Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  They were all good friends, but Truman’s closest companion in those Greenwich years, the partner of his secret thoughts, was the girl Nina had exclaimed so over, the witty and amusing Phoebe. Truman met her at a party shortly after he arrived from New York, and once they started to talk, they found it hard to stop. “For the first time in my life I thought I could really speak to someone and share what I was feeling,” said Phoebe, “and that person was Truman. We cared tremendously, deeply and passionately, about writing and poetry. We loved The New Yorker, we loved Oscar Wilde, we loved Saki.” They talked about everything in the weeks that followed, but no matter how far they let their imaginations wander, they always ended up on their fondest, most enduring dream: to move to Manhattan and become part of the smart literary life they were certain awaited them there. “Our dream was to get out of Greenwich and to go to New York,” she said. “Manhattan was Oz to us, a place where we could let loose and enjoy ourselves.”

  Tall and attractive, with huge brown eyes and lustrous dark hair, Phoebe was a unique combination of several usually irreconcilable qualities. She was sophisticated far beyond her years, and as much as a girl in her early teens can be glamorous, she was glamorous, with a sure knowledge of how to dress and act and a never-failing ability to enliven any conversation. Even in her early teens she had the figure of a young woman; while the other girls went to parties in dresses that carefully covered the fact that they did not yet have much bosom to cover, she wore gowns that revealed that she most decidedly did. “My parents gave me a party,” said Marion Jaeger, recalling one such time, “and my father, who was very German and very strict, said, ‘Your mother will choose your dress.’ She did and it was pink, with lace up to my neck. Then Phoebe came in in a strapless gown and took over the whole party. I was never so disappointed in my entire life. Truman pulled me into a corner and said, ‘You look like a little old maid!’”

  They were not yet old enough to move there, but in their mid-teens, Truman and Phoebe would sometimes visit Oz on a Saturday night. Not telling anyone else what they were up to, they would spend weeks collecting their money and putting their clothes together; by the time they were ready, the forty-five-minute train ride into Manhattan had taken on the colors of a daring, illicit adventure. They would first stop at a couple of the jazz joints that lined West Fifty-second Street, where they would listen to Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, or Lionel Hampton; then, as midnight approached, they would walk a block or so east and fast-talk their way into those glittering seats of Café Society, El Morocco and the Stork Club. Truman had been to both places with Joe and Nina, but even his bravado wilted under the stares of headwaiters the first time he went alone with Phoebe. She looked as if she were going to a high school prom and wore white gloves and a white, full-length silk gown covered with sparklers. He looked like her little brother and was terrified that despite all their efforts, they had not scraped together enough money to pay the bill. “Don’t order anything expensive!” he whispered as they sat down on one of El Morocco’s zebra-striped banquettes.

  They were not thrown out, however, and after that first nervous night they breezed through the door, those two brassy teenagers, as if they were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “We were such a wild-looking pair that the maître d’s never knew what to say to us,” said Phoebe, who thereafter left her gloves in their drawer and exchanged her sparkler-covered white gown for the black cocktail dresses the other women were wearing. “They always thought that Truman was too young to drink. But since I looked older, they would take a bet on us. We really got in because we were interesting to watch. We were both wonderful dancers—there was never anyone on the floor who could dance those Latin rhythms the way Truman could—and when we got onto the floor, we were forgiven everything else. We were an unusual couple, and we must have been figures of fun. So we danced for our supper.”

  They talked for it as well, making up for their perennial shortage of cash by mastering the knack of cadging drinks and dinners from charitable older couples at the bar. “We’re on the hockey team at Princeton,” Truman would joke, while Phoebe would display her expansive eyes and charm their barside benefactors with her effervescent chatter. After a night of such strenuous activity, they would rush out the door, like Cinderella leaving the ball, and race down to Grand Central Station, arriving just in time to catch the last train to Greenwich.

