Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Puzzled by his choice, Wyatt tried to find out what it was in Danny that appealed to him. “I don’t understand what it is you like. What movie stars, for instance, do you find attractive?” Scorning the names of those stars most of the world found appealing, Truman finally admitted that he always had had “rather a yen” for Lloyd Nolan, a Hollywood character actor whose plain, horsey face had often cast him in the role of the cop on the block. “Now, Mrs. Lloyd Nolan never had a yen for Lloyd Nolan!” said Wyatt, laughing as he recalled their exchange. “But when he mentioned his name, I knew what he meant. The normal, the dull and the average had great glamour for him because they were the opposite of what he was.”

  Growing up in a town not much different from Monroeville, Danny doubtless had been the image of the normal, uncomplicated son Nina had longed for. When he met Truman, probably in the first weeks of 1970, he was still normal and uncomplicated, “sweet and simple,” in Truman’s words, “a combination of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was the type of person I found very attractive. He was like a puppy dog—a very sexy puppy dog. On a sex level, I don’t like people that are too smart, and from my point of view he was perfection. I think he must have been just about the stupidest person I’ve ever known. I cannot imagine anybody being dumber than Danny.”

  Dumb as he was, it was still a matter of enormous pride to Truman, a testimony to his own appeal, that he was able to seduce someone who appeared to be impregnably heterosexual, who was, if proof were needed, both a husband and a father. “Truman was always nagging on about Danny’s heterosexuality, as if he was the only man Danny had ever fancied,” said John Richardson, an English art critic who lived in Manhattan and traveled in Truman’s circles. “This colossal conquest was a terrific feather in his cap, he thought, though it seemed to me that Danny’s sexuality, such as it was, was so precarious and vague that anybody who had the interest or the patience could have, as it were, penetrated it. In fact, I thought Truman could only get heterosexual men because homosexual men would have found him extremely unattractive. I didn’t dare put it to him in that light, however.”

  Nor did anyone else, and Truman’s chief attraction for Danny—money—was obvious to everyone, including Truman. “He knew he was deceiving himself,” said Saint Subber. “He kept saying to me, ‘Tell me he’s not doing this for any reason other than love.’ I didn’t want to hurt my best friend by telling him the truth.” Prostitution disgusted him, and Truman never would have purchased the services of a call boy. But he saw nothing wrong in giving Danny an average of two thousand dollars a month, or in promising something like twenty thousand dollars to set him up in a housekeeping business for Palm Springs’ itinerant rich.

  He had two weapons besides money in his armory, however. The first was his charm, potent still. Under the scrutiny of his intense blue eyes, Danny’s sleeping ego awoke, stretched and smiled with pleasure. Never before had he been lavished with so much attention. “Here was a man nobody else would have been interested in,” said Wyatt, “and suddenly Truman found him attractive. So Danny said to himself, ‘Well, I knew all along that I really was somebody!’ The fact that Truman was also unattractive was almost irrelevant, because Danny’s narcissism had been awakened.” The second weapon was his celebrity. “Fame is the great aphrodisiac,” Truman said. As his friend, Danny was no longer a hired man; he sat as an equal beside tycoons and movie stars.

  Wherever Truman went, he dragged Danny with him. When they first heard the name of the friend Truman was bringing to dinner, the local grandes dames fluttered with excitement, assuming he was a popular poet and singer who, inconveniently for them, bore the same last name. Their enthusiasm dimmed noticeably when they learned their mistake; it flagged altogether when they discovered that he could talk about little but air conditioners, which, even in the desert, are rarely a topic of conversation. “He was an authentic primitive,” said Charlotte Curtis. “He never said a word. He couldn’t hold up his end of the conversation, which is a trial socially.” But Truman persisted in making it clear that where he was invited, Danny had to be asked too. “Truman knew what people were thinking,” said Alan Schwartz, a Manhattan lawyer he had retained some months before. “But it was his way of saying, ‘Look, you bring whoever you want to my house, and I can bring whoever I want to yours. It’s up to me.’ He was also saying, ‘I’ll show you I’m not your court jester! I’m equal!’”

