To Connolly, and many others, so much exuberance and vitality painted “an unforgettable picture of what a city ought to be: that is, continuously insolent and alive, a place where one can buy a book or meet a friend at any hour of the day or night, where every language is spoken and xenophobia almost unknown, where every purse and appetite is catered for, where every street with every quarter and the people who inhabit them are fulfilling their function, not slipping back into apathy, indifference, decay. If Paris is the setting for a romance, New York is the perfect city in which to get over one, to get over anything. Here the lost douceur de vivre is forgotten and the intoxication of living takes its place.”
The darling of the gods, as Howard had called Truman, was becoming the darling of half of Manhattan as well. The members of New York’s smart set were as fascinated as nearly everyone else by “this extraordinary boy,” as Phyllis Cerf called him. In a scene that was repeated, with only slight variations, many times during that period, she described how easily, how seemingly effortlessly, he captivated one of her celebrity-crowded gatherings. “We were having a black-tie dinner party, and since I was short of men, I told Bennett to invite some of his Random House authors. He did, and as the guests were arriving, the butler suddenly came up to me. ‘Are you expecting a child?’ he asked. I said no, I wasn’t. Bennett said, ‘That’s Truman Capote!’ and rushed to greet him. Truman then came up the stairs, looking very thin, very waifish, very childlike, with his blondish hair and bangs, and walked into the room rather blindly—he wasn’t wearing his glasses. The first guest to arrive had been Edna Ferber. She had come when our son, Chris, who was then six or seven years old, came down in his pajamas to say good night. I introduced him to Miss Ferber and sent him off to bed. But throughout the evening she pointed Truman out to people and whispered: ‘Really! Things couldn’t have been so bad that Phyllis had to bring her own child to the table in a dinner jacket! When I arrived, that young man was in his pajamas.’”
The combination of that little-boy facade with an acute adult intelligence only made him more intriguing to the Cerfs’ high-octane guests. The women in their jewels and gowns instantly surrounded him after dinner—“really instantly,” insisted Phyllis—and listened intently as he told his well-polished stories about fortune-tellers and bragged about his hitherto undisclosed ability to foresee the future. “They were absolutely enchanted by him,” said Phyllis, “and from then on people of that group began inviting him to parties themselves.”
No one invited him more often than the Cerfs, and he was often a guest at that brownstone on East Sixty-second Street or at the Columns, their estate in Mount Kisco. Phyllis adored him, and Bennett may well have recognized a kindred spirit behind those deceptively innocent blue eyes: like a teddy bear, which exists only to be hugged. Bennett too was desperate for the spotlight, which he finally received a few years later as one of the panelists on the popular television quiz show What’s My Line? “Everybody always said, ‘Oh, Bennett Cerf, he’s kind of a joke. He just wants to be on television and make those dreary puns,’” said Truman. “And there was that side of him, to be sure. But he was also an extremely sensitive and sound person—you could really talk to him. His advice was always excellent; he had very, very good taste; and he knew the difference between good and bad. People thought he didn’t, but he knew the difference better than anyone else.”
Along with Bob Linscott, Bennett advised Truman, sometimes becoming so fatherly in his attentions that Truman liked to embarrass him with affectionate embraces and cries of “Big Daddy.” Bennett later admitted, “I do things for Truman that I wouldn’t do for any other writer. I love him.” For fear of hurting Truman’s feelings, Bennett would deputize his wife to issue his scoldings. Intelligent and sympathetic but also extremely tough and even pugnacious—Bennett himself called her “the General”—she would usually convey his advice over lunch. Truman did not always follow it, but since it was delivered by Phyllis, he accepted it in good humor. “I loved her,” he said. “Very few people did. But she was a really feisty, good-hearted, loyal person who would do anything for you if she really liked you—and anything against you if she didn’t. If she didn’t like you, it was best to get a passport and leave the country.”
