Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  As Lady Coolbirth’s knowing eyes pass over the other patrons—a singular assembly that includes Babe and her sister Betsey Whitney; Lee and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy; and Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Matthau—she becomes Truman’s mouthpiece. “The truth of the matter is that Lady Ina Coolbirth is me!” he later insisted. “I’m the person who gathered all that information, and her conversation is precisely the kind I might have had with somebody.” Lee, for instance, receives the usual valentine. “If I were a man, I’d fall for Lee myself,” says Lady Coolbirth. “She’s marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine.” Older sister Jackie is given the usual needle. “Very photogenic, of course,” Lady Coolbirth reluctantly admits, “but the effect is a little… unrefined, exaggerated.” But most of Lady Coolbirth’s monologue is devoted to two long and scandalous stories: a barely disguised account of the Woodward killing and a tale of a philandering tycoon’s comic comeuppance.

  The Woodward killing had intrigued the social world since 1955, when Ann Woodward had unloaded a double-barreled Churchill shotgun into the smooth and handsome face of her husband Bill. A sportsman, whose racing colors, red and white, had been worn by the great thoroughbred Nashua, Bill had been a popular figure in New York society; on the day of his funeral, his clubs had lowered their flags to half-mast, and servants all over Manhattan’s East Side had demanded time off to pay their respects. A Long Island grand jury had exonerated trigger-happy Ann, who asserted that she had mistaken him for a prowler; but most of Truman’s friends, who had heard about her fits of insane rage, believed otherwise. When she pulled the trigger, Bill had just emerged from the shower. How many burglars, they asked themselves, make their rounds in the nude?

  When Truman began making notes for Answered Prayers in 1958, he apparently had planned to make Ann his central character; in a list of eight names he jotted down in his journal, hers was the only one he had underlined. By 1975 the Woodward affair was largely forgotten, and he had a different heroine. Ann Woodward—Ann Hopkins, he calls her, not even bothering to change her first name—has been reduced to a bit player whose entrance into La Côte Basque induces Lady Coolbirth to lay out the facts of that twenty-year-old case, or the facts as Truman and most of his friends understood them.

  His Ann is a West Virginia hillbilly who becomes a Manhattan call girl, then a gangster’s moll, and finally, through luck and wile, the wife of one of society’s golden boys—Bill Woodward right down to his shirt size. Her career is a smooth glissando until her husband, who is tired of her flamboyant adulteries, learns that she has never dissolved a teenage marriage; in the eyes of the law, she is not his wife at all. Realizing that he is about to send her packing, Ann bangs away with her shotgun. She gets away with it, too, as old Mrs. Hopkins, willing to do anything to avoid ugly publicity, buys off the police and pretends, as Bill’s mother, Elsie Woodward, did, that her son has been the victim of a cruel accident. (“My son’s death was an unfortunate accident,” Elsie had actually insisted. “I have never thought otherwise.”) Ending her macabre little history, Lady Coolbirth says that now the old lady never gives a dinner party without inviting her daughter-in-law, the assassin. “The one thing I wonder,” adds Lady Coolbirth, “is what everyone wonders—when they’re alone, just the two of them, what do they talk about?”

  The second of Lady Coolbirth’s cautionary tales is prompted by the sight of the wife of a former New York governor, who is also partaking of Monsieur Soulé’s expensive hospitality. One night at a dinner party, says Lady Coolbirth, Sidney Dillon—“conglomateur, adviser to Presidents”—found himself sitting next to the lady. He had always hankered after her, and since both their spouses were away, he invited her back to his pied-à-terre in the Pierre hotel, where, without any difficulty at all, he lured her into bed. It proved to be a disappointing conquest: she had neglected to warn him that it was the wrong time of the month, and she was menstruating—nearly hemorrhaging, in Truman’s grossly exaggerated account. When she left, the sheets were covered with bloodstains “the size of Brazil.”

