who, despite his froglike appearance, was irresistible to many women. The irate husband of his longtime lover, Maria Callas, went so far as to crow to the press that Onassis tossed Maria aside so he could be with Lee. Washington columnist Drew Pearson asked, “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?”

  When the Kennedys’ newborn son Patrick died in August, 1963, Lee told Ari how shaken Jackie was. He responded by inviting Jackie to join the cruise as well; the Christina would go anywhere she wanted, he said. “Oh, Jackie, it would be such fun,” Lee assured her and Jackie was persuaded. But for Lee it was not fun, and if she had dreams of marrying Ari, they were soon forgotten. At the end of the cruise, he bestowed on Jackie a diamond-and-ruby necklace. Lee’s reward for bringing them together was only three little bracelets, so “dinky,” she complained to Jack Kennedy, that little Caroline Kennedy would have been embarrassed to wear them to her own birthday party. That was not the end of Lee’s complaints, and nearly five years later she called Truman to inform him of the final, bitter result of her good deed. “She’s crying and weeping and sobbing,” he told friends. “I can’t tell you what she said, but it’s going to be in the news. It’s the biggest piece of gossip there is, and she’s crying her eyes out because of it.” The piece of gossip, which resulted in headlines all over the globe, was that Jackie and Ari were soon to be married. Lee’s consolation prize, according to Truman, was a valuable parcel of land on a promontory near Athens, which Ari apparently had given her in hopes that Jackie would build a house there.

  Her sister’s climb from peak to peak was thus the second and perhaps more enduring cause of Lee’s melancholy. When they were growing up, Lee was the center of attention, and Jackie sat off in the corner reading a book. “Lee was the pretty one,” sighed Jackie. “So I guess I was supposed to be the intelligent one.” From then on, the fickle spotlight turned the other way, and Lee seemed condemned to live in Jackie’s shadow forevermore. “Why would anyone care what I do when there are so many more interesting people in the world?” Lee asked not long after Jackie became First Lady. “I haven’t done anything at all.” Only a few perceived the resentment that lay behind that plaintive comment. “My God, how jealous she is of Jackie: I never knew,” wrote Truman in 1962.

  Lee was desperate to make a name for herself, but did not know how. Enter Truman, the master of self-promotion. If Lee yearned for recognition, he yearned to give it to her. Never before had he had either the time or the opportunity to play Pygmalion on such a grand scale. Babe and the other swans were several years older than he was; he could give advice here and there, but the plots of their lives had been laid out long since. Lee was nearly nine years younger; her future was still undetermined. It was his dream to shape it, to make of her life a work of art. He saw her not merely as a character in a novel, but as a character in his novel. Molding her into a woman who could rival and perhaps surpass her sister became a cause to which he would devote much of the year following his ball. “She doesn’t want to be just somebody’s sister,” he said. “She wants to have a life and identity of her own. She’s a very, very extraordinary girl. She’s got a really good, first-class mind. It just has to get released!”

  In January, 1967, he joined that extraordinary girl for a leisurely week or so in Morocco, which the international set had turned into its playground. Lee had been there twice the previous year. They traveled south, from Rabat to exotic Marrakesh, to pink-walled Taroudant. She rode horses while he slept and relaxed under the palm trees of their hotel gardens. Parting from her at the end of the month, he flew to Switzerland, going first to St. Moritz, where the Aga Khan was giving a party for the Shah of Iran, then to Verbier, where Jack and the animals—Charlie and Diotima—awaited him. He returned to New York with Charlie in early March, then proceeded to a spa in Miami Beach, where he went on a crash diet and lost, by his own account, eleven pounds.

