Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Isak Dinesen had many admirers, but Truman was among the most devoted. Out of Africa, her memoir of her life as a coffee planter in the highlands of Kenya, he regarded as one of the finest books of the century. At some point, perhaps on his earlier trip to Russia, he had visited the fragile baroness at Rungstedlund, her house on the Baltic Sea, and they had charmed each other: two exotic creatures from different worlds and generations, both self-made. “I am really three thousand years old, and have dined with Socrates,” she once said, probably only half in jest.

  When he knew her, she was in her early seventies, but in fact looked much older, emaciated by years of illness. “‘I have such a longing for darkness,’ she told me. ‘You know, I’ve only been staying alive for the last two years because I want to get the Nobel Prize.’ That took me down quite a lot, because she was such a fabulous, marvelous woman and a great artist, and if ever I have known anyone who was above any kind of nonsense like that it was Isak Dinesen. But she really wanted the prize.” When he visited her with Slim, she served a high tea and asked many questions: she was planning her first trip to America and wanted to know everything.

  She was the last person he would have wanted to hurt, but, quite inadvertently, he did later that year with the publication of Observations, a book of Richard Avedon photographic portraits for which he wrote his own portraits in prose. He meant his short profile of her to be flattering, and to most readers that is how it must have sounded. “Time has reduced her to an essence, as a grape can become a raisin, roses an attar,” he wrote. “Quite instantly, even if one were deprived of knowing her dossier, she registers as la vraie chose, a true somebody. A face so faceted, its prisms tossing a proud glitter of intelligence and educated compassion, which is to say wisdom, cannot be an accidental occurrence; nor do such eyes, smudges of kohl darkening the lids, deeply set, like velvet animals burrowed into a cave, fall into the possession of ordinary women.”

  Unfortunately, he proceeded downward from her eyes to her lips, which he described as twisting “in a sideways smile of rather paralytic contour.” That description, along with Avedon’s photographs, one of which showed only her veined and gnarled hands, wounded her, and she wrote Truman to complain of his unkindness and lack of generosity. She considered reneging on her commitment to write the preface to the Danish edition of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, deciding in the end that it would be mean and vindictive to break her promise. “But I wrote it with bitterness in my heart because of his ungallant treatment of me,” she said.

  Yet she was, as he had said, not an ordinary woman, and by the time Cecil made the pilgrimage to Rungstedlund, shortly before her death in 1962, she had forgiven him. “He’s a nice chap and a good writer and he’s improving all the time,” she told Cecil. “His last books are the best. Tell him that I have evaporated my spite and that I wrote a preface for his last book [Breakfast at Tiffany’s] translated into Danish. He’s a friend and I’m fond of him. Give him my love.”

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s had taken longer than Truman had expected, the result mainly of his perennial difficulty in finding a satisfactory ending. “I read several versions and watched him struggle,” said Phyllis Cerf, who had witnessed similar struggles with Other Voices and The Grass Harp. “I think quite often the problem was that he hadn’t thought of the ending, though he swore to me that I was wrong, that I didn’t know what I was talking about—and in truth, I probably didn’t.” But end it he did in the spring of 1958. In accordance with a promise he had made to Carmel Snow, Harper’s Bazaar was to publish it in the summer, before Random House brought it out as a book.

  Between his promise and publication, however, Mrs. Snow had been booted out by the Hearst Corporation, and her niece, Nancy White, had taken her place. Mrs. Snow had been the protector of editorial integrity, the abbess of the convent, and while she was there, the men from the publisher’s office rarely had the nerve to ask questions about her fiction. Now they did, objecting to Truman’s use of a few four-letter words and the relaxed lifestyle of his heroine: Holly Golightly was not exactly a call girl, but she did make her living from sex.

  “I used to get these lists of objections from either the publisher’s office or the Hearst offices across town,” recalled Alice Morris, who had taken Mary Louise Aswell’s place as fiction editor. “They all were reading as they had never read before, word for word. I kept saying to Nancy, ‘This is a slightly raffish society Truman’s talking about. There’s nothing ugly or pornographic about it. He’s only used words where they would be absolutely natural, never simply for effect. Tiffany’s will someday display it in their window.’ Finally I got all the objections boiled down and showed the list to Truman.

