Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Before Wood’s husband could arrive, Tennessee showed up, accompanied by Gore Vidal, whose unwelcome presence provided the perfect ending to their little comedy. Tennessee and Gore found the scene highly amusing, and Tennessee decided to prolong the confusion. “They broke into your house—do you want to press charges?” asked one of the policemen. “Well, they weren’t here when I left, I know that,” replied Tennessee, who seemed undecided. “Listen, Tennessee,” said Truman, “don’t you do anything of the sort!” There was never any real danger. Reaching into his bag of tricks, Truman had won their captors over with imitations of some of his famous friends. Andrew had mentioned that Truman was coming to dinner the next night; when they left, the policewoman, obviously impressed by the evening’s entertainment, said to Truman: “I’m sorry I wasn’t invited to dinner tomorrow too. I’d love to see your imitation of me.”

  Truman’s life in Manhattan thus proceeded much as it had before his trip to Europe. He forgave Newton and continued his biweekly visits to Northampton, where, after a day’s work, they took turns reading aloud Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Yet underneath that placid routine could be heard small but disturbing sounds of distress, like those that presage an earthquake. It was a painful autumn. Although they were both groping for an exit from a no longer tenable relationship, neither was ready to admit it, even to himself. Indeed, despite everything that was pulling them apart, they still loved each other.

  Truman apparently made one last, unsuccessful effort to ward off the inevitable breakup, renewing his old request for a full-time companionship. But a full-time companion Newton would never be, and he said so, noting in his diary that he was having difficult times with little T: “Our excruciating, insoluble problem.” Two weeks later he recorded Truman’s response to his refusal: “Talked with Truman on the telephone at noon. He seemed preoccupied and oddly unresponsive—for him.” It was an almost exact replay, in reverse, of their exchange when Truman had returned from Europe, and it was now Newton’s turn to receive rejection over the telephone wires—an experience he enjoyed no more than Truman had. “Insomnia & Angst,” he wrote the next morning. “Intense angst,” he said the day after that; “rather shaky all day,” some time later. Although Truman did not say so, he had fallen in love with someone else.

  It was over between them, but they continued seeing each other for several weeks, celebrating their third Christmas together in Northampton. At the beginning of February, 1949, after he had all but proclaimed the news to his friends in New York, Truman finally confessed that he had a new lover, something Newton had already guessed and accepted. “Sad but also tender and without bitterness” was his diary comment. As Truman observed, Newton even seemed relieved. “I don’t think he was up to having a very intense relationship with anybody. He was a weekend caller, one might say. He wanted to spend the week in his own activities.”

  In retrospect, the end could not have been delayed much longer. Truman was no longer the Wunderkind who had burst into Yaddo, in many ways still unformed, unfinished, and uncertain. He was an established writer with a small but growing international reputation, and he had a much surer sense of himself, both as a man, which he now was, and as an artist, which he also indisputably was. He was not the “dear child” he had been during those enchanted weeks of June, 1946, someone Newton could patronize, if ever so gently and fondly. It is inconceivable that after having seen the wider world of Europe, after having bitten the apple of fame, he could have continued the old routine much longer, the tedious, fortnightly train trip to Northampton, followed by an occasional Saturday night at the movies and listening to the NBC radio symphony on Sunday afternoon. If Newton had found it hard to breathe in the high-pitched atmosphere that surrounded Truman, so too had Truman found it increasingly hard to breathe in the claustrophobic, mothball-scented atmosphere that surrounded Newton. They remained affectionate friends nonetheless, and on June 14, 1949, three years after their first meeting, Newton wrote: “The anniversary of a great day in 1946. Many thoughts of little T.”