Rarely has a young novelist, particularly an unpublished young novelist, been as praised and petted by a publisher as Truman was by Random House. In those more luxurious days, the company maintained its office in one of those commercial buildings masquerading as palaces, a mock Italian palazzo on Madison Avenue. No other publisher in New York could boast such an impressive suite of offices, and Truman seemed to believe that if he did not own it, he had, at the minimum, a long-term lease. William Goyen, a novelist who was signed by Linscott after Truman, had a similar impression: “He was considered a kind of naughty but very talented little kid at Random House, like somebody from an Our Gang comedy. ‘Look out,’ everybody seemed to say, ‘or the little devil will trip you up on a banana peel!’ I have a vivid memory of coming in those great doors one time and finding him sitting on a bench by the reception desk, a baseball cap on his head and his feet not touching the floor. It was as if he were saying: ‘This is my place. It’s a wonderful place, and I’m going to take you all through it and introduce you to everybody.’ And he did take me to people, give me hints about what to do, and make me feel more at home there.”
It was his place, that magnificent Renaissance building, the first home Truman had felt himself welcome in since Jennie’s house on Alabama Avenue. The Cerfs had all but adopted him, and true to his word, Linscott took special care of him, wrapping him in a blanket of satiny solicitude. As he had done with Carson McCullers and a few others, Linscott, who was a widower, gave him a key to his apartment on East Sixty-third Street so that he could have a quiet place to work during the day; he told Truman to bring Newton along for weekends at Linscott’s farm, which was only twenty miles from Northampton; and he constantly lauded him to everyone within hailing distance. “Bob believed Truman led a madly glamorous life,” said Linscott’s assistant, Naomi Bliven, “that he knew everybody there was to know and that he could give him tips to all the best places. My husband and I often had dinner with Bob, and we always went to restaurants that Truman had suggested. We finally wound up going only to the Plaza Hotel because Truman had recommended their chicken hash.”
Many writers eventually felt let down by Linscott, whose enthusiasm, which was so invigorating when he was happy with a manuscript, could turn to gelid disdain when he was disappointed. During the twelve years they worked together—Linscott retired in 1957—he was never seriously disappointed by Truman, however. From Truman’s standpoint, he was an ideal editor, one who was perceptive enough to occasionally make helpful suggestions but shrewd enough to realize that his real job was not to pencil copy but to hold hands. “As an artist, a craftsman, [Truman] is completely sure of himself,” Linscott told an interviewer in 1948. “As a human being, he has a great need to be loved and to be reassured of that love. Like other sensitive people he finds the world hostile and frightening. Truman has all the stigmata of genius. I am convinced that genius must have stigmata. It must be wounded.”
18
NEW York is like a city made out of modeling clay,” Truman once said. “You can make it whatever you want. It’s the only city in the world in which you can have totally separate lives, groups of friends that don’t know one another or anything about one another.” What he made it in those postwar years was a never-ending party, with clusters of people scattered around a vast room that extended all the way from Ninety-sixth Street down to Greenwich Village. The Cerfs and the high-powered people he met through them were in one corner, the Leo Lerman set was in another, Mary Louise Aswell and all those who looked to her for warmth and advice were in a third, his close homosexual friends were over by the windows, and the nonaligned singles, a varied list that included Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Parker, and Tennessee Williams, were conveniently close to the bar. During the
course of a month, he saw nearly all of them at least once, darting from one to another like a hummingbird on a long summer’s day, determined to extract nectar from every flower in the garden before dusk turns to dark. When he said that Truman had a great need to be loved, Linscott did not realize just how great—how boundless and insatiable—that need actually was.
A few times when Joe and Nina were away, and a couple of times when they were not, he brought his separate lives together at 1060 Park. “Truman had really begun to move in New York,” said Phyllis Cerf, recalling what was probably his first big party, which brought out everybody from Marlene Dietrich to Walter Winchell. “It was staggering to see who was there; an extraordinary group. But Truman didn’t have any concept about how to give a party, and his mother was absolutely horrified at the number of people he had invited. It was a madhouse, hilarious, as if somebody had said, ‘Come and get a thousand dollars!’ There was no room to get in, get a drink, or get out the door again.”
In addition to his trips to Northampton, he occasionally traveled outside the city to visit the Cerfs or the composers Gian-Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber, who shared a house in Mount Kisco—Capricorn it was called—with Robert Horan, a talented young poet. Many people passed through Capricorn, and Bill Goyen, who was Barber’s lover for a while, described Truman’s arrival at the Mount Kisco station. “We all went to meet his train, and he appeared with a flourish. He was all in velvet—he liked lots of velvet—and his descent was so measured that it seemed to take him at least five minutes to get down the steps. He seemed to think the press was waiting for him, but it was just us guys.”
