Perhaps to nurse John’s bruised ego, Truman took him to Europe again in the middle of July, almost a year to the day after they had met. They stayed with the Wyatts on the Riviera, and, with vivacious Lynn leading the way, attended one gala after another. Twice they lunched at the palace in Monaco, where John, who noticed such things, was surprised that amidst all the informal family photographs, he found not one of Princess Grace’s brother, Jack Kelly, whom he had once met at a track meet. “She was a prisoner, absolutely a prisoner,” he declared. He later shared his discovery with one of Grace’s friends, who agreed, but replied, as if surprised by his innocence: “But she had to make a life.”
It was a comment that would have puzzled him twelve months before, but now struck John with the force of revealed truth. If Truman required any more examples for his book, he need not have looked any further than his own lover, whose answered prayers had brought him nothing but unhappiness. John had broken out of his middle-class rut, just as he had promised Brian, but he had only exchanged one jail cell for another: he too was a pampered prisoner. He did not manage money for writers, movie producers and winners, nor did he have any prospect of doing so. Both he and his family were totally dependent on the whims and moods of just one writer, and that knowledge filled him with fear, as well as anger.
Truman and John thus continued to vex each other, each in his customary way. Truman’s was the subtle way; he made it clear that he was the one who wrote the checks. John’s was the direct way; he seemed to delight in cutting his provider down to size before friends like Kay Graham and Carol Matthau, who was so horrified that she threatened to kill him. “I have a gun in my purse,” she warned him, “and I’m a crack shot.” John Knowles was with them at a restaurant in Bridgehampton when John threw his drink in Truman’s face. “Oh, Johnny, stop that” was Truman’s mild reproof. “Sit down and be quiet.”
John did not even stop at demeaning Truman in the eyes of his father. Claiming that he was writing Truman’s biography, he telephoned Arch for information, taking the opportunity to furnish some of his own. “He didn’t try to hide,” recalled Arch. “He said he’d been intimate with Truman sexually and he told me all about it.” Although Truman’s sexual orientation was obvious to most of the world, some ultimate scruple had prevented Truman himself from suggesting it to his father. John had now done it for him.
Unable to stay in one place very long, Truman was on the move throughout the fall and winter of 1974, traveling, sometimes with John, sometimes with Lee, to New Orleans, California and Florida—then back to California, to Mexico and to Florida. Alighting with John in Key West at the end of February, 1975, he finally settled down for several weeks of concentrated writing at the Pier House hotel, rushing to finish a story he had promised Esquire two months before. Titled “Mojave,” it apparently had been in his mind, and perhaps partly on paper, for some time. Now, with the deadline fast approaching, he sat down to complete it.
By March 12 he was done. But perhaps not since he’d first walked into the offices of Mademoiselle had he been so uncertain about the quality of his writing, so eager to be reassured. Not only was he putting on exhibit his first fiction since “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” nearly eight years before, but he was also giving the world its first peek at Answered Prayers. A bleak tale of disappointed love, “Mojave” was supposed to be a fiction within a fiction, the work of the novel’s cynical narrator, P. B. Jones.
He was so nervous that he demanded an immediate reaction, and Don Erickson, Esquire’s top editor, obliged by flying down from New York to pick it up himself. When Erickson arrived, Truman ordered him to take a swim in the Pier House pool first, then read it in a deck chair, while he himself anxiously watched from the bar. Erickson’s face registered appropriate appreciation—under the circumstances, how could it have been otherwise?—and he soon took “Mojave” back to Manhattan.
“To John, with all my love and gratitude,” Truman had written on the manuscript, and for as long as he was writing, he and John enjoyed one of their good periods, ending each night with a tour of Key West’s many night spots. Wherever they went, much was made of Truman. One night, in a crowded bar on Duvall Street, a woman asked for his autograph, handing him a felt-tip pen and pulling down her panties to offer him a plump pink pad—her bare buttocks. Not to be outdone, an athletic bartender vaulted the counter and ran over to him, unzipping his pants and hauling out a considerably smaller piece of flesh for a similar inscription. “You won’t be able to autograph it,” John slyly observed, “but you might be able to initial it.” Truman did neither, but, appropriating John’s amusing put-down as his own, he repeated the story on several TV talk shows, to giggles and laughter each time.