  Expecting his wife to return early the next morning, before the hotel maid came to make up the bed, Dillon struggled frantically to expunge the evidence of his infidelity, scrubbing those crimson sheets in the bathtub with the only soap at hand, a bar of Guerlain’s Fleurs des Alpes. “There he was,” related Lady Coolbirth, “the powerful Mr. Dillon, down on his knees and flogging away like a Spanish peasant at the side of a stream.” The sheets finally came clean, and after baking them in the apartment’s tiny oven, he made up the bed and crawled under the covers for a warm but somewhat soggy sleep. He was so exhausted that he did not hear his wife come and go, leaving an affectionate message on the bureau: “Darling, you were sleeping so soundly and sweetly that I just tiptoed in and changed and have gone on to Greenwich. Hurry home.”

  Of all Truman’s writing, “La Côte Basque” is probably the one piece that can be called a tour de force: he has transformed a table in a Manhattan restaurant into a stage on which he has placed his own jet-set Vanity Fair. One by one, he shines a spotlight on his glittering cast, which includes, besides his fictional characters, the very real Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill. There is no plot—the only unifying element is a tone of profound disenchantment—and he has pulled off one of the most difficult tricks in fiction, which is the fashioning of a seamless narrative out of disparate characters and unrelated deeds. “La Côte Basque” is not great art, but it is superb craftsmanship, storytelling at its most skillful.

  But Truman had more than literature in mind when he wrote “La Côte Basque.” He also used it to get back at some of his rich friends who, for one reason or another, had offended him over the years. Wrapped inside it is a hit list. Ann Woodward is on that list, of course. Besides being fascinated by her rather compelling biography, he remembered a much-talked-about meeting in St. Moritz in which she had called him a “fag,” and he, in return, had nicknamed her “Bang-Bang.” Also on his roster are Princess Margaret (“I was about to doze off, she’s such a drone,” says Lady Coolbirth, who had the misfortune to be stuck with her at a party); J. D. Salinger, who was one of Oona Chaplin’s early beaux (“It seemed to me he must be a boy who cries very easily,” Carol Matthau thought after reading some of his letters); Gloria Vanderbilt, who is made to appear so vacuous and self-absorbed that she cannot even recognize her first husband when he stops by her table to say hello (“Oh, darling. Let’s not brood,” says Carol consolingly. “After all, you haven’t seen him in almost twenty years”); and Josh and Nedda Logan, whom Truman had not forgiven for sabotaging his New Yorker article on the filming of Sayonara (How was the Logans’ party? Carol asks Gloria. “Marvelous,” replies Gloria. “If you’ve never been to a party before”). All those names might have been anticipated. But one is a startling surprise, and that is Truman’s old friend Bill Paley, who is his model for Sidney Dillon, the millionaire turned laundry man.

  In an earlier version, Dillon had been based on W. Averell Harriman; the woman he had been in bed with was his mistress, not someone he had lured home for a night; and the bloodstain she had left behind had been a mere spot, not a splotch the size of Brazil. By the time it appeared in “La Côte Basque,” the episode had been radically altered. Dillon was no longer, like Harriman, a WASP patrician; he was now a rich and attractive Jew who yearned to be a WASP patrician. He wanted to go to bed with the former governor’s wife not because she was appealing—in fact she “looked as if she wore tweed brassieres and played a lot of golf”—but because she was a symbol of what he most desired. “It was simply that for Dill she was the living incorporation of everything denied him, forbidden to him as a Jew, no matter how beguiling and rich he might be,” says Lady Coolbirth, “the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White’s—all those places he would never sit down to a table of backgammon, all those golf courses where he would never sink a putt….” Conversely, the reason she had agreed to go to bed with him was so that she could humiliate him with those bl
oody sheets; it was her way of putting him in his place. “She had mocked him,” concludes Lady Coolbirth, “punished him for his Jewish presumption.”

  Few readers could have guessed that Dillon was supposed to represent Bill Paley. He did not look or act like Bill, and there were no obvious hints, as there usually are in romans à clef. But to some of those who knew Truman and the Paleys well, it was clear that Bill was his target. The first clue was his description of Dillon’s deceived wife, Cleo—“the most beautiful creature alive,” in Lady Coolbirth’s reverential words. Truman employed such extravagant language to describe only one mortal, Babe Paley; even Lee was not accorded such an encomium. The second clue was his emphasis on Dillon’s hungering for WASP gentility; Truman was convinced that Bill Paley shared that appetite as well. In any event, he thought that by means of such cryptic signals he was doing to Bill what the former governor’s wife had done to Dillon: putting him in his place. Through words, he liked to think that he was hitting perhaps the only vulnerable spot possessed by a man of such monarchical self-confidence: his sensitivity about being a Jew.

