Truman did not reply, but his actions spelled out his ambivalence: he unsuccessfully tried to write his play and fiction too. He was not the kind of writer who could easily switch his attention from one project to another; he was not able to sit down with his play in the morning, for instance, then put it away and concentrate on fiction in the afternoon. When he was engaged in something, it occupied his entire imagination, and House of Flowers, for which he had both a contract and a deadline, automatically assumed most of his time and energy. Not until it was completed did he turn seriously to the stories he wanted so much to write. “I’ve been working with zombielike concentration the last 2 months (after having squandered most of the summer) and have put everything else out of my mind,” he wrote Newton in October. “I finished my ‘House of Flowers’ play (if indeed a play is ever ‘finished’) and am working on some new stories—what a pleasure to return to the sanity and ‘space’ of straight prose.”
If he squandered most of the summer, he had a good excuse: a battalion of friends and celebrities converged almost simultaneously on that little fishing village. Some, like Coward and John Gielgud, stayed with Rex Harrison and his wife, Lilli Palmer, who had a house in the hills. Others, like Tennessee Williams, Frankie Merlo, and Paul Bowles, were just passing through. A few, like Cecil, Saint Subber, and John Malcolm Brinnin, came to visit Truman himself. Whatever their reasons for being there, Truman could not resist the pleasure of their company. He saw them all. He could not complain, as he had in Taormina, that he heard nothing but the sound of the sea. In Portofino there was a gabble of voices, a cascade of laughter, a buzz of gossip. He was in his element.
Jack was not in his element, however, and never before during the nearly five years they had been together had their different attitudes toward the world been so sharply defined. It appeared that two more mismatched souls could not have come together: oil and water, Cavalier and Roundhead, Truman and Jack. The differences between them could have filled a thick catalogue. Truman sought notice; Jack shied away from it. Truman loved to be around people; Jack worshiped solitude. Truman wanted to charm the world; Jack seemed to delight in offending. “You take your life into your hands when you invite Jack to a dinner party,” Mary Louise once said, “because you never know at what point he will suddenly turn against someone in the room, give him a dressing-down, and storm out.”
Jack’s friends traded anecdotes about his turbulent exits. The classic departure occurred in 1949, when he and Truman were overnight guests at a house several miles outside Paris. After breakfast, Jack went out, presumably to take the air. When he failed to come back, Truman and their host became alarmed, afraid that he had fallen down an abandoned well in the garden. The host organized a search, but hunt as they might, Jack could not be found. Not until Truman, sick with anxiety, opened the door to their hotel room in Paris was he located. He had been there for hours: when he had left the house, he had not stopped walking until he was back in the city.
From the start he had made it clear that with a few exceptions like Mary Louise, he did not like or want to meet Truman’s friends. They were all babies in his estimation. Few of them ever got close enough to know him. Those who did considered themselves among the elect; those who did not were usually intensely curious about him. “I’ve always wanted to know him because I thought him attractive and mysterious, but I never got to first base,” said Glenway Wescott with a sorry sigh.
Truman had had fair warning, but only with time did he realize just how obstinately antisocial and eremitic Jack was. In Portofino he pouted like a child, for instance, when Truman invited Greta Garbo to their apartment. Her name was almost a synonym for misanthropy, but compared with him, she was as affable as a Rotarian. “The other night Greta Garbo was eating at a restaurant with some friends,” Jack told his sister. “I did not recognize her and was displeased with Truman when he pointed her out to me. She looked too much like her awful newspaper pictures. Truman later invited her to the apartment, but I did not feel like going up then. He tells me she played with the dogs and complained of a pain in the neck.”
That incident was symbolic of many others over many years: Truman in their apartment, laughing with one of the most beautiful, sought-after women in the world; Jack sulking down below, walking the waterfront until she had left. Still, for several years, despite many embarrassments and many more such rebuffs, Truman tried to convert him to some semblance of sociability. “I beat my head against that wall for a long time,” Truman said. “Finally I just went my own way. The alternative would have been for me to become a kind of recluse. But that was against my nature. I like going out.” The pattern of his relationship with Newton was being repeated, and both he and Jack had other, casual sexual partners, Truman occasionally, Jack frequently. So overheated was Jack’s libido indeed that, in a scene of pure farce, he once chased the composer Ned Rorem around a table, panting to a stop only when Rorem shamed him by telling him how much Truman adored him.
There was one difference between Truman’s relationship with Newton and his relationship with Jack, and it was fundamental. Newton had made it clear that Truman was a visitor in Northampton, and not always a welcome visitor at that. With Jack he had a home, even if it was only a hotel suite in Portofino. Although their paths often diverged, they continued to live together, they still were lovers, and they still had sex together. By their own standards they also remained faithful to each other. “I did not have affairs,” Jack maintained. “I just went to bed with people. In those days I thought I should go to bed with everyone. The homosexual world was all new to me.”
