The Southern Fag simply stared at him, his rattle played out like a pair of mute maracas.
The crew cut quickly to a commercial break, at which point Truman rose, disconnected his mic, and left it on the rough orange surface of his swivel chair.
Without further word to Siegel, he moved to Sally Quinn.
‘C’mon, honey. Let’s blow this popsicle stand.’
CODA
IN THE LIMOUSINE, truman poured two glasses of bubbly from the open bottle, though the ritual lacked the spirit of triumph he had anticipated when he left it.
He smiled at Sally Quinn, deflated. A maestro who had almost pulled off a virtuoso performance—who knew his own potential, but had fallen just short.
‘It was theater,’ Truman lamented. ‘Couldn’t he see that?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘I mean, it’s clear the man’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but my gawd.’
‘For what it’s worth, I thought it was a superb performance.’
At this, the woebegone face brightened. Ever a sucker for a compliment.
‘Why thank you, sugar. It means so much that you recognized what I was going for. It’s why I asked Kay-Kay for you to be here to bear witness. Lee dismissed me, so I turned myself into an extreme version of exactly what she accused me of being. I was supposed to be playing some crazy, monstrous queen you’d meet in a bar.’
‘It’s too bad you didn’t get to finish your act.’
‘Oh, but I willllll, sugar. That’s what you’re here for. I still got lots pent up inside me that I just gotta purge! Now, we can go for a nice luncheon out, or you can come back to chez moi and we’ll have something in. Whaddaya fancy?’
SALLY HAD CHOSEN to go back to Truman’s apartment, reasoning he’d be more candid there.
When they’d settled into his Victoriana nest of a living room with a pot of tea, the author relaxed and the showman returned. Sally set up her tape recorder and pointed it toward him. He gave her a coy smile.
‘Are you certain you want to hear this… ?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘What bits would you like?’ Cause trust me, I’s got the goods.’
‘What do you want to tell?’
‘Oh, there’s so much, it could take days. About every man the Bouviers have ever used. About their sense of entitlement. About their obsession with one another. They’re like the Kennedy boys— they keep covering the same ground, sexually, those two. Talk about share and share alike! But it isn’t sharing, if it’s some sort of sick competition. Why, Jackie couldn’t even give birth without Lee gunning to get into Jack’s trousers. And of all the sugar daddies for Jackie to hitch her wagon to… The very one that baby sis had her heart set on… ? Of course, the irony there is that Bobby asked Lee to break things off with Ari years before. Said it would look bad for the President’s dear sister-in-law to run off with such a reprobate. That Jackie snapped him up herself after Jack and Bobby were gone is simply too ironic.’
‘It all feels quite incestuous.’
‘Honey, you don’t know the half of it. It’s as if those girls live, breathe, and think in the royal “We”… Until it comes to each other, then it’s every gal for herself.’
‘And Lee confided all of this to you? Over all these years?’
‘Radzilla told me everything. She couldn’t fart without knowing what I thought. But my gawd, how I loved that girl—I saved her, you know. Multiple times. That’s why it’s so treacherous, her dropping me as she did.’ He smiled, sadly. ‘You know, I can joke and make light of it. They are pathetic figures after all, and I can certainly spin a good yarn round’ em both. But truth is, I was there for Lee Radziwill when no one else was. I put my own career on hold to bolster hers. (Not that she had any real talent in the end, gawd help her.) She wasn’t a kind person, Lee. Never particularly warm. In fact, most people who met her found her quite cold. The only person she was ever really interested in was herself. She was a phony, a climber, the ultimate star-fucker… but I loved her. I was the single most loyal friend she ever had.’
‘Do you think you made a mistake in choosing someone so treacherous?’
‘I made a mistake in trusting her. I thought that because I had been there in her moments of doubt or need that she would be there for me. Hell, if I had tossed Lee to the curb whenever she was low, she’d have been mowed down in traffic decades ago. I held her hand through the botched jobs, the failed pursuits, the wrong men. Then when it happened I needed the same from her, she goes and betrays me without a second thought. Trusting that little narcissist was the single worst misjudgment of my life.’
‘I can see how you’d be hurt.’
