Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  She died on July 6, 1978, having planned her own funeral, as she had planned everything else. Truman was not among those notified. “She always said to me, ‘There’s only one person in the world who could hurt me, really hurt me, and that’s you,’” he recalled. “‘Bill can’t hurt me. Betsey’—that was the sister she was slightly frightened of—‘can’t really hurt me. But you could really hurt me. You could do something. I don’t know what it would be. But I know that you’re the one person in the world that could ever really, really hurt me.’ And apparently I did hurt her, bizarre and ridiculous as it seems. But because I loved her, she was able to hurt me too—out of loyalty to a man who was so disloyal to her. The tragedy is that we never made up before she died. And I never even went to her funeral… I never even went to her funeral.”

  Her death, combined with a long and unflattering profile of him in The New York Times Magazine, was enough to destroy the serenity he had boasted of at the start of the year. Ten days after her funeral he once again mortified himself in public, rambling incoherently on one of New York’s morning TV talk shows. “What’s going to happen unless you lick this problem of drugs and alcohol?” the host, Stanley Siegel, finally inquired. “What is going to happen to Truman? I’m sure you’ve thought about it.” Truman certainly had, and to that question, at least, his reply was chillingly clear: “The obvious answer is that eventually I’ll kill myself.”

  In New York, and much of the rest of the country as well, his appearance made headlines. “Drunk & Doped, Capote Visits TV Talk Show,” reported that afternoon’s New York Post, which followed up the next day with a savage cartoon: it depicted him as a sleepy-eyed bum, surrounded by hypodermic needles, piles of empty liquor bottles, and a book titled Breakfast at the Bowery. Television critics debated whether Siegel should have let him go on the air in his dismal condition. But no one disputed that the show had been riveting. “A talented man of considerable literary stature was making a fool of himself in front of 250,000 viewers,” wrote Newsday’s John Cashman. “But, strangely enough, it was drama.”

  Truman himself could remember nothing of what had happened, and he was dismayed to hear about it when he returned to his apartment. “I can’t even talk, I’m so upset,” he said. “Ohhh, I feel so awful!” Trying to forget, he spent most of the night at a gay disco in SoHo with Liza Minnelli and Steve Rubell, one of the owners of Studio 54. The next day, July 19, he was in such bad shape that Bob MacBride checked him into a hospital. Afraid that he might return to his apartment and try to kill himself, Bob then went back and removed the gun Al Dewey had given him when he was researching In Cold Blood; dropping it into a paper bag, Bob carried it to Alan Schwartz’ office. Informed that Truman was deeply depressed and suicidal, Jack, who was in Sagaponack, asked a friend to sit with him—he did not want to be alone. “I’m just shaking,” he said. “I guess I wanted someone to do my job for me, and I had great hopes that MacBride would take care of him. I thought MacBride was a staff Truman could lean on. Instead, he’s a wet towel.”

  In this instance, however, Jack was the wet towel, Bob the staff on whom Truman could lean. “I saw what that man is about under stress,” said Joe Petrocik, admiringly. While Jack nursed his own anxieties on Long Island, Bob took charge in Manhattan, searching for a solution to what seemed to be a desperate situation. Finally, with the help of Winston Guest, C.Z.’s husband and also an alcoholic, he prevailed on Truman to enter Hazelden, an addiction-rehabilitation clinic fifty miles north of Minneapolis. When Truman seemed to waver—if Smithers had been Devil’s Island, he moaned, then Hazelden was Alcatraz—Bob and Winston bundled him into Winston’s car, virtually abducting him, Bob confessed, and drove him to the Guest estate on Long Island. Afraid that he still might back out, a few days later Winston and C.Z. drove him to the airport and flew with him to Minnesota.

  To his surprise, Truman almost enjoyed his month at Hazelden, which was surrounded by woods and water and which, unlike Smithers, gave him a private room and freedom to wander around. “It’s highly disciplined—they don’t fool around—but it’s not unpleasant at all,” he admitted. “I’ve got my nerves back together and I’ve got a good attitude. Getting better is all in the attitude, actually. My head wasn’t in a place to really work things out at Smithers; there were too many things hanging over me. Now I feel as if a hurricane had gone out to sea and that I’m on a kind of fresh beach.” But the Hazelden treatment worked no better than the Smithers treatment. By the end of September, just a few weeks after his discharge, he was drinking so heavily again that Rick Brown, who accompanied him on a speaking tour of Western colleges, had a hard time keeping him on schedule.

