Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  He did not do much work, however, and, to judge from his letters, even in that isolated spot he was mesmerized by the biggest society drama since the Woodward killing: Leland Hayward had left Slim for Pamela Churchill. “Your item about Leland and Pam C. stunned me,” he wrote Cecil, who had informed him of the news. “I’d heard nothing about it! Babe, who is in Biarritz, did not mention it in her last letter, though that reached here several weeks ago. Toward the end of May, just before I came here, I saw Leland and Mrs. C. in tete-a-tete at a restaurant—and I kidded them, and said I was going to write Slim (who had already left for Europe, where Leland was supposed to join in a week—but never did). As a matter of fact, with my usual gaucherie, I did write Slim asking if she knew her husband was running around with the notorious Mrs. C. Oh dear! Are you sure it’s true? Has he really left Slim? Please write me what you know. I am devoted to Slim; I’m amazed she hasn’t written me, I must find out where she is at once.”

  Cecil’s news was indeed true. In New York, Bennett Cerf told Truman, people were taking sides—for Slim or Pamela—as if they were watching a World Series. In August, Truman visited the Paleys at their retreat in New Hampshire and dispatched a report to Cecil. “There was much talk about what is termed ‘Topic A’—the Hayward-Churchill fandango. I had a long letter from Slim, very touching, very regretful, but full of good-sense; it seems that Leland has never asked her for a divorce, though Mrs. C. tells everyone she will be Mrs. H. in November. The whole thing has caused a ‘situation’ among the Cushing girls: Babe and Minnie have vowed undying enmity to ‘that bitch,’ while sister Betsey is Mrs. C’s greatest partisan (so grateful is she that the threat to her own happy home has been removed).

  “Tout New York is divided into warring camps—the pro-Slim contingent, led by Mrs. Paley with Jerome Robbins and Mainbocher [America’s reigning dress designer of the forties and fifties] as seconds in command, have already sent Mrs. [Arthur] Hornblow to the firing-squad because she gave a dinner for Leland and Mrs. C.—which was odd, considering she has always been so close a friend of Slim’s. No doubt Mrs. C. will be the winner in the coming contest. Needless to say, I am a Slimite to the death.” Mrs. C. was the winner, and she became the new Mrs. Leland Hayward on May 4, 1960. Shortly thereafter, Slim cabled Truman. “I wonder,” she said bitterly, “if she tied a ribbon on it.”

  Truman remained a Slimite. A year or so later he telephoned her, begging for help. “What possible trouble or disaster could befall Pamela?” he inquired.

  “I don’t know. Why?” demanded Slim, who had probably been asking herself the same question.

  “Well, I sent a cable to Gloria Guinness saying, ‘Isn’t it a shame about Pam?’ Now I know I’m going to get a cable back, saying, ‘What do you mean?’ And I’ve got to invent something quickly. But what can it be? She can’t be pregnant.”

  “No. She can’t be pregnant. We know she can’t be pregnant. I don’t know what it could be, but I’ll try to think of something.” Slim was as good as her word, and her telegram soon arrived with the answer: “How about clap—as in applause?”

  After finishing forty pages of his Moscow article, Truman went to William Shawn with an embarrassing confession: he could not complete it. If he did, he said, and his subjects’ pro-Western views were revealed, they might be sent to Siberia, or perhaps even a firing squad. He offered to give back his advance, but Mr. Shawn graciously told him to keep it, to apply it to his next project for The New Yorker.

  Although he still talked about Answered Prayers, Truman’s mind was really on nonaction. “I like the feeling that something is happening beyond and about me and I can do nothing about it,” he explained to a reporter. “I like having the truth be the truth so I can’t change it.” He was too restless to settle down to fiction, he told the now elderly Glenway Wescott. “I couldn’t sit there to write,” he said. “It was as though there were a box of chocolates in the next room, and I couldn’t resist them. The chocolates were that I wanted to write fact instead of fiction. There were so many things that I knew I could investigate, so many things that I knew I could find out about. Suddenly the newspapers all came alive, and I realized that I was in terrible trouble as a fiction writer.”

