Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Arch had not met him, or even heard about him, as he had some of the other men in Lillie Mae’s life, when Joe was in New Orleans in 1925. Not long after she had taken up residence in New York, however, by April, 1931, at the latest, he had guessed that there was someone new in her life: she was no longer writing to him, he complained to John. By that summer she had confirmed his suspicion, and frantic that she would leave him, he begged her to quit her job and return home immediately. Finally, she agreed to meet him July Fourth—or so he believed—in Jacksonville, where he was putting on a show with the Great Pasha. When she failed to appear, John, who lived in Jacksonville, wired Sam in New York, asking him to plead Arch’s case to her. “His mental state concerning her desperate otherwise okay,” John telegraphed Sam, adding, without any evidence whatsoever, that Arch had done a complete about-face and was now able to support her.

  That was too much for the hardheaded Sam, who was now almost as irritated with his younger brother for speaking in Arch’s favor as he was with Arch for asking him to do so. “The enclosed wire came last night after I had gone to bed,” he replied. “John’s name is signed to it but it is hard to believe he could have sent such a foolish message. Let me analyze it briefly:

  “1. ‘Arch’s mental state desperate otherwise okay.’ Why should his mental state be desperate because Lillie Mae has too much sense to quit a job and go back to a husband who has failed to support her, and who has humiliated her on countless occasions?

  “2. ‘She promised him come fourth, etc. etc.’ She shouldn’t have done that, but Arch’s letters were worded so pitifully (his old trick when he is desperate of appealing to sympathy) that she thought she would promise him anything which might temporarily relieve his feelings.

  “3. ‘Strongly recommend that she come immediately.’ How utterly ridiculous. Why should she come? Arch hasn’t a nickel to his name, no job, hunted by the police, owes everybody under the sun, and you recommend that she return to that. Have you lost your mind, John?

  “4. ‘No further question about A’s complete about-face and ability support her now.’ This is even more absurd than No. 3. There is every question about his complete about-face. He has been giving trouble continuously for about twenty years—serious and endless trouble—and it will be a miracle indeed if the day should ever dawn when he acts like a normal person.”

  Lillie Mae could not have stated her case better, and when she finally did travel south to meet Arch, her purpose was not to discuss their marriage, but to end it. With Joe paying her way, she left New York in mid-July, 1931, and, picking up Truman in Monroeville on her way, met Arch in Pensacola, Florida, on July 24. There was no discussion. Within fifteen minutes she had told him that she wanted a divorce so that she could marry another man. “She wouldn’t tell me who he was,” Arch remembered. “She just said his initials were J.C. and that he was a big executive with a textile firm in New York. She didn’t tell me he was a Spaniard or spic or nothin’ like that.” Joe’s name was not secret very long, but months later Arch still pretended not to know it. In letters to his family, Capote was misspelled as Capotey or Catobey or dropped altogether in favor of “the foreigner,” “the Spaniard,” “the N.Y. dago,” “that lousy cheap Cuban,” or, finally, “a Cuban, the lowest type of white person imaginable.”

  In her divorce complaint, Lillie Mae alleged cruelty, and Jennie swore in an affidavit that she had seen Arch strike her. Arch denied it—although he later said that she sometimes deserved it; but he seemed happy—delighted, even—to play the part of the innocent and righteously angry husband. In letters to his family and friends, he wallowed in self-pity, splashing in his own tears as he bewailed the terrible injury that had been done him. Trying to find money to please Lillie Mae was what had led to his problems with the law, he said; it was her “greed and unprincipled actions” that had led him astray. “I am the deserted boy,” he concluded, complaining that she had been both disloyal and ungrateful. In everything that had transpired he believed himself to be blameless. The supreme salesman, he was his own best customer, and his capacity for self-delusion verged on the pathological.

  Lillie Mae’s lawyer formally filed for divorce August 2, and at the end of August, three weeks after she had returned to New York, Arch was presented with legal papers. In a letter to John he once again bemoaned his unlucky fate. Lillie Mae, he reported, had phoned to tell him “that she wanted to marry Joe at once, and that she loved him, and that I had never meant anything to her. So that’s that. She was just as cruel and heartless about it as possible. Girls are sure a pain.” There was a short delay in the proceedings when, out of pique and spite, he spent a couple of days dodging a sheriff who was trying to serve him with papers. But by November 9, 1931, the divorce was final and that really was that. Arch and Lillie Mae were no longer man and wife.