  Yet he was hurt nonetheless by the consternation Danny unwittingly caused. Late one night, a small group ended the evening at a Palm Springs discotheque, and Truman, who had been drinking heavily, pulled Curtis onto the dance floor. Half in tears, he shouted above the crash of the amplifiers: “I suppose you want to know about Danny. I cannot tell you how wonderful he is for me. He’s exactly what I need. People make fun of him and they don’t like him. But he’s important to me. You don’t know what it is to have someone there who doesn’t put any pressure on me.” As he explained it, his obsession made perfect sense to her. “Danny was one of the few people who didn’t force him to rise to some brilliant occasion and perform,” she said. “He didn’t have to do anything when he was with him, whereas the rest of the time he had to go out and be Truman Capote.”

  In June Danny went with him to New York, where the consternation of Palm Springs was repeated on a larger stage. Trying, like everyone else, to find out what Truman could see in him, Slim cornered him at a party. “Do you know what Truman does?” she demanded. “Do you know what he has done? Do you understand what his work is?” But her questions, she soon realized, were addressed to “an empty suit. He had no idea what I was talking about.” In Washington, which was also on Truman’s itinerary, Kay Graham was no less aghast. “I was horrified. Ooooh! I didn’t want an air-conditioning man for a friend. I said, ‘Truman, this is terrible. You shouldn’t be doing this. Where is Jack? What’s happened here?’”

  It was a question all of his friends were asking. “When he was with this man, Truman was just repulsive, a totally different person,” said Phyllis Cerf. “He was a terrible show-off and name-dropper. It was pathetic how determined he was to impress him. And you looked at this dunce and wondered what in heaven’s name had got into Truman! We couldn’t believe it. People were whispering behind their hands at his insistence on taking this man with him. They didn’t want him. He didn’t have the background, social or otherwise, of the people Truman was foisting him on. He was indeed an air-conditioning man. It was the beginning of the destruction of Truman’s friendships.”

  The Cerfs invited them to Mt. Kisco one weekend nonetheless, along with Frank Sinatra and Kay and Joe Meehan. “As a sweet little gesture to me, the man said that he wanted to show me how to clean my air conditioners,” said Phyllis. “I had no desire to learn how to clean my air conditioners, but he insisted, and not wanting to be rude, I went with him into a room where there was a window air conditioner. He started taking it apart to get the filter out—and he broke the front of it!” Later, when they set their luggage down in their bedroom, Danny and Truman broke both of the beds, a coincidence so improbable that Bennett mischievously spread the story that his beds had been sacrificed to their sexual frenzy. A few weeks later, at a party at the Cowleses’ house nearby, Phyllis heard Bennett’s more entertaining version from Pamela Hayward. “Oh, don’t say that!” Phyllis angrily commanded, causing the entire room to snap to attention as she brushed Pamela’s shoulder with her hand. Within seconds the Tale of the Broken Beds had become legend, and an equally apocryphal sequel had been added—the Society Slap. According to some accounts, Phyllis had not merely touched Pamela, she had slugged her. So does gossip spread, and it was perhaps only justice that Truman, who was so often the purveyor, was now the subject.

  In Europe, where they went next, Truman at last began to share his friends’ doubts about Danny. “We went to a grand party in the Agnellis’ vast, vast palace in Turin. When I say grand, I really mean it. There was a footman behind every chair. No royalty has ever lived like the Agnell
is. Danny was sitting next to the Queen of Denmark, and she asked him if he had ever been to Europe before. ‘No,’ he said, ‘except for that time in Korea.’ I was sitting across the table and heard every word, and I laughed until the tears came to my eyes. Marella liked him, but didn’t know how dumb he was. To Europeans like that all Americans are the same. We’re all niggers. They don’t see any difference because they think we’re totally unimportant. You can pass anyone off on them.”

  In some ways, however, Danny may have been smarter than Truman: he realized that he did not belong, and it was cruel of Truman, and selfish as well, to place him in a position where people whispered about him behind their hands. He could help neither his ignorance nor his upbringing. The initial thrill of meeting celebrities had passed, moreover, and he was as wearied by Truman’s friends as they were by him. He did not want to sit next to the Queen of Denmark; he may never even have heard of Denmark. He did not even want to see the sights of Europe.