Harmony expired when Truman grew tired of such late-night revels and John went carousing by himself, sometimes not stopping until the early hours of the morning. Truman was angry, but he did nothing until John brought a young woman back for a skinny-dip in the hotel pool, making so much noise that other guests came out to their balconies to see what was going on. Whether Truman heard about that noisy swim or whether he witnessed it himself from behind a palm tree, John never knew. But find out he did, and early the next morning, March 22, he called John Knowles, who was staying at the Palm-Aire health spa in Pompano Beach, nearly two hundred miles to the north. “Can I come up there?” he whispered into the telephone. “I’ve got to get out of here.” Packing as quietly as he could, he then sneaked out to his car, leaving John a note and a hundred dollars for the flight back to New York.
Truman had meekly accepted almost every humiliation John could contrive, and compared with John’s other misdeeds, a romp with a young woman in the Pier House pool seemed almost innocent. “I didn’t even get into her pants,” John regretfully recalled. But Truman saw nothing innocent in it. In preferring her company to his own, John had finally committed the unpardonable offense: he had, so Truman believed, betrayed and rejected him.
Vowing revenge, Truman made two important phone calls from Pompano Beach. One was to inform Alan Schwartz that the president of Bayouboys had just fired the vice president. “Accordingly,” Alan dutifully wrote John a few days later, “you are in no way to consider yourself an employee of Bayouboys Limited nor to hold yourself out as such to anyone.” John tartly replied that Truman demanded a twenty-four-hour-a-day attendant, not a business manager. “If Mr. Capote’s emotional dysfunction is such to require that he needs a male nurse, then he should have hired one” was his spirited retort.
Truman’s second call was to Peg O’Shea, telling her that John’s drinking had forced him to flee Key West. For their own safety, Truman advised her, she and her children should vacate their house before he came back. Terrified, Peg began packing. Her signal to leave came when John himself phoned from Florida, asking her to meet him at the airport. Trying not to convey the panic she was feeling, she suggested that he take a cab instead. Then, while he was still airborne, she and her children loaded their belongings into the car and, like refugees escaping an invading army, sought asylum in the home of a friend. A few hours later John entered a silent house.
She had left him before, only to forgive him after a few days; in her world a wife did not abandon her husband simply because he drank too much, or even because he was violent. “He was the father of my children, as well as my husband,” she explained. “If you’re brought up in my faith, you think you’re married for life. He was a very mean person, and I didn’t like him. But I loved him.” Apparently afraid that such love would prevail once more, Truman returned from Florida and drove out to her hideaway a few days later. He was determined to win, and it was time to call in the artillery.
Standing there in her friend’s living room, he told her everything: that he and her husband had been lovers, that their business arrangement had been little more than a front for their affair, that they had met in a bath, and that John had had other homosexual relations before Truman came along. By way of proof, he showed her an affectionate letter he
had just received from John, who was eager to make up. As Peg recalled it, it said something like: “Dearest Truman, We’ve had our ups and downs. Sorry if I’ve hurt you. I want you to know I really do love you. All my love, Johnny.” She read it, and so stunned that her ears rang for hours afterward, she automatically handed it to her friend—an ex-nun, as John’s bad luck would have it. “That’s grounds for annulment!” declared the friend.
Still, Peg seemed to waver. Who, she asked herself, would take care of her and her family? Despite his drinking, John had always been a good breadwinner; once he found another position, he doubtless would be one again. She, by contrast, had no employment history; at the age of forty-five, she had dim prospects of finding a good job.
“You’ll be my personal secretary,” said Truman, who had come prepared with an answer for every question. “We’ll go on a lot of trips. You need a change. You need to relax.”