  7

  UNDER the terms of the divorce settlement, Lillie Mae was to have custody of Truman nine months of the year, Arch the other three, from June 1 through August 31. But for the time being, and for some time to come, that was merely a paper agreement, with neither one assuming the duties of a full-time parent. As far as Truman was concerned, the divorce scarcely mattered; he remained in Monroeville and his parents saw him only occasionally, as they had before.

  If she had wanted to do so, Lillie Mae could have taken him with her to New York at the end of the year, when she and Joe moved into their own apartment. She did not do so, however, and the bedroom he might have had was given to her sister Marie—Tiny was her nickname—who came north to become Joe’s personal secretary. Finally, Joe’s own divorce came through on March 18, 1932, and less than a week later, on Thursday, March 24, he and Lillie Mae were married. Yet even then, secure in her new home and assured of the support of a doting, hardworking husband, Lillie Mae did not send for Truman.

  Arch, for his part, often spoke about his “little angel,” but the time he actually spent with him could be counted in hours, rather than days. At the end of February, he did treat him to a long weekend in New Orleans, and in April he grandly talked about spending the summer with him in Colorado. But when the first of June, the day he was supposed to assume custody, came around, he was, as usual, busy elsewhere. During the entire three months he had charge of him, Arch spent exactly two days with his little angel. That did not prevent him from being outraged when Lillie Mae brought Joe down to Monroeville in July. His feelings toward her, which had warmed considerably after the divorce, had turned frigid again after she remarried. When she sent him a conciliatory letter, he scrawled on it “not interested” and mailed it back. When she accused him of failing to provide the required forty dollars a month in child support, he dispatched a letter of such vituperation that both John and his mother warned him that he might be violating postal regulations.

  He soon had other, more pressing matters to occupy his thoughts. In early August he was in jail once again, confined to New Orleans Parish Prison for writing eighteen hundred dollars’ worth of bad checks. This time John put up bail, wryly remarking to his mother that what Arch really needed was a guardian to keep him away from fountain pens and checkbooks. To no one’s great surprise, he was uncontrite when he was released, blaming all his troubles on his good nature in trying to do a favor for a larcenous hotel clerk. “I am as innocent of wrongdoing as a baby,” he maintained.

  In the first week of September, 1932, what he feared most finally happened: belatedly asserting her rights and duties as a mother, Lillie Mae sent for her son. Accompanied by Lucy Brown, a black woman who was going north to be the Capotes’ cook, Truman boarded a train for New York. Arch drove down from Birmingham to say goodbye, but he was too late and in a letter to John three weeks later expressed his bitterness and frustration: “Today is Truman’s birthday. I did not have money to send him a present, or even a wire. I never hear from him or about him as of course the Spaniard forbids any communication with me. Isn’t that a hell of a position to be in? Next summer, it will be a different story. I will take po
ssession June 1st, and then somebody else will be up against a wall of silence. In fact, when I get on my feet, I am going to ask the Court for a new deal on the custodianship as her marriage changes the situation entirely, and I have good reason to think Truman’s welfare is not best served by being in daily association with a man who must dislike him and what he stands for—especially a person of that type.”

  The truth about Joe was just the opposite. Far from disliking Truman, Joe was an indulgent stepfather, more likely than Lillie Mae to spoil him or forgive him when he was bad. To demonstrate to Arch how well they were all doing in New York—or, more likely, just to show off—Lillie Mae took Truman and Joe to visit Sam in October. The car was new, and Lillie Mae was “dressed to kill,” Sam reported, “full of bull and brag” as usual. Yet Truman, he grudgingly acknowledged, was being well taken care of.