When it came to grand flourishes, however, even Truman had to give way to Tallulah. “She drank a lot, and she used to call me up at two o’clock in the morning,” Truman said. “She talked about every romance she had ever had, every person she had ever been to bed with, and all the fights she had ever had. She had done everything, including going to bed with women, although I don’t think that was much of a thing with her.” She came by Capricorn once when he was there and shocked the neighborhood with her flamboyance. Wilted by the heat, the whole party moved to a cooler house nearby, where the hostess, offering them bathing suits, invited them for a swim in her pool. “I never wear a suit,” declared Tallulah, who, good as her word, was soon standing on the diving board dressed in nothing but her pearls. “Everybody, particularly the teenage boys, looked on with open mouths,” said Horan. “But it was a typical Tallulah scene, down to the fact that her chauffeur had to go back later and fish the pearls out of the water. When I asked her why she had done it, she said, ‘I just wanted to prove that I was a natural ash blonde.’ She had the bravura, the grand theatricality, which carried those things off. I never felt that way about Truman. His performances were rather small-scale, defensive and extremely human. I understood them. They were acts of defiance, as if he were saying: ‘I’m really quite vulnerable, and so before you wound me in some way, I’m going to assert myself.’”
Perhaps being able to drop so many names was part of his armor, and he seemed to derive an almost palpable sense of power out of knowing such a wide variety of people: he liked to think that he alone knew all of them and was privy to their secrets. In his fondest fantasy, he was like a tourist in the Sahara, sneaking through the darkness from tent to tent, campfire to campfire, to spy on the natives. “He was everywhere, and on the phone all the time,” said Goyen. “My God, he was a busy little boy! He really wanted to think he was discovering love affairs and making matches.”
Of all the friendships he made during those years, no other was quite so unusual as the one with Gore Vidal. Younger than he was by almost exactly a year, Vidal had worked even more furiously for early success and had already finished two novels when they met in December, 1945, at the apartment of Anaís Nin, who was to become famous for her diaries. “When the bell rang I went to the door,” she wrote, describing Truman’s entrance. “I saw a small, slender young man, with hair over his eyes, extending the softest and most boneless hand I had ever held, like a baby’s nestling in mine.” A few minutes later that baby’s hand was also extended to Vidal for the first time. “Well, how does it feel to be an enfant terrible?” Truman asked him, giving that French phrase a mangled pronunciation all his own. However he pronounced it, he was aware what it meant and that there could be but one enfant terrible at a time. Even as he shook that little hand, Vidal knew the same, and from the beginning theirs was more a rivalry, a bloodthirsty match of wits, than an alliance of affection.
Aside from youth and promise, they appeared totally dissimilar. Vidal was tall, fair, and good-looking, with a pencil-sharp profile that was appropriate for his pugnacious personality; unlike Truman, he was masculine in appearance, dress and manner. Unlike Truman too, he had enjoyed a conventional, if highly privileged, boyhood. His grandfather was a senator from Oklahoma; his father had held a sub-Cabinet office in the Roosevelt Administration. His mother, after their divorce, had married an Auchincloss and provided Gore with an entrée into society; before entering the Army in 1943, he had graduated from one of the country’s best and oldest prep schools, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
In other, perhaps more profound ways, they were surprisingly alike, however: both felt that they had been emotionally abandoned by their mothers, both were attracted to members of their own sex, and both were possessed by the desire to achieve immortality through the written word. Gore later declared that he wanted to be remembered “as the person who wrote the best sentences in his time,” and that was Truman’s wish too. If Truman thought of himself as a condor waiting to pounce on literary fame, Gore believed that he was a golden eagle who, if he could not find fame first, would quickly snatch it away. “Gore was terribly anxious to be the number one young American writer,” said Truman, “and he was afraid that maybe I was going to do him out of it.” For a year or more, they were content nonetheless to soar together in relative harmony over the fields and canyons of Manhattan. Gore took Truman to the Everard Baths, a well-known homosexual bathhouse. Truman took Gore to Phil Black’s Celebrity Club, a vast, mostly homosexual dance hall in Harlem. Almost every week they met for lunch in the Oak Room of the Plaza, where they nibbled at their friends during the first course, devoured their enemies during the second, and savored their own glorious futures over coffee and dessert. “It was deadly to get caught in the crossfire of their conversation,” recalled someone who once joined them. “They were a pair of gilded youths on top of the world.”