  In that mood he opened The New York Times on Monday, November 16, 1959. There, all but hidden in the middle of page 39, was a one-column story headlined, “WEALTHY FARMER, 3 of FAMILY SLAIN.” The dateline was Holcomb, Kansas, November 15, and the story began: “A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged.”

  38

  IN describing the genesis of a successful work, a writer often will say that he stumbled across his idea, giving the impression that it was purely a matter of luck, like finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. The truth, as Henry James observed, is usually different: “His discoveries are, like those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than alert recognitions. He comes upon the interesting thing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in the right direction for it.”

  So it was that Truman, who had been moving in the right direction for several years, came across his San Salvador, his interesting thing, in that brief account of cruel death in far-off Kansas: he had been looking for it, or something very much like it. For no apparent reason, four people had been slain: Herbert Clutter; his wife, Bonnie; and two of their four children, Nancy, sixteen, and Kenyon, fifteen. As he read and reread those spartan paragraphs, Truman realized that a crime of such horrifying dimensions was a subject that was indeed beyond him, a truth he could not change. Even the location, a part of the country as alien to him as the steppes of Russia, had a perverse appeal. “Everything would seem freshly minted,” he later explained, reconstructing his thinking at that time. “The people, their accents and attitude, the landscape, its contours, the weather. All this, it seemed to me, could only sharpen my eye and quicken my ear.” Finally he said to himself, “Well, why not this crime? The Clutter case. Why not pack up and go to Kansas and see what happens?”

  When he appeared at The New Yorker to show Mr. Shawn the clipping, the identity of the killer, or killers, was still unknown, and might never be known. But that, as he made clear to Shawn, was beside the point, or at least the point he wanted to make. What excited his curiosity was not the murders, but their effect on that small and isolated community. “As he originally conceived it, the murders could have remained a mystery,” said Shawn, who once again gave his enthusiastic approval. “He was going to do a piece about the town and the family—what their lives had been. I thought that it could make some long and wonderful piece of writing.”

  Truman asked Andrew Lyndon to go with him, but Andrew was otherwise engaged. Then he turned to Nelle Harper Lee. Nelle, whose own book, To Kill a Mockingbird, was finished but not yet published, agreed immediately. “He said it would be a tremendously involved job and would take two people,” she said. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.” Watching with some amusement as the two amateur sleuths nervously made their plans, Jack wrote his sister: “Did you read about the murder of the Clutter family out in Kansas? Truman’s going out there to write a piece on it. The murder is unsolved!! He’s taking Nelle Harper Lee, an old childhood friend, out with him to play his girl Friday, or his Delia Street (Perry Mason’s sec’t.). I hope he’ll be all right. I told him curiosity killed the cat, and he looked scared—till I added that satisfaction brought it back.”

  He also enlisted the aid of Bennett Cerf, who, he correctly assumed, had well-placed acquaintances in every state of the union. “I don’t know a soul in the whole state of Kansas,” he told Bennett. “You’ve got to introduce me to some people out there.” By coincidence, Bennett had recently spoken at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and had made a friend of its president, James McCain. By furthe
r coincidence, McCain had known the murdered Clutter family, as he did nearly everyone else in Finney County. He would give Truman all necessary introductions, he told Bennett, if, in exchange, Truman would stop first at the university to speak to the English faculty. “I accept for Truman right now,” Bennett responded. “Great!”

  Thus assured, in mid-December Truman boarded a train for the Midwest, with Nelle at his side and a footlocker stuffed with provisions in his luggage. “He was afraid that there wouldn’t be anything to eat out there,” said Nelle. After a day and a night in Manhattan, where the Kansas State English faculty gave him a party, they rented a Chevrolet and drove the remaining 270 miles to Garden City, the Finney County seat. They arrived at twilight, a month to the day after he had come upon his interesting thing in the back pages of the Times. But if he had realized then what the future held, Truman said afterward, he never would have stopped. “I would have driven straight on. Like a bat out of hell.”

