Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  He made the decision after a visit to Andrew Lyndon, who was living there in a rooming house owned by two elderly ladies who ran a telephone-answering service in the basement. Spying his salvation, Truman soon joined him. “I have changed addresses, have moved to a little lost mews in darkest Brooklyn,” he told Brinnin, making the mud towers of Timbuktu sound less distant and mysterious than the borough across the Bridge. “I wanted most to get away from hectic, nerve-racking influences, to escape and get on with my work. I had reached a point where I was so nervous I could hardly hold a cigarette, and my work was not going too well.” For the sum of ten dollars a week, an astonishingly low figure even in 1946, he was able to rent two sunny rooms. Filled with enough Victoriana to make even George Davis envious, the house, at 17 Clifton Place, in the Clinton Hill section, was clean, well heated, and as quiet as a church. Aside from the owners, who only occasionally ascended for air, he and Andrew were the only occupants.

  Sometimes he did not leave his new neighborhood for three or four days in a row, traveling into Manhattan only for lunches or parties or to catch the train to Northampton. Invariably, he would try to persuade Andrew, who was attending the New School in Manhattan, to skip his classes and keep him company. Andrew, who was also attempting to become a writer, would often oblige. For a few weeks Truman enjoyed believing he had found a secret haven, and he would not give Nina, or many others, his telephone number. “Under no circumstances are you to tell it to anyone, neither family nor friends,” he sternly admonished Brinnin. It did not take long for him to miss Manhattan, however, and the forty-minute subway journey into midtown came to seem like a journey of a thousand miles. “Truman regards the trip to Brooklyn about as Livingstone must have his trip to Africa” was the wry comment of one of his friends. The location of his Brooklyn hideout was a short-lived secret; soon he was begging people to visit him.

  By December he and his mother had reconciled. He took her to the theater as part of a peace settlement, and although he kept his rooms at Clifton Place for most of the winter, he also spent many nights at 1060 Park, where a measure of quiet had returned. Mother and son still walked warily around each other, but they seemed to have come to an understanding, a modus vivendi that satisfied, if it did not entirely please, both of them. Their tacit truce was illustrated by a scene Friede witnessed. On his way to a dinner party, Truman emerged from his room in his most stylish dinner clothes: a black velvet suit, a red velvet vest, a ruffled white shirt, and shiny patent leather pumps. “It was a bizarre outfit then,” said Friede, “and he looked a little bit as if he were going to a costume ball. Nina took one glance and said, ‘Truman, you come over here! What are you wearing? You go right back in there and put on your gray flannel suit from Brooks Brothers. I don’t want you going out dressed like that.’ He kind of pouted, but he went back into his room anyway. When he came out again, he had on his gray Brooks Brothers suit. He hadn’t given in entirely, however. He was still wearing his red velvet vest and his patent leather pumps.”

  For months after they met, Newton continued his highbrow gushing. “As Thoreau would say, we live not in harmony, but in melody also; and it was an exquisite melody this weekend,” he told Truman in October. “You aren’t a human being; not a mere human being, I mean,” he later added. “I’ve been sure of that all along. You only have all the conceivable charm of a human being, but in fact you are a Supernatural Helper, as the folklorists say, and if I’m not as good as I’m supposed to be, you’ll just vanish on me someday, in a puff of fragrant colored vapor—and where will I be?” His comments in his diary were briefer than those in his letters, without all that intellectual filigree, but they sounded no less heartfelt. “Wonderful to see him,” he said at the beginning of one of their weekends in Northampton. “T.C. leaves again for New York—painful as always to have him go,” he said at the end of another.

  Wonderful as it was for him to see him, Newton did not want to see him very often, however. He could enjoy that exquisite melody for only short periods before being afflicted by a feeling of claustrophobia and a need to be quiet and alone. More than once he said that he was truly alive only when they were together; but the fact remained, towering over both of them, as stubborn and irrefutable as Gibraltar, that he wanted to be truly alive in that way only once or twice a month. The rest of the time he preferred the less demanding companionship of the authors on his bookshelves. “Sweetened my mouth with a little Montaigne” was how he described his bedtime reading in his diary; he would not have written about the act of sex with greater or more sensual pleasure.

