Naïveté may be a necessary armor for writers who, like Truman, closely pattern their fiction on real people and real incidents. How, after all, could they ever write anything if they could foresee what their words would cost them? Only such protective ingenuousness could explain how Thomas Wolfe, for example, could have imagined that his family and friends would not have been wounded by Look Homeward, Angel. Only such deliberate blindness could account for Proust’s surprise when some of his titled friends were offended by their portraits in Remembrance of Things Past. And only such obstinate self-deception could explain the astonishment and dismay with which Truman now watched the reversal in his fortunes that followed “La Côte Basque.”
He had of course hoped to raise the blood pressure of people like the Logans and to cause momentary annoyance to a few more, like Bill Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt. What he had not anticipated was the disaster, complete and absolute, that had now befallen him. Forced to remain in California while he was making his movie, he kept in touch with events from afar. “He was the most surprised and shocked person you can imagine,” recalled Liz Smith, “and he would call to ask me—torment me—about what people in New York had said about him. After ‘La Côte Basque’ he was never happy again.” Joanne Carson watched helplessly as he rambled around her house in a near-daze, repeating over and over, “But they know I’m a writer. I don’t understand it.”
He telephoned Slim to make up. When she refused to take his call, he persuaded John to phone her. Although Lady Coolbirth may have borne a superficial resemblance to her, John was instructed to say, she was really supposed to represent Slim’s old enemy Pamela Hayward, the new Mrs. W. Averell Harriman. “Truman’s very upset by your reaction,” John said. “He thought it would make you laugh.”
“I didn’t,” retorted Slim, who, quite the contrary, had consulted her lawyer about suing him.
“Don’t you think it’s well written?” John asked.
“No. It’s junk,” said the implacable Slim, who at that point detected breathing on the other end and hung up, realizing that Truman was listening in on an extension phone. Truman persisted nonetheless, and at the end of the year he sent her a cable in Australia, where she was vacationing. “Merry Christmas, Big Mama,” he said. “I’ve decided to forgive you. Love, Truman.”
Bracing himself for more harsh words, Truman also phoned Bill, who did take his call, blandly pretending that nothing untoward had taken place since they had last talked. “I have other ways of torturing the little shit,” he later told a friend. Truman asked if he had read his Esquire story, and Bill said, “I started, Truman, but I fell asleep. Then a terrible thing happened: the magazine was thrown away.” When Truman, with pathetic eagerness, offered to send him another copy, Bill politely declined. “Don’t bother, Truman. I’m preoccupied right now. My wife is very ill.” My wife! Not Barbara, not Babe, but my wife! As if Truman had hardly known her, had not spent some of the most enchanted hours of his life with her, had not been entrusted with secrets she confided to no one else, including her husband. To be dismissed as a stranger: that was torture indeed.
To Babe herself, Truman wrote two long letters. She did not reply, but in early 1976 chance brought them together in Quo Vadis, a then-fashionable restaurant on East Sixty-third Street—though ill, she was occasionally still able to go out. He introduced her to his luncheon companions, and like Bill, she was polite but distant, as if he were someone she knew only slightly. Eventually Jack, without prompting, also approached her, phoning her one Saturday afternoon at Kiluna Farm. Forgive him, Jack asked her. “Never! Never! Definitely not!” she declared.
“Babe, what Truman said in that piece is none of your business. Or his business either,” replied Jack, in that stern voice Truman himself had so often heard. “He is an artist, and you can’t control artists.”
“Oh, Jack…,” she began, and seemed about to say more; then, after a second’s hesitation, she concluded, “Let me talk it over with Bill.” Jack knew then that he had lost the argument. He did not make similar entreaties to Slim, which was probably just as well for both of them. “If I ever met Slim on the street, I’d kick her,” he promised. “I’d say, ‘Jesus Christ, Slim, as nice as that boy was to you!’ When Truman and I were living in Spain, Leland Hayward left her. She was in trouble, wandering around, and we took her in.”