  “‘I’m not going to change a word,’ he said. But finally he agreed he would. I think he said yes partly because I showed him the layouts. We had about six pages with beautiful, atmospheric photographs. Then when all the changes had been made and we were just about to send the whole thing to the printer, Nancy called me into her office and said, ‘I’ve just had a call from Dick Deems [a Hearst executive], and we’re not going to be able to run Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’” Without much ado, Harper’s Bazaar had ended its long and distinguished history of printing quality fiction. Although he subsequently sold his story to Esquire, Truman never forgave the new, Snow-less Bazaar. “I’m not angry, I’m outraged—that’s an entirely different thing,” he told a reporter. “Publish with them again? Why, I wouldn’t spit on their street.”

  The bad news from Bazaar had come as he and Jack were packing for a summer in Greece, but on May 28, 1958, they sailed, as scheduled, on the Vulcania. Truman’s friend Irving Drutman happened to see their arrival at Athens’ Grand Bretagne Hotel a week or so later. “The Grand Bretagne was the Ritz of Athens, very snobbish,” Drutman said. “They came in the lobby with something like seventeen pieces of luggage: bags, oddly shaped bundles, things carried in knapsacks, things tied in neckerchiefs. Jack was holding two ferocious-looking dogs. The clerk looked at them and at the dogs and said there was no reservation.

  “‘Of course there’s a reservation,’ said Truman. ‘We have it confirmed.’

  “‘Sorry, there’s no reservation,’ repeated the clerk. Truman began arguing and said that he would call the owner of the hotel, whom he knew. The clerk of course had heard that sort of thing before, but in this case I’m sure Truman did know the owner. Truman made a great fuss, and they finally gave them a room, which the dogs proceeded to tear to pieces during the several days they were there.”

  Truman did not care for Athens—ruins, no matter how important, never appealed to him—but both he and Jack fell instantly in love with Pares, the Aegean island where they spent the next three and a half months. “Have written you from many places,” Truman told Newton, “but never before from heaven. Adore this island, prefer it to anywhere I’ve ever stayed.” To Cecil he added: “Absolutely beautiful. Just sun, sea, and serenity. No tourists to speak of. The town is dead-white—with blue courtyards and walls covered with morning-glory vine and terraces roofed with grape-arbor: like a clean, cool Casbah. And it is cool, by the way; even sometimes chilly—we sleep under a blanket. The food is fairly good, the wines delicious. We are living in a very clean and delightful hotel. There is a little villa next door that we are trying to acquire. But really I don’t care if we do—because we have such a quiet, pleasant apartment with a terrace overhanging the sea and a flight of stairs going down to a nice-enough little beach.”

  While Jack began another play—his previous one, Light a Penny Candle, had closed Off Broadway just before they left—Truman worked on his Moscow piece. He also devoted some thought to the Proustian work he had been contemplating since he was first admitted to the company of the rich and powerful. “A large novel, my magnum opus” was how he described it to Bennett Cerf. “A book about which I must be very silent, so as not to alarm my ‘sitters,’ and which I think will really arouse you when I outline it (only you must never mention it to a soul). The nov
el is called ‘Answered Prayers’; and, if all goes well, I think it will answer mine.” His characters were to be his rich friends, the sitters, as he referred to them. The title was borrowed from a saying that he attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila: more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.3 It was a truism that he had already seen confirmed many times: those who achieve their highest goals are rarely happy; something almost always intervenes to turn dreams into nightmares.

