If Truman showed any of the tension he had referred to in his letters, it was not noticed by Cecil, who was caught up not only in his love affair, but also in a running feud with George Cukor, the director of My Fair Lady. During the following days in Los Angeles, Cecil was once again impressed by Truman’s ability to instantly take command. “He was completely at home on the [studio] lot here,” Cecil observed. “He was effusively received by the hypocrite Cukor & confided in by Rex [Harrison], who says that he likes working with Audrey [Hepburn], as she has such discipline, but she possesses no fire. Liz Taylor for all her slatterliness does possess this quality.”
After his California holiday, Truman dutifully went to Kansas, where he saw friends in Garden City and spent perhaps an hour and a half each with Perry and Dick in Lansing. “I had so much to say & discuss with you and so little time to say it in,” complained Perry a few days later. “It seemed as though we no sooner greeted each other, had a few brief words and here I was, back in my limbo again, feeling as though I was cheated of something and a little confused and disappointed.”
Truman associated Verbier with hard work and isolation, and in December, 1963, he let Jack go there by himself while he drove to Florida to stay with rich friends, the Gardner Cowleses in Miami Beach—Cowles owned Look magazine—and the Guinnesses in Palm Beach. He took Donald Windham with him to the Cowleses’, where he received a phone call telling him that Perry and Dick had won another appeal. Donald was witness to his depression and sudden nervousness, which manifested itself as a twitch in his cheek, a compulsive blink, and a darting, snakelike movement of his tongue. “I really have been feeling very low—almost bitter,” Truman confessed to the Deweys. “It’s all absolutely beyond belief. My God! Why don’t they just turn them loose and be done with it…. Well, there’s nothing to be done—except try to get through another year of this totally absurd and unnecessary torture.”
Jack lent his support from a distance. “Go on with your work, it’s a miracle of writing,” he said. “That’s what you must keep before you, day in, day out, waking and sleeping—your story.” But Truman’s restlessness sent his imagination off in a dozen different directions. He considered buying a house in Westchester, for example, not far from the Cerfs; but he quickly gave up the notion when Jack wrote back: “No, I want to be at least within bicycling-distance of water. Salt water!” He then said that he would like to spend the summer in Spain again. Jack sent a second veto, advising him to stay in America, close to his story. In the end, they again rented a house on Long Island, where Truman at last bought a piece of American real estate, a small house in Sagaponack, just east of Bridgehampton.
About a hundred yards from the ocean, the house had a high-ceilinged living room and a tiny bedroom downstairs; upstairs, reached by a spiral staircase, were two or three more rabbit-warren bedrooms. Jack hated the place immediately, believing, probably rightly, that they both would go mad in such a small space. He said nothing, but Truman undoubtedly read his face: not long after, he also bought the house next door. He would live in the first house, he said, and Jack would live in the second.
Thus they had found the ideal arrangement: they were within hailing distance, but they could not see each other through the trees and shrubs. Truman’s house was just right for him. He removed walls upstairs, giving his little house a more spacious feeling. Jack’s house was just right for him, an old-fashioned gingerbread cottage, with one large room downstairs and another one upstairs. He was so pleased, in fact, that, hat in hand—an unusual gesture for him—he asked Truman for title to his own house: he was forty-nine and, standing on his own ground at last, he yearned for the security of actual ownership. “I never asked Truman for anything,” he said. “I never asked him for favors. But I did ask him for my house, and he gave me the deeds for both of them in a butterfly box. He said that it was too much trouble to separate titles, so I could have them both in my name. I have never seen anybody else in my life do anything as generous as that.”
