“We were both so terrified that we giggled a lot,” said Joanne. “‘Don’t worry, honey,’ said Myrtle, who was black. ‘They ain’t gonna spot me. There’s no moon out.’” Her hands trembling, Joanne broke a nail opening the box’s spout. But that was the raid’s only casualty, and after pouring the sugar into the tank, she and Myrtle made a successful getaway. Their mission accomplished, they called him in New York with their report. He could scarcely have been more pleased if they had blown Danny’s car into a thousand pieces. He had had his revenge.
49
EXIT Danny; enter Rick Brown, a combination barker and bartender at the Club 45, a rough sailors’ bar on West Forty-fifth Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Rick was standing in the doorway one night early in 1971 when he saw Truman, whom he recognized from television, walking home from the theater with Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell. “How are you, Truman?” he called out.
“Fine, fine,” said Truman, who was surprised into stopping. “What kind of place is this?”
“Just a little bar. Come in. I’ll buy you a drink.” Though they stayed only a few minutes, Truman came back a few nights later with two other friends—he was gathering material on Manhattan’s lowlife for Answered Prayers, he told them—and invited Rick to lunch at the Oak Room of the Plaza, where he quizzed him about his past and his hopes for the future. “He said I seemed too bright to be in a place like that,” recalled Rick. “I wasn’t naive, but I had no idea what he was leading up to.” What he was leading up to was soon clear: he had found another Tom Sawyer, someone who met his specifications in almost every way.
Rick was five feet eleven inches tall; he had an ordinary build; he wore thick glasses and he had a pleasant but homely face and thinning blond hair. Beyond that, there was not much to tell. Barely twenty-six, Rick was a West Virginia hillbilly who had grown up in a backwoods hollow near where the Hatfields and McCoys had fought and feuded. Except for the introduction of electricity, living conditions had changed little since then, and he had grown up without running water or an indoor toilet. To escape, he quit high school and joined the Navy. When he got out, he married, fathered a son, and then, like Danny, separated from his wife. Although he was poorly educated, he was far from stupid and aspired to be both a writer and an actor.
During the weeks that followed their lunch at the Plaza, Truman returned to the Club 45, took him to celebrity-packed parties, introduced him to tycoons like Robert Anderson, and acquainted him with some of Manhattan’s most expensive restaurants. He also gave him a key to his apartment and showed him the drawer in his bedroom in which he kept an envelope stuffed with several thousand dollars, mostly in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills, which were fresh from the bank and still had the bosky smell of uncirculated currency. “If you ever need money, here it is,” he said, as casually as someone else might have offered entrée to his liquor cabinet or refrigerator. After his experience with Danny, he apparently planned to make sure that this time he would dangle bait large enough to bag his quarry.
He did not need to worry. Rick was where he had always yearned to be. He was thrilled to meet and talk to stars, he was delighted to hear headwaiters crooning in French as they bowed him to the best table in the room, and he, who had never seen more than two hundred dollars at one time, was pop-eyed at the thought that without so much as saying please, he had access to ten, twenty, thirty times that much. “This is the way for a boy from West Virginia to live,” he said to himself. “Well, hell, it’s just a matter of time before I’m one of these jet-setters myself.” That belief turned into certain conviction after a trip home, where he was reminded of the mean and arid existence that awaited him there. “I didn’t want to waste twenty years of my life and be like the people there,” he said. “I wanted more. It’s not a sin to want more.”
Truman, who had always wanted more himself, understood perfectly. But at the moment all he desired was Rick. Proving once again that he was his father’s son, he sweetened his other inducements with a pitch that never fails: he told Rick exactly what he longed to hear. After reading his unfinished fiction and screenplays, Truman proclaimed him a writer of unquestionable promise. “A lot of people don’t become great writers until they’re forty-five or fifty. Very few have hit the mark before they reach their thirties. I feel that you have that gift, if you will just sit down and do it.”