  “Truman told me that the point of the bloody-sheets story was that Bill Paley was a Jew from the Midwest who was doing a number on a New York WASP,” recalled John, who proofread “La Côte Basque” before it was sent off to Esquire. Offended by the anecdote—“That’s gossip! that’s bullshit!” he exclaimed—John tried to shame him into removing it. He pointed out that they had been the Paleys’ guests at Kiluna Farm a few weeks before, that over the years the Paleys had laden him with gifts, and finally, that he might hurt Babe, who, as they had had sad occasion to observe, was gravely ill with lung cancer. Take the Dillon section out, John urged him; but Truman could not be persuaded. “It was a vicious story,” said John, “and I’ve never understood, and will never understand, why he put it in. There’s something there that defies analysis.”

  Only someone who had observed that curious trio—Babe, Bill and Truman—in earlier times could have fathomed Truman’s tangled reasoning. He liked and admired Bill; some even speculated that he had a crush on Bill as well as Babe. But he was also jealous of him, as he would have been jealous of anyone married to Babe. Yet at the same time, he resented Bill’s inexplicable failure to appreciate that glorious woman; he was infuriated by what he saw as Bill’s put-downs of her, his insufferable condescensions. Divine Babe! Revered by Truman and so many others, but mocked and belittled by her own husband! Contemplating the unfairness of it all was more than Truman could bear. She was the one person in the world he loved without qualm or reservation, and he alone realized how unhappy she was. Now that she was dying—for that was the case—he was avenging her in the one way he knew how: by holding up to ridicule the man who had caused her so much hurt.

  Truman wanted Bill to be aware that he was being ridiculed; otherwise the Sidney Dillon anecdote would have had no purpose. But so confused and contradictory were his thoughts, he also tried to convince himself that neither Bill nor some of the others he had made fun of would recognize themselves. One day in July he took a friend for a swim in Gloria Vanderbilt’s pool in Southampton—Gloria and Wyatt were away in Europe—and after the friend had read his manuscript, Truman identified, one by one, the models for his characters. “But Truman, they’re not going to like this,” protested the friend. Floating on his back and looking up at a sky of cloudless serenity, Truman lazily responded, “Nah, they’re too dumb. They won’t know who they are.”

  But they did know, and when “La Côte Basque” reached the stands in mid-October, their wrath shook the ground beneath his feet. The first tremors were felt on October 10, even before it appeared. Learning of her own leading role—someone had smuggled her an advance copy of the November Esquire—Ann Woodward swallowed a fatal dose of Seconal, the same drug that had killed Nina Capote. Ann had been deeply depressed anyway, and “La Côte Basque” may only have been the catalyst that hastened the inevitable. What had bothered Ann most, a weary Elsie Woodward told a friend, was not Truman’s dredging up of the sordid past, but his suggestion that her marriage to poor Bill had been bigamous. Few regretted Ann’s death, in any event; the general feeling was that justice had been served at last. But many were angered by the embarrassment Truman had caused that beloved icon, ninety-two-year-old Elsie, who had spent twenty years trying to make everyone forget the scandal. Now, in a few paragraphs, he had destroyed all her hard work.

  When “La Côte Basque” was available to everyone a week later, the earthquake itself struck, sending shock waves from New York to California, where Truman was beginning rehearsals for his movie. The reaction was most succinctly summed up by a cartoon on the cover of New York magazine: a French poodle—Truman, complete with glasses—disrupting a formal party with his sharp and rapacious teeth. “Capote Bites the Hands That Fed Him,” read the magazine’s headline, which expressed the shocked and outraged feelings of most of his society friends: their favorite household pet, their ami de la maison, had turned against them.