As consumed with anger as they might have been toward a lover who had deceived them, Babe and Slim were not prepared to make peace. Nothing Truman did, whether it was to write eloquent letters or to send amusing telegrams, could change their minds. All the devices that had worked so well for him in the past were now of no avail. “Babe always spoke of Truman with total loathing, as this snake who had betrayed her,” said their mutual friend John Richardson. “Have you heard what Truman’s done now?” she would ask her friends, professing to be horrified by each new comment she saw quoted or each new escapade she heard about. When her sister Minnie’s husband, Jim Fosburgh, who had once painted Truman’s portrait, broke ranks to lunch with him, Babe called to upbraid him that very afternoon. How could he, her own brother-in-law, have been so disloyal? she demanded. Yet carefully hidden beneath her fury lay a great disappointment: like Truman, she too had lost perhaps her best friend. Harper Lee glimpsed that disappointment the few times they met in the ensuing months: seeing her, Babe was reminded of Truman and automatically burst into tears.
For her part, Slim could not stop herself from chewing endlessly on the wrong that had been done her. “If ever there was a woman who was beside herself, it was Slim,” said one friend. And it was literally true. When she discussed him, Slim became so agitated that she could not remain seated for more than a moment, moving restlessly from couch to chair, chair to couch. “After ‘La Côte Basque’ I looked on Truman as a friend who had died,” she said, “and we never spoke again. I took the cleaver and chopped him out of my life. And that was it.”
In public Truman regretted the loss of Babe, and Slim too, but claimed to be otherwise unaffected by the commotion he had created. Like Jack, he lectured rather loftily on his mission as an artist. “The artist is a dangerous person because he’s out of control,” he said. “He’s controlled only by his art.” Defiantly saying that he had done nothing that Proust had not done before him, he tried to wrap his work in the mantle of literature. “Oh, honey! It’s Proust! It’s beautiful!” he exclaimed to Diana Vreeland.
In a more practical vein, he noted what probably would have been evident all along, if he had not, in Slim’s rueful words, been “so wily, so clever and so bright” that even the most suspicious dropped their guard. “All a writer has for material is what he knows,” he said. “At least, that’s all I’ve got—what I know.” But sometimes in private, late at night and when he had been drinking, he would break into tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” he would cry. “I didn’t know the story would cause such a fuss.”
53
WHILE the drama of his social demise was being played out in New York, Truman was encountering different kinds of problems in California. One, which might have been anticipated, was his role in Neil Simon’s farce Murder by Death. Simon had chosen him as the model for his comic villain—a neat turnabout for the author of “La Côte Basque.” All Truman was supposed to do was portray someone much like himself: a weird eccentric who gathers the world’s greatest detectives to solve a murder he has thoughtfully arranged. It seemed like a not insurmountable assignment, and Truman had expected his debut as a movie star to make him the envy of both his friends and his enemies. “Gore Vidal must be dying,” he had gleefully declared. He had looked forward to his weeks in Hollywood as a holiday, a glamorous and well-paid frolic.11 The real acting was to be done by a cast of sterling professionals: Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Elsa Lanchester, Peter Falk, James Coco and Nancy Walker.
But standing in front of the cameras was not the romp he had imagined; it was hard and often boring work, as the screenwriter of Beat the
Devil and The Innocents should have remembered. Most days he had to leave for the Burbank studio by 6:30 or 7 A.M. and stay there, either working or on call in his trailer, until late afternoon or evening. At the best of times, such an arduous schedule, coupled with the tension he usually felt before public appearances, would have filled him with dread. But the days that followed publication of “La Côte Basque” were not the best of times. “Making that film knocked everything out of him,” said John. “It was probably the most exhausting thing he ever did psychologically. He used to get up in the morning as if he were going to the gallows, instead of a studio.”
