Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Much as he enjoyed it, Truman soon realized that Venice, with its constant noise and activity, did not provide the atmosphere he needed to write, and he persuaded Donald to go with him to Sirmione, a lake resort he had heard about, midway between Venice and Milan. Their departure was delayed, however, by more noise and activity than either of them could have anticipated. On July 14, as they were preparing to leave, Palmiro Togliatti, Italy’s Communist leader, was shot outside the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, and Italy’s millions of Communists reacted with rage. Within hours workers were in the streets of all the major cities; the Communist labor unions ordered a general strike, and the government called out the army to preserve order. In Venice, panicky shop owners dropped iron shutters over their windows and doors, restaurants closed, and foreigners, especially Americans, were urged to remain inside their hotels. A measure of quiet returned after two days—Togliatti did not die of his wounds—and, crowding onto a bus, Truman and Donald finally made their way to a calm and peaceful Sirmione.

  “An enchanted, infinitesimal village on the tip of a peninsula jutting into Lago di Garda, bluest, saddest, most silent, most beautiful of Italian lakes,” Truman wrote of Sirmione. And at that time, before the tourist invasions, enchanted it was, with fewer than two dozen other outsiders sharing its charms. He and Donald chose to stay in the cheaper of the two hotels—five dollars a day, including all meals—and have dinner in the more expensive. (Expensive was not very expensive in the Italy of 1948; the excellent martinis at Harry’s Bar, for instance, had cost just twenty-five cents.)

  As a place to work, Sirmione was all that they had hoped it would be, and they remained until July 30, when Donald resumed his travels in Italy and Truman returned to Paris before heading back to America. “Peaches precious,” he wrote Donald from the Pont Royal Hotel. “We shoulda stood in Sirmione! It is frightful hot here, and a ghost town to boot, except for millions of Americans: the worst variety, natch. And I can’t begin to tell you what my trip here was like: Not only did I fail to have a wagon-lit, but I didn’t even have a seat until we were in Switzerland… yep, stood up all the way in the worst heat ever. Anyway, Ten [Tennessee] is here, having failed to show up in London for his opening [The Glass Menagerie], and we went out dancing last night. The play got rather bad reviews, and he seems to be upset about it, though I can’t imagine why. Good God, who cares what anyone in England thinks?”

  He had ample opportunity to console Tennessee, and on Saturday, August 7, they both sailed home on the Queen Mary. Truman had been away only three months, but his brief exposure to Europe affected him profoundly; the extraordinary people he had met there took up permanent residence in his memory, and some of them, like Natalie Barney and Denham Fouts, eventually became characters in his fiction. “It was right that I had gone to Europe,” he wrote, “if only because I could look again with wonder. Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it. Going to Europe was like that. It was a bridge of childhood, one that led over the seas and through the forests straight into my imagination’s earliest landscapes.”

  Truman had met Tennessee the year before at a dinner given by Andrew Lyndon and Harold Halma. “Truman went into the kitchen,” Andrew recalled, “and Tennessee turned to me and said, in what he thought was a whisper, ‘Baby, I think your little friend is charming! Just charming!’ It was a small apartment, and Tennessee’s voice tended to carry anyway. I could see Truman in the kitchen listening to every word and preening.” He and Tennessee met at least a few times after that, but their first prolonged exposure to each other was during the voyage back to New York.

  That Tennessee was willing to even sit with him at dinner was something of a victory for Truman, because a couple of Tennessee’s closest friends, Carson most notably, had tried to recruit him into their Hate Capote Club. Believing, quite unfairly, that he had copied her work and stolen her fame, Carson had turned from friend to enemy. Even more irrationally, given the sexual equations, she resented his romance with Newton, whom she jealously regarded as her best friend, not his. The success of Other Voices had intensified her spiteful rage, which she had vented in her letters to Tennessee. “Aren’t you allowing yourself to judge this little boy a bit too astringently?” Tennessee asked her. “I know you must have reasons which I don’t know of. I see him as an opportunist and a careerist and a derivative writer whose tiny feet have attempted to fit the ten-league boots of Carson McCullers and succeeded only in tripping him up absurdly. But surely not one of the bad boys. His little face, as photographed by Cecil Beaton against a vast panorama of white roses, has a look of prenatal sorrow, as if he were still in the womb and already suspected how cold the world is beyond the vaginal portals.”

