Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  From the first, Truman’s writing had been tinged with nostalgia, a yearning for a serene and smiling past that he himself had not known, nor given to his fictional characters. “Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky” was the song Holly had sung as she sat on her fire escape, plaintively strumming her guitar. But nostalgia did not provide him the bittersweet pleasure it offers many others. It was, rather, the manifestation of a pessimism so profound that it darkened every waking moment. “People think I do frivolous things, and I do,” he said, “but it’s in defiance of this feeling of mutability and death being the central factor of life.”

  Since his childhood had not provided him with the parental love that usually brings later contentment, he had manufactured his happiness, conjuring it out of his imagination as he had his fiction. After In Cold Blood he was no longer able to summon the energy to perform that magic act. Nostalgia descended into sorrow, and to those who knew him well he seemed to be in perpetual mourning, overwhelmed by a sense of loss that was no less keen because he could not say precisely what it was that had been taken from him.

  There were even signs that he was growing disenchanted with the very rich and that, on occasion, he was bored by the swans. He had walked on Olympus and had discovered that those who resided there were not heaven’s anointed after all. It was a shock—not to his intellect, which had always known better, but to his emotions, which had not. The myth by which he had lived was starting to crumble. He floundered like a man who has lost his religion, and his confidence ebbed with his faith. The sunshine of prior years shone less and less frequently, the clouds gathering so swiftly that it seemed as if they had come from nowhere. That was not the case: they had been there, circling the horizon, all along.

  The theme that ran through his life—a ceaseless but unsuccessful search for love—can be likened to a leitmotif in certain symphonies and operas. Surrounded by strings and trumpets at the beginning, the chord sparkles with optimism and laughter; all is possible, it seems to say. Then the tempo of the music slows, and mellow oboes and deep-voiced horns crowd out the lighter instruments that had danced around that melodic line; the best is over, the chord now seems to say, it is past and done. The same notes that once had sung with the high spirits of spring begin to speak of melancholy autumn and the winter that will come after. To the audience that still hears the exuberant echo of their earlier incarnation, they sound, indeed, heartrendingly sad.

  46

  “IF an idea is really haunting you, it will stay with you for years and years,” Truman had once said. “Drain you like a vampire until you get rid of it by writing it down.” So had he been haunted by the idea of Answered Prayers. Although he put it aside when he went to Kansas, he never doubted that one day he would return to it. “Oh, how easy it’ll be by comparison!” he told a reporter in 1965, a week or so after he had finished In Cold Blood. “It’s all in my head.”

  But the day of return was continually postponed as he embarked on one bootless project after another, an increasingly lengthy list that included not only his ill-conceived television adaptations for Lee, but also his documentary on capital punishment, Death Row, U.S.A., and a new second act for House of Flowers, which was being produced Off Broadway. Added to all the other diversions that are thrust upon a famous author, those endeavors disguised the fact that except for the few final pages of In Cold Blood, he had written scarcely anything of his own since the summer of 1964.

  Perhaps, unconsciously, that was his wish, and haunted though he was, he seemed curiously reluctant to begin Answered Prayers. What had seemed an easy task in the summer of 1965, when it lay off in a hazy distance, appeared considerably more difficult when the time approached to sharpen his Blackwing pencils. One of the reasons may have been that the subject now repelled as much as it mesmerized him. He had not become fixed on Saint Teresa’s aphorism because he saw in it the kernel of a novel. He had fastened on it because it expressed his own bleak vision of life, his belief that fate punishes those it seems to favor by giving them precisely what they desire. It was a variation on an ancient adage: every large gift exacts a large price—“she who lent him sweetness made him blind,” said Homer. Again and again he had watched different casts reenacting the same pathetic drama.

  In the fifties, when he first conceived the idea of transforming that theme into fiction, he could only have imagined, or have had a presentiment of, finding himself once again an actor in that mournful play. His greatest triumph was still ahead of him; his own prayers were yet to be answered. By the late sixties they had been answered, and he realized that he was paying a price for them. It must have occurred to him that Answered Prayers would not only be his most ambitious work; in the loosest sense, it would also be his autobiography. He would be writing about his own disenchantment, as well as that of his characters.

  The other reasons for his hesitation were probably more practical. He shuddered at the prospect of another long and lonely labor. And he feared that even if he did make such a commitment, his talent might not match his ambition. Except for two short stories, “Among the Paths to Eden” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” he had not attempted fiction since Breakfast at Tiffany’s ten years before. As he thought again about Answered Prayers in the late sixties, he must have wondered if he were still in trouble; whether, indeed, he could still write a novel.

  Raising the level of his anxiety even higher was an ambition that had grown beyond the bounds of reason. Inspired by the example of Flaubert, he had always set for himself the most elevated standards—“I aspire,” he had jotted in a schoolboy notebook—but until In Cold Blood he had been a practical perfectionist. He had aimed high, but he had not insisted that he produce a great work every time he picked up his pad. That sensible approach was another victim of his malfunctioning gyroscope: his expectations now exceeded rational limits. Answered Prayers had to be a masterpiece. Nothing less would do if he were to be true to his art and, at the same time, thumb his nose at those mocking, smirking faces in the literary establishment. “When I didn’t get those prizes, I said to myself: ‘I’m going to write a book that will make you all ashamed of yourselves. You’re going to find out what a really, really gifted writer with a great determination can do!’”