If he had been content to play himself, as the producers had hired him to do, he might have shone like the star he longed to be; there have been a few films in which an amateur of a unique stamp has upstaged his experienced colleagues. But such a passive assignment was not enough for Truman. Since boyhood, he had dreamed of being in the movies; now that he was, he was not going to let his chance go to waste: he wanted to act. “The original intent may have been for me to parody myself, but that’s not how it’s going to work out,” he defiantly informed one interviewer. To another he jokingly added: “How am I as an actor? Let’s just say, ‘What Billie Holiday is to jazz, what Mae West is to tits… what Seconal is to sleeping pills, what King Kong is to penises, Truman Capote is to the great god Thespis!’”
The film premiered in the summer of 1976. That he looked the part of a dotty murderer no one disputed. Weighing far more than he ever had before, with cascading jowls and a stomach that threatened to burst the buttons of his gray vest, he appeared funny and sinister at the same time, like a giant frog preparing to pounce on his prey. Looks aside, he was not very good. His characterization was overwrought, a reflection perhaps of his anxiety, and curiously in-authentic—he did not play a convincing Truman Capote. He was the recipient of many harsh words from the critics, as well as a few kind ones, but Guinness’ critique—“godawful!”—was the most succinct, as well as the most accurate. That was not the only word, however, and Robert Moore, whose unhappy task it had been to direct him, laid the blame for his performance not on Truman, but on those, including Simon, who had picked him. “To put Capote at a table with international stars was too much of a test for any literary figure to withstand,” said Moore. “It’s like saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get [the President of the United States] to play the President of the United States?’ The answer is ‘No.’”
Truman’s second problem, which also might have been anticipated, was his volatile, up-and-down relationship with John. Their journey West had started well enough, with a long and relaxing drive through Canada and the Canadian Rockies, a kind of second honeymoon. That amicable mood had lingered even after Truman began working. Assuming the unaccustomed role of helpmate, John had shared his burden, waking up with him at dawn, driving him to the studio, and staying with him for the rest of the day. Only later, after Truman had become accustomed to the routine—and John had become bored with it—did John arrange for a studio driver to take over his chauffeur’s duties.
That congenial spirit soon began to evaporate, however, as the same old difficulties surfaced in the same old ways. Though Truman drank a little less while he was working on the movie, John drank even more. On Thanksgiving he was feeling so low that he poured his first drink at 9 A.M. He and Truman celebrated at Joanne Carson’s, and by late afternoon, when the turkey was served, he was so drunk and belligerent that he spat in the face of one of her other guests, then wandered away to pass out on the floor in another room. (Truman had bragged so much about John’s sexual equipment that another member of the party surreptitiously followed him and, taking advantage of his stupor, unzipped his trousers to inspect that anatomical wonder. “It’s pretty good,” he reported to another member of the party. “Truman didn’t exaggerate.”)
Late one night a week or so later, they had a fight in their own house in Beverly Hills, which Joanne had rented and helped decorate for them. John became so violent, smashing every glass object in sight, that Truman was forced to flee. Dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, he walked barefooted to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he telephoned Joanne. When she picked him up a few minutes later, he was shaken and white, and his feet were bloody from the broken glass. He and John soon reconciled, but two weeks later they had another fight and Truman again sought refuge at Joanne’s.
Destructive as it was, alcohol merely fueled their arguments, which centered, as always, on power: who was to exercise control? John was desperate for that privilege, and once again tried to interpose himself between Truman and the rest of the world. “I’ve always [concluded] that the best way to handle Truman’s affairs was to keep him away from any substantive discussions of money, and to prevent him from making stupid or excessive commitments,” he told Alan Schwartz. Not only did he open Truman’s mail, but he also gave the studio guards a list of visitors who were to be denied entry into his trailer. Above the name of one man, with whom Truman had enjoyed a brief fling, John wrote the word “NO,” which he underlined three times.