“I rather liked Gore,” Truman said. “He was amusing, bright, and always very vinegary, and we had a lot of things in common. His mother was an alcoholic, and my mother was an alcoholic. His mother’s name was Nina, and my mother’s name was Nina. Those things sound superficial, but they’re not. And we were both terribly young and at the same time very knowledgeable about what we were doing. We used to sit at those little lunches at the Plaza, and he would explain to me exactly, in the greatest detail—he was very methodical about it—how he was going to manage his life. He planned to become the grand old man of American letters, the American Somerset Maugham. He wanted to write popular books, make lots of money, and have a house on the Riviera, just as Maugham did. He always used to say, ‘Longevity’s the answer. If you live long enough, everything will turn your way.’ I would say, ‘Gore, you will do it all if you really want to.’ And he did, too. He got it all except for one thing: he will never be as popular as Maugham was, and none of his books will ever be as good or readable as the best of Maugham. He has no talent, except for writing essays. He has no interior sensitivity—he can’t put himself into someone else’s place—and except for Myra Breckinridge, he never really found his voice. Anybody could have written Julian or Burr.”
An eventual collision was all but ordained, and it finally came, perhaps as early as 1948, in the apartment of Tennessee Williams. “They began to criticize each other’s work,” said Williams. “Gore told Truman he got all of his plots out of
Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. Truman said: ‘Well, maybe you get all of yours from the Daily News.’ And so the fight was on. They never got over it.” Truman himself could not recall the origin of the dispute, but did remember that “it was very, very, very unpleasant, whatever it was about, and after that Gore and I were never friends. Tennessee just sat back and giggled.”
From then on it was open war, and their friends were soon entertaining one another with the latest reports from the battlefield. When one of them was praised for having achieved so much so early, the other (his identity varies according to who is telling the story) angrily exploded: “Why, he’s twenty-two if he’s a day!”—a comment so delightfully daffy that it soon acquired a small fame of its own. “The first time I ever saw Gore, I remarked how extremely talented Truman was,” said Glenway Wescott, an older writer who claimed neutrality. “Gore, who was lunatic competitive, blew up and said, ‘How can you call anybody talented who’s written only one book at twenty-three? I’ve written three books, and I’m only twenty-two!’” In like manner, Truman became furious whenever Gore’s name was mentioned, stamping his feet like Rumpelstiltskin. “He has no talent!” he would exclaim. “None, none, none!”
Much as he carried on about it—“Have you heard what Gore’s done now?” he would indignantly ask Phoebe Pierce—their feud was more of a game than a real war for Truman, and it seemed clear to those who knew them both that Truman was less concerned about Gore than Gore was about him. The reason was obvious to everyone but Gore: Truman had won; the title of reigning literary prodigy was his. Young as he was, he was a mature writer with a distinct and confident voice. Prolific as he was, Gore was still floundering for both a style and a subject, and few took his work very seriously. Williams privately complained that Gore’s third novel, The City and the Pillar, which gained a certain notoriety because of its homosexual theme, contained not one “really distinguished line,” and Anaïs Nin, to whom Gore was closely attached, found his work lifeless. “Action, no feeling,” she wrote in her diary. Truman’s stories, on the other hand, “entranced” her, and she admired “his power to dream, his subtlety of style, his imagination. Above all, his sensitivity.” Such sentiments, echoed nearly everywhere he went, were bitterly galling to Gore, who could not accept the image of that tiny figure standing on a pedestal he believed to be rightfully his. Traveling through Europe with Tennessee in 1948, he spent much of his time talking about Truman. “He’s infected with that awful competitive spirit and seems to be continually haunted over the successes or achievements of other writers, such as Truman Capote,” Tennessee wrote a friend. “He is positively obsessed with poor little Truman Capote. You would think they were running neck-and-neck for some fabulous gold prize.”
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