To do that, he made arrangements to spend a month at the Smithers clinic in Manhattan, an institution so tough and uncompromising that some of its successful graduates, like John Cheever, looked back on their stays there with profound dislike. The Devil’s Island of alcoholism clinics, Truman termed it, and he seemed genuinely afraid that he might not survive the course. “He feels as if he’s died already, and he wonders what he’ll be like when he comes out,” said Jack, who talked to him by phone. “He was so sad, so elegiac the other night. ‘When we sat in Harry’s Bar, it all seemed so innocent,’ he said.”
He was resolved despite his fears, and on October 12, the day before he was to leave Los Angeles, he asked Jack, who was on Long Island, to meet him in New York; he did not want to be alone on his last night as a free man. But Jack was not sympathetic, making it clear that he did not want to rush into town on a fool’s errand. It was not a proud moment for either one of them, and Truman’s half of their conversation, which Joanne recorded, sounds as poignant today as it must have sounded then: Truman believed that Smithers was his last chance, and he was begging for assistance. “It’s always been my nightmare that I would go there,” he said. “It’s a real charnel house. I talked to John Cheever on the phone yesterday. He said, ‘Listen, Truman, it’s the most terrible, glum place you can conceivably imagine. It’s really, really, really grim. But I did come out of there sober, and I have been sober for two and a half years.’ I’ve tried everything else,” Truman added, his voice breaking into sobs. “I am really frightened about it. I feel that it’s the end of everything. I’ve got to get all of this out of my system, because if I don’t, nothing is ever going to work.” Jack could not resist such a plea and he did drive into Manhattan.
Smithers was as tough as Truman had feared. “I hate this place,” he said shortly after his arrival. “They wouldn’t give you an aspirin if you had pneumonia.” But he soon had to admit that the Smithers regime was working; for the first time in many years he found that he could get through the day without pills or alcohol. Overlooking their just-concluded battles, he and John planned yet another reconciliation after his release—a sober Christmas in Palm Springs.
That happy moment never arrived, and as the day of Truman’s release approached, John grew more and more apprehensive, afraid that the cure had not taken and that Truman’s drinking would threaten his own fragile sobriety. Finally, in his own words, he “freaked out” and ran away. When Truman called their Santa Monica apartment, he heard only a recorded announcement saying that the phone had been disconnected. A second call, to their landlady, informed him that John had vacated, taking everything with him. Still a third call, to his lawyer, Alan Schwartz, brought news of a farewell letter. Truman would be happier without him, John said—he was going off to live in the wilderness.
As if that were not enough, John himself phoned the U.N. Plaza the night of Truman’s discharge, blaming him, as Truman told Joanne, for ruining his life. After they had hung up, Truman went out and bought a bottle of vodka, which he drank to the last drop. His month in Devil’s Island had been wasted, and his post-Smithers abstinence could be measured not in weeks, or days, but in hours. In the game of revenge, John was now the winner.
Truman enacted most of the dramas of his life in public, and taking Peg and young Chris O’Shea along with him, he foolishly kept an engagement to speak the following day, November 13, at Towson State University, just outside Baltimore. Only after they had arrived at their hotel did Peg realize that the bottle he had hugged so tightly in the limousine had been filled not with Tab, as he had claimed, but with vodka. “I am an alcoholic, a genuine alcoholic,” he announced to a local reporter, “not just a fake, phony alcoholic, a real alcoholic.” As if to prove it, he tripped as he approached the podium; once there, he rambled aimlessly. “I’m not going to let this go on,” said the man in charge, and Peg sent Chris to lead him from the stage. The next morning’s headline in the New York Daily News read: “Is Truman’s Song: ‘How Dry Am I?’”