  In April he was back in Kansas, watching the filming of In Cold Blood. He had chosen the director, Richard Brooks, over the many others who had wanted to make the picture because he thought that Brooks was especially tough. “I don’t know if any other director would have the strength or the stamina to do this movie right,” he said. Brooks, who had previously directed such movies as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Blackboard Jungle, proved that he had both. The studio expected In Cold Blood to be filmed in color; he insisted on the stark clarity of black-and-white. The studio wanted Steve McQueen and Paul Newman to play Dick and Perry. “For chrissake,” said one executive, “we’ll have a big hit!” Brooks demanded two unknowns: Scott Wilson and Robert Blake, who bore an eerie resemblance to Perry. Though Truman promised not to interfere, he did ask to see the script, which the director had written himself. Brooks said no to him, just as he had to everyone else. “Truman, I can’t work that way,” he said. “Either you trust me to make it or you don’t.”

  Truman did trust him, and Brooks went to uncommon lengths to capture his book on film. Many people in Finney County, including the editor of the newspaper, wanted to hear no more of In Cold Blood. “Why in hell they can’t let people stay dead—rest in peace—is beyond me,” grumbled one of Herb Clutter’s neighbors. But Brooks maintained that the movie had to be made there and nowhere else, persisting until he had obtained permission to film not only in the courtroom, but also in the Clutter house itself. He then persuaded seven of the twelve original jurors to sit in the jury box once again, hired the same hangman who had executed Perry and Dick, and brought Nancy Clutter’s horse Babe out of retirement. When the young actress who was portraying Nancy sat on her back, faithful Babe instinctively headed toward the Clutter orchard, where Nancy had always guided her.

  Shooting was well under way when Truman arrived in his Jaguar, in time to greet the planeload of foreign and American journalists Columbia’s publicity department had flown in. An intense director who liked to keep outsiders off his sets, Brooks was visibly irritated by the disruption, and when they were alone, walking in a field of freshly planted winter wheat, Truman asked why. “You’re not happy. What’s the matter? Am I in the way?”

  “You’re not in the way, Truman, but your personality is, bringing all these people out here. I can’t shoot with them around.”

  “My personality?”

  “Truman, you’re a big star.”

  “When do you want me to take them away?”

  “As soon as possible. Tonight would be fine.”

  “Well, if that’s what you want, I’ll have them out of here tonight.” Truman kept his word, but only after he had been interviewed and photographed. Two weeks later Life put him on its cover, standing on a lonely prairie road between the two actors who were portraying the killers he had known so well.

  The movie opened at the end of the year to generally excellent reviews. It is as accurate and uncompromising as Truman had hoped, but despite Brooks’s efforts, it has little of the book’s impact. Paradoxically, it is also less cinematic than the book; its flashbacks are clumsy; its pace, tedious. Worst of all, Brooks added a new character, a tall, lugubrious-looking reporter whose main purpose is to preach against capital punishment. Though he praised the film in public, Truman had private reservations. “The introduction of the reporter, who acted as a kind of Greek chorus, didn’t make sense. There also wasn’t enough on the Clutter family. The book was about six lives, not two, and it ruined it to concentrate so much on Perry and Dick. On the other hand, I thought that the actors who played the two boys were very well cast, acted well, and were directed well
.”

  Still sunning himself in the glow of the book’s renown, Truman embarked on several new projects, the most important of which were for television, a medium in which he already had had one conspicuous success. A Christmas Memory, which he had adapted the previous year with the husband-and-wife team of Frank and Eleanor Perry, had won both popular and critical approval, including an Emmy. Thus encouraged, he and the Perrys began dramatizing several of his other stories. Working on a commission from ABC, he was also writing a documentary on capital punishment, which sent him to several Death Rows to interview still more prisoners awaiting execution. But the question of Lee’s future was rarely far from his mind: how could he help her make a name for herself? In the end, the answer seemed obvious. He would turn her into an actress—a movie star.