  Truman, by contrast, could engage only in intimate relationships. He did not know how to be cool or standoffish, and he retained his boyhood habit of hugging, kissing, and opening his arms even to comparative strangers. That puppylike warmth was basic to his personality. He could not switch it on and off, and if he loved someone, as he did Newton, he assumed that he would be with that person as much as possible. Newton’s friends made the same assumption. Hearing him babble about his T.C., Howard and Brinnin had feared that he had fallen so completely under Truman’s spell that he would throw away his life for him. The truth was the opposite: Newton only talked like a man obsessed; his feet were as firmly planted in Northampton as the ancient maples that shaded the Smith campus, and he did not plan to have his life disrupted. When he did not want to see Truman, he told him so, causing Truman no end of pain and confusion.

  More than once, as he was preparing to leave for Northampton, Truman would receive a last-minute call from Newton, asking if he would mind not coming that weekend. “One time, when we were living in Brooklyn, Truman was all ready to go,” recalled Andrew. “At the last second Newton rang up and said, in that rather cautious way of his: ‘You perhaps best not come up this weekend, Truman, because I believe that some friends are motoring in the vicinity, and it might be embarrassing if they chanced to stop by.’ When he hung up, Truman started to cry, and he asked me to get into bed with him and cuddle—nothing sexual ever went on between us; he just wanted to be held and told that everything would be all right. After a few minutes, he got up and shrugged his shoulders, as if he were shaking off something physical. Then he returned to his room and went back to writing his book. Later in the day he came to my door and said, ‘Take my advice. Never be without a novel. There are moments when you need one.’”

  All that fall Newton tried to explain away what seemed like inexcusable callousness, attempting to make comprehensible a state of mind that even he admitted was incomprehensible. “It distresses me unspeakably that things should be such hell for you there in the city, and that you should be so far from well, in the midst of everything else,” he wrote in late October, when Nina’s drunken rages were reaching their crescendo. “The impulse is almost overwhelming to call you on the phone or wire you, and insist on your coming back to Northampton and staying with me indefinitely. I have just barely courage enough to tell myself No—courage enough and perhaps cruelty enough. But, dearest Truman, for the time being I cannot conceal from myself that this might be a terrible disappointment to both of us, and if it were, might do something to our happiness in each other that I cannot bear to have done. I have never felt such grief over my own limitations as I do this fall. But self-knowledge can be flouted only at deadly peril, and though I cannot explain it even to myself, still less to you (and therefore not at all to anyone else), I know too well what this primordial, unanswerable hunger for a certain number of hours or days of solitude means, or is—I know it too well to be willing to lie to you. It is as if something physical like blood were ebbing out of me—not always, but much of the time—when I am not alone; and the point comes when my identity begins to slip away from me, and I cease to be a whole person even for someone I love….”

  That was as clear and comprehensive a statement of his feelings as he was to give, his apologia pro vita sua, and it was honest enough, as far as it went: his needs for privacy were enormous, yet he did love Truman all the same. What he did n
ot say was that his guilt about being homosexual was the central fact of his life—and that Truman often embarrassed him around other people. “I feel as if I were, indeed I am, going about in disguise, though luckily it is a disguise I have worn so long that no doubt it looks as if it fitted me,” he had written Truman not long after they met. “I am an impostor. Won’t I some time be caught and exposed…? But you know, my dear, I seriously believe that we must learn to live part of our lives in enemy country: the penalty for doing the other is even more terrible.” Given such fears, it was more than a little ironic, then, that he fell in love with someone who had never tried to disguise himself, who had no such fears, and who, holding his hand as they strolled around campus, gave him away every time they were together. “When I first met him, Truman kissed me!” said Newton’s colleague Daniel Aaron. “It was the only time that a man had ever kissed me. I was absolutely mortified! I was stunned! It was as if he had given me a blow in the face. It seemed to me as if he were camping rather dreadfully, with a certain kind of malice, that first time. I think he sensed that Newton was ashamed and ought not to be—that he ought to be much more open than he was. And he wanted to get back at him a little bit.”