  Lillie Mae’s sudden affluence must have been galling, in fact, to everyone in the Persons family; even Sam and John, steady and industrious as they were, had been gravely hurt by the Depression. But to Arch her obvious prosperity must have been a particular wound. He not only was destitute, but also stood a good chance of being sent to Louisiana’s Angola State Prison—the toughest in the world, he observed, with customary hyperbole. At Christmas all he could afford was fifty cents to send Truman a telegram; that was enough to break even Sam’s heart, and he sent the boy a pair of skates, with a card indicating that it came from his father rather than his uncle. More bad news still came Arch’s way in the first week of 1933, when he received a subpoena from Monroeville, telling him that Lillie Mae, who had not received child support since the previous May, was petitioning the court for full custody. For once he had a good reason to feel sorry for himself; he was a man fighting off a pack of lions with his bare hands, he said.

  He was not about to give Truman up without a struggle, however, and when Truman returned to Monroeville for the summer, Arch was determined that he stay there. The court hearing was scheduled for August, and while Lillie Mae was enjoying a belated honeymoon in Europe, he was preparing a surprise for her return. He would give up his three months of custody if she would give up her nine. Truman, the prize in that give-and-take, would be left with Jennie and Callie and would be allowed to leave Alabama only to attend the Gulf Coast Military Academy, Arch’s own alma mater, in neighboring Mississippi. He was working hard, Arch wrote John, to save Truman from that “she-devil.”

  Everything he could do Arch did do. He hired Jennings Ratcliffe, a well-known local lawyer, to represent him, and he prevailed upon his old friend Bill McCorvey to talk to the judge, who had been the law partner of Bill’s father. Arch persuaded his mother, Truman’s grandmother, to write as well, and he sent a letter to the judge himself, reminding him that he had been a friend of his own father. “Little Truman,” he told him, “is every inch a Persons—the image of my late father—and we do not propose to have him forced to adopt this Cuban as his father–in fact.” As the day of the hearing approached, he radiated confidence. The judge was reported to be on his side, and lawyer Ratcliffe guaranteed victory. He was further heartened by Lillie Mae’s general unpopularity thereabouts. After Truman had described the “fast life” she was leading in New York, her reputation, which had never been high, had sunk still further, he triumphantly reported to John. Lillie Mae, he predicted, would be in for a bad day.

  That day was Thursday, August 24. Lillie Mae and her relatives testified in the morning, Arch and his friends in the afternoon. He tried to sell the judge as he had everyone else in his life. As he warmed to his subject, all of his disputes with Jennie were forgotten, and that house of ill and aging eccentrics was portrayed as the ideal place for a young boy to grow into adolescence. “I have never appreciated any home as much as theirs and probably never will,” Arch said. “And I feel that his best interest would be served to keep him here among his kind of people. If the court were to award me the custody, the full custody, to have him to do with as I saw fit, I would take the child and place him in the same hands that I am asking that he be placed. I would not accept full custody.”

  He must have suffered a few uneasy moments when Lillie Mae’s lawyer pressed him to admit that he had not contributed to Truman’s support for sixteen months. He must have experienced a few more such moments when he was forced to own up to his collisions with the law. He had been arrested “five or six times,” he said, but “just for foolishness every time.” Nonetheless, when he walked out of the courtroom, Arch was convinced that he had won, and believed Lillie Mae thought so too. He accepted her invitation to dinner at the house that night as her graceful bow to defeat. The day was marred for him by only one thing: Truman’s mail, he noticed, was addressed “Truman Capote.”

  Once again, however, he had succeeded in selling only himself. He did not want his son, but he did not want Lillie Mae to have him either, and the judge saw through him completely. The decision, which was handed down the following Monday, gave Lillie Mae absolute custody; Arch was given nothing. “I think it would be a calamity for the child to be placed in boarding school for months on end with not even a weekend at home,” the judge declared. “No lonelier, more forlorn situation can be pictured. There is nothing in the record indicating unfitness on the part of the mother. Her present husband appears to be a man of means and responsibility, and willing to spend his means on his stepson. The best interest of the child lies with the mother.” Almost immediately after hearing that, Lillie Mae and Truman left for New York.