He thus gave her John’s old job, albeit without the title; when John moved out of their house, as he did shortly thereafter, she was even able to use the little office he had set up for his Bayouboys work. Truman had not only taken away John’s job; he had also robbed him of his wife, family and home. To John, who was living by himself in a rented room, it seemed as if Truman had planned it that way from the first. “He decided from the beginning that he would make a conquest and that to do that he would have to subvert my relationship with Peg. He had it down to a fine line: how to subvert a married Irish-Catholic life.” Truman had had his satisfaction.
Truman now courted Peg as ardently as he had courted John two years before—or Rick and Danny in earlier years. Taking command of her life, he hired a housekeeper to look after her children and in May he flew her to California, where he dazzled her with expensive restaurants and movie-star parties. Carol Matthau, Jack Lemmon and Jennifer Jones (who was now married to the financier Norton Simon) invited them to cocktails or dinners, and Robert Anderson flew them to his New Mexico ranch for the weekend, ferrying them by helicopter from the roof of his headquarters in downtown Los Angeles to a private jet at the airport. Peg was as impressed as Truman had hoped she would be. “Gee, Barbara, how big is your ranch?” she asked Anderson’s wife when she saw how far it stretched over the New Mexican landscape. “You don’t ever ask!” laughed Barbara.
One long trip with Truman, no matter how glamorous, was enough for her, however, and when it ended three weeks later, she told him so. “It was fun while it lasted,” she explained, “but I felt that I was having myself a good time at the expense of the children. All of a sudden they didn’t have a father, and now they had a traveling mother. So I stopped.” Thenceforth she did her secretarial work from home.
But a secretary, or a business manager, was not what Truman needed. John’s angry comments to Alan had not been far off the mark: Truman wanted a full-time companion, if not a nurse. Peg would not provide such company. Her much-chastened husband would, and by the beginning of July, John was prepared to give in. Try as he might, John had still not been able to land another job in a bank, and he was reduced to selling life insurance during the day and working for a collection agency at night. With extreme reluctance—“I fought like a son-of-a-bitch not to get involved with him again”—he called Truman and asked for help in obtaining work in Manhattan.
Grabbing the bait, Truman asked him to join him at a weekend party on Long Island. John accepted, they talked some more then, and he was invited out again to spend the night in Sagaponack. Finally Truman popped the question John was waiting to hear. As a kind of lark, Truman said, he had accepted a part in a Neil Simon mystery-comedy that was to begin filming in the fall. Would John go with him to California? Could they start over? John said yes, and Truman rented him an apartment in the nearby town of Noyac for the month of August, warning his friends not to mention his presence to Jack. So they resumed, as if nothing, including the destruction of John’s marriage, had interrupted them. Truman had his revenge and John too.
During the time they had been apart, John had remained sober. But when Truman drank, John drank—and vice versa—and within days they were boozing and fighting again. One typical scene took place at the Mount Kisco estate of Truman’s friends Bill and Judy Green. Obviously fishing for an invitation, Truman called Judy one Saturday afternoon.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m sitting by the pool with Frank and Ava,” she injudiciously replied, referring to her houseguests, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.
“If that’s true, I’m coming right up.”
“Oh, no, please don’t! I’m having a dinner party.”
“All right,” he said grudgingly. “I’ll come after dinner.”
He and John arrived at 6 or 6:30, before she had even gone upstairs to bathe and dress for the evening. Truman was wearing a Sonny & Cher sweat shirt, khaki pants and sneakers; John was wearing a cotton tweed sports coat and looked, to Judy’s sophisticated eyes, like the manager of a grocery store in the Midwest. By 9, when dinner was served, they were both drunk and disrupting a gathering that included several tycoons and the Governor of New York. John accidentally dropped his cigarette, which burned a large hole in an expensive Portuguese rug, and began insulting Sinatra, accusing him of having ties to the Mafia. “Frank took it very well,” said Truman, “but I couldn’t stand it. I had to get out of there. I went to the car, and Frank said he would drive us to a motel. But John got into the driver’s seat and wouldn’t move. So the two of us roared off down those narrow paths, hitting fences and trees. Finally I grabbed the wheel and we wound up in a ditch. I jumped out and ran into a field. John called for me, then drove away.”