  When people speak of Middle America or the American heart-land, they are talking about Garden City, or somewhere very much like it. Located at the western edge of the state, only sixty-six miles from the Colorado line, it sits on the semiarid high plains, at a point where the continent begins to stretch upward before making its great leap to the Rocky Mountains. “Pop. 11,811,” read a brochure of the Santa Fe Railroad, whose trains passed through there on their daily runs between Chicago and the West Coast. “Largest irrigation area in midwest with unlimited supply of underground water. World’s largest known gas field. Sugar beet factory. Largest zoo in Kansas, largest buffalo herd in midwest.” Although the pamphlet did not note it, in December, 1959, Garden City was also prosperous, mostly from wheat and natural gas, and staunchly Republican, a town of teetotalers and devout Christians who filled twenty-two churches every Sunday morning.

  There was not much more to say. Unlike Dodge City, forty-six miles to the east, where Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp had dispatched a platoon of outlaws to Boot Hill—the real Boot Hill—Garden City had led a colorless and relatively placid existence. The terrible events in the outlying village of Holcomb, just six miles west on U.S. Route 50, were thus even more shocking than they might have been in many other places. As Truman had predicted, the murder of the Clutters had started an epidemic of fear. Robbery did not seem to be the motive, and the peculiar brutality of the killings—Herb Clutter’s throat had been cut before he was shot—led most people to believe that the killings were the doing of a vengeful psychopath, someone local who might well have other targets in mind. Lights burned all night; doors that had never been locked were bolted; loaded guns were placed next to beds.

  It was into that atmosphere, darkened by fear and mistrust, that Truman and Nelle now came. A few people may have recognized his name; the Garden City public library owned two of his books, Other Voices and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But no one in those parts had ever seen anyone remotely like Truman. In their eyes, said Nelle, “he was like someone coming off the moon.” Inevitably he was greeted with derision. Asked what he had thought of Truman, one resident was most likely replying for the majority when he later drawled, “Well… I’d sure hate to tell you.” Jokes were made about his mannerisms and his height. “By God! Don’t he look like a little old banty rooster?” observed one farmer to everyone within earshot. At Christmas parties imitations of his voice were heard as often as “Jingle Bells.” Some people were openly hostile; a few suspected that someone so strange-looking might be the killer, returning to rejoice in the commotion he had caused. Truman did not look like a reporter, certainly, and it did him no good to say that he was on assignment for The New Yorker—the magazine had more readers in Moscow than in Finney County.

  His ability to charm, which had overcome many other formidable obstacles, momentarily failed him, moreover. Soon after arriving, he and Nelle walked into the office of Alvin Dewey, who was supervising the investigation for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. He needed a long interview, Truman told Dewey. Telephones were ringing, other detectives were waiting to make their reports, and Dewey, a tall, good-looking man of forty-seven, was not at all impressed by the names Truman dropped. He refused to grant an interview. Truman would have to get his information from the daily press conferences, he said, just like all the other reporters. “But I’m not a newspaperman,” Truman objected. “I need to talk to you in depth. What I’m going to write will take months. What I am here for is to do a very special story on the family, up to and including the murders. It really doesn’t make any difference to me if the case is ever solved or not.”

  “Well, he could have talked all day without saying that,” Dewey recalled. “Solving the case made one hell of a difference to me.” Truman was lucky, in fact, that the detective, who had lost twenty pounds in an almost round-the-clock search for leads, did not throw him out. Not only was he the agent in charge, but the Clutters had been family friends, fellow parishioners of Garden City’s United Methodist Church, people much-admired and much-liked. Time and again Dewey had looked at photographs of their bodies in hopes of discovering some hitherto hidden clue. Time and again he had seen nothing but horror. “Nancy’s forehead, where the shotgun blast exited, reminded me of the jagged peaks of a mountain range,” he remembered.

  Under those circumstances, his reaction to Truman’s flippant remark was surprisingly indulgent. “I’d like to see your press card, Mr. Capote” was all he said. Truman meekly admitted that he had none, but offered to display his passport instead. Dewey was not interested and told him once again the time of his press conferences. At last Truman gave up, and the next morning he and Nelle took their places among the other reporters.