  “At Bozeman, Montana, he was so drunk that they had to drag him out of the plane,” said Rick. “I hired a car to drive to the next stop—I didn’t want him drinking on an airplane—but after a while he said, ‘Rick, you’ll have to stop so that I can get a drink.’ Finally I pulled into a cowboy hangout. He went up to the bar and asked for a vodka and orange juice. When the bartender said they didn’t carry hard liquor—they only had beer and wine—Truman pounded his fist on the bar and yelled: ‘Beer and wine! I thought this was a tough place! And you call yourselves men!’ I was afraid that those cowboys would kill him. But they just looked at him. I don’t think they had ever seen anything like him before. When we got to Denver, he was so bored that on our first day he took me to five porno flicks, straight and gay both. We saw so many that I finally recognized a girl I knew.”

  Returning to Long Island in October, Truman once again was paralyzed by anxiety. “I’m followed by fear and terror, which hits my chest and then goes up to my throat,” he said. “I think a lot—not just a little, but a lot—about killing myself. I’m obsessed with the idea of dying, and I wake up hoping that I will die. But what scares me is the fear that I might injure but not kill myself, that I might do terrible things to my brain with Tuinal, yet not die.” Jack believed that he also saw death’s approaching shadow. “You’re looking at a dying man, you know” were his gloomy words to a friend. “I watch him when he’s sleeping, and he looks tired, very, very tired. It’s as if he is at a long party and wants to say goodbye—but he can’t.”

  During the summer crisis Jack had also said: “Truman has surprised me before, and he may surprise others too. The tree may seem to have no more leaves on it, but who can say? There may be another spring.” And so, miraculously, there was. At the beginning of 1979, in an almost exact reprise of the year before, Truman tried to break the destructive patterns of the recent past, to give himself a fresh start—indeed, a fresh face before the world. Within the space of a few months, he had a face lift, hair transplants and major work done on his teeth. “Why, Truman,” exclaimed Andy Warhol, “it’s a new same old you!”

  This time his efforts seemed to succeed. Though he continued to pop pills and snort cocaine, a drug to which his friends at Studio 54 had introduced him, he was nonetheless able to stop the heavy drinking and reassert control over his life. “My recovery wasn’t spontaneous,” he said. “It was hard work. I had to go through hell to get there. It was all a question of being ready. I was ready—I always knew I would be—and things that had been impossible for me suddenly became very easy.” One of those easy things was writing, and 1979 became perhaps the most productive year of his career. Nearly every day he descended fifteen floors to a maid’s studio apartment he had rented in the U.N. Plaza, and there, safe from importuning visitors and the telephone, he scribbled in his notebooks and on his yellow pads. “I’ve never worked in such a concentrated way as I’m working right now,” he said. “I write all the time, and I’m oblivious to everything else. I don’t like to talk about it because it destroys the concentration, but bits of it will begin appearing very soon.”

  He had always been happiest writing short pieces, fiction and nonfiction alike, and some of the bits that followed were among the best works he was ever to produce: the years of self-abuse had not dulled his musician’s ear for the rhyt
hms and intonations of the English language. Most of the pieces were later collected in Music for Chameleons. They included the title story, which he published in The New Yorker; “Dazzle,” a confessional story about his childhood yearning to be a girl, which he sold to Esquire; and ten pieces he wrote for Interview. Among the latter were a profile of Marilyn Monroe (“A Beautiful Child”), an anecdote about his chance encounters with a Soviet spy (“Mr. Jones”), an account of a day with an itinerant cleaning woman (“A Day’s Work”), and Handcarved Coffins, which was a superbly executed novella-length thriller—his last major work.

  The idea for Handcarved Coffins had come from Al Dewey, who several years before had told him about a series of bizarre murders in Nebraska—in one instance the inventive killer had used rattlesnakes to dispatch his victims. Truman followed the case by telephone and he may also have conducted interviews. But this “Nonfiction Account of an American Crime,” as he subtitled it, was, nonetheless, mostly fictional. His homespun detective was not a real person, but a composite of several lawmen he had known—not the least of whom was Al Dewey—and Truman did not, as he indicated in the manuscript, play Dr. Watson to the detective’s Sherlock Holmes.

  Handcarved Coffins, like his other contributions to Interview, resembled a movie script, with long stretches of dialogue occasionally interrupted by passages of descriptive prose. In his hands such a structure was remarkably pliable and plastic, and he was so happy with the results—“there’s not an ounce of fat on these stories,” he boasted—that once again he claimed to have discovered a new art form: one that combined the techniques of film, fiction and nonfiction. It was such a radical advance, he said, that it made traditional storytelling obsolete. “It’s a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism—everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I’m trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way.”

