Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  He met the Paleys in January, 1955, just after the opening of House of Flowers, when the Selznicks, David and Jennifer, were invited for a long weekend at the Paley house in Round Hill, Jamaica. “Do you mind if we bring Truman along?” David asked Bill Paley. “No, of course not,” Paley replied. “It would be an honor.” And so early one cold morning Truman boarded Paley’s private plane and was introduced to that golden couple, Bill and Babe. Although Bill looked startled when he saw him walk into his airplane, the inevitable scarf trailing behind him, he said nothing until they were airborne. He then turned to David. “You know, when you said Truman, I assumed you meant Harry Truman. Who is this?”

  “This is Truman Capote, our great American writer,” responded David.

  On such mistakes do fortunes turn. By that time Truman and Babe were already deep in conversation and had begun a friendship that was to last more than two decades, an attachment that had much of the passion but none of the complications of a sexual entanglement. “Babe looked at him and Truman looked at her, and they fell instantly in love,” said Jennifer. “I had a few jealous pangs because up until that time I had been his best friend—we really did adore each other. By the time we got to Jamaica not only was Babe absolutely enchanted with him, but so was Bill. Truman was almost adopted by them. The three of them became inseparable.”

  From then on, wherever the Paleys went, Truman often followed. He was a frequent guest at their house in Jamaica, and then at a later warm-weather house at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas; he spent weekends at Kiluna Farm, their eighty-five-acre estate overlooking the Sound on Long Island; he went with them on other people’s yachts, and he vacationed with them in Europe. Indeed, the three of them traveled the world together and, in Truman’s words, “did every kind of conceivable thing. I loved them both because they were bright, they were attractive, and they were with it in every sort of way. We were a great little trio. I was really their best friend, the best friend they ever had.”

  That was undoubtedly the case with Babe, who was more protective of him than she probably was of her own children. “There’s great beauty in his face,” she said, “especially in his eyes just after he takes his specs off. They look so vulnerable.” Bill was less effusive, but obviously enjoyed his company. An exception to Truman’s observation that the rich are cheap, Bill was exceedingly generous, paying Truman’s way on most of their travels and once even offering to buy him a house, an offer that Truman wisely but gratefully refused. Most of all, Bill was generous in giving him his wife, in allowing Truman to join them on their travels and in their homes. “He handed Babe to Truman on a silver platter,” said Jack Dunphy, who knew and liked both Paleys. “It wasn’t the Cushing family in Boston that made her. It was Bill. She would have been nothing if she hadn’t married him, and Truman wouldn’t have had much to do with her either. Whether he admitted it or not, he was attracted to money and power.”

  If Newton was Truman’s Harvard, Babe was his Yale. Along with her sister Minnie Fosburgh, who was also devoted to him, she gave him a graduate degree in the manners and mores of the cultured rich. “He had a passion to identify with quality,” said Oliver Smith. “He eagerly wanted to know how you behave in society, and Mrs. Paley and Mrs. Fosburgh educated him. They taught him about decoration, painting, and all the other things that are the intelligent result of great wealth.” Truman willingly admitted as much. “Babe taught me a lot of things,” he said; “how to look at a room, for instance. She showed me how to decorate by throwing things together, expensive things with cheap things from the dime store. She showed me that a room could be fun and personal, and that’s the way I’ve decorated ever since. I taught her a lot of things too, such as how to read and how to think.”

  Like many women of her class and generation, Babe had ended her formal training with secondary school, just as he had, and the world of books was, by and large, terra incognita to her. He instructed her in the things in which Newton had instructed him, and in her found an equally avid pupil, who was excited to be introduced to Flaubert, Henry James, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and of course Proust. “[Truman’s] opened up avenues for me,” she said. “He made me read Proust, the whole thing.”