  Still, hard as it may have been for him, Newton now took off his disguise with a few of his friends at least, and over the next year or so he introduced his young lover to several of those who resided in the highest reaches of the literary establishment: Lionel and Diana Trilling, that intimidating pair from Columbia; Harvard’s Harry Levin and F. O. Matthiessen; Granville Hicks, the radical critic and writer; Louis Kronenberger, the drama critic of Time magazine; and Edmund Wilson himself. The reaction, however, was not what Newton had hoped for. Indeed, when he said he wanted to take Truman to a dinner at the Trillings’, the hostess, a formidable woman by any measure, gave him a firm no. “When I want anybody to come to my house to dinner, I invite them,” she indignantly answered. “You were invited to dinner; you were not asked to bring your friends.” Newton angrily showed her reply to Truman, who tore it up. “Of course you have to go anyway,” Truman told him, and Newton did. “The academic community was very chilly to me, and it must have been very hard for him,” Truman said. “As I think back on it, I must have looked like a male Lolita to those people.”

  Most of the time he and Newton were happiest alone, and that is how they ended 1946. “A rather quiet, solitary day for the two of us” was the way Newton described their New Year’s celebration in his diary. “Champagne. Records. The slow movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto. To bed rather early, but we woke at midnight (on hearing the chimes) & welcomed in the New Year in each other’s arms.”

  17

  WHEN I was young, wrote Swift, I felt that I could leap over the moon. So Truman must have felt as that new year, 1947, began. His most serious problems with his mother were behind him, he and Newton had arrived at a tolerable understanding, and his fame as a writer, like Jack’s wonderful beanstalk, seemed to grow by itself, ascending heavenward from a very small seed, a handful of short stories and only the promise of a novel. Yet that tiny output, coupled with curiosity about Truman himself, was enough to excite intense interest in publishing offices all over Manhattan and to raise a few murmurs of enthusiasm even in Hollywood. On the bare chance that there might be a movie in those unseen pages, Twentieth Century–Fox paid $1,500 for an option on Other Voices and the second novel that would presumably follow.

  “After the war everybody was waiting for the next Hemingway-Fitzgerald generation to appear,” said Gore Vidal, in partial explanation. “That’s why so much attention was devoted to novelists and poets, and that’s why a new novel by one of us was considered an interesting event.” Reporting on the postwar American scene for the British magazine Horizon, Cyril Connolly, the English critic, exaggerated only slightly when he described the hubbub in New York literary circles: “The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value… may yet somehow win the coveted jackpot is feverish and incessant. Last year’s authors are pushed aside and this year’s—the novelist Jean Stafford, her poet husband Robert Lowell or the dark horse, Truman Capote—are invariably mentioned. They may be quite unread, but their names, like a new issue on the market, are constantly on the lips of those in the know. ‘Get Capote’—at this minute the words are resounding on many a sixtieth floor.”

  Life, which could bestow instant celebrity with a flick of a camera shutter, much as television talk shows do today, selected its own group of up-and-coming writers. Except for Truman, all had at least one novel between hard covers; but it was that small dark horse, the pony of the herd, whose picture, blown up to nearly a full page, the editors chose to lead their article. And it was “esoteric, New Orleans–born Truman Capote,” as he was described in the caption, whom most readers doubtless remembered. The day the issue appeared, Bennett Cerf received a call from his friend and competitor Richard Simon, the Simon of Simon and Schuster. “How the hell do you get a full-page picture of an author in Life magazine before his first book even comes out?” Simon demanded. “Do you think I’m going to tell you? Does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” answered Cerf. “Come on. How did you wangle that?” Simon insisted. “Dick, I have no intention of telling you” was Cerf’s stubborn reply. “He hung up in a huff,” Cerf later wrote, “and I hung up too, and cried, ‘For God’s sake, get me a copy of Life.’ That was the first I knew about the whole affair! Truman had managed to promote that full-page picture for himself, and how he did it, I don’t know to this day.”