  James McCain’s letters and calls opened a few important doors, but Nelle’s help proved more valuable during those difficult first days. Her roots were still in Monroeville, and she knew how farmers and the inhabitants of small towns thought and talked. She was the kind of woman people in Finney County were accustomed to; where he shocked, she soothed. “Nelle walked into the kitchen, and five minutes later I felt I had known her for a long time,” said Dolores Hope, a columnist for the Garden City Telegram.

  Not once was he or Nelle seen taking notes: it was Truman’s theory that the sight of a notebook, or worse still, a tape recorder, inhibited candor. People would reveal themselves, he maintained, only in seemingly casual conversations. Unless they saw a pen or pencil flying across a page, they could not believe that their words were being recorded. “It wasn’t like he was interviewing you at all,” said Wilma Kidwell, the mother of Nancy Clutter’s best friend Susan. “He had a way of leading you into things without your knowing it.” Only when they had returned to the Warren Hotel did he and Nelle separate and commit to paper what they had learned. Each wrote a separate version of the day’s interviews; they then compared notes over drinks and dinner. “Together,” declared Nelle, “we would get it right.” Their method was time-consuming but productive. When their combined memory failed, as it sometimes did, they went back and asked their questions in a slightly different way. On occasion they talked to the same person three times in one day.

  The farmers who plowed that flat and forbidding terrain did not work harder than the two who came to talk to them. “It was always bitter cold, really so incredibly cold on the plains,” said Truman. “We would drive out to some lonely ranch or farmhouse to interview the people who lived there, and almost invariably they had a television set on. They seemed to keep it on twenty-four hours a day. They would sit there talking—and never look at us! They would go on looking straight at the TV screen, even if there was just a station break or an advertisement. If the television wasn’t on, if the light wasn’t flickering, they began to get the shakes. I guess television has become an extension of people’s nervous systems.”

  Nowhere else had he felt at such a loss. The Kansans spoke the same language, paid their bills in the same currency, and pledged allegiance to the same flag. Yet they seemed utterly different. If they thought that he had dropped f
rom the moon, he may have wondered if that was where he had arrived. A CARE package from Babe Paley, a tin of delicious black caviar, reminded him how far he was from his friends and all the things he loved. At one particularly bleak point, he despaired, telling Nelle that he was thinking of giving up and going home. “I cannot get any rapport with these people,” he told her. “I can’t get a handle on them.” She bucked him up. “Hang on,” she said. “You will penetrate this place.”

  So he did, on Christmas Day, appropriately enough. Dolores Hope had told her husband, Clifford, one of the town’s leading lawyers, that they ought to share their holiday dinner with someone who had no other place to go. The visitors from New York fitted that description and were invited to partake of the Hopes’ dinner of duck and twice-baked potatoes. “Of course, Truman dominated the conversation,” recalled Mrs. Hope. “Once you got over the high-pitched voice, why, you didn’t think about it, really. It was not your everyday Garden City talk. The things he said were from another world, and they were fascinating for us. It was a right pleasant day. People started calling me. Had I really had him to dinner? I said yes, and then things kind of started for him. Entertaining him became the in-thing to do. He was an attraction and people didn’t want to be left out.”

  The switchboard at the Warren Hotel began buzzing with invitations from the local aristocracy. Instead of imitating his voice, people found themselves listening to the real thing and, for the most part, liking what they were hearing. Even Alvin Dewey, who attended one of those parties, melted when his wife, Marie, who had been born and bred in New Orleans, discovered another native of that city. Within a night or two, Truman and Nelle were at the Dewey house dining on grits, gumbo, and red beans and rice, a menu that few steak-and-potato Midwesterners could properly appreciate. Within a week the Deweys had become such good friends that Truman felt free to give Alvin a nickname, Foxy. “Foxy, you’re not telling me everything!” he would say, with an accusing wag of his finger. He and Nelle were at the Deweys’ the night of December 30, 1959, when Alvin received the phone call he had been praying for: two suspects in the Clutter murders had been arrested in Las Vegas. Elated, Alvin made plans to go get them. Truman asked if he could go along. “Not this time, partner,” Alvin replied.