Life with a famous person, particularly one as hungry for attention as Truman was, can shatter any ordinary ego. Living with Tennessee had already robbed poor Frankie Merlo of his identity, and it was a broken spirit, in Jack’s opinion, that caused the cancer that eventually killed him. Jack’s own position was even more precarious. Frankie was not a playwright, not someone who could be compared with Tennessee; but Jack was a writer, and, like it or not, he was Truman’s rival, as all writers are rivals. His ambition was as large as Truman’s, his efforts were as great, his standards were as high, and his confidence in his abilities was as unbounded. It therefore must have been galling that his reputation was immeasurably smaller. The harsh truth was that although he was talented, he was not gifted. His work did not reverberate, as Truman’s did, and he did not have Truman’s uncanny ear for the music of a sentence. To most people he was known, and always would be known, not as a writer but as Truman Capote’s lover.
Keeping his equilibrium in such circumstances would have required a more serene and secure disposition than Jack possessed, and he fought fiercely and sometimes irrationally to proclaim his independence. Frustrating as it was to Truman, Jack’s antisocial attitude was more than a flaw in his personality. It was the wall that protected him. It was his crude but effective means of asserting himself, of saying that though he stood in Truman’s shadow, spiritually he stood by himself. “I would have debased myself if I had done everything Truman wanted me to do. And Truman would have hated me because I wouldn’t have been a person. I would have devirilized myself because I would have had to do everything on his terms. I escaped from all that social life. I never went on anyone’s yacht, even though I was invited. I think I would have become a drunk or a terrific pleaser if I had. Frankie Merlo died because he lost himself in Tennessee’s glare. He got sick on fame. I’ve never, never wanted to be famous. I wanted to be a writer.”
In every way he could, Jack created his own world, as distant from Truman’s as he could make it. He had his own circle of friends, whom Truman saw only occasionally; he retained close ties with his family; and to anyone who would listen he proclaimed a different and, to his mind, purer set of values. He should have become a Jesuit, he later said, and he was not altogether wrong. There were no ambiguities or grays in the world he had constructed for himself; there were only absolutes—blacks and whites. Like his father, who did not have enough money
to own a car and who sneered at those who did—“grease monkeys,” he called them—he despised the adornments that more successful writers acquire. He kept himself as ignorant as a child of the details of domestic finances, as if by not knowing how much money it cost the two of them to live he could escape the knowledge that it was Truman who paid the bills.
A partnership of such complicated checks and balances was a strain on both of them, and they were frequently at war. Yet as mismatched as they seemed, as much as they argued, some miracle of geometry made them fit together like pieces in a picture puzzle. From the outside, their relationship appeared impossible. But it worked, in its own cranky fashion. “We didn’t live the life that most people lived,” said Jack, “but, with great leaves of absence, we lived perfectly fine lives and enjoyed and amused each other all the time. That’s a very rare thing. Through the years, whatever would happen, Truman would come home and I would be there.”
Jack was correct in believing that Truman could not have abided a slave or a toady. Instinctively, Truman had known what he was doing when he rushed to Leo’s on that autumn night in 1948. His unerring ability to find the right person at the right time had once again caused him to make the right choice. As irritating and in many ways as selfish and self-absorbed as Jack was, he was nonetheless a man of absolute integrity, a craggy rock in slippery waters. “He is the only person I trust one hundred percent,” Truman said. “He is everything to me. He is not my shadow. He is not my alter ego. He is the one person I will love until the day I die.”
Jack was his lover, but his best friend in those days, the one who made up for many of Jack’s deficiencies, was Cecil Beaton. At first glance, he and Truman also appeared utterly mismatched, as different as two men could possibly be. Twenty years older than Truman, tall, slim, and silver-haired, Cecil was the personification of English high style, London’s arbiter elegantiarum since the thirties, when he had become the favorite portrait photographer of the rich and social on both sides of the Atlantic. Hidden behind his chill blue eyes was a unique visual imagination, and he was also in demand as a designer of costumes and sets for operas, movies, and plays, including, of course, The Grass Harp. Impeccable in dress and manners, he had so snobbish an outlook that it could only have belonged to someone who had climbed up from the middle class. “Cecil’s perfect manners become radiant as a saint’s gestures in Holy pictures,” wrote Jack, who groaned audibly every time Truman invited him to visit. “An extraordinary man, but I am not comfortable avec lui.”
Truman was comfortable with him, however, and the things that separated them, such as age and accent, were minor compared with those that united them. They both venerated style, they both had achieved early success, and they both loved to gossip and entertain. “Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore” was one of Cecil’s maxims. They both had wanted to eat at the tables of the rich and sail aboard their yachts, and they often did so. Cecil introduced Truman to the world of international society; Truman introduced Cecil to those few rich Americans Cecil did not already know. “They considered themselves small-town boys,” said one mutual friend. “They were outsiders poking fun at the establishment. They loved to peek. They were like naughty little boys peering into their parents’ bedroom.”