In October, 1964, Truman went back to Kansas, taking with him Sandy Campbell—Donald Windham’s lover—who was a fact checker at The New Yorker, assigned, at Truman’s request, to check the accuracy of In Cold Blood. They first flew to Denver, where Truman had arranged a party for some of his Garden City friends, most notably the Deweys, and Mary Louise Aswell, who had left Harper’s Bazaar in the fifties for a new life in New Mexico. The Deweys, Sandy noted in his diary, were almost like parents to Truman: he called Alvin Pappy, and Alvin had nicknamed him Coach. They then drove east to Garden City, where Sandy verified such things as dates and distances. Sandy said that he had worked with many New Yorker writers, including A. J. Liebling, Richard Rovere and Lillian Ross, but Truman was the most accurate. It was the opinion of Mary Louise that Truman most treasured, however, and he anxiously awaited her verdict on the first three-quarters of his book. He was profoundly pleased by her response. “That you really liked my book was so touching, and such a reward. I sort of dreaded your reading it—because I knew that if I was fooling myself, and had made a real mistake (about the artistic possibilities of reportage) you wouldn’t have been able to lie (successfully).”
Just before Christmas, Truman spoke, as he had before, at the Poetry Center of Manhattan’s Ninety-second Street Y.M.H.A. The program said he would read from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But some, suspecting that he would surprise them with In Cold Blood instead, arrived with more than the usual eagerness, like movie fans hoping for the sneak preview of a long-anticipated film. They were not disappointed. Newsweek, which sent a reporter, said that the effect he created was like that of “a fabulist of the old order, weaving a spell with voice and word, making one hear, see, feel, sense. What he shaped was a whole landscape and the fateful people in it.”
Perry’s and Dick’s numerous appeals not only caused him depression and anxiety. They presented him with an insoluble moral dilemma. He desperately wanted his book to be published. But publication almost certainly meant the painful deaths of two men who regarded him as their friend and benefactor, two men whom he had helped, counseled, and, in Perry’s case, tutored. “It wasn’t a question of my liking Dick and Perry,” he carefully explained to an interviewer. “That’s like saying, ‘Do you like yourself?’ What mattered was that I knew them, as well as I know myself.”
His entire future awaited their walk to the Big Swing, and his comments to his friends, which indicated his real feelings, ran like a grim counterpoint to the consoling comments he was making to Perry and Dick. Perry was of course unhappy when the Supreme Court refused in January, 1965, to hear their latest appeal. But where he saw a black cloud, Truman saw a ray of sunshine. “As you may have heard,” he told Mary Louise, “the Supreme Court denied the appeals (this for the third damn time), so maybe something will soon happen one way or another. I’ve been disappointed so many times I hardly dare hope. But keep your fingers crossed.” To Cecil he added: “I’m finishing the last pages of my book—I must be rid of it regardless of what happens. I hardly give a fuck anymore what happens. My sanity is at stake—and that is no mere idle phrase. Oh the hell with it. I shouldn’t write such gloomy crap—even to someone as close to me as you.”
In Verbier, waiting out events, he decided not to go back to America for the execution in February, working out an arrangement by which Sandy Campbell would cable him, word for word, the story in the Kansas City Star. “Hope this doesn’t sound insane,” he wrote Sandy, “but the way I’ve constructed things, I will be able to complete the entire ms. within hours after receiving [the] cable. Keep everything crossed.” At the last moment the hangings were postponed once again. Desperate for information, he made a transatlantic call to one of the defense lawyers, who infuriated him by suggesting that Perry and Dick might not only escape the noose, but actually gain their freedom. “And I thought: yes, and I hope you’re the first one they bump off, you sonofabitch,” he told the Deweys, who shared his frustration. “But what I actually said was: ‘Is that really your id
ea of justice?—that after killing four people, they ought to be let out on the streets?’”
