Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  The last time they met was on an early morning in May when they were both walking their dogs. Bobby, characteristically, had stopped to give a spirited lecture to two boys he had caught smoking. “One of the kids looked up at him,” Truman recalled, “and said, ‘Honestly, honestly, Mr. Kennedy. I swear we’ll never do it again.’ It was as if he was some sort of avenging angel who had fallen out of heaven upon them.” A month later Truman attended Bobby’s funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Feverish with the flu, he could not bring himself to ride the special train that carried Bobby’s body to Washington for burial, however, watching that long journey on television instead and crying so much that he became even sicker. In response to his letter of condolence, Rose Kennedy thanked him, sadly adding, “I keep thinking of Hecuba’s Lament in Euripides’ Trojan Women.” 8

  Truman’s credentials as an expert on crime were somewhat tarnished when James Earl Ray—far from being dead, as Truman had assured the audience of The Tonight Show—was arrested in London. That did not stop Truman from going on the program again on June 13 to expound a second and even more bizarre theory that connected the King assassination to those of both Bobby and John Kennedy. It was possible, he said, that all three murders were part of a giant scheme to destabilize the United States by killing its leaders. He was not the only one to harbor such suspicions during that bloody year, but he went further than most, pointing his finger at a specific group, the theosophists. Such a plan of wholesale murder, he said, had been expounded in the nineteenth century by Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy; he noted darkly that soon after his arrest, the man accused of Bobby’s murder, Sirhan Sirhan, had asked for a copy of Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.

  His second theory was as shaky as his first, as the angry theosophists were quick to point out. “Mr. Capote is in complete confusion or abysmally ignorant of the society, its aims and teachings,” said Joy Mills, the president of the Theosophical Society. In fact, Madame Blavatsky promoted brotherly love, not murder, and Truman may have confused her with nineteenth-century Russian anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin, who did advocate assassination. Newspaper commentators accused him of irresponsibility, an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor adjudging that “the entire discussion was utterly in bad taste.”

  In July he removed himself from the American tumult to cruise the Mediterranean once again on the Guinness yacht. But he no longer derived pleasure from such luxurious excursions. “It was the third time I had done the Turkish coast and I was absolutely frantic! Every day we would drop anchor and get off to look at some ruins, some dumb old rocks in the middle of nowhere. There was even a professor from some university in Italy who would explain what these incredible heaps meant.

  “Finally I said, I believe it was to Babe: ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I want off! I want to go back to New York or Long Island.’ And she said to me: ‘Don’t go with us when we get off. Stay on the ship, swim, play phonograph records, drink, get drunk, have a good time.’ So that’s precisely what I did. I went swimming, read books and played records—the yacht had a wonderful stereo—and got a terrific tan. Tan is scarcely the word! I looked like a mulatto! I would be relaxing when the others would all come back fatigued and dripping with sweat, just because they had gone to see some big old bunch of fucking rocks someplace in Turkey.

  “‘Truman, I really don’t understand why you’re not coming with us,’ Gloria would always say to me. ‘We’re seeing some quite extraordinary things.’

  “‘Gloria,’ I said. ‘What you’re doing is the single most boring thing I can conceive of. I have been on six cruises with you, but never before have I been crucified like this. I don’t care anything about these things, and I am not getting off this boat to look at those old dead tombs and rocks!’”

  A greater disappointment awaited him in the fall when ABC, employing a logic unique to the entertainment industry, refused to run Death Row, U.S.A. The program was too grim, said the network, a remark that prompted Truman to retort: “Well, what were you expecting—Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm?” He was the victim of a not uncommon corporate shuffle. The program had been commissioned by ABC’s former president, his friend and Palm Springs neighbor Thomas Moore, but the network’s new president, Elton Rule—“that sun-tanned Uriah Heep,” Truman derisively labeled him—wanted nothing to do with such a somber subject. Though Truman declared himself “terribly disillusioned” by the outcome, his chief regret was that he had wasted a year and a half of his time. “My primary thing is that I’m a prose writer,” he said rather lamely. “I don’t think film is the greatest living thing.”