Returning to the house, John said that he had lost his passenger. “That’s impossible!” bellowed Ava Gardner. “You can’t let somebody jump out of a car! We’ve got to find him.” And she and Judy took another car and went searching for Truman. “Truman!” they shouted across those otherwise peaceful hills and dales. “Truman, where are you?” There was no answer. Giving up at last, they returned for nightcaps in the Greens’ pool house. They were still sitting there at 3 A.M. when they heard a tap on the door. Turning, they saw a face pressed against the glass: Truman, looking much refreshed from his long walk in the warm summer air, had come back on his own. “By that time he was completely sober,” said Judy, “and I think he was terribly embarrassed by everything that had happened.”
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Answered Prayers was pursuing him “like a crazy wind,” Truman had told Newton in 1958, and for the better part of two decades chase him it had, bawling in his ears like a sirocco. But for a moment at least, the publication of part of it, “Mojave,” had stilled that persecuting wind. Calling him “a modern master,” Esquire had given his story star treatment—the entire cover of its June, 1975, issue—and from those who read it he heard nothing but hosannas. Tennessee Williams, who was not usually an admirer, thought that it even demonstrated a touch of genius. “I’ve never read anything by him, except possibly ‘Miriam,’ that was comparable,” said Tennessee.
Such an enthusiastic reception erased all Truman’s worries and doubts, reducing his writer’s block to a small and contemptible pile of dust. At the age of fifty he still had what it took; neither alcohol and pills nor a series of disruptive love affairs had damaged the faculty he prized most: his magician’s power over words. Perhaps, he seemed to say to himself, Answered Prayers would be the masterpiece he had claimed; perhaps he would be the American Proust after all. Before “Mojave” came out, he had jealously guarded his book’s contents; now he could scarcely wait for everyone to applaud his achievement. To the astonishment of the editors of Esquire, he promised even more chapters. “We stood back on our heels in amazement that we were able to get from Truman Capote what other people hadn’t been able to get in such a very long time,” said Gordon Lish, the magazine’s fiction editor. “Each time he said yes, that he would go one segment further, we were beside ourselves with delight.”
If logic had prevailed,
the book’s first chapter, “Unspoiled Monsters,” would have preceded “Mojave,” which was the second chapter. Just as many had suspected, however, he had not written as much of Answered Prayers as he had maintained; most of it was still in his head. “Unspoiled Monsters” was only half done, and as he resumed his affair with John and prepared to leave for Hollywood, he realized that he would not have time to finish it before the end of 1975. Rushing to give Esquire something new, he again disregarded chronology, plucking from his notebooks what was probably the only other finished chapter, the fifth of a projected eight. “It seemed to be complete in and of itself,” he explained. “So without really thinking about it, I sent it on.”
That fifth chapter borrowed its title, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” from Henri Soulé’s renowned restaurant on East Fifty-fifth Street, a popular gathering spot for the swans and one of the few Manhattan restaurants that possessed what Truman regarded as “established chic.” The action takes place on an afternoon in 1965 when P. B. Jones encounters his friend Lady Ina Coolbirth on the street nearby, and Lady Coolbirth, who has been stood up by her lunch date, the Duchess of Windsor, drags him along to fill the Duchess’ empty seat at one of Monsieur Soulé’s choice front tables.
Despite her title, Lady Coolbirth is an American, a “big breezy peppy broad” in her forties, who grew up on a ranch in the West and whose latest husband is a rich English knight. In looks, manners and speech, she resembles another big breezy peppy broad, who in 1965 was also in her forties, who also grew up on a ranch in the West, and whose latest husband was also a rich English knight. She is a photograph, in short, of Truman’s old friend Slim Keith. On this afternoon in 1965 the fictional Lady Coolbirth has a lot she wants to talk about, and over many glasses of Roederer Cristal champagne, talk she does. Using her voice as his own, Truman is able to stuff his narrative, like an almost infinitely expandable Louis Vuitton bag, with many of the secrets he had become privy to during his years of hobnobbing with the rich.
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