Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Truman was enthusiastic, but Rick soon had second thoughts. “If you do this, it’s going to be like a disease,” he warned. “If you do it once, you’re going to do it again. Why don’t you just save the money and drop the whole thing? Say: ‘All right, I got beat and that’s it.’ We’ve all been beaten. It happens to everyone. So forget about it! Go out and find yourself another man-friend! Write this one off to experience.” Fortunately for John, the bone-crusher became convinced that Truman was too unstable to keep their arrangement secret, and he backed out before Truman could make up his mind. If he could not have the satisfaction of hearing John’s bones cracking, however, Truman at least wanted to hear howls of anger, and after several days of nagging, he finally persuaded Rick himself to go to California. “I want you to find this guy and punch him in the nose, break his glasses, destroy his car—whatever” were his instructions as he sent Rick off.

  “I found the building,” Rick soon reported.

  “Oh, thank God!” said Truman, who had been waiting nervously by the telephone.

  “And I know which is his window.”

  “Ohhhh,” sighed Truman, who seemed to regard that as a discovery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

  But Rick would not punch John in the nose or break his glasses, and after three days he returned to Manhattan. If Truman really wanted him to do John some serious damage, Rick said, he would have to give something in return: his help and name as the coauthor of a horror movie Rick had been working on. “Fine, fine,” said Truman, and after recruiting a giant-sized Navy buddy, Rick headed west again. “We’re going to find a guy and beat him up with a baseball bat,” he told his friend. But even with that intimidating hulk at his side, Rick’s heart was not in the maiming business, and he and his companion were no more of a threat to John than Joanne Carson and Myrtle Bennett had been to Danny. Following Truman’s directions, they did nothing more destructive than pour sugar into the gas tank of his car, then, like those earlier saboteurs, beat a quick retreat. It was not much of a revenge, but for the moment it seemed enough to satisfy Truman.

  It was not enough, however, to stop him from sinking into perhaps the darkest depression he had ever known. “Johnny was the great love affair of my life,” he lamented. “I keep saying he’s out of my system, but he’s not. I know the best thing would be for me to forget him. But I can’t do that.” Forgetting the lessons of the Connecticut clinic and the pledge he had made at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Santa Fe, he drank more than ever. A fall during one drunken spell resulted in a bloody head and cracked teeth, and Rick was pressed into service once again to drive him to Miami for several weeks of rest and repairs.

  Jack was usually not around on such occasions, escaping, as much as he could, to Sagaponack or Verbier. It would be unfair to blame him—living with an alcoholic requires more-than-human patience—and it is possible that his absence may have helped more than it hurt. When Jack was around, he tended to nag and lecture and hector, which only added to Truman’s guilt and anxiety; and Jack sneered at clinics and Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of relying on such aids, he maintained, alcoholics would do better to study the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. Yet if it would be unfair to blame him, it would be fair to say that Jack did not offer Truman much emotional support during his alcoholic years, most often leaving it to others, Rick among them, to put him into hospitals and to look after him when he came out.

  On his return from Florida in November, Truman sought the aid of two psychoanalysts, one male, one female. But neither did much good. Ten days before Christmas, 1976, he invited a friend to lunch at Quo Vadis. He wanted to talk, and through lunch, drinks and dinner, he kept his guest a virtual prisoner at their prized banquette near the entrance; then, as the restaurant emptied for the night, he dragged him to a bar across from the U.N. Plaza for still more drinks. For twelve hours Truman’s monologue continued, as he spoke of his apparently unquenchable despair and explained why, at the age of fifty-two, he was contemplating suicide.

  “Every morning I wake up and in about two minutes I’m weeping,” he said. “I just cry and cry. And every night the same thing happens. I take a pill, go to bed and start to write or reread something I’ve written, and suddenly I start to cry. There’s just so much pain somebody can endure. How can I carry it around all the time? The pain is not about any one thing: it’s about a lot of things. I’m so unhappy. I just have to come to terms with something. There is something wrong. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t think any of these jerky analysts know either.