  Truman and Tennessee were together much of the voyage, enjoying what Tennessee described in his memoirs as “an hilariously funny” crossing: “In those days Truman was about the best companion you could want. He had not turned bitchy. Well, he had not turned maliciously bitchy. But he was full of fantasies and mischief. We used to go along the first-class corridors of the Mary and pick up the gentlemen’s shoes, set outside their staterooms for shining—and we would mix them all up, set them doors away from their proper places.” Scarcely had they reached deep water, he added, before an Episcopal bishop, portly and bibulous, began looking at Truman with an irreligious gleam in his eye. Everywhere they went, the unwanted bishop followed. When the lustful ecclesiastic ventured to sit down, uninvited, at their dinner table, Truman decided to send him on his way. “You know,” he said, staring at the bishop’s hand, “I’ve always wanted to have a bishop’s ring.”

  “A bishop’s ring is only available to a bishop,” the bishop answered.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” countered Truman. “It occurred to me that maybe I might find one in a pawnshop. You know, one that had been hocked by a defrocked bishop.” The bishop left them alone for the rest of the trip.

  When the Queen Mary docked on Thursday, August 12, Truman and Tennessee were reminded that in their own country they had not been forgotten. Ignoring such other passengers as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Charles Boyer, that night’s television news showed the two of them disembarking and stepping back onto native soil, returning travelers with words to write and stories to tell.

  The person Truman was most eager to tell his stories to was Newton, and rushing from the dock to 1060 Park, he called to prepare him for a surprise weekend guest. Newton, who had not been expecting him for another week, was indeed surprised and instantly dispelled his buoyant excitement: he had already made plans, Newton said, to spend the weekend on Martha’s Vineyard with his old friends David and Helen Lilienthal. After all his adventures and triumphs in Europe, Truman had anticipated a far more exuberant greeting, and he was, as Newton phrased it in his diary, “much distressed” that Newton would not change his plans. Probably realizing that the fault was mostly his, that he should, after all, have cabled the date of his arrival, Truman called back a few hours later in renewed spirits, and they set their joyful, if delayed, reunion for the following Wednesday, August 18.

  Truman doubtless should have cabled—people who spring surprises are often unhappily surprised themselves—but his intuition, which usually served him well, had been correct, detecting a chill in Newton’s voice that even Newton was probably unaware of. Newton had not given him a warmer welcome for a good reason: he was not happy to have him back, at least not so soon. Ambivalent as always, Newton had been sorry, or so he told his diary, to see him sail away in May, and he had fretted when he did not hear from him immediately. At the same time, Newton had enjoyed his newfound freedom, and he was sorry to lose it. Relying on Truman’s original timetable, which would have brought him home in early September, he and Howard had planned their own joyful reunion in late August. But on August 2, after receiving word that Truman might leave Europe a week or so earlier, h
e warned Howard that he might have to cancel. “Of course I shall be eager to see him,” Newton said, without any conviction at all, “but between you and me, and with many self-reproaches, I am dreading a little the resurgence of some of the problems I had been confronted with the last two years. Poor kid! I love him to death, but I’m terribly afraid this longish interval has proven to me beyond cavil how incapable I now am of getting my breath and filling my lungs in that rather intense and high-pitched atmosphere he so touchingly and lovably evokes around him.” Four days later he added a gloomy postscript: his fears had been confirmed; Truman would be back on the weekend they hoped to meet.

