Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Carol was nice and, for his sake, asked Joanne to a party after he left. But Joanne’s first solo flight ended in a crash. When she arrived, she startled the other guests by announcing that she was sick and needed fresh orange juice. She then anxiously followed Carol, who, dropping her other duties as a hostess, rushed into the kitchen to squeeze oranges. They in turn were followed by Audrey Wilder, the wife of movie director Billy Wilder, who delivered what was to be Group A’s unyielding verdict on Joanne. “You know, you’re a pain in the ass,” she said. “If you’re really sick, you shouldn’t have come.” Barred from the inner circle, Joanne eventually made her own way in Los Angeles, achieving some success as a television interviewer.

  Although he never admitted Joanne into his pantheon, Truman liked her and grew dependent on her almost idolatrous devotion. “You have to understand that I would walk through fire for Truman,” she said. She reserved a small room and bath next to her kitchen for him, and he often stayed in it when he was in California, enjoying her pool, which she heated to ninety-two degrees, and her patient mothering.

  During his weeks in California Truman also talked with Paramount executives about their newest version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—it had been filmed twice before—and he was commissioned to write the screenplay for a fee of one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. In its structure, which is an extended flashback, in its brevity, and, most of all, in its elegiac mood, Gatsby has much in common with The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and he approached the assignment with some excitement. “Fitzgerald has charm,” he said. “It’s a silly word, but it’s an exact word for me. I love The Great Gatsby and its sad, gay nostalgia.”

  But capturing such elusive qualities in a film script proved a more formidable task than he had anticipated. “When I had the parts disassembled, I saw that there are so many things in that book that are so bad. It was like going into the kitchen and finding the garbage strewn all over. I must say that the same thing happened when I adapted The Turn of the Screw for The Innocents. It is incredible how James fudged that story.” (Ironically, Fitzgerald, who also labored for Hollywood, had similar complaints about adapting the work of other writers. “It’s all beautiful when you read it,” he said, “but when you write it down plain it’s like a week in the nuthouse.”)

  In early December he and Rick flew to London so that he could discuss his first draft and make revisions with Jack Clayton, who had directed The Innocents and who, at Truman’s suggestion, had been chosen to direct Gatsby as well. He finished his scenario a few weeks later, in January, 1972, and, on the whole, was pleased with it, he told Alan Schwartz. But Paramount was not and rejected it, calling it “unacceptable.”

  “Well, Truman, this is just like the book,” complained a studio executive.

  “I was under the impression we were adapting the book,” Truman answered. Using the excuse that he had missed his deadline by more than a week, the studio refused to pay him the remainder of his fee, which amounted to a little more than one hundred and one thousand dollars. But Truman, who replied that he had been delayed by an attack of the flu, sued and got what was owed him.

  It was in London that Rick, concluding that his dreams were not going to be realized, decided that he had had enough of Truman, who, when he was not working on Gatsby, spent most of his time in bed, drinking and watching television. One of the few times he left their suite at the Connaught Hotel was to take Rick to dinner at Lee Radziwill’s. But that visit only underlined for Rick his position as a hanger-on. “What a rude bitch!” he exclaimed. “She shook my hand, turned her back, and never looked at me again.”

  Rick wanted to go home, and just as Danny had done the year before, he made a plane reservation. Reenacting that by-now-familiar scene, Truman abruptly changed his own plans so that he could join him, and on December 14, a week after they had left New York, they flew back. Unchastened, Truman continued to gulp down vodka over the Atlantic, causing Rick at last to turn to him. “Truman, I just don’t think it’s going to work. Here, I want you to have your keys back because I’m not going to honor our bargain anymore.” With those words, he made a symbolic exit, handing him the keys to the U.N. Plaza apartment as he departed for the lavatory.

