Unlike most of the rest of Brooklyn—or most of Manhattan, for that matter—the Heights still retained the leisurely and capacious feeling of nineteenth-century New York. Truman made friends with the shopkeepers; strolled the nearby Promenade, with its stunning views of Wall Street and the harbor; and snooped around the ships that docked below. As extensively as he had traveled, he still could not untangle the New York subway system; when he crossed the river to Manhattan, it was almost always by taxi. However far he wandered, he was always glad to return to the bright yellow house at 70 Willow Street. “Home! And happy to be,” was the way he concluded a description of his life there. “I love Brooklyn Heights,” he told a reporter. “It’s the only place to live in New York.”
35
THE success of The Muses Are Heard had made him eager to do more journalism, and a little over a year after he had boarded the Blue Express, Truman set off again in hopes of repeating his Russian triumph. Though his destination was the Far East, his subject was similar: another American company trying to open doors to an alien society. Shortly after New Year’s, 1957, Warner Brothers was to begin shooting a big-budget movie called Sayonara in Japan’s ancient imperial capital, Kyoto. Set during the Korean War, the film was to have as its theme the cultural clash between Orient and Occident; playing its lead, an ace American fighter pilot, would be one of the world’s biggest stars, Marlon Brando.
As soon as he heard about the Warners’ project, Truman realized that the cultural clash depicted in the script could not be half as entertaining as that between Hollywood and Nippon, or between director Joshua Logan and the temperamental and reclusive Brando. A comic novel was again what he had in mind—a Japanese box lacquered in brilliant red, perhaps—and without leaving Willow Street, he could see boundless possibilities for his deadpan brand of satire. Although they were sparing neither time nor money to ensure that Sayonara accurately reflected Japan and its people, the filmmakers saw nothing incongruous, for example, in asking Audrey Hepburn to play Brando’s Japanese lover or in hiring a Mexican, Ricardo Montalban, to assume the part of a famous Kabuki performer. (Hepburn declined, predicting that audiences would laugh at her, and a Japanese-American was chosen in her stead.) The New Yorker, which hoped for a sequel to his Russian adventures, gave its blessing, Cecil Beaton agreed to keep him company, and on December 27, 1956, Truman and Cecil left for the Land of the Rising Sun.
Almost instantly things began to go wrong. In San Francisco, their first stop, Truman somehow got his head stuck in an elevator door of the St. Francis Hotel. It was extracted undamaged, but when he reached Honolulu, their second stop, he had to wait three days for his baggage to be found. Then, just as they were preparing to depart for Tokyo, he and Cecil both discovered that they had neglected to procure Japanese visas, without which they could remain in the country only three days. To stay longer, they would have to fly to Hong Kong, obtain visas there, and then return. When they reached Tokyo, Truman telephoned Logan in Kyoto and received the worst news yet: Logan did not want him to write about the film at all and planned to bar him from the set. “Of all the hypocrites!” Truman hissed to Cecil as he hung up the phone.
There obviously had been a misunderstanding, but whose fault it was is still not clear. The Logans knew he was coming. Nedda Logan, who had closely followed her husband’s production, had even invited him to lunch at the end of November to give him background. But Josh Logan did not want a visitor with such big ears on his set, and he professed to be outraged by The Muses Are Heard. “It treated human beings like bugs to be squashed under-foot,” he wrote in his memoirs. “And Truman would have even juicier fodder to chew on with us. Boorish Hollywood invades Japan, and with golden ladies’ man Marlon Brando. I knew from his conversation at many parties that he had it in for Brando and wanted to shatter his powerful image. Both Bill [producer William Goetz] and I called The New Yorker and complained vehemently. We also wrote letters through our lawyers. But with all our protests, I had a sickening feeling that what little Truman wanted, little Truman would get.”