  Within hours, phones were ringing all over the East Side of Manhattan. One of the first callers was Babe, who asked Slim to identify Sidney Dillon. “Who is that?” Babe inquired suspiciously. “You don’t think that it’s Bill, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” answered Slim, who knew very well who Dillon was meant to be—Truman had told her months before. But Babe found out anyway, and instead of accusing Bill of infidelity, she blamed Truman for putting such a distasteful tale into print. Although Truman had studied her with the rapt attention of a lover, he had failed to understand perhaps the most important component of Babe’s character: her loyalty to her family. Brought up to honor the stern Roman virtues of Old Boston, she had different values from many of her fashionable friends, including Slim. She believed, as Peg O’Shea did, that whether or not he had strayed, or whether or not he had humiliated her, a wife’s duty was to stand beside her husband. She was now standing beside Bill. In attacking him, Truman had also attacked her family and the code by which she lived, and she could not forgive him.

  Nor could Slim. “You’re in it, Big Mama,” he had warned her; but expecting no more than a walk-on part, Slim was totally unprepared to encounter herself as the gabby Lady Coolbirth. “When you read it, there’s my voice, my armature, my everything!” she exploded. “She looks like me, she talks like me, she’s me! A mirror image of me! I was absolutely undone when I read it, staggered that he could be sitting across from me at a table and then go home and write down everything I had said. I had adored him, and I was so appalled by the use of friendship and my own bad judgment.”

  Others were equally chagrined. “Never have you heard such gnashing of teeth, such cries for revenge, such shouts of betrayal and screams of outrage,” reported Liz Smith, who wrote the article that accompanied the New York cartoon. One cry came from the Logans, who were enraged by his witty gibe about their parties; “that dirty little toad is never coming to my parties again,” declared Nedda. Another came from Gloria Vanderbilt, who vowed that if she ever saw him again, she would spit at him. “After all,” explained her husband Wyatt, “they’ve known each other a long time. It’s not that a secret has been betrayed, it’s that a kind of trust has been betrayed.”

  “It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer,” Somerset Maugham had said, and in the end Truman had elected to be the latter. He had broken the rules of the club, and he had to be punished. Just as it once had been the fashion to take him up, now it became the fashion to put him down, “the chic of the week,” as Charlotte Curtis phrased it. Those who were not hurt by “La Côte Basque” were often as angry as those who were. Marella Agnelli, who more than once had begged him to be her guest on one Mediterranean cruise or another, could not even bring herself to mention his first name. “Capote despises the people he talks about,” she complained. “Using, using all the time. He builds up his friends privately and knocks them down publicly.” Overnight, doors slammed in his face, and except for a few hardy loyalists like Kay Meehan an
d C. Z. Guest, who had not been made fun of, his society friends refused even to speak to him. Not since Franklin Roosevelt came to power had the rich felt themselves so misused by someone they had considered one of their own. Truman had been accepted, pampered and allowed into the inner recesses of their private lives; in return, he had mocked them and broadcast their secrets. He was, in their opinion, a cad and a traitor.

  “In society a great friendship does not amount to much” was Proust’s cynical observation, and so it seemed to be, as even Cecil, who was eagerly following events from England, rushed to join the pack of Truman-haters. Forgotten were the unblemished days he and Truman had enjoyed together in Tangier, Portofino and Palamós; disregarded the many words of sticky adulation Cecil had scribbled about him in his diary; banished from mind the time Truman had rescued him from the two sailors in Honolulu. After having dedicated most of his life to protecting his place in the front ranks of fashion, Cecil did not want to be left behind now.

  Actually, Cecil, whose chief defect was not snobbery, as many assumed, but a consuming envy, had secretly turned against Truman a decade earlier, after the success of In Cold Blood. “The triumph of Truman is salt in one’s wound,” he had bitterly noted in his diary at the end of 1965. The further triumph of the Black and White Ball had inflamed him still more. For ten years he had waited for the weather to change. To Cecil’s envious ears, the howls of indignation he now heard from the other side of the Atlantic were as soothing as a lullaby—Truman’s most venomous enemy could not have taken more delight in his downfall. “I hate the idea of Truman,” he happily confessed to one correspondent. “How low can he sink?” Even Truman’s erstwhile best friend had pronounced his name anathema: there could have been no clearer confirmation that he had been expelled from Olympus.