  Much of his sense of grievance, deprivation, and even annoyance had doubtless been conveyed over the telephone, leaving Truman with a familiar feeling of rejection. When he finally arrived in Northampton, laden with gifts from Europe, Truman was subdued and sober. Yet Newton was warmer in person than he had been on the phone, and the next day Truman was in better temper, listening attentively as Newton read aloud the newest parts of his Melville biography. Friday, Truman’s black mood returned. Why Newton did not know. But there was a reason: the minute Newton left that morning, Truman had sneaked a look at that diary Newton kept so faithfully, and he had been profoundly shocked and wounded by what he had discovered in those telltale pages.

  Long ago he had learned how to unobtrusively open the locked desk drawer in which Newton kept his journal; since then it had been mandatory reading each time he visited. What he had found there had often annoyed him. On the few occasions Newton had had sex with other people there would be a bold “X” marking the date. Sometimes there would also be uncomplimentary remarks about Truman, “lots of wondering about whether my intelligence was as large as my talent,” as Truman remembered. “It’s a terrible thing to know that somebody has such thoughts about you as Newton had about me and not be able to talk about it.”

  But that morning he received an extra jolt. As he turned the pages, he quickly apprehended an extremely unpleasant fact: Newton and Andrew had carried on a secret romance all the time he was gone—from the day after he had left, in fact, to the very day he returned. He may also have read some of the incriminating letters Newton had hidden away. “You and your Andrew,” Howard said in one of them. “I am of course horribly envious.” Or one from Andrew himself: “My very dearest Newton: Last weekend with you was perfect. Of course it didn’t last long enough, but then quantity can hardly be a measure of perfection, can it? and perfection cannot logically be expected to endure. You are an angel and an angel to be with!” When he told Andrew to take care of Newton, Truman had not imagined that his injunction would be carried out with such maddening exactitude.

  His discovery placed Truman in an awkward dilemma, however. He had learned of their deception through an unscrupulous act of his own; if he accused Newton of infidelity, he would have to explain how he had found out. “I couldn’t say anything without letting him know that I had read his diary—and had gone to a lot of trouble to open his desk to do it.” Gritting his teeth, he realized that he could not confront him until he had returned to Manhattan and first prized a confession from Andrew. Thus, for the next several days, which included the celebration of Newton’s forty-eighth birthday, Truman underwent the self-inflicted torture of anyone who has found out something infuriating by snooping where he had no right to be: he was forced to seethe in silence. “It was the most excruciating thing in the world to sit smiling, talking with him after reading that diary, knowing that everything he said was a lie,” he said. When he left at last on August 25, Newton was probably as happy to see him depart as Truman was to go. “T.C. leaves in the morning, anxious, apprehensive, low-spirited. Painful to see this of course,” Newton later wrote in that well-read journal.

  It did not bother Truman, or bother him greatly, to know that a few others had enjoyed the pleasures of Newton’s bed. How could he complain when he too occasionally had strayed from the path of fidelity? During his trip to California the year before, for instance, he had spent the night with Errol Flynn. “If he hadn’t been Errol Flynn, I wouldn’t remember. We were both drunk—it was the first time I ever had a hangover—and it took him the longest time to have an orgasm. I never did.” He also had had a brief fling with John Garfield, who popped up from time to time at Leo’s parties. “He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. My mother saw him just once and tried to get him into bed with her.” The list of his sexual partners was apparently not much longer than that, and because he had not been emotionally attached, he did not feel that he had cheated on Newton. “I don’t regard being with someone a week, or two weeks, or even three weeks, as an affair,” he declared. “There has to be emotional involvement in an affair, and I didn’t have any of that.” Newton’s liaison with Andrew was different from anything Truman himself had done. By Truman’s definition, it was a real affair, made worse because it was conducted with his best friend. He believed that Newton had cheated on him and that Andrew had betrayed him. And so he told Andrew when he returned from Northampton on that broiling August afternoon.

