Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  At George’s parties, no one would have been surprised to see Shakespeare come staggering through the doorway; at Leo’s, no one would have noticed, so many people were jammed in so little space. The host himself, wearing a colorful costume, such as a red robe topped by a fez, often greeted his guests from his bed. But whether he was standing, sitting, or lying down, he would spread a happy glow over the festivities, and despite the confusion and the haphazard, thrown-together atmosphere, his parties were as carefully choreographed as a hit musical. He made sure that the people he wanted showed up, that those he did not want stayed away, and that everybody who came was happy to be present. “You knew exactly what you were going to get there,” said Mary Louise. “He was a wonderful host, genuinely welcoming and funny, and you could be certain that Sunday night at Leo’s would be very jolly.”

  Shakespeare, said Truman’s friend Marguerite Young, must have known someone very much like Truman when he created Ariel and Puck. One moment he was an ethereal wisp of cloud and sky, Ariel in all but name; the next moment he was a mischievous earthbound sprite, Puck making merry in the concrete forest of Manhattan. And half one, half the other is what he was then and for many years to come. As Ariel, he was warm and sympathetic, generous with time and with money too, when he had it. As Puck, he enjoyed playing tricks and telling tales on his friends; more naughty than bad, he liked to stir up trouble and create the dramas that he loved to see swirling around him. “Little T can be absolutely adorable or such a pain in the neck that you want to take a swift kick at him” was how Mary Louise described him to a reporter at the time.

  “We love him up here,” she added, however—the “here” being the offices of Harper’s Bazaar and its sister magazine, Junior Bazaar. “He is in and out all the time.” In fact, he spent so much time there with Mary Louise and Barbara Lawrence, who had left The New Yorker to become features editor of Junior Bazaar, that Carmel Snow assumed he was Barbara’s little brother and offered him a glass of milk the first time someone brought him to one of her cocktail parties. When Mary Louise told her that that innocent-looking boy was the author of those nightmare visions, “Miriam” and “A Tree of Night,” Mrs. Snow quickly put a martini into his hand instead.

  It was the first of many she was to share with him during the next few years, and she became yet another in the succession of middle-aged women who clasped him to their bosoms and caused heads to turn wherever they went with him. She was the famous editor, a perfectionist who was seen only in Balenciaga; he was the stripling writer, more than thirty-five years her junior, whose only distinction in dress was the long Bronzini scarf that fluttered after him like a ship’s pennant in a stiff breeze. A more curious and singular pair could scarcely be pictured; yet there they were, having lunch or drinks together and gossiping like ancient friends, and there he was, the sought-after extra man who added the spice to her dinner parties, entertaining her guests as much as he did her. “Carmel and Diana Vreeland were both fascinated by him and adored him,” said Mary Louise. “They both had an eye for the unusual and the extraordinarily gifted. I had nothing at all to do with those glamorous, beautifully dressed women in the fashion department—the literary department was the absolute stepchild of the Hearst organization—but one day Diana came up to me and said, ‘I like you because you’re a friend of Truman Capote’s!’”

  With those empresses of fashion he was like an amusing godson, who appeared on command for a few hours of happy chatter but minded his manners, as godsons usually do. Real intimacy was reserved for several other women he met at that time, to whom he was more of a pal, a playmate, a younger brother. He had and was to have many male friends, heterosexual as well as homosexual, with whom he felt a bond of confidence. But he had a special rapport with women, an easygoing relationship that few men ever enjoy, whatever their sexual preference. Women liked being with him, he with them, and he often found his closest companions among members of the opposite sex. “It’s too bad I don’t like going to bed with women,” he lamented years later, with what sounded like genuine regret. “I could have had any woman in the world, from Garbo to Dietrich. Women always love me, and I love attractive and beautiful women, but as friends, not lovers. I can’t understand why anyone would want to go to bed with a woman. It’s boring, boring, boring!”