  As they discussed it, probably under a palm tree in the Sahara, the idea made eminent sense. Between them, they had everything she required. She had the looks, the desire and some training; he had the brains, the experience and the connections. He persuaded Milton Goldman, who represented Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, to be her agent, and he and Goldman decided that in her first appearance, she would twinkle brightest away from the lights of New York and Hollywood; a Chicago dinner theater, the Ivanhoe, seemed sufficiently out-of-the-way. Although she preferred to play a Chekhov heroine, they further decreed that she should begin with an easier role; Tracy Lord, the rich, spoiled heroine of Philip Barry’s comedy The Philadelphia Story, sounded about right. She was understandably annoyed at the inevitable suggestions that she would really be playing herself. “I feel absolutely nothing in common with that girl,” she said. “She has none of the feelings I understand, of sadness, despair or of knowing loss.”

  Determined to succeed, she studied the part with a drama coach in London, and in late May she joined the rest of the cast for rehearsals in Chicago. Kenneth flew from New York to do her hair; George Masters, a Hollywood makeup artist, came from California to prepare her face; and Truman and Stas arrived to hold her hand. With such a crowd in attendance, the scenes of pandemonium in her penthouse suite at the Ambassador East Hotel may well have been funnier than those in Barry’s comedy. Much of the humor was provided by Masters, who called Stas “Princie” and complained that the colors of her Saint Laurent dresses—shocking pink, purple and chartreuse—were all wrong. One of them, he said, looked like “a dog’s lunch—the Supremes wouldn’t even think of wearing something like that.”

  But Lee did, and as opening night, June 20, approached, she professed to be philosophical about her reception. “I have a feeling of now or never,” she said. “Maybe it will be a flop, but all I can do is hold my nose and take the plunge.” After examining her signs, the Cabala Woman, a California astrologer Masters introduced to her by long-distance, pronounced them “very promising for theater work.”

  Either the signs lied or the Cabala Woman miscalculated, and the career of Lee Bouvier—she used her maiden name—should have received a quick but dignified burial. Searching for something to praise, the reviewer from the Chicago Sun-Times settled on her spunk, observing that, given the pressures, it was a triumph that she had remembered all her lines; searching even harder, the critic from the Daily News noted that she had “at least laid a golden egg.” For all his planning, Truman had neglected to ask a basic question: could she act?

  Ignoring the unpleasant truth, he proceeded as if she had heard nothing but cheers in Chicago. And astonishingly enough, he almost convinced other people that she had—or that the boos were irrelevant. When he returned to Manhattan, he asked David Susskind, who was an independent television producer as well as a talk show host, to give her the lead role in a TV special. As an inducement, he said, he would write the script himself. Although Susskind had not been favorably impressed by Lee’s acting, he had been impressed by the publicity she had received. He soon announced that ABC had signed Lee Bouvier, at a salary of fifty thousand dollars, to star in Truman’s adaptation of John Van Druten’s comedy The Voice of the Turtle. Truman had performed an act of magic: he had persuaded Susskind and the network to gamble a large budget and two hours of prime time on a pretty amateur with not a hint of talent.

  Reflecting on her inability to find the humor in The Philadelphia Story, Susskind discarded Van Druten’s comedy and chose a drama for her instead, an adaptation, also to be done by Truman, of the 1944 movie Laura. She would take Gene Tierney’s part and George Sanders would take Clifton Webb’s. She did not mind the switch, and in her letters to Truman, sounded uncharacteristically ebullient. “I wish we could begin tomorrow—it’s going to be marvelous,” she said in August. “My interests have narrowed down in such a violent way that now I’m just possessed. Thank you!” Although she would not have to leave home this time—Susskind had arranged for Laura to be shot in London—Stas was not encouraging her new endeavor, which caused her to lean even more heavily on Truman. “When I want advice I feel you’re in the room giving it to me,” she told him. “When I want to laugh at something I can hear you laughing with me & that makes me so much happier.” As taping time approached and Stas became more difficult, she added, I was so happy to get your letter except that it made me weep because I miss you so much & need you to make life worthwhile.” As an expression of her gratitude and appreciation, she sent him an elegant gold-lined Schlumberger cigarette box, in which she had had inscribed: “To my Answered Prayer, with love, Lee. July 1967.”