  They climbed only rarely to such dizzying altitudes, however, and when they descended, they had to confront an unpleasant reality. All their friends knew that Phoebe was unhappy at home. Her mother was an alcoholic with a history of mental illness, and her father, whom she adored, died when she was sixteen. What their friends did not know was that Truman was equally miserable. Beyond New York and the nightclubs, beyond even their shared devotion to writing, Truman and Phoebe had in common a similar sadness. Their secret excursions to New York were not only trips to Oz; they were also escapes from the ugly scenes they found inside their doors. “What an odd and lonely pair of children we were!” marveled Phoebe. “We were like a brother and sister, and we helped each other through the dark, because really, life was terribly lonely for both of us.”

  Loneliness was nothing new to Truman, of course. From earliest childhood he had felt isolated and unwanted. Even during the happy times with Sook, even while he was enjoying the exuberance of the Millbrook gang, he lived with the knowledge, sometimes distant, sometimes close, that things were not right at home. His mother’s ambivalence toward him had neither died nor lessened in the years since she had brought him North. It had instead become more pronounced, and when she had been drinking, as she did more and more in Greenwich, the loving, good Nina could change into the bad and unloving Nina with terrifying speed.

  The good Nina was the one most of his friends saw, the woman who made the Capote house on Orchard Drive an inviting and congenial place for them to meet. Gregarious and fun, she treated his friends as her friends, laughing with them at risqué jokes, dancing with them, and winking indulgently at their infractions of ordinary rules. Few other mothers would have put up with their noise, looked the other way when they smuggled in their stolen bottles of liquor, or pretended not to see them carry out the empties. “We were all just smitten with her,” said Howard Weber. “She seemed very young, and we thought of her as being more of our generation than that of our parents.”

  This public Nina was also a devoted mother whose concern for her son was shown in little things as well as big. Howard Weber, who visited often, noticed, for example, that she would stop whatever she was doing to give Truman a fond but careful scrutiny before he went out at night, wetting her finger with her tongue to slick back his straying cowlick and unruly eyebrows. And, added Weber, “when she and Joe went out, she never failed to come into his room when they returned. Truman and I made a pretense of being asleep, but we were usually wide awake, having made a mad dash for the beds after polishing off a bottle of apricot brandy. She would tuck him in, kiss him good night, and check to see that the windows were closed. She always seemed very fond of him in front of me.”

  Yet even those who liked her best noticed something unusual about her relationship with Truman. She did not seem comfortable playing the role of his mother, and if she treated his friends as equals, she also treated him as an equal—like a brother or perhaps a lover, but rarely like a son. It was the old story updated. She could be protective and loving, and she could also be cruel and degrading. “Sometimes I thought she hated him because of the way he behaved,” Joe said. Truman returned her ambivalence with an ambivalence of his own. Just as she loved him, he loved her, and just as she hated him, he hated her. “No one made him as happy as she could,” said Phoebe, “and no one got under his skin the way she could. It was the kind of relationship that would make teams of psychiatrists happy for years.”

  More and more, the bad Nina was released by a bottle of Scotch, and within months after she arrived in Greenwich, Nina—chic, sophisticated, fastidious Nina—had turned fro
m being a woman who likes to drink into a woman who likes to drink too much. Joe claimed that she started to drink heavily because she was ashamed of Truman and worried that he was becoming homosexual. “She wasn’t realistic about him,” he said. “She didn’t want to face facts.” Her brother Seabon, who worked in New York, thought, on the other hand, that she drank because of her problems with Joe. Their remarkable passion had not cooled over the years—“I loved my wife and she loved me,” Joe said—and each reacted strongly to the smallest hint of a flirtation by the other. Marion Jaeger recalled a time when Joe, who was teaching her the steps to a Latin rhythm, was brusquely pushed aside by Nina. “I’ll teach Marion,” she said. On the other side, Joe himself recalled another incident, similar to the one at the Stork Club a few years earlier, when he caught another man putting his arm around Nina at a party. “I grabbed his hand,” he said, “jerked it away, and pushed him so hard that he fell down. Oh, I was so goddamned mad!” Both were still attractive, with an appeal that photographs cannot convey. “Nina had a sexual allure that just oozed,” said Lucia Jaeger. “My mother was a pretty woman, but if she and Nina were together, men would look at Nina and not at my mother.” Joe, at the same time, had a Latin charm that many women found almost irresistible.