Truman also discussed with him, as he had with Danny, a joint business venture, an elegant Manhattan bar that would capitalize on Truman’s name and Rick’s experience. “TC’s” or “Truman’s Place,” as they thought of naming it, was to have a literary atmosphere, with bookcases and—so ran Truman’s macabre fancy—decorative rubbings from the tombstones of the many writers and poets whose remains reside in Paris’ Père Lachaise cemetery: sip a brandy next to Proust, raise a glass to Oscar Wilde, carry on a romance beside Colette. “Put me down for five grand,” asserted Frank Sinatra, who was impressed by the notion. “No, make it ten!”
With a casual sweep of his hand, Truman thus brushed away the clouds that had always hovered over Rick’s head and spread before him a sky of brilliant blue. “All of a sudden all these dreams woke up,” said Rick, “and I realized, well, Christ, maybe I can have them. He made me feel like everything was there for me. I didn’t want to hit it when I was forty-five, fifty-five, or sixty-five. I wanted it then. He gave me hope, and he actually convinced me that, through him, I was going to get more out of life.” All of those who had been gulled by Arch over the years, who had invested in one of his cockamamie schemes or who had quit their jobs to follow him down that dead-end road to riches, might have made the same speech. But none could have stated it with more pathetic eloquence.
Truman invited him to Palm Springs, and when Rick protested that he could not leave his job, Truman offered to find him a better one, one more commensurate with his creative abilities. In the meantime, Truman said, he would take care of him himself. “Truman, I have never lived under those circumstances,” Rick grandly replied. “I can’t humble myself.”
“I promise you you’ll never have to. I’ll pay your rent and give you whatever you need to live on during the week, a couple of hundred dollars.”
“A couple of hundred dollars? Fine.”
So it was settled, and as an expression of his good intentions, Truman wrote out a check for seven hundred dollars, the amount Rick needed to pay off a couch he had bought for his apartment. On the plane west, Truman also surprised him with an envelope containing four hundred-dollar bills—“just in case you need anything,” he said. Not once had they mentioned sex, and only after they had been in California a few days, sleeping in separate rooms, did Truman spell out the obvious, that he expected something more than companionship for his money. “I don’t know,” said Rick, who of course knew very well. “Okay, we’ll give it a try.”
Three or four nights later, after a skinny-dip in the pool, they did give it a try, and Rick, who claimed that he had never had sex with a man before, was relieved to find that it was not objectionable. “It was really nothing difficult, so I felt, There’s no sweat, I’ll make it.”
Sex was not the only reason Truman had pressed him to come to Palm Springs, however; it was not even the most important reason. His real purpose became apparent when Danny was invited to Truman’s house for one of Myrtle Bennett’s fancy lunches, then asked to come again for dinner with his two sons. The atmosphere was calm and amiable, and not until later did Rick realize that he was there largely for display, that he had been flown from New York to demonstrate to Danny that Truman did not need him, that he had found someone else, somebody who was just as ordinary, just as masculine and just as heterosexual.
Sinatra gave them a ride back to New York in his private plane, and for several months, through the spring and summer of 1971, Truman and Rick adhered to a comfortable routine. With Truman paying the bills, Rick rented a two-room penthouse on East Forty-sixth Street, just south of the U.N. Plaza, so that Rick would have somewhere to r
etreat when Jack, who remained ignorant of their arrangement, came in from Long Island. “You could stay with him till Jack came to town; then you had to leave,” said Rick, a little bitterly. “You were allowed to have no other affairs, whether they were with women or whatever, but yet you had to make the concession to him to have his affair with Jack.”
Otherwise Rick had full run of Truman’s apartment. Truman, who had a fear of markets crashing and banks closing, placed sufficient confidence in him to show him where he kept his real money, which was several times the piddling amount in the bedroom drawer. Like a boy who was showing his hidden treasures to his best friend, Truman led him to the red-lacquered Chinese secretary in the living room, pushed aside a seemingly immovable panel, and revealed a secret cubbyhole inside which nestled four transparent bank envelopes, one containing ten thousand dollars, the other three containing five thousand dollars apiece.