  In fact, he had not promoted it, and the reason for such prominent display was too obvious for Simon, Cerf, or perhaps even Truman himself to guess. Life’s editors had focused on him for the same reason they had printed two pictures of him in a spread they had done on Yaddo the year before: he looked unusual, which is to say, newsworthy. Giving the appearance of a jaded and world-weary child as he sat pouting amid Leo Lerman’s Victorian bric-a-brac, he was the only one in the group who would make a reader stop before turning the page. Most of the other young novelists, a selection that included Thomas Heggen, Jean Stafford, Calder Willingham, and Vidal, could just as easily have illustrated a story about young advertising executives—or junior editors at Life itself. Like a movie star, or a very clever child, Truman instinctively knew how to seduce the camera, when to stand and when to sit, when to smile and when to frown, and the editors of Life, like many other editors in years to come, could scarcely avoid giving him the spotlight he craved.

  It is impossible to conceive of so much excitement being aroused today by such a young writer with such a slim output. The New York that resounded with his name in those years just after the war has now vanished, and a new city, different in spirit as well as body, has taken its place. That Manhattan was the unchallenged center of the planet, “the supreme metropolis of the present,” as Connolly told his English readers; it was what London had once been and what Rome had been so long before that. The great capitals of Europe lay prostrate and impoverished from the battles that had raged around them; European intellectuals, who had sought refuge in seedy but congenial West Side caravansaries, lingered on; and the cities of the Sunbelt—there was no such word then—basked in sleepy obscurity, unaware that soon they would seek to become rival centers themselves. Political decisions were made in Washington, but most of the other decisions that counted in the United States—those involving the disposition of money and fame and the recognition of literary and artistic achievement—were made on that rocky island, that diamond iceberg between the rivers. No wonder successful New Yorkers felt proud, and perhaps a little smug, about being who they were and where they were: they had all climbed to the top of what Disraeli had called the “greasy pole.” And no wonder that Truman, who had arrived at that dizzying height before he was old enough to vote, found the view so exhilarating.

  The El still rumbled along a dingy Third Avenue, coal dust had turned the limestone and brick of Park Avenue to a sooty gray, and summers, in that era before universal
air conditioning, meant hot and sleepless nights listening to the sound of a whirring fan. But it was also a time, as John Cheever observed long after, “when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartet from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” For those who dwelt along those streets and avenues, there was a feeling of romance and wonder about their city that is now hard to reconstruct, even in imagination. Green-and-yellow double-decker buses, so elegant and imposing that they were called Queen Marys, after the Cunard steamer, cruised serenely down Fifth Avenue; incoming ocean liners preened themselves as they passed the Statue of Liberty; and a regal red carpet was rolled out at Grand Central Terminal each night when the Twentieth Century Limited arrived from the West with its pampered freight of Hollywood stars. The skyline itself was romantic: the first flat-roofed glass skyscraper had yet to be erected, and Manhattan was still an island of grand and ebullient architectural fantasies—minarets, ziggurats, domes, pyramids, and spires. Banks resembled cathedrals, office buildings masqueraded as palaces, and spike-topped towers unabashedly vied for a place in the clouds.

  Except for a few seamy areas, people walked wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted: street crime was rare. Hustling for news, eight major papers made everything that happened in the five boroughs, no matter how trivial, sound grave and consequential, while a battalion of gossip columnists, like nosy telephone operators in a small town, made the city seem smaller than it was with their breathless chatter about the famous, and those who would like to be famous. Broadway was a never-ending feast; theatergoers, sated with the variety before them, probably expected every year to be as bountiful as 1947, which not only saw the openings of A Streetcar Named Desire, Brigadoon, and Finian’s Rainbow, but enjoyed also the continuing runs of Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Harvey, and Born Yesterday.