  Two of those with whom he felt most relaxed were Barbara Lawrence and Mary Louise. Not only did he spend hours encamped in their offices, he also went to exercise classes with them, had dinner with them, and dared them, as he had the Jaeger sisters in Greenwich, to join him in some amusing devilment. “Oh, those were funny days!” said Mary Louise. “Truman was never embarrassed about speaking his mind, and we got thrown out of practically every Schrafft’s in New York because we laughed so much.” Even his silliness made them laugh. Once they invited him to a concert, only to be turned down when he found out they would be sitting in the balcony: he could not afford to be seen in such cheap seats, he informed them; it would ruin his image. “He was mighty airy in those days,” said Mary Louise, “and Barbara and I used to tease him an awful lot about his delusions of grandeur.”

  Playing the part of the helpful older sister, as she had at The New Yorker, Barbara continued to read drafts of his stories; at her suggestion he had changed the ending of “Miriam,” dropping the last two paragraphs before submitting it to Mademoiselle. Mary Louise was more like a mother; not since Sook had he met a woman who was so warm and unstinting in her affection. One of those rare beings who receive universal devotion, she seemed to make good people want to be better and encouraged mediocre writers to put music into their prose. She was, in short, an ideal editor as well as companion. “She was perfect for Truman, someone Truman could go to and talk,” said his friend Andrew Lyndon. “She admired him as an artist and found him lovable too. And I don’t think many people up to that time had found Truman as lovable as she did.”

  Inspired to assume the unaccustomed role of the good son, Truman was also a great comfort to Mary Louise, who bore more than the usual burdens of sadness. Not long before, troubled by some emotional disturbance, she had been persuaded by an incompetent therapist to enter a mental hospital; when she emerged, she made the devastating discovery that her ex-husband had gained custody of their two children. “She was in a very shaky state,” said Pearl Kazin. “Yet, young as he was, Truman was a great support and gave her the reassurance she needed. I was astounded by that. There was no one else I knew at that age, or any other age for that matter, who was able to be as intuitive, affectionate, and helpful to her as he was. His friendship mattered a very great deal to her.”

  His letters confirm that assessment. For the next several years, whenever Mary Louise was feeling low, he was there to raise her up. “As an editor it seems to me as though you quite persistently refuse to acknowledge your role as one of the two or three people serious artists, particularly the young, can look to with any hope of commercial recognition,” he wrote when she was considering leaving Harper’s Bazaar. “That is a responsibility, Marylou, a role I do not know that I could forgive you for quitting… if ever, in some strange moment, you did. Isn’t it true you choose and publish and encourage the best short fiction in this country? And that is no accident, darling. It all, I suppose, depends on what one considers important; if you think art important, as you do and I do, then you are one of the most important people in the world.

  “All human life has its seasons, and no one’s personal chaos can be permanent: winter, after all, does not last forever, does it? There is summer, too, and spring, and though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, that summer, but they do, and always.”

  If Barbara was the dutiful but sometimes boring older sister, Doris Lilly was her glamorous, fun-loving twin. Tall and pretty, with long legs and streaked blond hair, she belonged to a species that was soon to become extinct: the good-time party girl whose only goal, openly and honestly stated, was to make a rich catch.
It was a pursuit for which she was admirably equipped. A onetime starlet, whose movie career can only be called fleeting—she had one line in one picture, The Story of Dr. Wassell—she was bouncy and buoyant, not subject to moods or given to silences of more than thirty seconds. She reminded some of her literary friends of Rosie Driffield, the embodiment of the life force in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale.

  When Truman met her, not long after she had arrived from California, she had not yet found either a millionaire or a job, and she had time to take long walks with him, have dinner with him in her East Seventy-eighth Street walk-up—ordering in, of course—and talk to him for hours on the phone. Once she failed to pay her rent, and her landlord turned off the heat and lights. “Who thought about those things?” she later explained. “I was so busy going out every night. I mentioned the problem to some man I was seeing, but instead of sending a check, he sent two dozen candles. Finally it was so cold that Truman and I took the shelves out of the kitchen closet and burned them in the fireplace.” Scatterbrained in most matters, Doris was capable of perfect concentration when she was trying to please a man, and even a sourhead like Evelyn Waugh, who was then at the apex of his fame, temporarily put aside his ingrained dislike of Americans to pay court. “Do you know anything about a writer named Waugh?” she asked Andrew Lyndon. “Do you mean Evelyn Waugh?” he replied. “No, dear,” she said patiently. “This is a man.”