  To Truman, Babe represented the ultimate in style. She was the genuine article, everything he had once dreamed his mother was. “I was madly in love with her,” he said. “I just thought she was absolutely fantastic! She was one of the two or three great obsessions of my life. She was the only person in my whole life that I liked everything about. I consider her one of the three greatest beauties in the world, the other two being Gloria Guinness and Garbo. But Babe, I think, was the most beautiful. She was in fact the most beautiful woman of the twentieth century, and with the single exception of Gloria, who was sort of neck-and-neck with her, she was also the most chic woman I’ve ever known. When I first saw her, I thought that I had never seen anyone more perfect: her posture, the way she held her head, the way she moved.

  “She was the most important person in my life, and I was the most important person in hers. I was her one real friend, the one real relationship she ever had. We were like lovers; she loved me and I loved her. The only person I was ever truly in love with was her. She once joked that her analyst said that she loved me more than anyone else, more than Bill or her children, and he thought she should have an affair with me. It was one of those jokes that wasn’t actually a joke. He was right; we had perfect rapport. We had an understanding: if I suspected she was feeling bad about something, no matter what time of the year it was, I would send her lilies of the valley, without any note. And she would do the same for me. She once told me that she had bought her funeral plot on Long Island and that there was a place for me, because she wanted me to be buried beside her.

  “I was her sounding board and the only one who really knew her. She was the real enigma inside an enigma. She was a wonderful woman, but she also had a cold, cruel streak that nobody but me knew about. After Slim divorced Leland Hayward and married Lord Keith, who was rich—but not very, very rich—Babe said, ‘Slim never quite made it, did she?’ Even I, who thought I knew all the intricacies of her mind, was surprised, and for two reasons. The first was that it was surprising to hear Babe talk about someone ‘making it.’ The second was that Slim was one of her very best and most devoted friends. But she was deadly accurate and one hundred percent right. Slim never did quite make it in that small circle of theirs.”

  In matters of style, Bill Paley was also the genuine article. His taste was as assured as his wife’s, and he was even more of a perfectionist. When CBS built its new headquarters on Sixth Avenue, for example, he supervised every aspect of the building’s design, right down to the shape of door handles. When he created the little park that bears his name on East Fifty-third Street, he put his stamp on the smallest detail, not excluding the hot dogs that were to be sold at the concession stand. Unsatisfied with the dozens of different kinds of frankfurters he tasted, he ordered one made to his own recipe—then specified how it was to be cooked.

  From early manhood, he had been accustomed to being obeyed and to getting precisely what he wanted when he wanted it. He could turn off his charm as quickly as he could turn it on. Associates who assumed they were his friends invariably learned otherwise. “I don’t think I am a very easy person to know,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It is my impression that although I have had a multitude of acquaintances in my life, many of whom call me friend and whom I call friend, I have had very few intimates. Apart from these few, I think I do not like the idea of depending on others. I don’t feel safe.”

  He did feel safe with Truman, however, on whose bed he sometimes sat for long talks, like those a doting father might have with an overindulged son. “He gave me marvelous advice,” said Truman. When the occasion demanded, Bill could also perform the role of the stern father. Once, recalled Christopher Isherwood, Isherwood and his lover, Don Bachardy, were booked with Truman and Bill on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. The night
they were to leave, fog enveloped the airport. Looking into the gloom, Truman declared that he had a premonition of disaster, citing several examples of the terrible things that had occurred when he had had similar feelings in the past.

  “In spite of all the knowledge he had of Truman and the world, Bill Paley was made just a little bit uncomfortable by all of this talk,” said Isherwood. “It was getting to him, and in a tone that was both firm and paternal, the tone a colonel might use in talking to one of his men, he said: ‘Truman, if you don’t come on this plane tonight and if anything happens to us, you’ll never forgive yourself. So you’re coming!’ Truman did as he was told, and finally, after hours and hours of delays, we tore along the runway and off into the fog. Suddenly, despite the fact that no one was supposed to leave his seat, he came scooting down the aisle from first class, where he and Bill were sitting, jumped into our laps, threw his arms around our necks and said, ‘Are my bunnies scared?’ It was, I think, the single most lovable thing I’ve ever seen him do.”