They liked being together so much, indeed, that a few people assumed that they were having an affair, which was not the case. Theirs was a friendship of the spirit, not the flesh. In some sense, Truman looked up to Cecil as a mentor. “I respect and trust you almost more than anyone I know and love you accordingly, which is to say hugely,” Truman told him in 1952. “I admire you as a man as much as anyone I’ve ever known,” he added a few years later. Cecil returned his affection. His reserved, almost gelid personality was warmed by Truman’s enthusiasm. “We are now each other’s best friend,” Cecil observed in his diary that August of 1953. “I am always stimulated & happy in his company & wish nothing more than to continue to be with him.”
In Portofino they were like two boys on summer vacation. John Gielgud, who was there before Cecil, was appalled by the appearance Truman presented to the world. “He had very long toenails, dirty shorts, two awful dogs, and that ghastly little voice.” Gielgud expected Cecil to “clean him up a bit. But he didn’t. The next thing I knew I looked out the window and saw them in a boat together. Truman looked just the same, in his dirty little shorts, and Cecil, who had very fair skin, was red as a beet, wearing a great big hat with two ribbons behind it that had been chewed by Truman’s dogs.” Cecil did not seem to mind. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn could not have had a better time rafting down the Mississippi than did these two men of style as they splashed around in the cobalt waters off Portofino. While they swam and sunbathed, they talked—and talked and talked. “We discussed our beliefs and doubts, gossiped, argued, talked seriously, frivolously and bawdily,” wrote Cecil. “We were vastly entertained by each other’s revelations.”
Truman had grown up, in Cecil’s opinion; he had changed from that “fluttery willowy little wraith” he had met in 1948 into a man of remarkable strength and vitality. “In some ways I feel anxious lest this phenomenon may be too extraordinary to last,” he confided in his diary, “and that like Bebe [Berard, a French artist who died in the late forties] he may not survive to old age. There is something almost frighteningly violent about the way he crowds so much into such a short lifetime. He sleeps so soundly, enjoying sleep so sensually; he gets such violent reactions to everything in life when once he has come out of his drowsy, slumbrous wakenings. He is so surprised, so full of wonder. He is so conscious of the deliciousness of rare & expensive things as well as the simple things. I feel slightly scared that someone who lives so intensely, so warmly, so generously, may be packing into a short span more than most people are capable of enjoying or experiencing in a long lifetime.”
Toward the end of October, Truman and Jack left Portofino. They spent several days in Switzerland, where they saw Oona and Charlie Chaplin, then proceeded to Paris, their last stop before they were scheduled to sail home on the Queen Mary in January, 1954. Those weeks in Paris were unrewarding for both of them. “I am working, but not well,” Jack wrote Mary Louise in an uncharacteristic note of near-despair. “Everything seems rather hopeless to me—my own work, that is—and I grow more unpleasant as a person day by day. Two or three drinks and I’m all bitterness and resentment—most of which is directed not half so much against others and their achievements, so much as against myself and my lack.” Saint Subber had appeared in Portofino while Cecil was there in August, making Truman feel so guilty for not having worked harder on House of Flowers that he sat down immediately after Saint left and did finish it. But now in Paris he reread what he had written and belatedly realized that he would have to rewrite the second half, “stem to stern,” as he told Newton. The prospect of long days and nights doing more rewrites in New York filled him with gloom. “Paris is cold and yellow, not very exhilarating,” he added. “But I dread the thought of N.Y. so much I’d hawk hot chestnuts in the Tuileries sooner than set sail a moment before necessary.” To John Malcolm Brinnin he wrote: “Nothing seems to be going right for me—I seem to be in a welter of unsolvable problems, literary and otherwise.”
He and Jack were not alone in their despondency, and in November Truman received a call from Carson’s husband, Reeves McCullers. “This is your friend from across the River Styx,” said Reeves—a bit of black humor that Truman did not fully appreciate until a few days later. Carson had angrily left for America, refusing to advance Reeves any more money, and Truman invited him to his hotel for dinner that night. Reeves never appeared, and it was that night, apparently, that he committed suicide, taking an overdose of barbiturates on top of liquor. “Carson treated him very, very badly,” said Truman afterward. “There was nothing wrong with Reeves except her. He should have been running a gasoline station in Georgia, and he would have been perfectly happy.” At Carson’s insistence, Reeves’s ashes were buri
ed in France, rather than Georgia, as his family wanted, and Truman, much shaken, was one of only a handful who attended his funeral in early December. “My youth is gone,” he lamented to one of the other mourners.
It was a remark more prophetic than he knew. A few days after New Year’s, Joe Capote called from Manhattan with more bad news. After a night of heavy drinking, Nina had also swallowed a bottle of barbiturates—Seconals—and was in a coma. A second call quickly followed, telling him she was dead. Leaving Jack to sail home with the dogs, Truman flew to New York.
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FOR several years Nina had managed to pull herself together, imbibing nothing stronger than coffee. Then, toward the end of 1952, disaster struck and her life suddenly collapsed beneath her. Joe lost his job and most of their money, and their comfortable way of living ended abruptly. She was back where she had been with Arch, examining every dollar as if it might be the last one she would ever see. With Joe’s job went both her self-respect and her hard-won sobriety. She began drinking again, more than ever.
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