However much he had hurt John, John had always hurt him more, or so it seemed to Truman, and as if by reflex, once again he called on Rick Brown to come to his aid. Not only had John taken the twenty thousand dollars he had brought from New York, he told Rick, but he had also filched an unpublished chapter of Answered Prayers—the only copy in existence. The first complaint had some truth, although John contended that Truman had in fact given him the twenty thousand dollars as a kind of security deposit, to protect him in the event of another breakup. The second complaint was almost certainly untrue. Truman could not even remember what had been stolen, whether it was two hundred pages, as he originally asserted, or three hundred and twenty pages, as he claimed later.
Rick, in any case, was unmoved. “You deserve it!” he retorted when Truman had finished his list of charges. “After all that man put you through and you still moved in with him! You deserve everything that happened to you for being that stupid!”
“You never change,” replied Truman. “You always put me down. You never build me up. Why are you so cruel?”
Rick nonetheless agreed to help. He located John’s new apartment house, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, and, climbing a tree across the street, peered into his second-floor window through binoculars. “I zoomed in and there he was, with his drapes open, walking around naked. He must have been impressed with himself.” That description was all Truman needed to hear, and he briskly issued his orders: “Here’s what I want done. I want his legs broken. I want his arms broken. Kick him in the back. Do whatever you think.”
“How can you be talkin’ like this, Truman? Let’s be civilized. Why don’t I just go up and say to him, ‘Mr. O’Shea, I want to talk to you. You have Truman’s things. I think it’s best that you give them back.’”
“No!” said Truman. “I want to let him know that he’s not fooling around with punks.”
Again Rick agreed, deciding that a sound whack across the knees with a baseball bat might convey Truman’s message. Twice he and a friend pursued John by car, but each time John eluded them with a series of U-turns worthy of a Hollywood stunt driver. Once, on Truman’s instructions, they also heaved a brick onto his terrace, with a bullet and the name “The Avenger” (or some such) taped to it—“kid-shit stuff,” as Rick admitted. When he heard the thud, John rose from his chair “like a bat out of hell,” recalled Rick, and turned off the lights and closed the drapes.
Believing that Truman had persuaded a famous West Coast mobster to kill or maim him, John was terrified by such threats, juvenile or not. When Rick and his friend at last rang his bell, John was not inclined to let them in. “Mr. O’Shea,” Rick said through the closed door, “I’d like to talk to you concerning a mutual friend of ours.”
“About what?”
“It’s a little difficult to talk here in the hall. Could you open your door? Or could you step out?”
“No. Is this about Truman?”
“Can we speak face to face?”
“No. I don’t wish to discuss this anymore.”
“You know, you son-of-a-bitch, you’re going to be sorry you said that,” yelled Rick, who, true to his word, went down with his friend into the building’s underground garage. Jimmying open the door of John’s 1974 Mercury, he doused some rags with lighter fluid, threw them onto the cluttered back seat, and lit them with a match. By the time Rick and his friend reached the exit, John’s car was in flames. As he sat in his own car across the street, watching oily black smoke pouring from the garage and frightened tenants running through the lobby, Rick said to himself, “Oh, God, what the hell have I done?”
56
AFRAID that Truman’s hit men would get him, a panic-stricken John took flight, fleeing first to Las Vegas, where he bought another car, then to a beach community south of Los Angeles, and finally back to Santa Monica. Acting like a hunted man, he assumed an alias (Timothy O’Brian and Roger Sanderson Christie were among the names he used), kept his whereabouts secr
et, and had his mail delivered to a post-office box. They were all wise precautions. Prodded by Truman, Rick remained on the case and several times spotted him and gave chase, losing him in crowds or traffic each time.
But the explosion that had so thoroughly terrified John had had a marvelously soothing effect on Truman, who at last felt that he had given measure for measure. John now knew who was boss, and for the first time Truman was able to ignore his emotional plea, conveyed by a mutual friend, for still another reconciliation. “It’s as if a boil had been lanced,” Truman explained. “I feel very serene. I don’t have any of that hysterical anxiety anymore. Everything is going okay.” Then, his spirits restored, his hopes revived, he added: “I’m beginning my third act now. My first act ended with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My second act was In Cold Blood, which was a total switch for me. My third act will go on for the rest of my life.”