  “Come over, Andrew. I want to talk to you,” he commanded in a strained and ominous-sounding voice. “Don’t bring Harold. I want to talk to you alone.” Andrew, who was the only one he had told about reading Newton’s diaries, had been expecting such a call. He had been aware from the day he began seeing Newton that Truman would rush to that locked drawer on his first weekend in Northampton and would instantly know all. He had even guessed what Truman now had to say to him when, obeying his summons, he arrived at 1060.

  “To think that you, my dearest friend, the one I love most, would do this to me! And the moment my back is turned! How could you?”

  “Pure soap opera!” Andrew retorted, not at all abashed. “Truman, you’re just looking for an excuse to get rid of Newton. You knew this would happen. You set me up for it. You arranged it all.”

  “Well,” Truman replied, after looking at him intently for what seemed several minutes. “You’re right. But you didn’t need to be so damned sure!”

  But Andrew was not right. Truman had not set him up—not on a conscious level, anyway—and he agreed with him now only as an expression of pride. It hurt him less if Andrew thought that he had schemed to get rid of Newton rather than that Newton had schemed to get rid of him, which was closer to the truth. He may also have paused so long because Andrew had expressed what he himself had half-realized for many months: his relationship with Newton was rapidly approaching its conclusion.

  Meanwhile, with the approximately twenty thousand dollars he had made from Other Voices—the first real money he had ever had—Truman expanded his life in Manhattan, moving from 1060, where Nina was becoming troublesome again, to a small apartment of his own on Second Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, which he decorated with baby pictures of himself and his friends. Success continued to come his way. “Shut a Final Door,” the story The Atlantic Monthly had published after Mary Louise had turned it down for Harper’s Bazaar, won first prize in the annual O. Henry Awards, and he felt vindicated, as well as gratified. Holding his three-hundred-dollar prize money tightly in his hand, he immediately went out and ordered a tailor-made, four-hundred-dollar Knize suit—“which is merely to show you how close I am to the edge of madness,” he jokingly wrote Donald Windham. As far as he was concerned, it was worth every penny, however; few people gained as much pleasure as Truman did from expensive purchases, and he liked to show off the sleeves, which, unlike those on less expensive suits, could actually be unbuttoned so that they could be rolled up and down. “Honey, these cuff buttons button and unbutton!” he pointed out more than once to Phoebe Pierce.

  He occasionally entertained in his new apartment, resuming where he had left off in May with old friends such as Phoebe and Andrew, whom he held largely blameless for what had gone on in Northampton. One farcical night, in fact, he and Andrew were considered partners in crime by the New York Police Department. After dinner at the Plaza, they decided t
o visit Tennessee, who was living nearby, in a house on East Fifty-eighth Street. But Tennessee was not at home. “How inconsiderate of him!” Truman complained. “He could have hoped we’d come.” Truman had Andrew lift him up and push him through the transom, so that he could open the door from the inside. “We’ll just go in and play Victrola records until he comes back,” Truman said.

  Unbeknownst to them, their successful housebreaking had aroused the curiosity of two plainclothesmen and a policewoman who happened to be passing by, and as if on cue, those guardians of the public order suddenly made themselves visible. “Whose house is this?” demanded one of them. “It belongs to Tennessee Williams,” said Truman. “And I,” he added gravely, “am Truman Capote.” With one voice, they roared, “Who?” Furious, Truman sat down, and they all waited for Tennessee. There was a brief burst of activity when Andrew, reaching into a pile of suit jackets for his cigarettes, mistakenly pulled out the gun of one of the plainclothesmen instead. “They looked a bit startled at that!” Andrew recalled. “We had ‘em covered. But I got the damned thing out of my hand as quickly as I could.” Finally, after an hour or so, Andrew was allowed to call Tennessee’s agent, Audrey Wood, who promised to send her husband over to set matters right. “Tell Audrey to send a copy of Other Voices too,” Truman yelled as Andrew dialed her number. “I want to prove to these people that I am a writer.”