  He had begun 1968 with a firm resolve to work. He ended it with little to show for his efforts—in either film or prose. “I have been working hard, doing nothing else,” he wrote Cecil. “But it all has been so fragmented—writing my book, and doing (all by myself) a very complicated documentary film. That, and all the tragedy in our American lives, has kept one feeling like an insoluble jigsaw puzzle.”

  Shortly after Christmas he left for Palm Springs again, accompanied this time by C. Z. Guest and his cousin Joey Faulk, one of Seabon’s three sons. Joey, a former Army paratrooper, did the driving; C.Z., who was not used to traveling by car, sat beside Joey in the front seat asking questions about the towns they were passing through; and Truman, reading books and magazines, reclined regally in the back seat with Charlie. (Happy, the misnamed cat, had been killed by a car on Long Island.) They reached California at the beginning of January, 1969, and C.Z. stayed with him about two weeks, Joey a little longer. His routine was much like that of the year before, but, no longer pretending to be locked in seclusion with Answered Prayers, he became an active member of a winter party circle that included Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Walter Annenberg, the owner of TV Guide. At Eastertime, Joey returned to drive him back to New York.

  He had not completed his book by January, as he had predicted, but in May, Random House gave him a generous new contract nonetheless. As an advance against his next three books, it delivered him title to five blue-chip stocks valued at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars; the details ran to many pages, but the end result was that his Random House portfolio was supposed to provide him with a safe and substantial yearly income. A new deadline was set for Answered Prayers: January 1, 1971.

  Back in Manhattan, he resumed his rounds of the TV talk shows. He attacked what he called the “Jewish Mafia,” a mutual-admiration society, as he viewed it, of Jewish writers, critics and publishers. He once more denounced liberal Supreme Court decisions on criminal rights, and he began his most amusing literary feud, a fierce but, in the end, harmless scratching match with Jacqueline Susann, the author of history’s most popular potboiler, Valley of the Dolls.

  He struck first, using the familiar forum of The Tonight Show to slight her writing abilities. Carson invited her rebuttal, and instead of minimizing his talent, which would have been a losing move, she ridiculed his mannerisms, imitating his baby voice, his rolling eyes and his effeminate hand movements. Gestures are soon forgotten. Vivid phrases become indelible labels, and when his turn came up again in July, 1969, he was ready to attach a couple to Susann. Making reference to her dark, exaggerated and somewhat masculine features, he said that she looked “like a truck driver in drag.”

  His remarks were cruel, of course—though no more so than her imitation of him—but they contained enough truth to cause howls of surprised recognition from the studio audience. “Words are like chemicals,” wrote her lawyer, Louis Nizer. “Some combinations fizzle. Others explode. The laughter which burst across the nation drove her and Irving Mansfield, her husband and gifted partner in the dissemination of her works, right into my office. They insisted on an immediate suit.”

  Although he believed she had grounds for a libel suit, Nizer advised against taking legal action. The issue was not worth the trouble and fees, he said; she had not suffered actual damage, and she had offered some provocation. Much as she wanted to see “the lit
tle worm squirm under cross examination,” she reluctantly let the matter drop. Smelling victory, Truman did not. The reason she had backed down, he boasted to his friends, was that Nizer had informed her that if Truman’s lawyer dressed a dozen real truck drivers in women’s clothes and paraded them before a jury, she would lose: any jury would instantly agree that she did indeed look like a truck driver in drag. Eventually Truman’s wishful misstatement found its way into print, and Susann prodded her counsel again. “Now the little ‘capon’ has put words in your mouth,” she said. “It’s really wild. What do you think?”

  Nizer thought it was time to ask for a correction. He received it by return mail. “How pleasant to have a letter from the admirable Mr. Nizer—even a scolding one,” Truman wrote. “It was so well written; if only your client, Miss Susann (sp?) had your sense of style!” Although he apologized for fabricating Nizer’s words, he did not apologize for comparing Susann to a truck driver. “That seems to me merely an aesthetic opinion—a spontaneous observation. Bitchy, yes; malicious, no. I feel no malice for your client; on the contrary, I respect her as a very professional person who knows exactly what she’s doing and how to do it. On the other hand, I suggest you examine a few of the remarks Miss S. made about me—as recently as an interview 3 weeks ago in the Los Angeles Times. Over and again she has implied that I am a homosexual (big news!) and a lazybones jealous of her productivity. As far as I am concerned, I couldn’t care less if she won the Nobel Prize—so did Pearl Buck, alors.”