  Her madcap sense of fun and adventure appealed to Truman as much as it did to most other men, and she was to be one of the models for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She helped to provide him with a character, and he returned the favor, suggesting both the subject and the title for her first book. “Write about what you know,” he told her. “You know about millionaires, so write about them, and call it How to Meet a Millionaire. After all, every girl in the world wants to know how to do it. I’ll help you write it.” And he did.

  “The first time I saw her—a tall slender wand of a girl, slightly stooped and with a fascinating face that was simultaneously merry and melancholy—I remember thinking how beautiful her eyes were: the color of good clear coffee, or of a dark ale held to the firelight to warm. Her voice had the same quality, the same gentle heat, like a blissful summer afternoon that is slow but not sleepy.” So Truman described Carson McCullers, who was the most extraordinary of all the women who came into his life in that year of first success. Rita Smith thought that he should meet her famous older sister, and sometime in the spring or summer of 1945, not long after Rita herself had met him, she invited him to Nyack, where the two sisters and their widowed mother shared a large old house overlooking the Hudson.

  Rita had judged them perfectly, and Carson and Truman took to each other immediately, as well they should have: they were alike in everything but sex and body, and when they looked closely at each other, they saw someone very familiar. When her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940, Carson too had been a Wunderkind, the darling of the fashion magazines. George Davis doted on her, and they would sit for hours, studying his photo collection of freaks, like fond parents browsing through the family album.

  Precocious success was only one of the things she and Truman had in common, however. She had also grown up in the South. She was also thought to be odd-looking—too tall and skinny, in her case, rather than too short—and to have quirky mannerisms. Although she was married to Reeves McCullers, she was primarily attracted to members of her own sex. Even their writing was similar in substance, though not in style, dwelling on loneliness and the perverse nature of love. Small wonder, then, that Truman instantly became devoted to her. “I was very, very fond of Carson,” he said. “She was a devil, but I respected her.” Small wonder, too, that, as her cousin Jordan Massee reported, “she was enchanted with him and regarded him as her own private little protégé.”

  He became a regular visitor to Nyack, and learned what it meant to be her friend, what it meant to be barraged by her questions, enveloped by her concern, manacled by her demands. She was a toucher, a hugger, a kisser, and her friends were overwhelmed by her embrace even on the telephone. Still in her twenties when Truman met her, she had already suffered several serious illnesses, and like many people who are chronically sick, she felt that she had an almost imperial right to the time and attention of those around her. Many, like Truman, were caught in her spell and granted her that privilege; others stayed well away. “An hour with a dentist without Novocain was like a minute with Carson McCullers” was Gore Vidal’s acid memory.

  Her house in Nyack looked out on the Hudson, but those fast-flowing Yankee waters might just as well have belonged to some languid stream in Georgia, with alligators lazily sunning themselves in the shallows, so deep-fried Southern was the atmosphere inside the door. For Phoebe visiting there with Truman was a journey into bayou country. “Carson’s family was wildly Southern,” she said, “and when they were all together—her brother had come up from the South with his wife when I was there—it was quite a scene. Carson had taken to her bed, but the rest of us sat in the living room and listened to Brother-Man play the piano. I have never heard anything so execrable in my life. ‘Play it again, Brother-Man!’ everybody would cry, and he would. This had been going on for some time, and I asked to use the bathroom, thinking I could go upstairs. Not at all! Carson’s mother pointed to the one at the side of the living room. The house was being remodeled, and the bathroom was complete, commode and all, except for the one thing—it had no walls. ‘Close your eyes now, everybody, so Phoebe can use the bathroom,’ she said, and they all closed their eyes while I went into the bathroom without walls. But it was all right: Brother-Man kept on playing the piano.”