  Rick soon repented. He had become accustomed to the good life. “You get addicted,” he explained. “It’s murder. It’s habit-forming, like heroin.” But when he called to make up, Truman’s phone did not answer; without saying anything, he had flown off again, to Palm Springs and then to Switzerland. In a panic because his rent was coming due, Rick finally tracked him down in Verbier and dispatched a telegram: “GET IN TOUCH WITH ME.” Truman cabled back: “I SUGGEST YOU GET A JOB.” Then, in a more mellow mood, Truman wrote a long letter, saying, in essence, that although he cared about him, their relationship had no future. He asked Saint Subber to give him sixteen hundred dollars, money enough to carry him for several months.

  Rick returned to the Club 45 to tend bar again, and then, a year later, in 1973, moved to Los Angeles and found a job in a similar establishment, the Pussy Cat Café on Santa Monica Boulevard. Although they kept in close touch, Rick was convinced that his life would have been better if he had turned the other way when he first saw Truman walking along Forty-fifth Street. “Just as quick as the door opened, it closed again,” he said. “And, my God, what a disappointment it was! He promised me the world and gave me a pot of beans.”

  Truman had been fond of Rick, but he had not been in love, and the end of their affair did not send him into a spin, as the breakup with Danny had done. “I’m sinking back into my book,” he wrote Alan Schwartz from Verbier, “and every day I feel more removed from the bad vibrations, that incredible syndrome of juvenile nonsense that started some two years ago.” It seemed, for a while anyway, that his encounters with Danny and Rick had stopped his roving eye. “It is totally necessary to develop loneliness if you are going to be a writer, if you are really going to give yourself up to it,” he later proclaimed to an interviewer. “You can’t get around it—you’ve got to be alone.”

  50

  HE did not sink very deeply into his book, however, and many were starting to wonder, sometimes publicly, whether they would ever see it. When he missed his January 1, 1971, deadline, Twentieth Century-Fox demanded the return of the down payment it had made on film rights, two hundred thousand dollars, and to his chagrin, Truman had to give it back. To the reporters who asked how much he had actually written, he said that he was two-thirds done, which was the same reply he had been giving for several years.

  Even he began to talk as though he might never finish. “Of course I basically don’t really want to finish it,” he confessed at last. “It’s just that it’s become a way of life. It’s like suddenly taking some beautiful animal, say, or a child, some lovely child and you just took it out in the yard and shot it in the head. I mean, that’s what it means to me. The moment I give it up it’s just like I took it out in the yard and shot it in the head, because it will never be mine again.”

  Whatever his reasons, he was in no hurry. During the months that followed his return from Switzerland, he seemed eager to do nearly anything rather than lock himself away and confront the problems inherent in any long and complicated novel. Drinking less than he had in the two preceding years—in that respect the bad vibrations had indeed receded—he jumped from project to project, job to job, taking on almost any assignment, it seemed, that would keep him away from Answered Prayers.

  His first venture was into journalism. Peter Beard, Lee’s boyfriend—she finally had separated from Stas—and Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone magazine, persuaded him to cover what was expected to be one of the media spectaculars of 1972, the North American tour of the Rolling Stones. Beard was to take the pictures that would illustrate his article, and after it appeared in Wenner’s magazine, their collaboration was to become a book—The Muses Are Heard a generation later, with a hard-rock beat. He was in competition with any number of hun
gry young writers, all itching to become famous by using the journalistic techniques that he had pioneered. But only he and, for a time, the hip novelist Terry Southern, middle-aged men both, were allowed to travel in the Stones’ plane and to observe the private, as well as public, behavior of a group whose appeal rested largely on its reputation for appetitious depravity. He thus had an invitation to do what he did best: to become the fly on the wall that sees all.

  With that sweeping charter, the “fantastic T. Capote,” as Southern labeled him, joined the Stones in late June, midway through their thirty-one-city, two-month tour. It was an easy mix: the Stones liked him, he liked them, and he was stimulated by their company, the like of which even a planet-wanderer like him had never encountered. After attending their last performance at Madison Square Garden on July 27, he went out to Sagaponack, where he sifted through his notes and started his story. Its title, “It Will Soon Be Here,” he borrowed from a nineteenth-century painting of Midwestern farmers rushing to save their bay from an oncoming storm. To his mind, that title had an ironic symbolism: in the twentieth century things had been so turned around that instead of rushing from the storm—the Stones and the chaos they represented—the young descendants of those God-fearing farmers were running toward it, desperate to be engulfed in the maelstrom.