  That Latin charm carried with it a Latin attitude toward marriage, and he could not resist amusing himself with other women—“a shot here, a shot there,” as he later said. Occasionally he would spend a Saturday with a girlfriend in New York, asking young Carl Jaeger to drive him to the train station in Port Chester, so that no one in Greenwich would wonder why he was traveling into Manhattan on a weekend; then, at his request, Carl would call Nina to tell her that he had gone into the city. “I know,” would be her leaden reply. But his infidelities gnawed at her. In retaliation, she engaged in one or two affairs of her own. She lavished so much attention on some of Truman’s good-looking friends that Truman later suspected, with some reason, that she had gone to bed with one of them as well.

  Her life was not perfect, but still, from all outward appearances, she had achieved as much as she could have dreamed of when she was Lillie Mae Faulk, wistfully looking at the roads leading away from Monroeville. She had achieved as much even as Arch, that purveyor of promises, had offered her on that long-ago April in Troy. All that she had was in the end not enough, and she harbored a terrible disappointment—exactly what it was no one could say—that she did not have the will or the strength to confront. In a place where there was little for an intelligent woman to do and where everyone else drank so much, it was easy to find relief in alcohol. Before long, she would start filling her glass with Scotch in the afternoon, and she would continue filling it through the evening and into the night. She was not a reeling, messy drunk, and few of her friends in that boozy town would not have called her an alcoholic at all. But she was, and Truman suffered because of it.

  “The clue that she had been drinking too much was a kind of ominous, razor-edge gaiety,” said Phoebe, who had learned the symptoms from her own mother. “She could turn in a moment from almost being unpleasant to being very unpleasant indeed. She could be very nasty to Truman.” During one drunken rage she tore up one of his manuscripts in front of him; another time she accused him of stealing the idea for a story from a novel she had read. Both actions seemed designed to destroy the one thing he had confidence in, his knowledge that he could write. Her usual target, however, her main source of anger toward him, was what it had always been: his inability to look, act, or be like other boys. Miss Wood and all her pleas for tolerance had had no effect whatsoever. “You’re a pansy!” Nina would scream at him. “You’re a fairy! You’re going to wind up in jail. You’re going to wind up on the streets.”

  Truman reacted the way any child of an alcoholic parent does—with confusion, embarrassment, and rage of his own. “I was furious with her practically all the time because of her drinking,” he said. “She kept me in a constant state of anxiety.” Fueled by his anger, his own behavior was still often that of a disturbed child. He no longer kicked and screamed on the floor, but he could be equally, and impossibly, immature. Once, one of his friends saw Joe give him a reprimand for some supposed misdeed. Truman answered by spitting in Joe’s face, an insult that Joe, as usual, stoically ignored. Propelled by his talent and ambition, Truman had leaped far beyond his age in some ways; emotionally he was still a small boy.

  Nina had been right in one of her drunken accusations, and that which she had long been frightened would happen had happened: Truman was now, clearly and unambiguously, a homosexual. Looking as he did and acting as he did was at this point, ironically, something of a blessing. He could not hide what he was—not even from himself—and he never was afflicted with the paralyzing doubt and guilt that ruin the lives of many young homosexuals, who do not find out for years, or sometimes ever, who they are. By his mid-teens Truman knew who he was; indeed, he probably had known, unconsciously at least, since he was a child. “I always had a marked homosexual preference,” he said, “and I never had any guilt about it at all. As time goes on, you finally settle down on one side or another, homosexual or heterosexual. And I was homosexual.”