  “Because of my childhood, because I always had the sense of being abandoned, certain things have fantastic effects on me, beyond what someone else might feel. That’s why people who I know love me, like Slim Keith, like Babe, like Marella Agnelli, are being stupid. They have a total misunderstanding of what it is I’m doing with Answered Prayers and why I’m doing it, and they’re being very cruel. They don’t know that what they’re doing is cruel because they don’t know that I spent three or four years of my childhood locked up in hotel rooms. I can name the people on one hand who really care about me and want me to see my way through my troubles. And though they’re friends, even they have some vested interest in me.

  “I can go three or four months without having a drink. And then suddenly I’m walking down the street and I feel that I’m going to die, that I can’t put one foot in front of the other unless I have a drink. So I step into a bar. Someone who’s not an alcoholic couldn’t understand. But suddenly I feel so tired. I’ve had this problem with alcoholism for about fifteen years. I’ve gone into hospitals, I’ve tried Antabuse, I’ve done everything. But nothing seems to work. I keep thinking things will be right when I finish the book, when I dump Johnny O’Shea, or when I look beautiful. Well, the book is okay now—I can see the end. I finished with Johnny, and I dropped forty pounds. And things are not all right. I don’t know what to do next.

  “I’ve asked myself a thousand times: why did this happen to me? what did I do wrong? And I think the reason is that I was famous too young. I pushed too hard too soon. I wish somebody would write what it’s really like to be a celebrity. People come up and ask me for autographs in airports, and I give them ‘cause otherwise I think they’ll hit me over the head. On Long Island they drove right into the driveway last summer—the gate didn’t stop them—and some car broke Maggie’s jaw and ripped her stomach open. Celebrity! All it means is that you can cash a small check in a small town. Famous people sometimes become like turtles turned over on their backs. Everybody is picking at the turtle—the media, would-be lovers, everybody—and he can’t defend himself. It takes an enormous effort for him to turn over.

  “I feel that I should make this great effort with Dr. Kleinschmidt [his male analyst]. But I don’t have a lot of confidence in analysis. Kleinschmidt is so serious. I sometimes sit there for ten minutes and I don’t say a word to him and he doesn’t say a word to me. He did say one thing to me and that was: ‘I don’t think that this guy O’Shea is responsible for your problems. You’re using him as a red herring because you don’t want to finish your book.’ But I had known that all along. I don’t want to finish because finishing is like dying. I would have to start my life over again. He also said, ‘I think that you are going to kill yourself. It’s the number one thing on your mind.’ I never heard of an analyst saying that to a person, but the awful part about it was that it was true! I hadn’t realized how often I had talked to him about pistols. I have a .38-caliber pistol in a drawer, and it’s fully loaded. I also got prescriptions for Tuinal from him and from four or five other doctors, and I’ve saved them. I now have enough Tuinals to kill fifteen people!”

  So it continued, his catalogue of despair, through that December afternoon and night. Finally, around midnight, Jack, who had been searching the First Avenue bars, burst in to escort him home. “It’s time to go, Truman,” he commanded, so impatient that he prevented him from signing an autograph for a waiting prostitute. Insulted, she s
eemed prepared to give battle; Jack took no notice. “Come on!” he barked. “Tout de suite! Tout de suite!” Truman meekly obeyed, looking like a guilty boy who had been discovered in some forbidden pleasure. A week or so later he spent a few days in the detoxification unit of Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital. But, as he had wearily observed, nothing worked, and almost immediately—on New Year’s Eve, in fact—he suffered an alcoholic blackout and disappeared on his way home from a party. When he returned to his apartment the next day, he was unable to say where he had been or what he had done.

  At the end of January, 1977, he followed Jack to Switzerland and entered another clinic, where Jack visited him twice a day. In a letter to a friend, Jack contrasted the melancholy mood of those days to that of their first night in Verbier: “No! It was not sixteen yrs ago, but six hundred yrs ago. Indeed, it wasn’t at all. It was another world, another life, and we were all brave and warriors in it, and we were assuredly going to live forever—forever young!”