  His first deadline passed, and then his second, and although he read part of it to Beard, “It Will Soon Be Here” never reached its destination. He could write no more than a few pages. It may have been that he did not have the energy or power of concentration to devote himself to any significant piece of prose; or it may have been that, on examination, the idea bored him. The tour had been a new experience for him, he said, but in no way surprising; everything that had occurred, including the hysterical outbursts of the fans, had been coolly and efficiently manufactured by the Stones and their managers. “Since there was nothing to ‘find out,’” he explained, “I just couldn’t be bothered writing it.” Later, in a long interview with the magazine, he admitted that if he had been twenty-five years younger—and if he had not already written a history of a musical tour—he just might have been bothered. But why, he asked, “should I do a game that I’ve already done?”

  It was a good question, but it did not stop him from engaging in other games he had already done: a film script, a television play, a documentary, and three crime shows for ABC. The first three he did with Robert MacBride, a free-lance writer he met in the summer of 1972 in a Rockefeller Center bookstore. Theirs was a bond of brothers rather than of lovers, according to MacBride, and Truman may have latched on to Bob MacBride because he could see in him traces of the Jack of earlier years. The physical resemblance was obvious. At forty-six, Bob too was thin and ascetic-looking, with rust-colored hair and pale, bleached skin. “He seemed sort of uncooked, like a blancmange that hadn’t been in the oven long enough” was the way Slim Keith described him.

  There were also other, equally striking similarities. Bob too had grown up in Philadelphia, and he too was mostly self-educated, with an astonishingly diverse knowledge, ranging from computers and the navies of the Civil War to space and sculpture. Like Jack, he also spoke fluent French. Although the pliable Bob lacked Jack’s percussive temperament, he had the same unsettling habit of grabbing a conversation and turning it into a monologue. “When I see Jack is going off on one of his tantrums, I just tune out,” said Truman. “I don’t hear a thing, and then when he’s done, I tune back in. I do the same thing with Bob when he starts talking about space, stars and the universe. I don’t understand a word of it.”

  Bob was married, not happily, to his second wife when he met Truman, and he supported his six children as a commercial artist and as the author of corporate brochures. His labors with Truman promised greater reward, and during the next year, from the summer of 1972 to the summer of 1973, they worked together on their three projects, none of which was ever produced. Working with Bob much as he had with Wyatt on The Glass House, Truman sketched out his ideas over lunch or dinner; Bob then sat down by himself and filled in the details, which Truman revised at another lunch or dinner. For Truman at least, it was a pleasant and painless process, as little like work as work could be.

  In the fall of 1972 they flew to New Orleans, where they examined locations for their murder mystery, Dead Loss. In the winter they put together Second Chance, a TV documentary about transsexuals. Finally, in mid-June, 1973, they drove to Canada, where, during two weeks in a Montreal hotel and a nearly empty, out-of-season ski lodge, they completed Uncle Sam’s Hard Luck Hotel, a TV play about a California halfway house. Their relationship was entirely amicable, and Bob was therefore puzzled and hurt when, not long after their return from Canada, he detected a distinctly gelid tone in Truman’s voice over the telephone. “It was obvious that he didn’t want to talk to me,” Bob said. Without explanation or apology, Truman was giving him the brush-off. His wife soon complained of Truman’s “perfidy,” and Bob, who had expected much more from their collaboration, agreed. In October he wrote in his diary: “Dreamed that Capote returned.” But that Truman did not do.

  The explanation was simple: Truman was in love again. Not merely in love, as he had been with Danny, but enraptured and enthralled. His new lover’s name was John O’Shea, and although Truman thought that he was “one of the best-looking people I’ve ever seen in my life,” most other people described him as nondescript. He was five feet ten inches tall, and he had the build, neither fat nor thin, of the average man of forty-four. He had dark brown hair, pronounced eyebrows, and blue eyes that were magnified by thick glasses. In every way he looked like what he was, a low-level bank vice president.

