Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  All but hidden behind his blatant self-pity, his whining rebukes, and his unguent wheedling was almost certainly a grain of genuine affection; in his own way he loved the son to whom he had given so little and from whom he now expected so much. “It is hardly necessary for me to say HOW PROUD I am,” he said, “proud—not that I am your father, BUT PROUD THAT YOU ARE MY SON. There IS a difference!!” What Truman felt about that midsummer downpour of words he did not say. He was not mortally offended, in any event—it was the same old Arch—and three months later came Truman’s invitation to see the filming of “The Thanksgiving Visitor.”

  On Monday, December 4, groups from both sides of Truman’s family converged on Montgomery. From Shreveport came Arch and Blanche; from various parts of Alabama and Georgia came representatives of the Persons clan; from Monroeville came his favorite aunt, Mary Ida Carter, her two sons and their wives. And from New York came Truman and Lee, whose superannuated Polish title had caused the staff of their Montgomery motel several days of nervous anticipation. “Should we call her Princess or Your Highness?” the waitresses in the coffee shop had anxiously asked. Truman and Lee were immediately driven to the decrepit farmhouse in the piney woods country south of town where the Perrys were re-creating his childhood. Holding Lee’s hand—as if he were still a child, a reporter noted—Truman walked through the old place, which had been decorated to look like Jennie’s house in Monroeville. “Marvelous!” he exclaimed. “Absolutely marvelous!”

  The following day the entire party assembled there for a picnic under a hot winter sun. Almost as if by prestidigitation, Gene Callahan, the film’s inventive art director, had spread two Oriental rugs on the muddy field next to the house and had piled them high with Italian food and wine, which were served from crystal bowls and silver wine coolers. Despite its incongruous splendor, however, the backwoods fěte champětre was not a total success. “Truman’s relatives just wouldn’t integrate,” said Eleanor Perry. “They gathered on one rug, and the rest of us on the other rug. I think they felt we were all New York people and too chi-chi for words, even though, except for Truman and Lee, we were all dressed in filthy blue jeans. Truman, who was wearing a Cardin jacket with more zippers than I could count, was nice to them, but his male cousins were very chip-on-the-shoulder with him. ‘He’s made it,’ they seemed to be thinking. ‘He’s a millionaire, and we’re just being tolerated.’ I remember especially the sullen face of a young cousin, a sheriff or God knows what, who obviously didn’t adore him. It really was a funny scene, like something out of a Fellini movie. There we were, surrounded by mud and cow dung, eating our Italian food and drinking wine that was cooled in silver buckets. At one point I looked up to see a goat and a black sharecropper, who was probably starving to death, watching us over the fence.”

  From the minute he arrived until the minute he left, Truman never stopped holding Lee’s hand. Arch, who all along had refused to believe that a son of his could be truly homosexual—he blamed Jack, whom he called “that bastard,” for leading him astray—saw his faith confirmed. “Don’t you never think he’s homosexual,” he later asserted. “He’s screwed more women than he has fingers and toes! He’s a real stud. I think he just loves it both ways, that’s all. He’s what you call a bisexual.” Watching him mooning over Lee on Callahan’s rug amid the cowpats, he was convinced that Truman’s preference had swung decisively toward women; above the clatter of plates and crystal he began to hear the stately progress of a wedding march. “I think he’s going to marry Lee Radziwill,” Arch announced with excitement. “He’s going to marry the princess!” Assuming the unaccustomed role of concerned father, he said to the princess herself, “Lee, I hope that you’ll work it out so that you and Truman can get married.”

  No doubt amused by his naïveté, she indicated that she shared his wishes, later repeating his remark to Truman, who did not find it equally funny. “I think you used very poor taste in saying that to Lee!” he yelled over his shoulder as he passed Arch during the evening. When he and Lee left for New York the next morning, December 6, Truman did not bother to say goodbye. By themselves, Arch’s misdeeds did not seem serious enough to provoke so much anger: added onto a thousand other grievances, promises broken and hopes smashed, they had been sufficient for Truman at last to cry, Enough, no more.

  Truman never saw his father again. Four years later, after losing his job and suffering a serious accident, Arch wrote to ask for an allowance of ten thousand dollars a year. But even in old age the huckster in him could not be stilled; he made a plea for help sound like a once-in-a-lifetime bargain, pointing out that because of inflation, ten thousand dollars in 1971 was equivalent to only two thousand in the distant past. Nor could he resist going perhaps one step too far, suggesting in addition that Truman provide him with a house in Colorado, Arch’s favorite state in the Union.

  Truman did not jump to grab that bargain. He thanked Arch for his frankness, but replied that at the moment an income-tax problem was tying up all his funds; he would be in touch when it was settled, he said. Ever the optimist, Arch translated that bland and equivocal reply into a promise. He was thus all the more disappointed a few months later when he received an unmistakable no. “He had that Jew lawyer he’s got write me a letter of three or four lines saying he couldn’t do anything for me. Down in the corner it said, ‘Copy to Mr. Capote.’ It was just as brutal as hell. It’s awful to have one son and have him turn his back on you, especially for no reason at all. It’s one of the mysteries of the world and I’m just flabbergasted. It hurts like hell, I’ll say that. I never did him anything in my life but good.”