Logan did not make his protests until the end of December, however, and it may be that Truman and Cecil were already on their way; or that in the usual holiday confusion, The New Yorker had failed to pass on the bad news; or that Truman knew but, given his genial lunch with Nedda, thought that he could change her husband’s mind. In any event, having traveled so far and having promised a story to The New Yorker, he was more determined than ever to get his story. Impressed as always by his “courage & incredible fighting qualities,” Cecil wrote in his diary: “His assurance is deep-seated. His brain is twice life-sized. His memory unfailing. His curiosity boundless. A foreign country in no way inhibits him. Within a few moments of arrival here he had telephone operators buzzing. New friends had become old friends automatically. (The preliminaries of friendship do not exist with him.) Without seeming to see, he finds his way down the labyrinthine corridors of the hotel, knows his way about town & knows where the martinis are best.”
In the seventy-two hours between landing and leaving, Truman saw much of Tokyo, got drunk on sake, and met the novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima, who greeted him as a comrade. In fact, he and Truman had much in common. They were almost exactly the same age, they were both homosexual, and they had both achieved early renown. On January 6, 1957, Mishima took him and Cecil to a Kabuki performance, then backstage to meet the leading player. The following night he entertained them at a restaurant and guided them through a red-light district.
What seemed like a natural friendship did not develop much further. Mishima came to the United States in the summer of 1957 and later complained that Truman had not reciprocated his hospitality. Truman denied the charge. “I was nice to him,” he maintained. “He said he wanted to suck a big white cock. (I don’t know why people always think I can fix them up. I’m not really in the pimping business—though actually I do know a lot of people.) I telephoned a friend of mine, and he did go out with Mishima. But Mishima never called to thank me and he never paid the boy.”
In the seventies, a few years after Mishima’s public act of hara-kiri, Truman was much perturbed by a biography of Mishima in which Mishima confidently predicted Truman’s own suicide. “Reading something like that really brings you up short when you’re in bed late at night,” said Truman. “I don’t know why he said that. We never talked about suicide, and I certainly had no idea that he would commit suicide. He seemed like the last person who would do such a thing.”
The problems with visas caused a reversal of schedule, and instead of returning immediately to Tokyo, Truman and Cecil spent two weeks in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Cambodia, which originally had been the last stops on their itinerary. They did not enjoy themselves. Tokyo had struck Truman as “an ugly Oriental Toledo,” while Bangkok staggered him with its heat—even the dogs did not have enough energy to bark, he observed. He and Cecil were cordially received by Bangkok society—rich Thais and Western expatriates—but he was nonetheless delighted to leave. “Bless Jesus I don’t live there,” he jotted in his journal. At the haunted ruins of Angkor Wat Cecil was annoyed by the presence of a group of American tourists. “Absolute swine,” he called them. “How vomitous!” he added when their late-night carousing kept him awake.
Besides Angkor Wat, only Kyoto, which they at last reached on January 23, excited genuine enthusiasm. “A delightful city of wide avenues and narrow alleys, shopping arcades and some 200 (I think more) bars—where there is a girl for every customer,” wrote Truman. “Kyoto is nearest to seeming what I thought Japan would be like.” Unfortunately, Logan and his Sayonara associates continued to rebuff his efforts to write about them. Reluctantly and without telling anyone but Cecil—his revenge was to keep everyone else guessing—he abandoned the project. Articles can be written without help from those involved, but his was not one of them; Truman required a favored position from which he could see and hear what was going on. And that, clearly, he was not going to get.
As h
e wandered those narrow alleys over the next several days, a new enterprise took hold of his mind. “Am intrigued,” he wrote, “with an idea for a thriller-novel.” Having seen all the sights he wanted to see, he scarcely moved from his hotel for three days while he jotted down a five-page outline of an East-West spy story. Titled Monkeys and Old Stone, it would be set in Kyoto, Hong Kong, and Angkor Wat—almost all the places he had just been, in other words. “It is fascinating to watch his mind at the work of creation,” the ever-admiring Cecil observed in his diary. “He has so much knowledge about such a wide number of subjects that his possibilities are tremendous.” Truman was so excited, in fact, that he decided to stay an extra week in Kyoto, so that he could saturate himself in the atmosphere of that most Japanese of all Japanese cities.