  “Charlie Middleclass,” John jokingly called himself, and search as he might, a sociologist could not have found a better representative of the typical American, circa 1973. He and his devoutly Catholic family lived in a split-level house in a middle-class development about forty-five minutes from Manhattan. Both his wife, Peg, and his son Brian, who was sixteen, were leaders in their parish; his daughter, Kathy, who was fifteen, was one of the top students in her class; and his two youngest, Kerry and Chris, twelve and nine, were training to be runners—in his spare time John was a track coach, and a very good one at that.

  That was only half of the picture, of course, and John too bore the wounds of a terrible childhood. His parents had come to New York from Ireland, and when his father, who was a skilled carpenter, could not find work, his mother supported their family with her job at the telephone company. Disappointed with his life and longing to return to Ireland, his father became an alcoholic who regularly beat his wife and two sons. John grew up, and one day, after his mother had been thus roughed up, he threw his father out of their Bronx apartment. But that solved only half of his parental problem. His mother was perhaps even worse than his father. Her idea of an Irish lullaby was to hear him howl with pain. When he caught poison ivy, she poured ammonia on him in the shower. When she wanted to punish him, she made him sit in the bathtub and whipped him with an electric cord; naked wet flesh is easier to hurt than dry, she had learned.

  Like his father, John grew up to become a profoundly disappointed man. After serving in the Navy, he spent a year at a college in upstate New York, then returned to the Bronx to take a job in a bank, marry Peg and start their family. At that point what appeared to be a modest success story took an unexpected turn. Although his banking career slowly advanced, he was dissatisfied; his real ambition, which he nurtured at night and on weekends, was to be a novelist. Nor was he happy with his marriage, and he saw prison walls wherever he looked. “He was just a classic Irish guy,” said his son Brian. “He got beaten growing up, he went into the Navy, he came back, and when he woke up, he had a house and a bunch of kids. He never had a life.”

  Emulating his father again, John became an alcoholic, “an extraordinarily violent man,” in Brian’s words, who beat Peg and Brian both. But Brian grew up and became something of a martial-arts expert. One Sunday, when his father di
srupted a family dinner—John threw vegetables at Peg—Brian angrily rose from his chair, and using a trick he had learned, he stuck a finger up each of John’s nostrils, sending him crashing to the floor, and, for a moment, knocking him unconscious. So did hostility and violence descend through three generations. Like his father, John had lost control even in his own house.

  Such was his situation when he met Truman, probably in the first week of July, 1973. He had come into Manhattan to be interviewed for a job he had been all but guaranteed; but to his surprise and chagrin, he did not receive it. When two tranquilizers failed to relieve the resulting tension and anger, he decided, as he sometimes did when he was anxious, to pay a call at a gay bathhouse near the Plaza Hotel: he looked upon the sex he had there as a form of masturbation; he did not consider himself homosexual. “An older guy was doing a number on me,” he recalled, “and I looked to my right, and there was Truman. I felt compelled to talk to him, thinking he’d be sympathetic to my plight. I wanted to unravel my whole tortured existence, to tell him how I had been impressed into working for a bank when I was really a writer. He would tell me how to write.”

  In a private room Truman had rented upstairs, John did spill out his woes, and Truman was, or pretended to be, sympathetic. Once again Truman was swimming in the treacherous currents of nostalgia, reaching out for the absolutely average. But there was more to John’s appeal than his ordinary condition. Like Danny, he unwittingly pressed a button in Truman’s memory. Just as Danny had reminded him of a military-school classmate, so did John remind him of a Monroeville boy, a boy whose personality had stamped itself so indelibly on Truman’s memory that he had made him the title character in his story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Only later did Truman recognize how accurate and prophetic that association was: that boy was the school bully who had made his days miserable and filled his nights with foreboding. Odd Henderson he had called him, “the meanest human creature in my experience.”