Despite the disparity in both age and status, in many ways Rick assumed the role of a protective, often hectoring older brother, urging Truman to lose weight and cut down on his drinking. “You look grotesque!” said Rick, employing the direct diplomacy of the Hatfields and McCoys. “You’re still a young man. Take care of yourself!” he added, putting him on a diet and signing him up at a gym on Forty-seventh Street. But no amount of insulting speech could persuade Truman to cut down on his consumption of alcohol. “He drank to get drunk,” said Rick. “Instead of ordering one screwdriver at a time, for instance, he’d order a double or a triple.” When talk failed, Rick sometimes took sterner measures, forbidding Truman anything stronger than a glass of wine at dinner. “If you take one drink—one drink!—I’m getting up and leaving,” he would say as they went out for the evening. “But before I do, I’m going to embarrass you by dropping the tablecloth in your lap.”
Forceful as they were, such guerrilla tactics were doomed to failure. All they managed to do was to make Truman both more devious and more determined. Like all other alcoholics, he won in the end. Staying home one night, for example, he was suspiciously agreeable when Rick told him that he could drink only 7-Up. In fact, he seemed to have developed a taste for it, sending Rick back to the kitchen for glass after glass. To Rick’s bewilderment, he became drunk anyway and grew ever more so as the night progressed. While Truman was out the next day, Rick rummaged through his bedroom and discovered the explanation: miniature vodka bottles hidden under the pillows and blankets of his bed. “Every time he’d send me to the kitchen for a 7-Up, he’d open one up and—phffft—down it would go. He used the 7-Up to wash down the vodka. When he came back later that day, I had eleven empties all lined up. ‘How did they get here?’ he asked.”
During the summer Truman recruited Wyatt Cooper to work with him on a television play, a prison drama titled The Glass House. Rick wanted the part of the young lead, a character who was supposed to be so attractive that teenage girls swooned over him, and Truman insisted that Wyatt, who was vacationing in Southampton, drive into Manhattan to meet Rick over lunch. “Here was this boring and totally uninteresting-looking man who sat and told us the plot of a Joan Crawford movie he had watched on television the night before,” said Wyatt, who was baffled as to why he had been summoned. “And Truman hung on his conversation as if it were full of gems!” The mystery was dispelled a few days later when Truman called again and announced, as if the idea had just occurred to him, that he had found an ideal candidate for their young protagonist. “You know who could play the part? Who would be kind of marvelous? Rick!”
“Truman, you’re kidding. It’s got to be somebody who’s good-looking and sexy.”
“Obviously your idea of good-looking and sexy is very different from mine” was Truman’s chilly reply.
He next tried to persuade Wyatt to collaborate with Rick on one of Rick’s own screenplays. “You collaborate with him!” shot back Wyatt. “You’re the one who wants to be around him.”
Rick soon had second thoughts about his friendship with Truman. By his reckoning, he had lived up to their unwritten agreement. By his further reckoning, Truman had not; Rick had expected not just a weekly allowance, but a push into the future. That, he could now see, he was unlikely to receive; believing himself wronged, he became more cynical and calculating. “I guess I adopted the attitude I just didn’t care,” he said. “The relationship turned strictly commercial. I would do my best to spend as much money as I could and to see as little of him as I could.”
At the same time, the sexual part of their relationship was becoming increasingly onerous to him. “Physically, Truman did nothing for me, and that’s why, sexually, we weren’t knocking the fireworks off. Plus, many nights he was drunk. It is very hard trying to be affectionate with someone if they’re drunk, excuse themselves to throw up, then come back. How could you kiss someone after that? You can’t. It was just hard, hard for me.” Making it harder still was the ragging he was taking from many of his old friends, who assumed that he was homosexual; even his estranged wife threw the word “fag” at him. “It hurt my feelings a lot, and I was thinking, ‘Jesus, do I look gay? Or am I gay?’” He had never imagined himself in such a predicament. “If a heterosexual who has sex with a man is called homosexual,” he plaintively inquired, “why isn’t a homosexual who has sex with a woman called heterosexual?”