  Friends Truman and Bill remained; but as the months and years passed, their relationship became decidedly more complicated. Truman admired, liked, and respected Bill, but, given his love for Babe, he could also be jealous and resentful, afflicted by all the emotions associated with the Oedipus complex. For his part, Bill could be generous and indulgent, but Truman thought that he could also be mean and petty. “Everybody who meets Bill thinks he is Mr. Cool and that he never loses his temper about nothin’,” said Truman. “That’s not the person he really is. The person he really is is a highly disturbed man with a terrific inferiority complex, despite all of his success. He has a terrible temper, which nobody realizes, and Babe was scared of him.

  “There was a children’s wing to that big house of theirs on Long Island, and every weekend she would bring a rabbi in to see the two Paley children while the two Mortimer children were packed off to an Episcopalian Sunday school. Bill didn’t know anything about it. The funny thing about him was that he was the least Jewish Jew I’ve ever seen. If you didn’t know he was a Jew, you would never have guessed it. He usually slept late on weekends, until eleven or so, and the rabbi came at nine and was gone by ten. This went on for maybe three years. Then one day he got up early for a golf date and wandered over to the children’s wing while the rabbi was holding services. Bill can walk into any room and size things up immediately, and he didn’t let on for a second that he was surprised to see the rabbi there. He even sat down and talked with him for several minutes before walking out. Then he rushed over to the other wing. I was sitting at the foot of Babe’s bed with a breakfast tray when he stormed up the stairs. I’ve never seen anyone so mad! ‘What the hell do you mean by bringing a rabbi into this house?’ he asked her.1

  “He’s the most jealous person I’ve ever known in my life—and that’s saying a lot. We were in Venice once and went out to dinner with an Italian count and his wife. The count came from one of the oldest Venetian families and was very handsome and very rich. He and his wife had about seven children, but he was totally gay: it’s one of those situations that can only happen in Italy. He spent the whole evening dancing with Babe on the terrace, and then she, Bill and I went back to our hotel. I could see that Bill was in an absolute rage, and when we got upstairs he said to Babe, ‘That was quite an exhibition you put on tonight. I don’t think you stopped dancing for four and a half hours while I was sitting there at the table.’

  “‘Oh, Bill, don’t be such a bore,’ she said. ‘I like him. He’s sweet, he’s charming, and he’s a good dancer. I like to dance and you don’t. It was fun. I had a good time.’

  “‘There’s something going on between the two of you,’ Bill said.

  “‘There’s nothing going on between them,’ I said—and then he turned on me.

  “‘What the fuck would you know about it?’ he asked me.

  “‘Well, what the fuck I would know about it is that he’s gay, and all the affairs he has are with men.’

  “‘That’s true, Bill,’ Babe said. ‘What Truman says is absolutely true.’

  “‘I know a lot of guys who go around pretending that they’re gay,’ said Bill, ‘and they’re fucking everybody’s wife from here to Maine. It’s just an act. I don’t believe he’s queer at all.’

  “‘Well, I can positively assure you of the fact he is,’ I said, ‘and I’ve known him a great deal longer than you have.’

  “At that point he began throwing the furniture around the room, and Babe and I locked ourselves in one of the bedrooms. He tried to knock down the door and we put all kinds of furniture against it to keep him out. And he wasn’t drunk! He was just in a fantastic rage! He is a very violent man. Babe and I were quite calm. In a way we were amused. We were safe and we knew that nothing too terrible was going to happen. So we just waited in the bedroom until he had exhausted himself. I think we actually fell asleep during that incredible scene.2

  “Bill has the best taste of any man I’ve ever met, and I think he realized that Babe was ‘it’ so far as women are concerned. He married her because she was so chic. It wasn’t because of love and I don’t think it was because of her social position—though that certainly helped. To him she was the ideal woman, perfect in every way. But what he wanted was Marilyn Monroe, a sexy broad. I tried to tell her that he did love her, but she never believed me. She thought that love and sex had to go together.