  Angry and bitter, complaining that he had been done in by small-town politics, Arch blamed everyone but himself. “I didn’t know a man could be robbed of his child in a civilized country,” was his despairing comment to John. Yet even Arch’s mother, who had no more liking for Lillie Mae than anybody else in the Persons family, privately applauded the decision, telling John that she would not want to see a boy as young as Truman locked away in a boarding school. Lillie Mae would take care of him, she said, adding something Arch had either forgotten or considered too unimportant to take into account: Truman loved his mother.

  Still, Arch persisted, more eager, it seemed, to get back at Lillie Mae than he was to have Truman. When he heard that Truman would be spending the summer of 1934 in Monroeville, he began plotting a second time to keep him there, convincing himself that Lillie Mae would give Truman up voluntarily if he threatened to expose her supposedly lurid past to Joe. “We have the goods on her in black and white,” he told John, “and she will want to save her present soft bed.” He never carried out his threat, however, and in April he walked into a federal court in Mobile to plead guilty to the forgery of a postal money order. His sentence, three years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, was suspended, but the close-up vision of cell bars apparently chastened him: he meekly agreed to let Joe adopt Truman as his legal son. He made only one condition: that Truman retain the Persons name.

  Now in command, Lillie Mae was unwilling to give in even on that, and on July 11, 1934, she filed formal adoption papers in Manhattan’s Surrogate’s Court. Trying to prove Arch’s unfitness as a father, she declared that she could not even find him to ask for child support. “My former husband makes it a practice to travel from place to place on the slightest occasion and in pursuits best known to him,” she said with some venom. A helpful friend had sent her news of his conviction in federal court, and she added to her evidence the clipping from a Mobile newspaper. “SENTENCE IS SUSPENDED,” read the headline; “MAN ENTERS PLEA OF GUILTY TO FORGING POST OFFICE MONEY ORDER.”

  Feeling himself cornered, Arch once again talked of blackmail. “Can you imagine anything so terrible as that—giving that gorgeous kid a legal spic name, and naming him for the man who stole my wife?” he asked John. “It beats storybooks.” But when the adoption hearing began in Manhattan’s Hall of Records on the morning of September 28, 1934, there was never any real doubt as to the outcome, and four and a half months later, on February 14, 1935, Lillie Mae’s petition was granted: Joe became a father, a
nd at the age of ten Truman Streckfus Persons was renamed Truman Garcia Capote. Arch alone clung to the old name, as if by doing so he could preserve his place as the rightful father. Finally, Truman himself asked him to stop addressing him the old way. “As you know my name was changed from Person’s to Capote,” he scrawled on a piece of school notebook paper, inserting, probably as a deliberate insult, an incorrect apostrophe in the family name. “And I would appreciate it if in the future you would address me as Truman Capote, as everyone knows me by that name.”

  8

  WHEN he was in Alabama, Truman had longed to be in the North with his mother. Now that his wish had been granted, he looked back, with sharp and unexpected nostalgia, to his life in Monroeville. For several years before he joined her, he had known Lillie Mae only as a visitor, an adored relation who would suddenly appear, awing him with her beauty and glamour, and then disappear just as abruptly, leaving behind, like a whisper on the air, the promise that someday she would take him with her. From those tantalizing glimpses his busy mind had constructed a woman more of fiction than of fact. Much as he had done with Arch, he had turned Lillie Mae into a character out of one of his storybooks, someone who would transport him to a more romantic and exciting world, a place where he would be loved, protected, and ceaselessly admired.

  Living with her in New York, he discovered that neither that world nor that woman existed in fact. The city was exciting, certainly, but big and alarming as well; even Brooklyn, where the Capotes had rented a house, seemed too fast and too impersonal to a boy who was accustomed to the amiable shuffle of Monroeville. If Lillie Mae had given him the love that Sook had poured on him as freely as bathwater, in time he probably would have become used to his new life. But the Lillie Mae who had smothered him with kisses in Alabama was stingy with her affection in New York. She had taken him with her, as he had prayed so many times, but the rest of the story was not following the plot he had imagined. His disappointment was complete, and he felt that she had betrayed him, as Arch had done so many times before. The difference was that Arch had promised only books and toys and trips to the Gulf Coast. Lillie Mae had promised herself, and that, it seemed, was the one thing she would not give him.