Indeed, it did seem, during the winter and spring of 1978, as if a curtain were going up on a new, happier phase of his life. John’s humiliation was the catalyst, but part of the credit for his resurrection must also go to the fortuitous reappearance of Bob MacBride, whom he had so callously dumped when he met John in 1973. Bob called him on some matter or other, they arranged a meeting, and Truman invited him on a vacation to Martinique. They got along better than ever, and from then on, wherever he went, Truman expected Bob to go as well. “Can’t you find somebody younger for Truman?” Andy Warhol finally asked a public relations consultant, Joseph Petrocik, who, together with his companion Myron Clement, became one of Truman’s closest friends during the seventies and eighties. “Truman is always getting himself involved with these old guys! They’re not very attractive, and they’re so dull!” But Bob’s steady, sober, unexciting company was exactly what Truman required, a safe port after four and a half years of rough and perilous waters.
Although his days were not quite as sunny as he pretended, things were brighter than they had been, and for the first time in years Truman was able to speak with convincing optimism about the future. Trying to rejuvenate his much-put-upon body, he returned to the gym to which Rick had introduced him in the early seventies. Renewing his surroundings, he redecorated his apartment, giving away—in effect banishing—the portrait painted of him when he was in his thirties by Jim Fosburgh. A new purchase, a Texas rattle-snake stuffed with Styrofoam, expressed the sentiments of the older and presumably tougher Truman. Rising to an attack position in the center of his coffee table, it seemed to say, “Don’t tread on me!” And like that angry rattler, he felt strong enough to strike at those who had snubbed him after “La Côte Basque,” delivering, for example, a public and much-publicized scolding to one minor society figure, Nan Kempner, who dared to advise him about Answered Prayers.
For all the others who had lined up against him, he plotted a subtler revenge: he would deny them invitations to the wonderful parties he was already busy planning. First would come a series of small and elegant lunches in his dining room overlooking the East River. “My little raspberry room will become the most exclusive club in New York,” he predicted. “If you get invited to Truman’s, you will be really and truly, totally, utterly in!” Then, when the outs were beginning to regret having crossed him, he would cause mass hara-kiri, as he had in 1966, by giving what he called his “get-even party,” a gathering grander than the Black and White Ball. March 21, 1979, the first day of spring, was to be the day of retribution. The place of honor was to be an indoor tennis court, which was to be decorated like a palace out of The Arabian Nights. The host himself was to be disguised in the humble robe of a poor peasant, revealing his true identity only by the huge emerald that would sparkle from his forehead, dazzling all those who approached his royal presence. “I will be the prince of all Araby,” he said, “and you will all kiss my hand when you come in.”
In the final years of the decade, that lovingly detailed but rather pathetic fantasy faded away, and most of his social energies were focused on a nondescript-looking former theater on West Fifty-fourth Street, inside which was what The New York Times called the “Oz of discos”—Studio 54. Discotheques had come and gone in New York since the sixties, but none was as popular as that palace of decadent pleasures, whose real progenitor was not its immediate predecessors, but the gaslit Moulin Rouge of the 1890s, the home of the cancan, Toulouse-Lautrec, and dozens of plump, pretty and available girls.
A birthday party for Bianca Jagger had set the tone: riding a white horse, she had been led around the dance floor by a huge black man, who was naked except for a covering of gold glitter. After that, anything went, so long as it was done with a similarly outrageous mixture of style and fantasy. Among the regulars were Disco Sally, a grandmother who loved to dance; Rollerena, a transvestite who endlessly circled the floor on roller skates; and two young men who showed up in different costumes each night—as cowboys one night, baseball players the next, and so on. “Le freak, c’est chic,” said the words of a popular song, and in the late seventies and early eighties it was. When any sophisticated tourist returned home, whether home was Paris or Peoria, the first question put to him was: had he been to Studio 54?