The lawyer’s optimism was unfounded, and the hangings were rescheduled for the early hours of April 14. This time Truman could not stay away—Perry and Dick had asked him to be with them—and he returned to America. Accompanied by Joseph Fox, who had replaced Bob Linscott as his editor at Random House, Truman arrived in Kansas City a day or two early. “He was incredibly tense and unable to really talk to anybody for more than two or three minutes at a time,” recalled Fox. “Tears rolled down his cheeks at the thought of what was going to happen. Alvin came to call, along with a couple of the other K.B.I, agents, and Truman would pace around our suite at the Muehlebach Hotel. At night we went to the movies or strip shows and transvestite shows—Kansas City is one of the six or seven biggest transvestite centers in the country.”
For some reason, Perry and Dick thought that Truman might help them obtain another stay of execution, and they tried desperately to reach him. Perry telephoned the hotel two or three times, and an assistant warden, acting on their behalf, tried seven or eight times more. But another delay was the last thing Truman wanted. Rather than say no, he let Fox answer the phone and make his excuses. Finally Perry telegraphed the Muehlebach. “AM ANTICIPATION AND WAITING YOUR VISIT. HAVE BELONGINGS FOR YOU. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE BY RETURN WIRE WHEN YOU EXPECT TO BE HERE.” Truman cabled back: “DEAR PERRY, UNABLE TO VISIT YOU TODAY, BECAUSE NOT PERMITTED. ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND. TRUMAN.”
Perry was aware, of course, that he was lying—that he would have been permitted to visit. At 11:45 that night, one hour and fifteen minutes before the noose was put around his neck, he sat down and wrote a joint letter to him and Nelle. “Sorry that Truman was unable to make it here at the prison for a brief word or two prior to [the] neck-tie party. Whatever his reason for not showing up, I want you to know that I cannot condemn you for it & understand. Not much time left but want you both to know that I’ve been sincerely grateful for your friend[ship] through the years and everything else. I’m not very good at these things—I want you both to know that I have become very affectionate toward you. But harness time. Adios Amigos. Best of everything, Your friend always, Perry.”
In a heavy rain, Truman and Joe drove to the prison, and Truman was able to say a few last words to each of them. Dick was hanged first. “I just want to say I hold no hard feelings,” he said. “You people are sending me to a better world than this ever was.” Less than half an hour later he was dead. Just after 1 A.M. Perry was brought into the warehouse where the gallows had been set up. “I think it’s a helluva thing to take a life in this manner,” he said. “I don’t believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute, something…” He stopped, and in a lower voice, added: “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.” The rope was placed around his neck, a black mask was put over his eyes, and at 1:19 A.M. he too was pronounced dead.
Crying, Truman later called Jack to describe the terrible scene he had witnessed. Jack was unsympathetic. “They’re dead, Truman,” he said. “You’re alive.”
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AND so at last the wait was over. Truman flew back to New York, tightly gripping Joe Fox’s hand all the way and carrying with him a forty-page essay in which Perry had set down his thoughts on life and death. “De Rebus Incognitis” (“Concerning Unknown Things”), Perry had titled it, ending with a sentiment that may or may not have consoled him when the rope was placed around his neck: “Did we not know we were to die, we would be children; by knowing it, we are given our opportunity to mature in spirit. Life is only the father of wisdom; death is the mother.”
Reading those unexpected words from the grave only prolonged Truman’s distress, and in the next few days he made many more tearful phone calls to friends and relatives. “Perry and Dick were executed last Tuesday,” he wrote Donald Cullivan. “I was there. I stayed with Perry to the end. He was calm and very brave. It was a terrible experience and I will never get over it. Someday I will try to tell you about it. But for the moment I am still too shattered. Over the years I’d become very devoted to Perry. And Dick, too.” Then, as if to assuage his guilt for refusing to talk to them until the hour before they were hanged, he added: “Everything possible was done to save them.” Days later, at a cost of seventy dollars and fifty cents each, he ordered simple granite markers for their graves, which were placed side by side in a cemetery near the prison:
RICHARD EUGENE HICKOCK PERRY EDWARD SMITH
June 6, 1931 Oct. 27, 1928
April 14, 1965 April 14, 1965
By the middle of June he had completed the pages describing their last night, when the rain, rapping on the high warehouse roof, sounded “not unlike the rat-a-tat-tat of parade drums.” In Cold Blood was finished. “Bless Jesus,” he exclaimed to Cecil. “But incredible to suddenly be free (comparatively) of all these years and years of tension and aging. At the moment, only feel bereft. But grateful. Never again!”