  In 1951, Newton’s biography of Melville won the National Book Award, enhancing his already large stature as a critic. But his life was not enlarged or made happier. Much of his sexual pleasure was now vicarious, and he secretly began collecting and exchanging homosexual erotica—stories, nudes, and pornographic pictures. A few years later, far more explicit photographs and movies could be ordered through the mail or purchased in adult bookshops across the country. But in the Massachusetts of those years, possession of such material was illegal and dangerous, and in September, 1960, acting on information received from a raid on a pornographic publisher, police broke into his Northampton sanctuary and discovered more than a thousand examples of sexual stories and pictures. Newton, who abhorred profanity and vulgar language, who always spoke and wrote with elegant precision, was arrested and charged with being “a lewd and lascivious person in speech and behavior.” His worst fear was at last realized: he was unmasked and publicly humiliated for being homosexual. Newspapers in Boston and New York headlined his shame. “Day of the Avalanche” was all he wrote in his diary—and the rest of the year was blank. Suffering a nervous breakdown, he was allowed to enter Northampton State Hospital, or “Dippy Hall,” as the Smith girls preferred to call it.

  To his surprise, his friends and acquaintances, including Lillian Hellman and Van Wyck Brooks, were neither shocked nor disgusted by what he had done and rallied around him, raising money and lobbying in his behalf. “All your friends are with you, of that you can be sure,” wrote Truman, who was living in Europe. “And among them please do not count me least; aside from my affection, which you already have, I will be glad to supply you with money should the need arise. This is a tough experience, and must be met with toughness: a calm head, a good lawyer.” Though he was hard pressed himself at the time, Truman delicately, and rather disarmingly, repeated his offer of financial help a few weeks later. “When and if you need money, please say so; I have some, I really do, and it would not inconvenience me at all.” Although Newton was never allowed to teach there again, Smith promised him a small yearly stipend and kept his name on its faculty list.

  What saved him from prison, however—he received a one-year suspended sentence—was neither his friends nor the college administration. It was, alas, his own cowardice. Turning informer, he gave the police the names of at least fifteen other collectors of pornography, including two younger faculty colleagues who were sentenced to a year in jail. “He panicked and ratted, poor bastard,” said Hellman. “He must have been in total terror.”

  Yet he survived, and a few months later he appeared happier than he had been in years, displaying a serenity he perhaps never before had known. The worst had happened; finally, at the age of sixty, he no longer had anything to hide; he had no more need for disguises. Writing to his friend Daniel Aaron, he said: “I can tell you, from a fund of experience, that one can be taken down from the rack, closer to death than to life—and then still have the most exquisite joys ahead of one.” He had nearly completed another book, a biography of Longfellow, when bad fortune visited again and he was stricken with cancer. Truman talked to him on the telephone shortly before he died in March, 1963. “He knew he was dying and he said one of the most marvelous things I ever remember anybody saying: ‘Never mind. At least I’ve grown up at last.’ I knew exactly what he meant. Like most of us, all of his life he had been the victim of adolescent impulses. Contending with something formidable, he knew what it was to be an adult.”

  23

  THE man who replaced Newton in Truman’s affections was Newton’s opposite in almost every way. His name was Jack Dunphy. He was thirty-four, vigorous and good-looking, five feet, nine inches tall, with receding red hair, a complexion as ruddy as an autumn apple, blue eyes, and the trim, athletic physique of the dancer he had been before going off to war in 1944—he had played one of the cowboys in Oklahoma! His ambition was to be a writer, however, and his only novel, John Fury, a spare, severely written t
ale of Philadelphia’s Irish poor, had been highly praised by the reviewers. Despite those accomplishments, many people in New York thought of him chiefly as the husband, then the ex-husband, of Joan McCracken, one of Broadway’s brightest young musical-comedy stars. Truman, typically, knew all about him even before they met. “I had a terrific crush on him without ever having seen him,” he confessed.

  Jack happened to be at Leo’s when Truman telephoned one evening in the fall of 1948. Knowing Truman’s interest, Leo said, “Jack Dunphy’s here!” Within ten minutes Truman was walking in the door. “He was cute, adorable-looking,” said Jack. “He was wearing a cap, and his skin was fresh and clear. He was trying to be his mostest and bestest. We sat on the couch together and talked about trains. I had a mad desire to go somewhere.” A day or so after that, Truman invited him to a party he was planning to give at 1060 Park in mid-December. Jack accepted, but suggested that they also see each other before then. Truman gladly obliged. They had dinner in Truman’s new apartment on Second Avenue, and as if adhering to a prearranged schedule, they went to bed together. “I made the advances,” said Jack, “but of course Truman was leading me by the nose.”