  Just as she had years before, when she unsuccessfully took him to psychiatrists, Nina tried once again to change him, packing him into the car one afternoon for a mysterious trip to New York. Truman bitterly recalled the day: “When we were on our way, she said to me, ‘I’m taking you to Dr. Murphy. I think you’re homosexual, and I want him to give you some male-hormone shots.’ In effect, she was saying, ‘I think you’re homosexual, you little monster!’ I said, ‘Stop the car this minute!’ and she pulled off the road. ‘You’re an idiot,’ I said. ‘I’ve got news for you. I am homosexual, and you’re not taking me to Dr. Murphy, whom you were going to bed with up until two years ago.’ She leaned over and slapped my face as hard as she could, and I just looked at her. ‘If you ever do that again,’ I said, ‘I’ll break your nose. I’ll do just what I want to do.’ After that she didn’t bother me about it, though she complained that I was homosexual to everyone who came within earshot.”

  And so she did. “Well, my boy’s a fairy,” she would say to a group of his friends, who, frozen with embarrassment, would try to laugh, pretending that she was making a joke. In fact, some of them may not have known what she meant. Not many people talked openly about homosexuality at that time, and though they knew he was different, of course, few of his friends, even sophisticated ones like Tom Flanagan, who had read Oscar Wilde and knew about such things, guessed his sexual inclination. “He was very affectionate,” said Marion Jaeger, one of the many who remained in the dark, “and he would hug and kiss like all the other boys.” Their parents usually knew what Nina was talking about, though a friend of the Webers was the only one rude enough, or drunk enough, to say so. “How can you let your son have contact with this obviously raging fairy?” she asked Howard’s mother and father.

  By his mid-teens, Truman had formed some romantic attachments. He had a long-standing relationship with a boy he had known in New York, and he later developed a passionate crush on another boy in Greenwich, a tall, handsome, athletic classmate—someone, in short, who was the exact image of the son Nina wanted. Although he was, in his own way, good-looking, Truman did not feel attractive, and he used all his considerable cunning to seduce his idol, flattering him, smothering him with attention, and opening a bottle of bourbon every time he entered the door. Eventually his efforts succeeded.

  “He was the handsomest boy I’ve ever seen, and the most popular boy in school,” he said, sounding like a fisherman who will carry with him forever the moment of triumph and elation when he hooked the biggest trout in the lake. “Everyone, boys and girls, was crazy about him. And the funny thing was—he chose me! We used to go off in his car and neck, and we had an active mutual-masturbation scene. Finally, one day I decided that this had gone on too long, and I reached down and gave him a blow job. For some reason that bothered him, and he felt very
guilty about it. But not guilty enough to stop. Then on my sixteenth birthday he gave me a book of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, in which he had inscribed, ‘Like ivy on the wall, love must fall.’ That tore me apart, and I cried, because I really did love him. We had sex after that, but emotionally it was never the same. Some connection had been broken.”

  As he grew older, Truman’s connection with Phoebe also became strained. He knew that there was no hope of romance between them, but irrational as it was, he nonetheless felt angry and rejected when he saw her dating other boys. His jealousy was as virulent as his mother’s. He did not want Phoebe for himself, but he did not want anyone else to have her either. In his anger he even attempted to keep potential boyfriends away, spreading rumors that she was not interested in the opposite sex at all, a tactic that fooled no one. For a time, frustration and rage consumed him: a visitor saw him throw her picture into the fireplace, then spit on it every time he walked by. “As much as Truman could be in love with a woman, he was in love with Phoebe,” said one of their friends. It was, however, only a partial and, to her, an unfulfilling love. “He loved me for the person I was, not the woman I was,” she said. “Several times he asked me to marry him. ‘You could live your life,’ he said, ‘and I’ll live mine.’ I told him, ‘Truman, I couldn’t bear it.’” Nor could he have. His road led in a different direction, and now, with no qualms or second thoughts, he began to follow it.