Everything he had set out to do Truman succeeded in doing. He had gambled and he had won. On a superficial level, In Cold Blood is a murder story of riveting vitality and suspense. On a deeper level, it is what he had always known it could be, a Big Work—a masterpiece, in fact, that he has infused with the somber energy of Greek tragedy. With stately, even majestic confidence he sets his scene in the first paragraph. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”
Employing the skills he had learned as a screenwriter, he presents his main protagonists in short, cinematic scenes: the Clutters, unsuspectingly awaiting their fate in the shadows of those dignified grain elevators, and their killers, racing across Kansas to meet them, Nemesis in a black Chevrolet. Going about its peaceful pursuits in Holcomb is one America—prosperous, secure, and a little smug. Along with his many good qualities, Herb Clutter is rigid and self-righteous; he promises to fire any employee caught “harboring alcohol,” and he refuses to let Nancy even consider marrying her boyfriend, whose only offense is that he is Catholic. Speeding across the plains is the other America—poor, rootless and misbegotten. “Transient hearts,” Randolph prophetically named such people in Other Voices; envy and self-pity are their only legacies, violence their only handiwork. Together, victims and killers are America in microcosm—light and dark, goodness and evil.
Truman had long maintained that nonaction could be both as artful and as compelling as fiction. In his opinion the reason it was not—that it was generally considered a lesser class of writing—was that it was most often written by journalists who were not equipped to exploit it. Only a writer “completely in control of fictional techniques” could elevate it to the status of art. “Journalism,” he said, “always moves along on a horizontal plane, telling a story, while fiction—good fiction—moves vertically, taking you deeper and deeper into character and events. By treating a real event with fictional techniques (something that cannot be done by a journalist until he learns to write good fiction), it’s possible to make this kind of synthesis.” Because good fiction writers had usually disdained reporting, and most reporters had not learned to write good fiction, the synthesis had not been made, and nonfiction had never realized its potential. It was marble awaiting a sculptor, a palette of paints awaiting an artist. He was the first to show what could be done with that unappreciated material, he insisted, and In Cold Blood was a new literary s
pecies, the nonfiction novel.
By that he meant that he had written it as he would have a novel, but, instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. Perry and Dick, Herb Clutter and Alvin Dewey were as much figures in history as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He could no more have altered their characters for the sake of his story than he could have affixed a moustache under Washington’s nose or shaved off Lincoln’s beard. He was fenced in by the barbed wire of fact. Yet within those boundaries, he believed that there was far more latitude than other writers had ever realized, freedom to juxtapose events for dramatic effect, to re-create long conversations, even to peer inside the heads of his characters and tell what they are thinking. “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere,” said Flaubert. And so, in the universe of In Cold Blood, is Truman’s presence felt in every sentence.
One by one, he repeats the themes, images, and leitmotifs that permeate his novels and short stories: loneliness, the death of innocence, and the danger that lurks in every shadow. In an uncanny way, his true-life chronicle is the culmination of his fiction, the logical extension of all that he had written before. From a multitude of facts he presents only those that interest him. Or, in his words: “I built an oak and reduced it to a seed.” Another writer might have laid emphasis on Holcomb’s small-town closeness and the warmth and good-heartedness of its citizens. Truman chooses instead to pick up a thread from his fiction and to dwell on its isolation. Though one sits on arid plains and the other is surrounded by swamps, his Holcomb sounds very much like the Noon City of Other Voices—lonesome is the adjective he applies to both. Finney County becomes Capote country, and the people who move through his pages become Capote characters.
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