  Setting such an extravagant goal did not send him rushing to put words on paper, however. It did for him what it probably would have done for any other writer: it constructed a writer’s block as impenetrable as the Great Pyramid. His approach toward his craft, so admirable in theory, was well-nigh paralyzing in practice. Even the steady and productive hand of Henry James, the Master himself, would have shaken if he had sat down at his desk every morning with such a warlike, uncompromising spirit.

  Small wonder that Truman stopped and allowed himself to be continually detoured from his path and purpose. Looking at that most intoxicating but daunting of sights—a blank sheet of paper—he must have wondered: had he taken on more than he could handle? could he create another masterpiece? did he in fact want to live with characters whose unhappy experience mirrored his own? He might have said, as Flaubert did when he prepared to write Bouvard and Pécuchet: “How scared I am! I’m on tenterhooks! I feel as if I were setting off on a very long journey into unknown territory, and that I shan’t come back.”

  By the fall of 1967 it was clear that Truman could no longer delay starting his own journey. He had publicly announced his title and theme: a dark comedy about the very rich. He had received a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance from Random House, and without showing anybody as much as the first line of the first chapter, he had sold movie rights to Twentieth Century-Fox for the staggering sum of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars—a figure one would have to multiply at least three times to find an equivalent in today’s dollars. All he had to do for that money was sit down and write the contractually guaranteed minimum of sixty thousand words: a short novel, in other words, of less than two hundred and fifty pages. But where w
as he to sit and write those pages? New York, with its distractions, was not the place. Nor was Long Island; although it had heat, his cottage in Sagaponack had been built for warm weather, not cold, and the flat potato fields that surrounded it, which were so lovely in other seasons, were unrelievedly dreary in winter. Verbier was the obvious spot, but the tiny apartment there was too confining and contained too many memories of the tortures of In Cold Blood.

  He settled the question, at last, by renting a house in Palm Springs, Hollywood’s favorite retreat. It had an ideal winter climate. It was small, yet, unlike Verbier, had all the sybaritic services he enjoyed and was now able to afford. It was out of the way, yet within convenient reach of his California friends, a number that now included even the Governor. “I have a strange new friend—Ronald Reagan,” he informed Cecil, adding, as if he were already hearing snickers from London: “Yes, I know. But really he’s very nice and we get on just fine.” Reagan had helped him by pulling strings so that he could visit San Quentin for his TV documentary. Truman in turn had helped Nancy Reagan raise funds for one of her own pet projects, the restoration of the executive mansion in Sacramento, by introducing her to some of his rich friends. “Write when you can,” she admonished him in November, 1967. “I don’t want to lose touch.”

  At the end of December, Truman headed west in a Buick station wagon. Donald Windham was in the front seat beside him; Happy, a newly adopted black cat, was in the back; and Charlie was halfway in between, panting in Donald’s face as he put his paws over the top of the seat to see where they were headed. Averaging five hundred miles a day, the four of them arrived in Palm Springs shortly after New Year’s, 1968, and Truman was pleased to discover that his rental, an ordinary but comfortable house at 853 Paseo El Mirador, had exactly what he needed: absolute privacy. A high wall enclosed the garden and pool, and all that could be seen of the world outside was the tops of nodding palm trees and purple desert mountains. “It was a perfect setup for working,” said Donald, “especially as no one Truman knew was there.”

  Truman did not appear to do much work, however, during the two weeks Donald was with him. Much of his time was spent on the phone to New York, conferring with Harold Arlen, who was trying to put together the new House of Flowers, and with the women friends who were arranging dinners before the show and a charity party on stage afterward. Less than three weeks after arriving, he interrupted his stay to fly back to Manhattan for his play’s January 28 opening. But the renovated House of Flowers fared even less well than the Broadway original. “Whatever changes have been made, it is difficult to imagine that they are improvements,” said Clive Barnes, the drama critic of the Times. The show closed after only fifty-seven performances, and the usually genial Arlen put much of the blame on Truman. “If he had stayed for rehearsals instead of going off to Palm Springs, I think we would have had a fighting chance,” he said.

  Truman quickly returned to Palm Springs, where a reporter for West Magazine, C. Robert Jennings, described a life that seemed to consist mostly of work, massages at The Spa, and frequent stops for drinks. What came through most clearly in Jennings’ piece, if only between the lines, was something Truman doubtless did not mean to disclose: the aimlessness of his life in that plush oasis. Although he had many friends there, he was depressed and lonely. “I don’t get bored here at all,” he said, but added rather poignantly: “But then I have an infinite capacity for boredom.”