He nodded—grateful that someone had heard him. ‘Lee thought I was disposable. I haven’t been very well the last few years. Oh, I’m strong as an ox now, but I was in and out of the hospital. I guess the Principessa thought I wasn’t worth worrying about. Weeeeeeeuuuuulllllll. Unfortunately for Lee Radziwill, this Southern fag’s alive and well in New York City—!’
But when the cameras went away and the tape recorders stopped, after the interviews were aired and the sound bites replayed, even after his revenge was recorded in newsprint in black and white for posterity… he found that he was left with a hole in the wall of his heart; that what he could not expunge was the pain of being discounted. Discounted by someone he had trusted with his innermost, private self, who said, in the end, that he didn’t really matter.
His heart was enormous, he told himself. He felt that, even wounded, it continued to beat so powerfully he feared it was too big for his very chest.
But he knew there was a hole into which Lee Radziwill had plunged her harpoon, and that a piece of him could never be recovered.
TWENTY
1980
VARIATION NO. 10
DON SEÑOR TRUMAN CAPOTE REQUESTS THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY AT HIS REVENGE BALL THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TEN O’CLOCK ANDALUSIA, SPAIN
DRESS: ANDALUSIAN ARISTOCRAT, CIRCA 1860 MASKS TILL MIDNIGHT
HE HAS HIS next idea when the invitations cease.
Hardly anyone asks him anywhere anymore, and while he’s put up a brave front, frankly it hurts his heart. He feels five years of penance are quite a long time to pass as a pariah, and he’d like to have a lovely time again.
March 21st. That’s when he’s calculated the first day of spring. The idea of pagan rites appeals, especially since this time he’ll make absolutely certain—no stuffed shirts, just for the sake of their names. Not that he’ll admit that’s what he did last time… but no Sinatras running off to Jilly’s just after two, or Gianni and his Italian mob making una partenza anticipata—a rudely early departure, that is—for a card game in the back room at Elaine’s. Or Old Bastard Paley, who refused to cut a rug, even while Babe never left the floor.
This time the host wants pure debauchery. No rules. No societal norms. Boys with boys. Boys with girls. Girls with girls. Perhaps a combination thereof.
He’s imagined the fervor that Stravinsky incited with his glorious Rite of Spring, causing a full-blown riot when first performed—inciting mayhem and chaos. That wonderful, terrible score of Igor’s, unsettling in its dissonance—with Nijinsky’s Ballets Russes hurled into a frenzy of erotic pagandance. That’s the kind of art and life that Truman has in mind. Where one sees or reads or hears, and stops and thinks MY GOD.
Isn’t this what he himself has begun to achieve with Answered Prayers? To incite and enrage—is that not the point of art?
He wants ripping of clothing in the darkest of corners. Not simply sipping champagne, but indulging in everything else. China bowls of white powder that amps one’s spirits high. Snorting and smoking and swallowing all. Costumes more than mere masks that guests remove too soon, unwilling to give his experiment a chance. He’ll correct this with the next one. It will be the ball of the future, stripped of modes and mores. He begins to think how his new party might achieve this.
&
nbsp; First of all, he’ll hire The Rolling Stones. ‘Mick loves me, honey,’ he’ll brag to anyone left to listen.
He has visions of a tennis court—a whole long string of’ em. Draped with rich-toned silks imported direct from Spain, with fans and muletas and a million paper roses. In his mind he’s dressed as a miniature Don Juan, welcoming señoras and matadors as a chorus of flamenco dancers stomp feet against the floor to the sultry rhythms of Spanish guitars.
Perhaps he’ll scrap the tennis courts and have his guests fly to Andalusia, which if they’ve never been, he’s certain they’ll adore. (How the Stones and flamenco speak to one another we really can’t imagine, but Truman might argue that he’s only in the early planning stages.)
Unfortunately for Truman, the best plan on earth can’t unfold in a vacuum. He’d need his precious guests, most of whom wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near him. He starts to formulate a plan, to make a party so big, he’s giving it for the masses. If last time was a dance for just five hundred of his ‘close personal friends,’ this will be a party for a thousand strangers. Just as he’s plotting how he’ll pull this off, as he’s starting to seek out addresses, something extraordinary happens.
Someone else does it for him.