  John Richardson, who saw them in Venice toward the end of their tour, recognized in him the same homesickness he had seen in GI’s in Britain during World War II. “He seemed like a plant that had been uprooted and was very unhappy out of its element. The one thing he wanted in Venice was a baked Idaho potato. He just longed for one! It was an emblem of American life that he felt starved of. Truman asked me to find him one, so I went to the market, found some large potatoes, and took them back to the chef at the Cipriani Hotel, where we were all staying. ‘They must be baked in their skin,’ I said, ‘not cut up, not sautéed.’ Both Danny and Truman were in a state of great excitement. And of course when the waiter arrived with them, they were chopped up and sautéed as they always were in Italy. So Danny’s great treat turned into a hideous disappointment, and he looked sadder and glummer than he had done before.”

  Reaching London the first week in September, they visited Lee. She was no more impressed by Danny than anyone else—“totally nondescript” was her two-word description—and Danny felt the same about her, which Truman took as a personal insult. Deciding finally that he had had enough of disapproving looks, Danny told Truman that he wanted to go home, and on September 7, 1970, four days after they had arrived, they abruptly left for America, Truman stopping in New York while Danny continued by himself to Palm Springs.

  After their disastrous weeks in Europe, Truman may have intended to drop him. But Danny, glad to be home, made the first move himself, seeking a reconciliation with his wife. That changed the emotional equation for Truman, who once again experienced the familiar feeling of rejection, disguised this time as jealousy. “My whole life has been dominated by jealousy,” he confessed not long after. “It’s the one uncontrollable thing with me. It’s the key to my character. I’m jealous about everything. If I pass a shop with an antique cup in the window, for instance, and I see someone else looking at it, I’ll turn around and go back and buy it.” It was not a pleasant sensation. Appearing on Dick Cavett’s television talk show in early October, he spoke rather startlingly of “the haze of pain one experiences when there is a separation from a friend, or more so, a loved one.” His mind turned to thoughts of retaliation, and in mid-October he made plans to return to California.

  His ostensible purpose was to cover the murder trial of Charles Manson and three of his female followers for The New York Times Magazine. But almost certainly his real reason for going west was to break with Danny and to hurt him in the only way he knew how, by withdrawing his support for the Palm Springs housekeeping service. He asked Alan Schwartz to go along to give him legal pointers on the trial; but his real motive was almost certainly different. Alan had been recruited to be the bearer of bad tidings, saving Truman the awful chore of informing Danny that both their relationship and the business were finished. Not until a few days before he and Alan were to leave did Truman mention to Alan that there was yet another problem in California: out there he was considered a fugitive from justice; he might be arrested when they landed at the Los Angeles airport.

  His criminal status was fallout from his abortive documentary. The conviction of one of the killers he had interviewed had been overturned on a technicality, and the prosecutor insisted that Truman testify at the new trial. Believing, like any other honorable reporter, that interviews are confidential, Truman had ignored the subpoena and on the appointed date he had fled with Danny to a seedy motel in the mountains. There he had heard on television that he had been cited for contempt of court—he was a wanted man.

  In his panic, all he could think of was escaping to his safe and secure aerie on the East River. The following morning Danny dropped him off at the Los Angeles airport and he raced down its interminable corridors to catch a noon flight to New York. “But the police were watching everything going out of Los Angeles,” he said, “and there, standing at the very gate of the very plane that I was going to take was this big tall policeman I knew. The plane was to leave in ten minutes, and I ducked into a telephone booth. How was I going to get past this guy? At this moment who should come sailing by, wearing a marvelous gray sable coat and surrounded by six or seven of her musicians, but Pearl Bailey! So I opened the door of the telephone booth.

  “‘Pearl! Pearl! Pearl! It’s me! It’s Truman!’

  “‘Darling, what are you doin’ in that telephone booth?’ she asked, and I explained quickly. ‘Think real fast,’ I said. ‘How can I get on that plane?’ So she told her boys to go into the men’s room with me, and they loaned me clothes. Then she sent somebody ahead with the tickets and wrapped me up in her sable coat. We sailed right through that gate! The policeman didn’t notice anything. He thought I was just part of this freak brigade.”