  So he doubtless believed: Arch’s powers of self-deception were infinite. But Truman, who knew the true story behind “The Thanksgiving Visitor”—the mother and father who had abandoned him in a household of old maids while they were off pursuing their own lives elsewhere—was not deceived, and as he himself advanced into a troubled middle age, he was not disposed to forgive either. In 1977, four years before Arch died at the age of eighty-three, Truman entered a clinic for alcoholics and was handed a form that asked whether his parents were alive or dead. “I put down ‘mother deceased,’” he said. “Then I thought a minute and put down ‘father deceased’ too.”

  FOUR

  45

  THE day In Cold Blood was published, Jack attached a piece of paper to the screen door of Truman’s house in Sagaponack. “Le Beau Jour,” he had scrawled on it—“The Good Day.” But he was only half right; it was a day that was both good and bad. In some lives there are moments which, looked at later, can be seen as the lines that define the beginning of a dramatic rise or decline. It was Truman’s misfortune that for him the same day marked both. Even as he was reaching the summit, he was starting his descent. For years he had pondered the aphorism attributed to Saint Teresa—more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers—and had collected illustrious examples for his projected novel. Now he too was destined to join that unhappy list. His life began to slip out of control, and slowly at first, then with terrible speed, it careered ever downward.

  The proximate cause of his tragic fall—for that is what it was—was In Cold Blood itself. “He never really recovered from that book,” said Phyllis Cerf. “Until then he had been able to cope with all of his problems extremely well. But it was very destructive for him, especially when those boys wanted him to witness their hanging. I don’t know why he put himself through that, but he did. He thought that he was tougher than he was and that he could take it. But he couldn’t. That book started the unsettling of his life. He began to live—I don’t know—recklessly.”

  He had mined his subject, but his subject had also mined him, exhausting his nerves, his reservoir of patience, and his powers of concentration; depleting, in short, his capital as both a man and a writer. “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” he said. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me. Before I
began it, I was a stable person, comparatively speaking. Afterward, something happened to me. I just can’t forget it, particularly the hangings at the end. Horrible!” The memory of all he had gone through continued to reverberate in his head, he said, like the echo in the Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. And it delivered the same dark message: life is meaningless; or, as Forster phrased it, “everything exists, nothing has value.”

  Deepening his despair was his doubt that the book had been worth the sacrifice. He had been accorded money and acclaim in abundance, but he had been denied what he perhaps had yearned for most, the respect of the literary establishment—“how he longed for praise from the right people,” he had once confessed to Cecil. But that respect and praise were withheld. In Cold Blood did not receive either of what he believed, somewhat ingenuously, to be the establishment’s official seals of approval, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the latter of which Newton had won a quarter of a century before for his Melville biography. Displaying what in retrospect seems like a willful blindness, the judges for both awards passed over the most talked-about book of the year in favor of worthy but less important contenders.6

  Truman felt like a war hero who has hobbled home, expecting a parade, only to discover that others, who have never even seen the enemy up close, have picked up all the medals. His triumph was incomplete and therefore not a triumph at all: the right people, the ones who had snubbed him when he was Newton’s boyfriend with the blond bangs, were still looking down their snooty noses at him.

  His belief that he had been robbed of his just reward was confirmed when a spy informed him that one of the judges for the National Book Awards, Newsweek’s Saul Maloff, had persuaded his colleagues that the honor should go to a work less commercial than In Cold Blood. Truman never forgave an insult, and his revenge came a year and a half later when The Washington Post’s Sunday supplement, Book World, asked him what volumes he would like to give for Christmas. Maloff’s novel Happy Families would be just what Frank Sinatra needed, he said. With a pleasure that can be felt in every word, he explained why: Sinatra suffered from a bad case of insomnia, and “this numbing little novel, an anthology of every chichi literary cliché extant, would tranquilize a kangaroo revved to the rafters on speed.”7

  Truman’s conviction that he was the victim of a conspiracy was reinforced two years later when Norman Mailer was given both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night, his story of his participation in protests against the war in Viet Nam. There were significant differences between Mailer’s book and In Cold Blood (the most important was that Mailer made himself the main protagonist, while Truman never mentioned himself), but there was, as far as Truman was concerned, an even more significant similarity. Mailer also wrote nonfiction as if it were fiction, something he had never done before, and like Truman, he affixed a fancy but nonsensical label to his work: “History as a Novel, the Novel as History.” Whatever he called it, Truman was convinced that Mailer would not have thought of doing it but for the example of In Cold Blood and that if his old friend and rival had been honest, he would have added: “Variations on a Theme by Capote.”