  And of course, he was. “I have a theory,” said Truman, “that if you want something badly enough, you’ll get it, whatever it is. You’ve got to really want it, and concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day, but if you do, you’ll get it. I have never found that to be untrue. When I finally met Jack, I thought to myself: ‘That’s exactly the kind of person I really, really like. Why is it that other people meet someone like that and I don’t? Why can’t I?’ So I decided that one way or another—and I didn’t know how—I was going to get him. I was absolutely dead-set and determined.”

  The party at 1060 was key to his campaign. Though ostensibly it was a celebration of Andrew’s thirtieth birthday, its actual purpose almost certainly was to demonstrate to Jack how many famous people Truman knew. At that it succeeded. “Good Lord! Who wasn’t there?” exclaimed Andrew. “Auden, George Davis, even the Marquis of Milford-Haven, who had been the best man at the wedding of Elizabeth and Prince Philip the year before. It was so crowded that you couldn’t move. Beatrice Lillie had said she would sing—that was going to be her birthday present to me—but there was no room. When I met her, she was in Truman’s bedroom and just said, ‘Happy birthday!’” It is doubtful that Jack, who was unaccustomed to such gatherings, was favorably impressed; it is doubtful, in fact, that he was aware who all those famous people were. He buried himself in the kitchen, prompting Nina, who had never seen him before, to ask him if he were sick. Truman carefully escorted him into the dining room to show him off to a few close friends, as if he were afraid that too many curious stares would cause him to bolt for the door—which might well have happened. “Truman told me he wanted me to meet somebody,” said Mary Louise. “He went through the swinging door into the kitchen and came back leading Jack, who had been lurking in there and who seemed nervous. Jack said nothing except hello, then immediately retired into the kitchen again. He looked gorgeous, and Truman was so proud and excited that you could tell that this was the real thing.”

  Jack was not so much shy as he was unsociable, and he had more than the usual dislike of milling throngs. “All parties are bad, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I don’t believe in social life for a reason: it doesn’t do anything for you.” He was not easily intimidated, and when Truman chose him, he chose someone whose will was as strong as his own, someone who had overcome equally formidable obstacles to become a writer.

  The eldest of six children, Jack had grown up in St. Monica’s parish, a poor Irish neighborhood, in Philadelphia. Life there was perhaps even more inflexible and narrow than it had been in Monroeville; the residents of those drab little row houses regarded themselves as members of a clan and held in fine disdain anyone who wanted to leave for the wider world outside. They were particularly suspicious of a boy like Jack who enjoyed listening to the opera on the radio and preferred reading to baseball and football. His own relatives were shocked by his desire to write. “My God! You’d think I sold dirty pictures the way [they] acted,” he complained. Unlike Truman and Newton, he was not a sissy, however: he gave back better than he received. He was twelve or thirteen when a neighbor boy taunted him for reading a book on the front porch. “Come on down and play, Mary!” the boy yelled. “Hey, Mary!” Throwing his book aside, Jack leaped over the porch railing and attacked him, smashing his head again and again against the sidewalk. “He had a terrible temper,” said his sister Olive. “It was as if he were saying to the boy, ‘I don’t care if I kill you.’ The mothers came running out when they heard the boy screaming, and there was lots of talk. But Jack was never bothered again.”