It was during those days in the first week of February that his luck abruptly changed and his story on Sayonara sprang back to life. Logan had stopped him from following the making of the movie, but he could not prevent him from talking to his star, whom Truman knew from New York. “Don’t let yourself be left alone with Truman,” Logan had warned Brando. “He’s after you.” But Brando, who loathed interviews and interviewers—“My soul is a private place,” he declared—invited Truman to dinner in his hotel suite nonetheless, simply to be polite. “He didn’t know that I was going to do a whole piece about him,” said Truman. “How could he? I didn’t know either.”
But like many other normally reticent people, once he started to speak, Brando could not stop. “What an experience,” Truman wrote in his diary afterward. “And how he loves to talk—and such a vocabulary: he sounds like an ‘educated Negro’—very anxious to display all the long words he’s learned. He talked, non-stop, from 7:15 until 12:30 in the morning.” Truman quickly realized that he had struck oil. Not only did he refrain from capping that gusher, but he did his best to keep him spouting, by trading confidence for confidence, as he had done so often before.
“The secret to the art of interviewing—and it is an art—is to let the other person think he’s interviewing you,” he later explained. “You tell him about yourself, and slowly you spin your web so that he tells you everything. That’s how I trapped Marlon.” With rue and regret, Brando later confirmed that that was what had taken place. “The little bastard spent half the night telling me all his problems,” he told a friend. “I figured the least I could do was tell him a few of mine.”
No subject was spared. One of their mutual friends had bragged that Brando had gone to bed with him. “I asked Marlon and he admitted it. He said he went to bed with lots of other men, too, but that he didn’t consider himself a homosexual. He said they were all so attracted to him. ‘I just thought that I was doing them a favor,’ he said.” Knowing that Brando’s mother had been an alcoholic, he described his own problems with Nina. That confession induced Brando to describe in detail the torture of watching his own mother break apart in front of his eyes like a piece of porcelain until “one day I could just step right over her, her lying on the floor, and not feel a thing, not give a damn.” In his journal, Truman added his own poignant postscript: “How well I understand that.”
Brando enjoyed their joint confessional—he told his makeup man so the next day—but he soon learned something most of Truman’s friends already knew: Truman could not keep a secret. Monkeys and Old Stone was put aside, never again to be picked up, as Truman succumbed to the thrill of a scoop and the delight of thumbing his nose at Josh Logan. “Oh, you were so wrong about Marlon not being gossipy,” he gleefully informed him. “He talked his head off.” He undoubtedly told others as well of Brando’s garrulousness, and word eventually got back to the star, who, belatedly realizing that he had been tricked, responded on May 16.
“Here, of course, is the inevitable communication,” Brando began, in a letter that he apparently both wrote and typed himself: it is full of misspellings, curious uses of words, and unique grammatical constructions. It was vanity alone that had deluded him into believing that they were exchanging private confidences in Kyoto, Brando said. But his “unutterable foolishness” was now clear to him. “It is, indeed, discomforting to have the network of one’s innards guywired and festooned with harlequin streamers for public musing, but, perhaps, it will entertain… In closing let me just say, I am sorry, in a way, that you didn’t complete your plans for the full travesty you had planned to do because it has come full upon me that there are few who are as well equipped as yourself to write, indeed, the comedy of manners.”
Truman’s Brando profile, “The Duke in His Domain,” appeared in The New Yorker the following November and caused every bit as much comment as Truman had hoped it would. A “vivisection,” Dorothy Kilgallen called it; Walter Winchell said it was “the type of confession usually confined to an analyst’s couch.” They were both right. Word for word, Truman repeated much of what Brando had told him: his inability to love or trust anyone, his contempt for acting, the scars left by his mother’s alcoholism. It was the public disclosure of that last memory that apparently upset Brando most. His soul could not have been more public if it had been on exhibition at Madame Tussaud’s.