  Susann, who was dying of cancer, did not pursue the issue. But she did manage to get in the last word, even if it was posthumous. In her final novel, Dolores, a tedious roman à clef about the Bouvier sisters, Jackie and Lee, she parodied the “little capon” in the character of Horatio Capon, the painter friend of the younger sister. “He had become a television personality,” she wrote, “looked like a blondish pig, but gushingly told outrageous stories and gossip.”

  Most of the summer and fall Truman spent on Long Island, where he brought Maggie, a new bulldog, into the Sagaponack household. She was even more dangerous than Susann, however, and at the end of October he was nearly killed trying to stop her from jumping out of his Jaguar convertible. In his panic, he stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake, sending the car smashing into a tree and propelling him through the windshield. Knocked unconscious, he was taken to Southampton Hospital, where he was treated for cuts to the head and face and kept for two days. Maggie, the cause of all the trouble, was unhurt, but his beautiful Jaguar—“Green Girl,” he had christened it—was demolished.

  In late November he flew to Teheran with Robert O. Anderson, the chairman of the Atlantic Richfield oil company. Anderson had more diverse interests than most other businessmen, and their friendship was not quite as curious as it might have seemed. Anderson entertained Truman at his ranch in New Mexico, and Truman introduced him to the Shah, who was a valuable acquaintance for the head of an oil company to have. “Bob wanted his company to put oil rigs in the Persian Gulf, but he couldn’t get anywhere with the Shah,” said Truman. “The Shah wouldn’t even see him. Well, I happened to know the Shah. I used to go for long walks with his wife, Farah Dibah, in Switzerland. They told me to come visit anytime I wanted, so I wrote her a letter and asked if I could bring a friend. She wrote right back and said they would have cars to meet us. They went with us to their palace in Isfahan, and Bob and the Shah got along famously. Bob got what he wanted in Iran, and his company made several million dollars.”

  At the end of their trip, Anderson asked him where he would like to have dinner. “Harry’s Bar in Venice,” Truman immediately answered—and off they flew in Anderson’s jet. When they landed in Venice, a waiting speedboat rushed them to Harry’s, whose management, flattered that they had come so far for a meal, kept the kitchen open past its usual hours. Truman returned to New York just in time to say goodbye to Jack, who was about to leave for Verbier. He himself went in the opposite direction, back to Palm Springs. “Jack refuses to go to California under any circumstances,” he sighed to Cecil. “Same old Jack!”

  48

  THEY had been together twenty-one years. They had loved and fought and traveled side by side into middle age: at the beginning of 1970, Truman was forty-five, Jack a decade older. But although Jack was indeed the same old Jack, the Truman who saw the sixties out was not the same Truman who had seen them in. Nor was their relationship what it had been in 1960 and the years preceding, when they had spent most of their time together, quietly working. “We were both vocation-driven,” said Jack. “We felt that if you stop writing, you die.”

  The publication of In Cold Blood disrupted that pattern, as it did nearly everything else in Truman’s life. He could no longer bear being cooped up in Verbier all winter, yet he did not want to be by himself at the U.N. Plaza either. If Jack had stayed with him in New York, he later maintained, he would never have gone to Palm Springs. But Jack would not stay, and every year his departure for Switzerland was a source of anxiety, something that Truman anticipated with dread weeks and months before it actually happened. In his increasingly fragile state of mind, he viewed Jack’s yearly leave-taking as a form of rejection and abandonment. Unwilling to remain in Manhattan by himself, Truman began his winter wanderings, first to Morocco with Lee in 1967, then to Palm Springs. Without actually planning it that way, he and Jack had so arranged things that they were apart as much as they were together.