  “‘Answered Prayers,’ a novel,” he wrote in his journal in July. “Anne Woodward, C-Z, Rosie, the Duchess, Elsa, Elsie Woodward, Thelma (leukemia) and David (leukemia).” From that brief notation, it appears that the main character was to be Ann Woodward, the chief protagonist in what Life magazine called “the shooting of the century.” A former showgirl and the daughter of a Detroit streetcar conductor, Woodward had shot and killed her rich, blue-blooded husband in the fall of 1955, claiming that she had mistaken him for an intruder. Few believed her, but Elsie Woodward, her mother-in-law and a much-loved figure in New York society, stood by her for the sake of the two grandsons. As a result, the new widow’s implausible story was accepted as fact, and she never went to trial. Old Mrs. Woodward was also one of those mentioned in his journal, together with C. Z. Guest; the Duchess of Windsor; Elsa Maxwell; and two New York and Southampton heiresses, Rosie Chisholm and Thelma Foy.

  Their sorry fates seemed to bear out his pessimistic thesis. Bill Woodward, who was born with the money and position most people only dream about, had got what he wanted—sexy Ann—and twelve years later she blew his head apart with No. 7 English shot from a double-barreled gun. Ann had got the name and fortune she wanted, but the shooting had made her a pariah, a social outcast. And so on down his list; all had had their prayers answered, and all, for one reason or another, would have been happier if their appeals had been denied. In their unhappy histories Truman discerned a plot on which he could build his own magnum opus.

  But great novels require time and concentration, and his always precarious financial situation allowed him neither. “I said I was happy,” he wrote Newton. “I am; except about my work. Simply because I’m not able to work at what I want. I’m on some dreadful treadmill of having to do dollar-making articles: because of my internal revenue troubles, the Joe Capote problem (who, aside from all else, has now married an invalid who is living in a hospital at my expense); and, I suppose, my own past extravagance. Meanwhile, I have a novel, something on a large and serious scale, that pursues me like a crazy wind: but! How did I ever work myself into this cul-de-sac?”

  Paros at least continued to enchant him, and he even talked to Jack about buying a little farmhouse to which they could come every year. “Now the nights are so moon-bright you can see a ship twenty miles at sea,” he wrote Newton, conveying in a sentence much of the wonder of the place. The only fault he could find was with the littlest Greeks, who he thought were among “the world’s meanest bunch of brats.” In most countries in which he traveled he managed very well with English alone: the word martini sounds the same all over the world. But the brats of Paros, he told a friend, had caused him to enlarge his vocabulary. “Have learned only five Greek words, in order to say: ‘Shut up, fat girl’ and ‘shut up, fat boy.’”

  Jack learned to hold those brats in equal disdain. Early one morning in August, he saw two boys playing with a kitten, which one of them suddenly hurled into the sea. Running barefooted over the rocky ground, Jack jumped into the water and swam to the rescue. “When I reached it,” Jack told his sister Gloria, “the mute sufferer climbed into the palm of my right hand and raised its voice in a seemingly endless series of wild agonized meows. I swam to shore cursing the boy, furiously now, since I remembered him telling me the cat had gone swimming. I had to splash him with water to get him out of my sight, but his brazen murderer’s face, his total inability to understand my concern, remains with me yet—as does the kitten. I wrapped her in my shorts, her bloody face, one leg half chewed away, more fleas than hairs, more scratches, cuts and bruises than a man could take and live, and yet this lived! Suddenly I began to cry for all the world’s cruelty, and my own. I have called her Diotima after the woman who taught Socrates all about love.”

  He and Truman never bought a farmhouse, and it was probably just as well. Much as he liked Paros, Truman was showing some restlessness by the time they left at the beginning of October. He asked Doris Lilly for Manhattan gossip, and he waited eagerly for the weekly boat that brought the latest magazines. In Athens he had picked up a pornographic version of Robinson Crusoe in which Crusoe and Friday engaged in practices unrecorded, and perhaps unimagined, by Daniel Defoe. “The whole notion opens vistas of pornographic possibility,” he pointed out to Newton, enthusiastically suggesting other revisions of great literary works: such as a Pride and Prejudice that paired Mr. Darcy with Mr. Bingley and an Uncle Tom’s Cabin that made a sexual quartet of Topsy, Little Eva, Simon Legree, and Uncle Tom himself. “And you can’t tell me,” he concluded, “that Tom Sawyer wasn’t in bed with Huckleberry!”