As Rick was having such doubts, Truman was making matters worse by becoming both less generous and more possessive. He began to watch Rick’s expenditures, he kept track of where he spent his time, and he accused him of having a romance with a woman friend. What Rick had feared would happen was happening: he was required to ask every time he needed money, as if he were a sixteen-year-old begging Saturday-night-date money from his father. “I had no identity. There was no way that he was going to let you become your own person because you’d have felt you didn’t need him anymore.”
In the midst of his agonizing, Truman took Rick to California, where he planned to establish Joanne Carson in Hollywood society. He had met Joanne shortly after the publication of In Cold Blood, and had been drawn immediately to someone whose childhood had been as lonely as his. She had been born in California. After spending most of her first eleven years in a convent and moving from relative to relative during her teens, she had survived to become a stewardess for Pan American. Following a plot line too corny not to be true, she had met Howard Hughes on a Pacific flight and had been given a contract with his studio, R.K.O. Though she was pretty, with dark hair and a superb figure, she was not a star. Giving up her modest movie career, she had moved to Manhattan and in 1962 had married Johnny Carson, who was then the host of an afternoon TV game show, Who Do You Trust?
His selection to be host of The Tonight Show had dramatically changed her life, as well as his. Suddenly she was the wife of one of the most popular and powerful entertainers in America, with servants, a limousine on call, and, by coincidence, a vast duplex at the U.N. Plaza, several times the size of Truman’s own apartment. Blinded by the spotlight unexpectedly aimed in her direction, she turned around to find Truman, who was always eager to direct the lives of rich and attractive women. “I was a little mouse,” she said. “I didn’t know anything. He went through my closets and told me what to wear and what not to wear. I grew up basking in the sunlight of his approval.”
Prey to anxiety and depression, she was probably more of a challenge than he had anticipated, however. Nor was she helped by Johnny, who had problems of his own, in Truman’s opinion. “Since he lived in my building, he used to call me all the time, and I knew him better than anyone outside of that small circle of people who work with him. People talk about how calm he is. Johnny Carson is consumed by rage! Under that calm surface there are tornadoes! He’s not a heavy drinker, but two glasses are enough to set him off. He can be very mean. There’s not an ounce of kindness in that man.
“But I know where it comes from. He hates his parents, particularly his mother. He comes from a very rigid, authoritarian family in Nebraska. He had to be home at a certain time, and
if he was so much as fifteen minutes late, there would be terrible scenes. Once when he was drunk, he told me that his mother would throw herself on the floor and scream, ‘I bore you from these loins, and you do this to me! All that pain and this is what I get in return!’ I met his mother once, and she was an absolute bitch. Despite everything he’s done, she’s never really accepted him, and he constantly wants her approval. I think that that’s what keeps him going.”
Despite her unhappiness, Truman advised Joanne against a divorce, suggesting to her, as he had to Babe Paley, that she look upon her marriage as a lucrative career. When it broke up anyway, he persuaded her to return to her roots in California. A few months before her fortieth birthday, she bought a house on Sunset Boulevard overlooking the UCLA campus, started her own TV talk show, and waited for calls from the friends she had made with Johnny. None came. The people she had seen when she was married to Johnny ignored her the minute their separation was announced, and for two months she sat alone in her new house.
Feeling at least partly responsible, Truman was determined to remedy that. He and Rick moved in with her in early September, and he set up lunches and dinners with his friends in Hollywood’s “Group A,” the entertainment industry’s social elite. Yet try as he might, pushing and shoving, pleading and wheedling, he could not nudge her into Hollywood’s inner circle. To his old friend Carol Marcus, who was now married to Walter Matthau, he confessed that she was not a natural candidate for membership.
“Honey, you’ve got to meet this girl,” he told Carol, as he invited her to lunch with them at the Bistro in Beverly Hills. “You’re going to absolutely hate her. She’s a bore and a pain in the ass, but I feel sorry for her and I like her. So, as a favor to me, please be nice.”
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