  The rules that governed their lives had evolved so slowly that not until the end of the decade was it clear how profound the change had been. On Truman’s initiative, they had even ceased being lovers and had become nonsexual companions instead. “Twenty years is a long time to live with someone,” said Truman. “Certain things come to an end, and this had come to an end with me. I wasn’t having an affair with anyone, and I decided that I didn’t want to go to bed for any reason that I can remember now, or could put my finger on then. All I know is that one day I said to myself, ‘I like Jack, but I don’t love him.’ It was as simple as that.” It is not too much to speculate, however, that there was an additional reason: he was retaliating, if only subconsciously, for Jack’s annual flight to Verbier.

  If Truman’s decision hurt Jack, as it did, the bruise quickly healed. In fact, as he looked back, Jack concluded that cutting the sexual bonds had probably preserved the other and, to him, more significant ties between them. “The platonic companionship of two men is the highest form of human relationship,” Jack declared. “If any homosexual relationship works, it has to mature into something beyond sex. Truman and I were the only ones I know of who managed it. It was unthinkable that we would ever break up. People thought that our relationship was based on sex. It wasn’t. It was never important to either of us. Truman wasn’t highly sexed, and there is something cold—hyperborean, as Joyce would say—about me. I’d rather talk to people than screw them, much to their annoyance. Truman didn’t want to go to bed with me anymore, and I forgot about it. I became pretty celibate. Steady nooky isn’t good anyway.”

  When Truman later changed his mind and wanted to go to bed, Jack was willing, but his body was not; it would not function. He was convinced that Truman had gone to bed with Lee—that “gold digger and out-and-out pirate,” as Jack called her—and, rightly or wrongly, he felt betrayed. “We tried, but I couldn’t do it,” he said. “The same thing happened with Joan McCracken. I can’t do it when I feel someone has been with another person. I can’t have sex to order.” Thus did Truman begin anew his search for sexual love, a pursuit that was to multiply his woes beyond easy reckoning. “It all started—all these affairs—because I didn’t want to go to Switzerland,” Truman was later to say, as if he were beginning a long, sad story, which of course was precisely what he was doing.

  Enter Danny, the first of Truman’s “men without faces,” as Wyatt Cooper was to characterize them, men “you always have trouble remembering unless they’re with Truman.”9 Those who saw him many times were hard pressed to
describe him afterward; photographs display not a single distinguishing feature. He was forty, or close to it, and about five feet nine inches tall; he had brown hair that was starting to gray, and he was neither handsome nor ugly. He came from a small town in Illinois, and living in the sophisticated resort of Palm Springs, as he did, had affected him not at all. “He wore what they wear in small towns in the Middle West,” said Charlotte Curtis, the society columnist for The New York Times, who was Truman’s houseguest for a few days that winter of 1970. “Open shirt, short sleeves, his hair slicked down for a Saturday night in Peoria. There was something of the fifties about him.”

  His education was limited; a year of vocational training after high school was all. He had served in Korea, worked as a guard at a prison in Illinois, and married and fathered two sons; he had recently separated from his wife. In Palm Springs he made his living repairing air conditioners and, in his off hours, fueling planes at the airport. Confusing planes with cars, Bennett Cerf informed Truman’s friends that he was a filling-station attendant. “I’m furious with Bennett for saying that!” Truman told Wyatt. “He is not a filling-station attendant. He came to repair my air conditioner.”

  When Marella Agnelli met him, she shrewdly observed that Truman must have had “a great nostalgia,” that Danny must have reminded him of a boy from his adolescence. She was right. That boy, a cadet at St. John’s Military Academy, had been the other half of what Truman termed his first affair. “I had had sex before,” he said, “but I didn’t know what I was doing. That boy was smarter than Danny, but he had the same kind of looks, the same kind of temperament.” Danny represented that boy thirty-five years later. But he also represented all those carefree, freckle-faced Alabama country boys Truman had wished he could have been, mocking him, even if they uttered not a word, with the nonchalant assurance of the absolutely average. In every way Danny stood for the common man: that was his allure. If he had been handsome, had boasted a fine physique, or had been out of the ordinary in any other way, Truman would not have given him a second glance.