  “She had a love-hate relationship with him: she loved, loved, loved him and hated, hated, hated him. I have never met anybody who was so desperately unhappy as she was. Twice I saved her when she tried to kill herself. One time she took pills and the other time she cut her wrists. Once she was ready to leave him, and I sat her down and said, ‘Look, you don’t have any money and you’ve got four children. Think of them. Bill bought you. It’s as if he went down to Central Casting. You’re a perfect type for him. Look upon being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job, the best job in the world. Accept it and be happy with it.’ She cried and said, ‘I’ve got to think it over. Let me take a nap.’ She lay down and slept for a couple of hours. When she woke up, she shook herself and said, ‘You’re right.’ And that was the end of it.

  “She had one affair with a man, now dead, who had been the American ambassador to an Eastern European country. She invited me over to a restaurant on the West Side for lunch with him. Their romance lasted a few months, but she broke it off because she was afraid that Bill would find out. She had everything: beauty, chic, all the money anyone could want. But she discovered when she got it that it wasn’t what she wanted. I regard her life as a great tragedy, though no one else in the world would agree with me.”

  Yet if Bill behaved badly toward beautiful Babe, so did Truman himself, who betrayed her trust by putting the Paleys’ sex life, or, as he said, lack of it, at the top of his list of lunchtime stories. Perhaps—to make the best case for him—he thought that his disclosure would somehow diminish Bill in the eyes of his peers and gain sympathy for Babe. Or perhaps—to make the more probable case—he was such an addicted gossip that he could not resist telling a juicy story, making it clear that he was the only one to whom she had entrusted her embarrassing secret. In either event, he did her an injury, whether she knew it or not.

  Whatever his motive, the reputation most tarnished by his breathless report was neither Babe’s nor Bill’s, but his own. “Babe made a mistake in trusting him,” said one of her friends. “My husband and I had lunch with him in the early sixties, just after he had spent some time with her. He told us that Bill would no longer sleep with her and that she was greatly bothered by it. We were both horrified by his indiscretion, and my husband wanted me to tell her. But I just couldn’t do that. I couldn’t tell her about Truman, and I didn’t want to humiliate her by saying that he had spread the intimate facts of her life from coast to coast. He didn’t tell just a couple of us who were closest to her. He told everybody.”

  That is not the last word on Truman and the Paleys, however. Most close relati
onships between intelligent and strong-minded people suffer changes of temperature, heat and cold, sun and storm. And so did theirs, which was one of the most unusual combinations of all. He was their friend, their confidant, their child. He was also the sharer of all that was good and bad in their marriage. They depended on him; he depended on them. He loved Babe, and he liked Bill more than he disliked him. Through fair weather and foul, their great little trio endured for twenty years, and it was the wonder of all those who witnessed it.

  An early photograph, taken beside the Paley pool in Jamaica, gives an indication of the nature of that curious alliance. Bill, the robust tycoon in his middle fifties, is in sport shirt and shorts, beaming as confidently as the sun itself. Babe, no more than forty or forty-one, is smiling radiantly, immaculate and serene. Truman, shirtless, in white trunks and a jaunty striped cap, is holding an apple and grinning impishly, as if the camera had caught him in the midst of some devilment, which he will resume the instant the shutter clicks.

  No three people could have looked happier together, and on that cloudless, sun-drenched afternoon Truman might have borrowed a line from Proust himself: “Greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in such moments, than that it should consist always of a series of joyous afternoons.”

  34

  IN the spring of 1955, while House of Flowers was still playing, Truman made certain that he and Jack once again would be able to spend the summer by the sea. Hearing about an isolated cottage on Fire Island, he telephoned the owner. “How many of you would be staying there?” asked the man. “There would just be two of us,” said Truman. The owner was dubious. “It’s kind of lonely for two girls out there,” he volunteered, which caused a scream of displeasure on the other end of the line. “This is Truman Capote!” A deal was soon struck, and Truman was able to leave for Europe with some of his new fancy friends. From Venice—which to Truman of course meant Harry’s Bar—Angelo, the headwaiter, dispatched a touching note to Jack. “Dear Mr. Jack,” he said. “We miss you, and wish you were here with our beloved Mr. Truman.”