  As Truman had suspected, his testimony had not been necessary to reconvict the killer he had interviewed, and now, in October, Alan telephoned Truman’s Palm Springs lawyer to learn if the state of California was still feeling sulky. “The judge says it’s okay,” the lawyer assured Alan. “They won’t arrest him at the airport, and they’ll just fine him a couple of hundred bucks and slap his wrists.” When they walked into the courtroom in Santa Ana three days later, however, Alan could see instantly that the Palm Springs lawyer had been misinformed. Things were not at all okay. Furious at what he labeled Truman’s “plain old contempt,” the judge fined him five hundred dollars and sentenced him to three days in jail.

  That was more like a knockout punch than a slap on the wrist, and back in his bungalow at the Hotel Bel-Air, Truman swallowed several pills, crawled shakily into bed and pulled the covers over his head. “Call Ronald Reagan!” he yelled to Alan, who was in the next room, and Reagan, who was still Governor, was more soothing than a Miltown. “No problem,” he said. “Just give me the name of the judge and I’ll take care of it.” But when he heard the name, even Reagan confessed helplessness. “Oh, no,” he said. “He’s the only Democratic judge in Orange County. He hates me.” There was no time for further appeal, and late on the afternoon of the following day, October 21, Orange County’s most-wanted fugitive was placed behind bars. “I’ve been in thirty or forty jails and prisons, but this is the first time I’ll ever be in one as a prisoner,” Truman jauntily told reporters, successfully masking his real feeling, which was one of stark terror.

  Leaving Truman in Santa Ana, Alan drove to Truman’s house in Palm Springs to deliver his message to a sad, bewildered and almost catatonic Danny. “I’m here to tell you it’s all over,” Alan said after a couple of amiable drinks. “You can’t be here when Truman comes back from jail.” The next morning Alan received a call from the judge’s office in Santa Ana. After serving only eighteen hours of his three-day sentence, Truman was to be released at noon; the judge had merely wanted him to realize what a serious offense it was to defy a court order, an assistant said. Racing over the freeways, Alan arrived a minute before Truman emerged from a door in the back of the courthouse. Appearing jaunty no longer, he looked, in Alan’s words, “as if he had been raped, rolled and beaten up.”

  The combination of co
nfinement in a jail cell—even if it was for only eighteen hours—and the end of his romance shattered Truman, and he spent several days in a Manhattan hospital trying to recover from the ensuing nervous breakdown. “He was absolutely flattened,” said Slim. “His breakup with Danny rocked him more than the breakup of any marriage I’ve ever seen. He would shake and cry and say, ‘Oh, the hell with it! I’m glad he’s out of my life, and I don’t ever want to think about him again.’ But he was like a dog with a bone. He couldn’t let go of it. ‘Do you know what he said to me?’ he would say. ‘Do you know what he did?’ He was in real and terrible pain. Babe was marvelous with him. She wanted to take him to Nassau with her. ‘One or the other of us should be with him,’ she said. ‘I think he may try to commit suicide.’” His vanity and self-esteem had been mortally wounded, and Truman could neither forget nor forgive. In the end, it seemed, his achievements, his fame, even his money were not enough: those freckle-faced boys were still mocking him.

  In his rage, he plotted schemes of revenge, which, like everything else in the Danny affair, sounded comical to everyone but him. He had paid to have caps put on Danny’s teeth, and he toyed with the idea of demanding them back. “They’re my teeth and I want them!” he told Johnny Carson’s wife Joanne. “I want to string them on a necklace and wear them around my neck.” A more practical notion was to repossess the car he had also paid for; but since it was registered under Danny’s name, he was frustrated in that too. Finally, in his fury, he dispatched Joanne and Myrtle Bennett, his Palm Springs maid, on a midnight sabotage mission to the parking lot of the Palm Springs post office, where poor Danny, no longer employed as an air-conditioning repairman, had taken a night job. Their weapon: a one-pound box of sugar, which was to be poured into the car’s gas tank.