John’s arguments for taking command were familiar; indeed, they had the perfunctory tone that comes from useless repetition. If he shouted louder, if he tried even harder to look important, it was only because he realized that he was being ignored. After two years of fruitless struggle, he knew that Truman would never let him, or anyone else, guide his career. “Truman and I have talked this to death,” he wearily confessed to Alan. “Nothing changes.”
Although he continued to bluster about the prerogatives that should have been his, John’s real demands were now quite modest. In return for his companionship, he asked for only two things from Truman. The first was a place to live. “John was always talking about security,” recalled Joanne. “That was his big cry. He said that he had burned his bridges in New York and that he depended on Truman. ‘If we have our own house, nobody can bother us,’ he said.” The second was help in finding employment. He wanted Truman to whisper a good word in the ear of someone—Truman’s tycoon friend Bob Anderson was the one he had most in mind—who might give him a job. “It’s all very interesting being with you, Truman,” he said, “but you have repeatedly done this number where you take off like a big bird and leave me hanging by my thumbs. What I want to do is establish myself in business, and I can’t do that if I’m flitting around the country with you. So the first thing I need is a place to live. The second thing I need is to get some kind of career going so that if you take off one time and never come back, I’m not going to be bereft.”
The first condition, providing him a place to live, Truman grudgingly agreed to. “I want something dramatic that looks over the ocean down a mountainside,” Truman proclaimed, possibly assuming that no such house was on the market at a price he could afford. But something dramatic was precisely what Joanne found in the hills above Malibu: a small, two-bedroom house with a sweeping view of the sea, much like the one Truman had enjoyed from the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina. Nor could he object that Joanne’s discovery was too expensive; by local standards it was a bargain, his for just under one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Even if he had wished to, Truman could not have said no. Taking possession early in 1976, he immediately redecorated, painting the living room a bright salmon and filling it with comfortable white wicker furniture.
Once having committed himself, he even talked about abandoning Manhattan, where so many had already abandoned him, and he ordered an appraisal of his apartment at the U.N. Plaza. In the future, he said, he would divide his time between two oceans, between his house in Malibu and his cottage on Long Island, between John and Jack. In John’s eyes, it was an ideal arrangement. “Truman didn’t want to spend three hundred and sixty-five days a year with me,” he said. “He didn’t want to spend three hundred and sixty-five days a year with anybody. And at one time he very frankly acknowledged that.”
But to John’s dismay, Truman rejected John’s second condition point-blank; he adamantly r
efused to help John find work. “He never helped me—he could not do it—because he was such a possessive fanatic that he didn’t want me out of the house,” said John. “He knew that if I had a five-day-a-week job and he suddenly got an inspiration to go to Rio, I couldn’t go with him.” John’s analysis was undoubtedly correct. Truman did not want an independent lover; he wanted one who was subservient, in fact if not in manner. But it was probably also true that he perceived that his only hold on John was financial, and that if John ever did find a job, John would be the one who would fly off like a big bird. That was not a chance Truman was willing to take.
At the end of 1975 Truman finished work on Murder by Death. He returned briefly to New York, then in the middle of January began a speaking tour that was to take him to thirty colleges and universities. Almost immediately he recognized his mistake. Although he had given readings in the past, they were usually isolated, separated by many months. Never before had he undertaken such a rigorous schedule, which kept him constantly on the road, like a politician running for office.
John Knowles saw him at the University of Florida, where, to accommodate a large and eager crowd, his hosts had arranged for him to speak outdoors. His reading was a singular success, as was the question period that followed. “Are you a homosexual?” asked one truculent young man. With perfect timing, Truman paused, then brought down shouts of laughter on the young man’s head with a sly question of his own. “Is that a proposition?” he inquired. But when Knowles visited his hotel room afterward, he discovered that once off stage, Truman had retreated into a numbed daze. “With the jet lag and endless motels, he hardly knew where he was. He had a couple of vodkas to revive himself, and he was on the moon. He just dwindled away. His energy was gone; his coherence was gone.”
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