  Despite the fact that she required direction so extensive that it might more accurately have been called on-the-job training, Susskind insisted that “there is something there.” Perhaps, but when the show was broadcast in January, 1968, that something eluded most viewers. Indeed, she was as close to being invisible as an actress playing a title character can be. Susskind had done what the director of The Philadelphia Story may have wished he could have done: he had left much of her performance on the cutting-room floor. More than one reviewer pointed out that when the camera should have been looking at her, it wandered off in other directions, as if it were too polite to embarrass her. As a result, her Laura “was reduced to a stunning clotheshorse upon whom no discernible thespian demands were made,” said Jack Gould, the New York Times television critic. When she was glimpsed on screen, she was, said Time, “only slightly less animated than the portrait of herself that hung over the mantel.”

  The negative reaction finally finished Lee’s acting career, and Truman was released from his rash promise to write something original for her. It is hard to say who looked sillier at the end of their quixotic adventure. But that unhappy honor probably belonged to Truman, who publicly demonstrated that where Lee was concerned, he had no judgment at all. Trying to be kind, he had succeeded only in being cruel. Instead of making her a star, he had turned her into a figure of fun and ridicule.

  Laura had yet to be broadcast and that bad news had yet to be delivered when she returned to America in the late fall of 1967 and joined him in Alabama to watch the filming of “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” the story he had dedicated to her. Turning the occasion into a family reunion, he also invited, at his own expense, a dozen or so of his relatives, including Arch and his wife Blanche.

  After not having written or talked to him since 1963, Truman had telephoned his father in August, then sent him five hundred dollars for his seventieth birthday. Arch was ecstatic, believing that it was merely the down payment on the rewards due him as the father of a rich man. “When that check fell out of the letter as I opened it, I could not believe my eyes,” he exclaimed to Truman. “It was the first gift of any kind you ever sent me in my whole varied, interesting and eventful life.” The years had not diminished his cupidity, and the gold mine he had spent most of his life hunting for he now espied in his own son. “He is now the No. 1 writer, and the wealthiest, now ten million, and a guaranteed million a year from now on,” he bragged to a friend, greatly inflating both Truman’s assets and his income. Making up for lost time, within the space of five days Arch wrote Truman three le
tters and a postcard, alternately flattering him, scolding him for past neglect, and trying to make him feel guilty enough to provide the annuity he wanted so much.

  Like all good salesmen, he began with the compliments. “Where I was dumb was not in realizing early that you were a ‘genius,’ not like other people, and treating you as a genius! That mistake won’t occur again! You are not only a genius as a writer, but you are a genius in the manner in which you keep yourself constantly ahead of the public. Just when they begin to think the Truman Capote hubbub is dying down, a new avalanche lies just ahead transcending even the public imagination. In other words, you maintain and even increase the momentum and keep it going to the boiling point. Some of that, if not the writing capacity, you inherited in an elementary way from me.”

  Then came the reproaches for Truman’s having neglected him, particularly, he said, in the “sunset period” of his life. “Now in my four years of isolation, I told Mama and any others not to intercede for me. I feel that such things have to be spontaneous and come from the heart. I felt we were the same flesh and blood, and somewhere in your innerself, the right elements would assert themselves in due time. I just worried it might be too late for me to enjoy it.”

  Finally he reached his main point. “You must of course realize that almost everyone thinks that because you have millions with a future earning capacity of even more, that this fact automatically gives your father the position of sharing more or less, when we know that is not the situation at all. I do believe in families sharing their lot in life, both good and bad, but it does not work out that way in many cases.” If he were in Truman’s financial position, he asserted, he would help a mere friend, and of course do much more for his own father. He made the same argument in several different but similarly graceless ways, then underlined it by adding: “I would like also for you to remember that whereas you are undoubtedly the greatest exponent of the powers of description alive today, I can still clearly and vividly remember when it was the ultimate struggle for you to say just ‘Ma-ma and Da-da.’”