It’s the nightclub of the future, just like Truman envisioned. But instead of high society, it’s new society that counts. An egalitarian world, where the freak and the outcast possess the same worth as the debutante or the rock star, the fashion fiend or the actor or the member of minor royalty.
A society of misfits, of exhibitionists and balls-out whores— and while the upper crust has rejected him, in this brave new world he’s become their patron saint.
He’s delighted by its scope and vision, so much so he forgets his own event.
From the first night he wanders through its crumbling art deco doors, Truman is enchanted. The space itself had lived a life. As an opera house in the Twenties. A theatre in the Thirties. Studios for CBS in the decades extending beyond. Truman senses its former inhabitants in the ether—of the Harlem dancers of Swing Mikado, or Jack Benny with his laugh track. Truman’s own publisher, Bennett Cerf—regular panelist on What’s My Line, filmed within these very walls. Bennett had died a few years back and Tru misses him something awful. He comes to this space to commune with him again, and all the other folks who’ve come and gone before him.
The space has been rechristened 54 and is run by Steve Rubell—a midget outcast like Truman, the dark to Truman’s light—and the gorgeous Ian Schrager—the brains with the master plan. In hand-selecting their guests, they create the perfect mélange. Something the boy, with his composition books and his Blackwings, could only have hoped to achieve. Whether luring celebrities or plucking hopefuls from the throng outside each night, the bacchanal is perfectly cast. ‘Mixing the salad,’ Rubbell calls it.
The boy, for his part, is pleased by the invitations. It’s been so long, after all, since he’s received one. He’s even more astonished to find himself wanted again. And not just wanted— he finds himself greeted with the semblance of something like reverence. When Truman enters, it’s as if the court lines up and the freak show bows to worship their own little demigod. Whatever society rejected him before, he’s certainly found a new one. One in which he is coddled and loved again.
Even if these are strangers, even if they’re higher than the homemade kites he once flew with Sook in the fields in Monroeville, he finds that he’s tremendously moved that someone might welcome his presence. Sometimes he’s even given a kiss from one of the shirtless cocktail boys in their dolphin shorts—all of whom know his name, and vice-versa.
‘Why Lance honey, what fabulous legs you have. And you can just see practically everything in those darling little shorts!… Gary, be a dear and pour me just one more teensy Orange Drink?… Now Jesús, you are a naughty boy—no! I don’t need another line—and I certainly don’t need to see your bits exposed!’
He loves the colors and the lights. The flashing strobes and the disco balls. An image of the Man in the Moon who appears hourly on a screen, a spoon of cocaine tilted to his nose.
In the bowels of the basement is the VIP room, where he can collapse onto sofas with celebrities of his ilk. The nastiest of spaces, reserved for the headiest guests, something Steve Rubell (in a Trumanesque gesture) thought naughty and fun. It’s where he puts Truman and Andy and Liza. Mick and Bianca and Halston. Lolling on basement couches directly beneath the dance floor, the constant thump of the music, the primal heartbeat of the stomping of feet on the parquet floor above, the collective orgasm of indulgence.
In the bathrooms and in darkened corners, in the shadows of the balconies, the sex flows as freely as water from a tap, but Truman doesn’t go there for that. He goes to forget where he isn’t allowed to go.
Of course he can see that it’s crude and cheap when compared to the drawing room at Kiluna, or the gardens in Manhasset, or on board the Agneta, sailing cobalt waters off the Amalfi Coast. Of course those are the things that move him… but this is what he can get. The society that he’s left with. A glorious, grotesque sideshow, surpassing those he’d created long ago in Monroeville.
No one at 54—or Cinquanta-Quattro, as Truman likes to call it—gives two shits who Babe Paley is. Most have never heard of the savage Slim Keith or cowardess Gloria Guinness. They know C.Z., for she has been here with him before. Truman takes pleasure that the rest of us would likely not get past the ropes. We’d be deemed too stuffy, too prim, not showy enough for admittance within these rainbow-flashing walls. It has nothing to do with age, we’re quick to note. Rubell lets Gloria Swanson in, well into her seventies, beauty mark darkened to a hideous rococo spot. Ditto the octogenarian known as Disco Sally, her weather-beaten face hidden beneath dark glasses, straddling young hunks of flesh, dancing to the latest hits in her muumuu tents and thigh-high boots—a novelty, but a memorable one. Almost as good as a bearded lady or a mermaid in a jar or half of a Siamese twin in Truman’s sideshows of old.