  His father, James Dunphy, was a newspaper Linotype operator. He fled to Baltimore when Jack was born; Jack’s mother, Kate, who may not yet have had the advantage of a marriage license, tracked him down, shaming him into returning to Philadelphia by thrusting their infant child into his arms. He grudgingly did his duty, but he never forgave either mother or child. “I think Dad really did hate me,” Jack said. “We were terrible enemies, blood enemies. The only time we were together was when he impregnated my ma. Truman was ambivalent about his father. I knew where I stood with mine. He read books himself—he always had something in front of his face—but he threw mine into the backyard.” When they had words, which they frequently did, his father would end the argument by saying, “Please don’t talk so high and mighty. Remember, you shit in your pants coming back on the train from Baltimore.” Although Jack was his father’s main target, the other children—two boys and three girls—did not entirely escape his ill temper. When his favorite son, Carl, was killed on the beaches of Anzio during World War II, James Dunphy turned to his son Bob and snarled, “Why wasn’t it you who died instead of him?”

  A swell, a spiffy dresser who had a haircut and manicure every week, he demanded much and gave little. “Now make me laugh!” he would command the radio when he sat down to listen to his favorite shows. He considered himself several steps above his wife, who could barely read, who drank her tea from the saucer in which she cooled it, and who was pregnant so often that he sarcastically nicknamed her Olan, after a Chinese peasant woman in Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth. Kate did have the patience of a Chinese peasant. Though he would often stay away for weeks at a time with one woman or another, she never murmured a word of complaint. “Here comes Father!” she would gaily yell when she finally saw him walking home to Gladstone Street.

  Perhaps because he was her firstborn, perhaps because his father hated him so, she worshiped Jack. When he was little, he stood behind her at night and brushed her long hair; after the other children had gone to bed, the two of them often shared a bowl of ice cream, a special treat in a poor household; his was the only name she called on her deathbed. “All the little good in me, what kindness and courtesy there is, I count from her,” he wrote. “The nay-saying part of me is from him; the Protestant part.” As is often the case with fathers and sons, Jack became more like his hated parent than he probably knew. He almost always said exactly what he thought, without regard for the laws of tact and convention, and it was impossible to predict his sudden outbursts of anger, which arrived without warning, like tornadoes roaring across the prairie on a cloudless summer day. “You never know what Jack’s reaction will be to anything,” Truman was to observe. “You can say, ‘I think Horn & Hardart’s baked beans are better than Schrafft’s,’ and you will suddenly be in a fantastic quarrel with him.”

  “Poverty is much more than a way of life,” Jack later wrote. “It goes much farther than skin-deep. It’s no tattoo that fades with time. Nor a brand that can be put out of mind except when faced. Poverty, if you’ve known it, is you.” So it was and so it remained for him. Quitting high school to earn his living in factories, he looked with gluttonous envy at the young men attending the University of Pennsylvania. Fired again and again—“I couldn’t stand an of
fice or a set routine”—he began attending a school for professional dancers; he had an Irish love for dance and movement and had spent many hours practicing steps next to the coal bin in the basement. To his surprise, he discovered that he could survive by shuffling his feet. “I didn’t really have any talent,” he admitted, “but I was good enough to do the job.”

  He married his classmate Joan McCracken, and they moved to New York, only to be temporarily separated when he landed a place in George Balanchine’s company, which toured South America for eight months. He had always wanted to be a writer, and it was on that trip that he began John Fury. “I wouldn’t have started it if I hadn’t been so lonely. When I wrote, I wasn’t lonely anymore. I cut myself off from the rest of the company. Everybody else would go out at night and screw. I would go up to my room, work, jerk off and go to sleep.”

  Whatever abilities he lacked as a dancer and entertainer Joan possessed in abundance. They both landed small roles in Oklahoma! His remained small; hers expanded—indeed, exploded. “When she came to the audition, she was very poor, wearing a coat trimmed with rabbit fur,” recalled Agnes de Mille, whose innovative choreography turned that musical into a Broadway landmark. “I insisted that she be hired and created for her the part of the girl who falls down, which became a great gag. She was a memorable comedienne and an exquisite technician; she had short, dumpy legs, but she used them brilliantly. She was beautiful, with a dear little, heart-shaped face, and when she came on stage and smiled, the audience melted. You could have sopped them up with a piece of bread. She was irresistible. Her personality was that of a star.”