  His energies partly revived by his weeks in Switzerland, on February 21 Truman returned to Manhattan and the question that still dominated his thoughts: how could he get back at John? The answer soon presented itself. Since he had already separated John from his family, why not go one step further and take John’s place as head of the O’Shea household? He would become like a husband to Peg and like a father to the youngest children, Chris and Kerry. (Brian and Kathy, the two oldest, had already left home.) It may well be that he never consciously spelled out such a devious plot; and it is true that he was also motivated by affection and a sense of responsibility to the O’Sheas. Whatever the reasons for his actions, the result was the same. He was the man to whom John’s wife and children turned thenceforth when they wanted advice or help; John himself they dismissed with a derisive nickname—Mr. Wonderful. Could Truman have had any sweeter revenge?

  He put Peg on the Bayouboys payroll again, at a salary of seven hundred and fifty dollars a month, and he began acting like a father to her children. When Chris, who was thirteen, was having problems in school, for instance, he invited him to La Côte Basque for a stern man-to-man talk. Worried that Chris was not being taught proper standards, he also sent him to an expensive summer camp in Colorado, where he bunked with the sons of millionaires. “It will let him know that there’s a world outside of that awful suburb,” Truman said. He cherished Chris’s letter of thanks, and cherished it even more when he mentioned it to John, whom he could hear almost sniffling with jealousy over the telephone. Truman was enjoying the role of daddy.

  But most of his attention was focused on Kerry, who, at sixteen, was blossoming into an attractive woman, tall and slim, with dark hair and lovely blue eyes—more clay for Pygmalion. “I’ve always wanted to be able to mold somebody like this, but the right person never came along,” he said, thrilled by his unexpected good fortune. “Kerry is just right, so pretty, so natural, so intelligent.”

  Once again he concentrated on creating the woman of his dreams, and he planned Kerry’s career as carefully as he had planned his own: first he would make her a model, then a movie star. But Kerry O’Shea was not the name for the goddess he was creating, and waving his hand as if he were Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner, he gave her a new one. Kate Harrington he called her, borrowing the first name from Katharine Hepburn and the last one from Peg—Harrington had been her maiden name. Kerry liked her new name’s elegant sound, and she was known as Kate Harrington from then on. Truman had not only assumed John’s place; he had also erased John’s name from his favorite child: he might just as well have rechristened her Kate Capote.

  The first part of Truman’s scheme to make Kate a star had met with some success. He had persuaded Dick Avedon to photograph her and one of Manhattan’s top modeling agencies to represent her. At the end of April he began the second phase of his campaign and took the new Kate Harrington to California. Though he kept their presence a secret from John, he trumpeted it to everyone else. In his Hollywood Reporter column, George Christy reported that at one fancy gathering “there was news of Truman Capote arriving in town, with 17-year-old [sic] Kate Harrington who he believes will be a smash in films (Kate’s the daughter of Truman’s great friend, John O’Shea).” Helping him out, Carol Matthau gave a party at which he showed Kate off to thirty or so of his California friends, a group that included Johnny Carson, Robert Wagner, Cybill Shepherd and Irving and Mary Lazar. It appeared as if all of Hollywood had turned out to see her, and Truman could not restrain himself from bragging: “Kate does have a quality, but if it wasn’t for me getting all these people together and pushing her, she would be just another girl out of a doughnut factory.”

  He spoke too soon. As his disasters with Lee should have taught him, even he, huff and puff as he might, could not make a Hollywood star. In fact, he could not induce Sue Mengers, the agent who handled some of the biggest—Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal and Mick Jagger—to take Kate on as a client; Mengers relented only enough to invite the two of them to a celebrity-packed dinner at her house in Bel Air. Truman had neither the will nor the strength to do much more, and he spent much of his stay in his bed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Propped up on several pillows and with a bottle of vodka by his side, he said: “I’m a compulsive, and compulsives have enormous amounts of energy for several days at a time. Then they collapse. I’m also an alcoholic. I’ve tried to say I’m not, but I am, I am—I am because I’m so unhappy. I’m going insane and nobody can bear to watch somebody going insane. Jack can’t. Even I can’t.”