  “I do something truly innovative, and who gets the prizes? Norman Mailer, who told me that what I was doing with In Cold Blood was stupid and who then sits down and does a complete ripoff. There has never been a greater literary ripoff in the twentieth century. He took everything that I had done, all of my hard work and experimental technique, and ripped it off. But I resent only one thing, and that is that neither Mr. Mailer nor all the others who copied me, like Mr. [Bob] Woodward and Mr. [Carl] Bernstein, ever said, ‘We owe Truman Capote something; he really invented this form.’ They got all the prizes and I got nothing! And I felt I deserved them. The decisions not to give them to me were truly, totally unjust. So at that point I said: ‘Fuck you! All of you! If you are so unjust and don’t know when something is unique and original and great, then fuck you! I don’t care about you anymore, or want to have anything to do with you. If you can’t appreciate something really extraordinary like In Cold Blood and the five-and-a-half years I put into it, and all of the artistry and the style and the skill, then fuck you!’”

  Yet it is doubtful that he would have been satisfied even if he had swept the honors. Sooner or later, some professor at Yale or Harvard would have written a disparaging article that would have persuaded him that the right people were still against him. His need for admiration had become insatiable; all the prizes in the world could not have filled it. In Cold Blood may have started his slide, but if it had not, something else almost certainly would have. As he entered middle age, the demons he thought he had exorcised long ago, the desperate fears of his lonely childhood, returned to tug at his elbow and whisper in his ear. “No words can express the secret agony of my soul,” said Dickens, describing the torments inflicted by the unyielding fears of his own childhood. “Even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time in my life.” So, in nearly the same words, might Truman have spoken. “Something in my life has done a terrible hurt to me,” he did in fact say, “and it seems to be irrevocable.”

  That hurt—so he believed, and so was probably the case—was caused by his mother’s unending rejection, and it was symbolized by the sound of a key turning in a door: the young Lillie Mae locking him in a hotel room as she left for an evening on the town. “I remember it all in such detail,” he said, his mind wandering back, as it did, more and more, to that time. “At this very moment I can see those rooms in St. Louis and New Orleans. That’s when my claustrophobia and fear of abandonment began. She locked me in and I still can’t get out. She was the cause of all my anxiety—‘free-floating anxiety’ is what all the psychiatrists say I have. If you’ve never had it, you don’t know what it’s like. It has the same relationship to ordinary anxiety as a migraine has to an ordinary headache. I live with it constantly. I’m never ever free from it.” Holly Golightly had given a name, “the mean reds,” to that hyperanxiety. “You’re afraid and you sweat like hell” was how she described it. “But you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

  “All our acts are acts of fear,” Truman had written in one of his early stories, “Shut a Final Door.” For a long time thereafter his own fears had been largely disguised by his high spirits; they may even have contributed to that puckish, clownish side of him. A frightened child has a choice of either hiding in a corner or showing off, demanding the spotlight that will drive away the darkness. Truman instinctively chose the latter course, and for years that immature side of him had served him well. One of the secrets of his appeal was his infectious exuberance and his refusal to be bound by grown-up conventions, his willingness, so rare in adults, to show affection and dislike and to say exactly what he was thinking. He could brag, lie and behave outrageously, but his friends, recognizing the excesses of a child, adored him anyway. Even his anger at Maloff and the National Book Award committee was evidence of a refreshing candor. All good writers want recognition and feel wounded and resentful when their best work is rejected; few are willing to expose and perhaps embarrass themselves by saying so. But the rebellious child within him had usually been kept in check by an adult of exceptionally clear vision and sound judgment. A remarkably sensitive gyroscope had prevented him from leaning too far in one direction or another.

  In the years after In Cold Blood, that gyroscope became less dependable and at last broke down altogether. “It’s as if two different people were inside of me,” he said. “One is highly intelligent, imaginative and mature, and the other is a fourteen-year-old. Sometimes one is in control, sometimes the other.” Flexing his muscles, the pugnacious adolescent more often pushed aside the increasingly weary adult, and the man in the middle, the Truman Capote the world saw, found it harder and harder to distinguish
between the possible and the impossible, between reality and unreality. It is unlikely, for example, that the Truman of a decade before would have embarked on such a feckless enterprise as trying to make Lee Radziwill into a movie star; or that he would have responded with quite such self-lacerating bitterness to the slights by the award givers.

  Contributing to the cloudiness of his judgment was an increasing dependence on pills and alcohol. Both had been part of his life since he was a teenager in Greenwich, stealing sleeping pills from his mother’s bedroom and sweet fruit brandies from Joe Capote’s bar. By the sixties, he had become addicted to tranquilizers and various other mood-altering pills, and alcohol, that old and trusty ally, had turned against him. “When I first knew him, we would have a little wine with lunch, then a martini,” said Phyllis Cerf. “But during the writing of In Cold Blood his drinking grew, grew, grew, grew. He would start with a double martini, have another with lunch, then a stinger afterward. That kind of heavy drinking was new with him.” By the early seventies, it had become obvious to him, as well as to everyone else, that he could no longer exist without the bottles in either his medicine chest or his liquor cabinet.

  “This phenomenon” Cecil had once christened him, worrying that someone who lived so intensely might someday burn himself out, might be too astonishingly incandescent to last. For a decade and more Truman had proved him wrong, moving more feverishly than ever. But in the months that followed publication of In Cold Blood, Cecil’s prediction at last came true: the phenomenon of the forties and fifties was no more. “I secretly feel T. is in a bad state and may not last long,” Cecil wrote in the spring of 1966. “He has become a real neurotic case.”