  As strange as that household seemed to her, it was as normal as grits and butter beans to Truman, a nostalgic reminder of summer evenings on Jennie’s front porch. More than one of his friends remarked that when they were together, he became more Southern than Carson, who had spent more of her life in the South and had a greater claim to the acreage. His Southern accent, which he had long since dropped, awoke from its slumber, and his whole manner changed, in perceptible, if undefinable, ways. “Somehow Northerners have the vague idea that Southerners are just like them, except for their funny way of talking,” said Phoebe. “I know I thought that. Seeing Truman with Carson, however, I realized that there is a whole shared experience in being Southern, and that he and Carson had that together.”

  She demanded a great deal from her friends, but Carson gave as much as she received, and she helped no other young writer as enthusiastically as she did Truman. Together with Rita, she found him an agent, Marion Ives, and she wrote a warm letter of recommendation to Robert Linscott, a senior editor with Random House. A tall, tweedy New Englander who had begun his publishing career as an office boy in 1904, Linscott was as impressed by “Miriam” as most other people, and on October 22, 1945, he signed Truman to a contract for Other Voices, Other Rooms, with a small advance, twelve hundred dollars, to be doled out in installments of a hundred dollars a month beginning December 1. “Now you’re going to be a writer and an artist,” Linscott told him. “We’re going to support you, take care of you. You’re like a racehorse.” Linscott’s boss, Bennett Cerf, described what happened next: “Well, that was a day when Truman arrived at Random House! He had bangs, and nobody could believe it when this young prodigy waltzed in. He looked about eighteen. He was bright and happy and absolutely self-assured. Everybody knew that somebody important had arrived upon the scene—particularly Truman!”

  14

  THROUGHOUT those hectic months of baby renown, all through the fall of 1945 and the winter of 1946, the literary world’s newest lion cub pressed on with his novel. Maintaining the same upside-down schedule that had dismayed his early-to-bed, early-to-rise relatives in Alabama the year before, he began writing about ten at night, lying on his bed with a notebook perched on his upraised knees, went to sleep about four the next morning, and woke up at noon, just
in time for lunch. “Night after night I would see him working in there,” said Joe Capote. And so it might have continued if it had not been for his mother. Writers can work standing up, sitting down, or lying on their backs; they can put their words on paper in heat or in cold, in the morning or at night. Very few can create anything as large as a novel, however, without some degree of tranquility, some measure of repose in which they can concentrate and construct. But tranquility was the one thing in short supply in Nina’s house. No matter what hours Truman kept, he had to contend with her agitated movements and lightning rages. There is no such thing as peace and quiet around an alcoholic.

  His dilemma was that he could not afford to leave, but it was impossible to stay, and once again Carson came to his aid, suggesting that he join her in the spring at Yaddo, the writers’ and artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, where she herself had often found a restful haven. There would be no expenses, she told him—Yaddo provided everything but transportation—and to be accepted he had only to ask: she would pull the necessary strings; Newton Arvin, one of the trustees, was one of her best friends, and Elizabeth Ames, the matriarchal director, would do almost anything for her. Truman did agree, of course, and on May 1, 1946, he and Leo Lerman, another prospective inmate, traveled by train to Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, about four hours from Manhattan.

  Surrounded by gentle hills, shady woods, and inviting lakes, Yaddo did indeed provide him the quiet Carson had said it would—and a great deal more. The guest list was small, never more than fifteen or twenty, and the spaces were large. Some guests were housed in cottages and studios on the grounds; others lived in the stone mansion, which was the center of social activity. Tranquility was not only promised; it was enforced, and any violation of the rules resulted in a sternly worded note from the vigilant Mrs. Ames. “She was a strange, creepy sort of woman,” said Truman, “silent and sinister like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. She was always going around spying, seeing who was working and not working and what everybody was up to.” Yaddo was a working community, the rules emphasized, and from nine to four guests were expected to be by themselves, doing whatever they had come there to do; the kitchen even provided box lunches so that they would not be interrupted by a formal midday meal. So much labor brought its reward, however, and after four, the silence was broken. Doors banged open, invitations were issued, and most years the visitors played as hard as they worked. Each summer ended with stories of drinking and dancing, games on the lawn, romances begun and ended under the northern stars.