  Even during their worst days, Truman and John had remained in touch: they were compelled to talk to each other, if only to trade insults. At the end of May, just three weeks after his return from California, Truman received a five-page letter in which a dispirited John described the downturn in his fortunes since Santa Fe. Without a job again, he was living on unemployment benefits, in a shabby apartment filled with shabby furniture; as a fitting emblem of his misery, he noted that his color television set displayed only a black-and-white picture. His message was crude but clear: he was broke and needed money.

  Turning those pages over and over, Truman nonetheless searched for other meanings; “he was talking about that letter last night as if it were something from Saint Paul,” grumbled Jack. At the beginning of July, apparently having convinced himself that those mercenary words constituted a love letter, he traveled West, and he and John set up housekeeping in an apartment in Santa Monica. Truman later set down his version of what happened in the painful months that followed.

  “When Mr. O’Shea came to see me at the [Hotel] Bel-Air in early July, he used all his wiles, con-trick gifts to convince me that he was now a changed person and had only my welfare at heart and deeply regretted that he had ever caused me so much distress. I should mention that at this time I wasn’t truly in control of my emotions or mental processes; I was not functioning in my normal manner due to an overuse of alcohol and sedatives.”

  Unlike previous reunions, there was not a hint of a honeymoon this time. As Truman should have realized from John’s letter, John’s first concern was money: he needed cash not only to live, but also to pay his tuition at UCLA, where, his ambition leaping over his ability, he was studying to become an English professor. John’s request for dollars was disconcerting enough; far more distressing was Truman’s discovery that he was still secretly involved with Joanne Biel, frequently sneaking away to talk to her on the telephone or to visit her apartment. Bitter arguments ensued, and as so often before, more than once Truman sought refuge with Joanne Carson.

  In August Truman interrupted their stormy summer with a trip to New York, returning to California in early September with twenty thousand dollars in cash. Their bickering resumed almost the minute John picked him up at the Los Angeles airport. “When we reached the apartment, I felt so weak and nauseated I fell on the bed and almost went to sleep. Almost, but not quite. I watched him expertly ruffle through my luggage. When he found the manila envelope containing the $20,000 he gl
anced at me sharply; I pretended to be asleep. He looked at his wristwatch; it was about 1:00 pm. He tucked the envelope with the money under his arm and on his way out of the room he stopped at the closet where I had hung the suit that I was wearing on the plane. He took my wallet out of the pocket; there was a little more than $500 in it. He took $300. He also tore several checks out of my check book. Then he left the apartment. I was not surprised. He had done things like this before. He knew that I was ill and helpless. I knew it, too; and also that I had become in some mysterious, psychological way, dependent on him. But what I felt most was: I felt I was in very great danger.”

  John was usually away from 8 A.M. until late at night, ostensibly pursuing his studies. Sometimes he would also tiptoe out of the apartment at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, drive away and return ten minutes later. “At last I figured it out,” Truman said. “He took these quick night drives to check on Miss Biel, see if her windows were lighted or if any strange cars were around. He was insanely jealous—and I mean that literally. The few times we went to a movie or restaurant, he would disappear for half an hour. I never bothered to ask where he had been. I knew he had been talking on the telephone, arranging some assignation.

  “I felt I was losing my mind. I knew something was being planned, but I didn’t know what. Gradually, I began to feel like the blind man in Vladamir Nabakov’s [sic] novel ‘Laughter in the Dark’—the blind man who is being tormented by a silent boy and girl: he knows they are in his house playing wicked pranks on him, but he cannot see them.” On October 5, Truman packed and left for the last time, taking a taxi to Joanne’s, where he drank himself into senselessness.

  John’s own account of those dark days was different—but with the exception of the disposition of the twenty thousand dollars, not necessarily contradictory. What should be said, to balance Truman’s version, was that even while they were fighting, John was doing his best to wean him from liquor, taking him to AA meetings and introducing him to a helpful doctor, a member of AA himself. His efforts may have had some influence, because when he emerged from his blackout in October, Truman decided to kick, once and for all, his dependence on drugs and alcohol.