  A week before leaving Paros, he celebrated his birthday. Peering into the mirror that morning, he sadly observed that there had been a change: he no longer appeared ten years younger than he actually was. “My Birthday,” he noted in his diary: “34—and I almost look my age; wrinkles around the eyes.”

  37

  WHEN he docked in New York, in late October, 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was in the bookstores, and Holly Golightly had already taken her place in America’s fictional Hall of Fame. Of all his characters, Truman later said, Holly was his favorite, and it is easy to see why. She lives the Capote philosophy that Randolph and Judge Cool only talked about in Other Voices and The Grass Harp; her whole life is an expression of freedom and an acceptance of human irregularities, her own as well as everybody else’s. The only sin she recognizes is hypocrisy. In an early version, Truman gave her the curiously inappropriate name of Connie Gustafson; he later thought better and christened her with one, Holiday Golightly, that precisely symbolizes her personality: she is a woman who makes a holiday of life, through which she walks lightly.

  Almost all of the scatty young women he had known and admired sat for her portrait: Carol Marcus, Doris Lilly, Phoebe Pierce, Oona Chaplin and Gloria Vanderbilt. In many ways she is also like the young Nina Capote, as seen through the blinders of childhood. Both Nina and Holly grew up in the rural South and longed for the glitter and glamour of New York, and they both changed their hillbilly names, Lillie Mae and Lulamae, to those they considered more sophisticated. But the one Holly most resembles, in spirit if not in body, is her creator. She not only shares his philosophy, but his fears and anxieties as well—“the mean reds” she calls them. “You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of,” she says by way of explanation. For her the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany’s; nothing bad could happen, she says, amid “that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets,” and her dream is to have breakfast in that soothing setting. Her wish—the title of his story—is also borrowed. Truman had once heard an anecdote and filed it away, waiting for the time he could use it. During World War II a man of middle age entertained a Marine one Saturday night. The man enjoyed himself so much in the Marine’s muscular embrace that he felt he should buy him something to show his gratitude; but since it was Sunday when they woke up, and the stores were closed, the best he could offer was breakfast.

  “Where would you like to go?” he asked. “Pick the fanciest, most expensive place in town.”

  The Marine, who was not a native, had heard of only one fancy and expensive place in New York, and he said: “Let’s have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

  With publication came what Truman called the Holly Golightly Sweepstakes: half the women he knew, and a few he did not, claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine. Shortly after it appeared, Doris Lilly telephoned Andrew. “Have you read Truman’s new book?” she asked excitedly.

 
; “Why, yes,” said Andrew, who knew what she was really asking, but pretended to be ignorant. “Truman sent me a copy, and I enjoyed it very much.”

  “It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!” she screamed, unable to play the game any longer. Andrew repeated the conversation to Truman, who said, “Honey, you tell her, her, her for me, me, me that it is her. But it’s also Carol Marcus and Oona Chaplin.”

  Unfortunately, a Manhattan woman who bore the name Golightly also entered the sweepstakes. Charging invasion of privacy as well as libel, Bonnie Golightly sued him for eight hundred thousand dollars. Her case did not go very far. “It’s ridiculous for her to claim she is my Holly,” said Truman. “I understand she’s a large girl nearly forty years old. Why, it’s sort of like Joan Crawford saying she’s Lolita.”

  Most of the critics were kind both to his Holly and to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The most gratifying praise, however, came from a colleague who was usually as combative as Gore Vidal. “Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him,” wrote Norman Mailer. “He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which will become a small classic.”4

  In the early spring of 1959, Truman went back to Russia to do more research on his Moscow piece. When he returned, he and Jack went to Clarks Island, a small island just off the coast of Massachusetts, for the summer. Although their house had neither phone nor electricity—light was provided by kerosene lamps—he told Cecil that it was “wonderful, big, clean, light and breezy, surrounded by beautiful tree-filled lawns sloping down to beaches—much the best place we’ve ever had. Wonderful for work.”