“I’ll kill him!” he shouted to Logan.
“It’s too late, Marlon,” said Logan, who could not resist an I-told-you-so. “You should have killed him before you invited him to dinner.”
Despite the unhappiness it caused, “The Duke in His Domain” is a remarkable work of journalism, displaying Truman at his shrewdest. A few days before publication, William Shawn congratulated him: “Thank you for writing this piece—or, to come right out with it, masterpiece.”
On February 8, a few days after his night with Brando, Truman and Cecil left Japan for Honolulu, where Cecil overlooked his dislike of most things American long enough to pick up two sailors. It was a mistake, as Truman tried to tell him, and around midnight Cecil phoned Truman’s hotel room in great distress: the sailors were trying to rob him. Truman rushed to his rescue, and his arrival frightened them away. “Cecil blew them each twice and then he did something incredibly dumb,” he said. “As they were getting ready to leave, one of them said to him, ‘Aren’t you going to give us something for this?’
“‘So you’re those kinds of guys!’ Cecil replied, and that got them mad. They started picking up all of his photographic equipment and throwing it into bags. That’s when he called me. I ran up the stairs without even thinking, and they ran down, pushing me aside.” Though they managed to get away with his watch and a camera, Cecil was unrepentant. “He enjoyed it so much,” Truman recalled, “that he said he would do it all over again.” The two travelers parted company two days later when Cecil flew back to San Francisco and then New York. Truman remained in Honolulu for a few more days in the sun, then did the same. On his way through San Francisco, he had one more encounter, a bittersweet rendezvous with a voice from the past, from his adolescence and the secret trips he and Phoebe used to take from Greenwich to Manhattan. “Went to a small boite to see Billie Holiday,” he wrote in his journal. “She was soaked in gin (or something) and her voice is gone. So sad.”
36
IN the summer of 1957 Truman and Jack joined with Oliver Smith to rent a huge Victorian beach house in the Long Island village of Bridgehampton, midway between the more fashionable resorts of Southampton and East Hampton. Built on stilts, the house was named Sailaway, and at high tide, when the waves swirled under it, it did look as if it were about to sail away. They worked hard in that house in the surf: Oliver was busy with various stage designs, Jack, who had caught Truman’s theatrical fever, was trying to put together a play, and Truman was returning to Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Even as he was concluding the adventures of Holly Golightly, Truman was thinking about a new venture into journalism, however, a profile of the pampered, privileged, and thoroughly Westernized young people he had met in Moscow. No one had ever written about them—few Western reporters probably even knew of their existence—and yet he, who spoke no Russian and knew very
little about the Soviet Union, was in a position to do so.
“Everybody in the West seemed to be so fantastically naive about Russia,” he said, “as though it were different from any other country. Well, it basically isn’t, because human nature is what it is. The people I knew weren’t all that much younger than I was. They were very hip, with it; they even had their own club in the Hotel National, which is right on Red Square. I decided I wanted to write a piece on this other Moscow, this whole other country they lived in.” It was an opportunity he could not pass up, and once again he approached Mr. Shawn, who gave him the blessing of The New Yorker and a check for expenses. Shortly after the beginning of the new year, 1958, he bundled up and made his second trip to frigid Muscovy.
This time he went in style. Slim was his companion, and joining them on various segments of their journey were Cary Grant, who was shooting a picture in London, and Sam Spiegel, the producer of such movie epics as Doctor Zhivago and The Bridge on the River Kwai. “As he had been there before, Truman knew the terrain, as well as some people,” said Slim. “He was a wonderful eye, like a child lying on the grass and seeing a whole jungle in it.” In Moscow he spent much of his time by himself. When he had obtained the information he needed, he and Slim went on to Leningrad and then Denmark, where he introduced her to one of his literary icons, Baroness Karen Blixen, or Isak Dinesen, as she was known to most of the world.
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