“Rendez-vous du High-Life,” the advertisements for the Moulin Rouge had read. “Attractions Diverses.” And so, in the same words, might the ads have read for Studio 54, which glorified drugs—its symbol, emblazoned on a curtain behind the stage, was the man in the moon sniffing cocaine from a spoon—and which celebrated sex. The handsome young waiters, who wore nothing but silk basketball shorts, were frequently lured away by the customers, and almost every night at least a few people could be observed engaging in some form of sex in the marijuana-scented balcony.
“I’ve been to an awful lot of nightclubs, and this is the best I’ve ever seen,” said Truman, who was so smitten with the place that he dragged Bob MacBride there two or three nights a week. “This is the nightclub of the future. It’s very democratic. Boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else—all one big mix!” But Bob, who hated it, usually disappeared into the balcony, where, making a bed of his overcoat, he would fall asleep, blind and deaf to the frenzied cavorting around him. “When I was in the Navy, I used to sleep on the steel deck of a destroyer, with five-inch guns going off over my head,” he explained. “So I can sleep anywhere.” And there he would remain until Truman sent someone to fetch him.
Truman preferred the deejay’s booth above the dance floor, a crow’s nest from which he could see without being seen. “Isn’t it too bad that Proust didn’t have something like this?” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m sitting up [there], I think about all the dead people who would have loved 54. It’s a shame they’re not around—people like Ronald Firbank or Toulouse-Lautrec or Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde or Carl Van Vechten. Cole Porter would have loved it.” Occasionally, he also joined others among the elite in the sanctum sanctorum, a fence-enclosed area in the basement, adjoining the boiler. “It was almost as if we were in jail, but at that time it was the most desirable spot in New York,” recalled Bob Colacello, the editor of Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview. “Now it seems sick, but it all seemed so glamorous then. Truman enjoyed it, but I think he wished that he could have gone to lunch with Babe the next day and have told her about what had gone on.”
That was never to be, and as spring turned to summer, Babe’s long battle with cancer approached its conclusion. When she did go out, it was most often to visit her sister and brother-in-law, Minnie and Jim Fosburgh, who, by a grotesque coincidence, were also—both of them—victims of cancer.13 Babe had not forgiven Truman for “La Côte Basque,” in any event. Chance once brought them together on a sick call to the Fosburghs, and for sweet Minnie’s sake, they acted as if nothing had happened; but every so often Babe’s eyes would meet his and tell him how things stood between them. “When she and Bill left, I pretended I had to make a phone call in the next room,” said Truman. “I was afraid that if I went down in the elevato
r with them, I would break down and begin crying. I do that sort of thing. Babe never did.”
Yet Babe may not have been as implacable as she seemed; though he was never to know it, Truman may have achieved his goal of turning her against Bill after all. “My own feeling is that there was this weird undercurrent, which she couldn’t admit to, of gratitude and a kind of perverse loyalty to Truman,” said the art critic John Richardson, who saw her frequently in her last months. “She became very anti-Bill. She would always refer to him as Paley, seldom as Bill, and only in the most cruel terms. It may have been partly the outcome of the cancer—I believe that people who have it tend to take it out on the person closest to them—but I think it was also a consequence of ‘La Côte Basque.’ People used to talk about Bill as a philanderer, but his affairs weren’t the talk of the town until Truman’s story came out.”
Bill was later to lament that “you understand much more about the value of a marriage when you’ve lost it,” and only when she was dying did he seem to appreciate the remarkable character that lay beneath Babe’s beautiful facade; only when it was too late did he appear to see what Truman had seen from the first. As she turned away from him, he turned toward her, making it not just his goal, but his mission to save her life. “I was determined to be the most knowledgeable man in the world about cancer, and I think I was,” he said. Yet in the end, all his determination, his money and his power could do nothing but make her more comfortable than she might otherwise have been. “But it will take millions to take care of her at home,” her doctors told him when she said that she wanted to leave the hospital. “That’s all right,” he answered, “I’ve got millions”—and he brought her home to their apartment on Fifth Avenue.
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