No… We, his former coterie, would fail at 54 for the very qualities he’d most adored in each of us—our subtlety, our grace. Our understated elegance. Our ability to converse. (If this sounds vain or boastful, may we say in our defense we’re merely repeating what he thinks.) If he’s honest with himself, that’s what the boy misses most, something the pounding beat of the dance floor renders a luxury of a distant social past. How he misses getting stuck in for a nice, cozy chat, which used to be his favorite part of any given evening. Truman now wears his caftan to Cinquanta-Quattro—the beige one he had shared with Babe, given to him by Yves. Sometimes he doesn’t bother to dress, and shows up in silk pajamas. He always dons his panama hat and shouts to his seat-mates above the racket. He’s starting to realize it might be a plot of Rubell’s—an attempt to ban all dialogue. If revelers fail to hear one another, they’re less likely to find the company lacking.
Of course most must be drunk or doped to the gills; without that they’d notice how empty it is. One can’t dare hope for a witty riposte, and they certainly ain’t discussing Proust. They have to keep going, keep racing, keep fueled, so the lights still seem magical, the dance floor still a wonderland. So no one notices how transient it is.
There’s distraction in extremes. The exposed pipes, to which people are cuffed, the plastic mattresses strewn on the floor. The needles in unisex toilets. The sparkle of clothing made of cheap sequins, rather than beading of bespoke evening gowns.
What Truman relishes most is to climb into the DJ booth, where he likes to sit and observe from on high. Rubell has shown him how to play a record, and how to work the lights, and is perfectly happy for the little patron saint to ascend and play God for an hour or so. From his perch the bodies look gorgeous, writhing on the floor. From his new-found height he is hovering above them, flying far, far away. From a distance one could escape their hungry looks and panicked eyes. Their quiet desperation. They seem a shimmering mass of loveliness, rather than wasted youth teetering on
the brink. Up in the safety of his nest, Truman can think of all the folks who’ve come and gone who would have loved to see this too.
Old Marcel is certainly one, observing the societal rituals of the now and making insightful observations. Toulouse-Lautrec is another, for there is something of the Moulin Rouge in Cinquanta-Quattro.
He thinks how much Cole Porter, darling, clever Cole, would have loved the rhythm, the beat-beat-beat of the tom-toms, albeit electronic ones. Would have loved the unhindered dancing of handsome boys with other handsome boys, the liberated feel. And Billie, Lady Day, gardenia in her hair, who he can picture chatting with Diana Ross, who played her in a film—perhaps they’d sing torch songs together, drowned by the less subtle throbbing pulse of Gaynor or Summer hits.
He thinks he would have liked to have shared this with Babe, and while a bit too trashy to be her scene, she’d have appreciated the spirit of transcendence and would have relished the stories he’d have spun.
Some nights Señor Capote wanders down to the dance floor, where, he must admit, he loves to cut loose. However, Truman will be the first to proclaim, he cannot stand disco.
‘Honey, where’s the tune? Where’s the musicality? For that matter, gimme some lyrics please! I will survive, I will survive— Jesus H. Christ, we get it already! Cole is turning in his grave on a rotisserie spit at the dearth of creativity.’
The boy misses soul and rock and roll—the records he’d put on after dinner, when we’d all dance barefoot on the Chinese rug in his UN Plaza study. He misses the Twist and the Frug and the Camel Walk, but most of all, he misses the Big Bands of his youth.
Never one to let a detail get him down, Truman has a special power to block out the dull thud of the disco. He’ll take his space on the strobe-lit floor, muting the monotonous pulse of ‘I Feel Love.’ While the near-naked bodies gyrate to this electronic beat, Truman instead hears his own sultry rhythms—the blaring clarinet of Benny Goodman, the frenzy of ‘Sing Sing Sing.’ The driving da-DA-da-de-DA-da, da-DA-de-DA-da of the drumbeat. The flights of fancy of Benny’s clarinet, the sluttish blare of brass.
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