  In fact, just the opposite was true: Truman had little capacity for boredom, and he could scarcely sit still inside his protective walls. In the middle of March he left for ten days in Europe, half of which he spent in London, probably with Lee Radziwill, who had visited him in California only a few weeks before. Returning in late March, he awaited the arrival of Jack. He did not want to spend his winters in Verbier anymore, and he hoped that Jack would join him in making the descent from the Alps. At first, that seemed possible, and Jack was entranced by the desert’s strange beauty. “I’m told not to walk out on the desert because there are snakes,” he wrote his sister Gloria, “but it is hard not to, the evenings being so beautiful.”

  Jack’s good opinion quickly changed. “Thirst’s End” he called Palm Springs, adding, with his peculiar touch of poetry: “Every time I raised my eyes, they bumped into mountains the color of turds.” He also hated Truman’s house, which he thought was common, and Truman’s life in it, which he thought was insanely frantic. “There was something terribly wrong with his life,” Jack said. “The doorbell kept ringing with people asking him to do this and that. He was under terrific stress. He was going crazy. He was like a person who has gone into a dangerous nightclub and can’t get out. He had gone too far. I didn’t say anything, but I just caved in, I felt so lonely. I’ve never known such depression. The boredom was almost frightening. Pretty soon I began to reel. I went black.

  “One day I ate two fried eggs and then went swimming in the pool. Suddenly I had a funny feeling around my heart. I thought I was having a heart attack and was going to die. Truman called a doctor, a tough little Jew, who actually came to the house and gave me a pill—what I had was a terrific case of indigestion. Truman watched me: he had been trying to get me to do something I could not do, which was to stay in a place I loathed so much I couldn’t physically be there. He knew what was happening to me. I think he hated it himself. ‘You’ll be all right when you get wheels under you,’ he said. And he was right. As soon as we drove away, I felt better.”

  In mid-April, two weeks before the lease on the house expired, they started back to New York. “God, what a big lonely country the USA is, and how beautiful,” Jack wrote Gloria from Sagaponack. “But I like Long Island best. My heart’s here. Here I feel home.” He never returned to Palm Springs. But Truman did, buying that rented house and remodeling it to his liking. At the time it seemed like a logical thing to do. Only later did he realize his mistake. “Buying the house in Palm Springs was the beginning of the end for me.”

  47

  IN much of the world, and America in particular, 1968 was a year of riots, protests, and assassinations. Although Truman cared nothing about politics—he and Jack were both proud to say that they had never voted—he did have strong views about crime and criminals. He had, after all, just finished interviewing a large number of convicted murderers for his television documentary. A few days after returning to New York, he made his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show to declare that the FBI was looking for the wrong person in its search for the man who had killed Martin Luther King, Jr., in early April. He had carefully studied the record of James Earl Ray, the fugitive suspect, Truman said, and had concluded that Ray was “not capable of this particular kind of very calculated, and exact and precise kind of crime.” Ray was, in his judgment, a pawn in an elaborate plot and had himself been murdered at least ten days before King.

  A week later, having delivered that portentous opinion, he flew with Frank and Eleanor Perry to France, where Trilogy, a combination of three of his stories that they had adapted for television, was contending for a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. “The people who ran the thing wanted big stars and big celebrities, and our picture was accepted on condition that we deliver Truman Capote,” said Eleanor. “Of course Truman agreed. Everybody’s expenses were paid, so what was the pain? We received royal treatment. We were met at the airport, I got flowers, and there were lunches and dinners for Truman. We were big deals.”

  But that year’s unrest had spread to France as well, and shortly after they arrived, the entire country erupted in strikes and protests. “We went into the Great Hall where some Spanish director’s film was about to be screened, and it was chaos,” recalled Eleanor. “Geraldine Chaplin was holding the curtain shut, people were screaming and punching one another, and Jean-Luc Godard was knocked into some plastic flowers. Everyone was told that this marked the end of dinner jackets, starlets, bikinis and all the other crap that was associated with the festival. From now on Cannes was only going to have r
eal movies for the people, we were told. Our picture was canceled before it was shown. There was nothing else to do, so we beat it.” Eager to take part in the developing drama, Eleanor suggested that they go to Paris, to witness the far more serious disruptions that were occurring there. But Truman, who was no more interested in French politics than he was in those of his own country, said no, and they returned to New York by way of Venice.

  He was back in Sagaponack, listening to the radio in the early hours of June 5, when he heard that Robert Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles. They knew each other from dinner parties and had many friends in common, including Lee and Jackie. Truman was convinced that Bobby’s influence over Jackie was so great, in fact, that if he had lived, he would have dissuaded her from marrying Aristotle Onassis. Truman had the impression that although he himself made Bobby uncomfortable, Bobby believed that he should like him, in the same way that some people who fail to appreciate opera grit their teeth and go anyway, in hopes that someday they will get the point. “I always felt that he was asking himself, ‘Well, what is this all about?’ There was something exotic about me that he couldn’t entirely accept.” Bobby tried nonetheless. Also a resident of the U.N. Plaza, Bobby occasionally called Truman on the house phone to ask if he could stop by for a drink before heading out for the evening, and he had read at least some of Truman’s books. His favorite, he said, was not In Cold Blood, as might have been expected from a former Attorney General, but The Muses Are Heard, which made him laugh, Bobby said, more than any other book he had ever read.