  In fact, he had discovered nothing but a renewed sense of self-confidence, and when Music for Chameleons was published in 1980, some reviewers said as much, dismissing his claim even while praising his achievement. It was not a glorious future he was pointing to, contended the British novelist John Fowles, but a glorious past, namely, the spare, tightly controlled stories of Flaubert and Maupassant. “I take it Music for Chameleons is a foretaste of what we can expect when Answered Prayers is finally rewritten and published, and I now look forward to it immensely,” wrote Fowles in Saturday Review. “So also, I suspect, somewhere under a café awning on Parnassus, do Mr. Capote’s three masters: Flaubert, Maupassant, and Marcel Proust (who must all have had a dry time of it recently). If I’m not quite sure yet that he will one day join them there, I think he begins, behind the froth and the brouhaha, the name-dropping and the backstabbing, the wicked penchant for recording how real people spoke and behaved, to make a serious bid for their company. And of one thing I am certain: Contemporary literature would be much, much duller and poorer without him.”

  Froth and brouhaha were as necessary to Truman as his art, however, and it was only to be expected that after several months of hard and steady work he began looking for some mischievous diversion. He found it, all too easily, in a collision with a once-treasured friend, Lee Radziwill.

  Gore’s libel suit against him (the result of the Playgirl interview in which he had alleged that Gore had been kicked out of the Kennedy White House) had been dragging on for more than three years, and there was no end in sight. From the outset Truman had expected Lee to come to his rescue and say that she had been the source for his story. But now, in the spring of 1979, he was startled to learn that without giving him so much as a hint, Lee—his love, his Galatea!—had done just the opposite. She had become a witness for the prosecution. “I do not recall ever discussing with Truman Capote the incident or the evening which I understand is the subject of this lawsuit,” she had told Gore’s lawyer.

  Stunned, Truman indulged himself in another of his retaliation fantasies. Convinced that if the facts were ever made public, Gore would be so embarrassed that he would immediately raise the white flag of surrender, he secretly gave his copies of their depositions to New York magazine, which in early June obediently printed long excerpts.

  “It’s all I can do to contain myself,” Truman said, so excited that his words tumbled over one another into a long and almost manic monologue. “Until the magazine was actually on the press I could hardly breathe, but right now it is rolling down the chutes along with Gore’s career. All along I knew that if people read these depositions, they would know that he was like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. Now they are about to explode and destroy his career. I will have the greatest single revenge in literary history. Nothing equals it. For the rest of his life he’ll wake up in the morning and be happy for ten minutes—and then he’ll remember what happened on that day in June. The humiliation for him! I love it! I love it! I love it! When he dies, they’ll write on his tombstone, ‘Here Lies Gore Vidal: He Messed Around with T.C.’”

  Why had Lee turned against him? he wondered. Why had she testified in behalf of Gore, whom she disliked? “Why she betrayed me is one of the world’s great mysteries, like those statues on Easter Island,” he said. When his own call to her was not returned, he nagged Liz Smith into calling her and requesting an explanation. Liz did as she was bidden, and she gave him Lee’s answer. “I’m tired of Truman riding on my coattails to fame,” Lee had told her. “And Liz, what difference does it make? They’re just a couple of fags.”

  If lightning had struck him, Truman could not have been more shocked. Through sleepless nights he had brooded, asking himself what he had done to offend her, but that was the one reply, probably the only reply, he had not imagined. Just a fag! He who had sacrificed months of his own work to help her become an actress; he who had foolishly gushed over her in countless articles and interviews. “I saved that girl’s life, for Christ’s sake,” he asserted. But now, when he needed her, she ignored him: he was just a fag and therefore someone who, when he was no longer useful, could be discarded like a paper napkin.14 No one could offer a credible explanation for her conduct—others were as puzzled as Truman was—but a friend of Babe’s, still angry about “La Côte Basque,” thought that quite unwittingly, Lee had nevertheless served the cause of justice. “Truman did everything for Lee and got nothing,” the friend said bitterly. “Babe did everything for him and got nothing.”

  Lee’s “fag” remark changed hurt to rage, and Truman mapped out an attack on the “principessa,” as he now derisively labeled her, slowly rolling that flavorful Italian word around in his mouth before spitting it out like a bad piece of candy. “If the lovely, divine and sensitive Princess Radziwill has such a low opinion of homosexuals, then why did she have me for a confidant for the last twenty years?” he demanded.

  Throughout the first weekend in June he hatched his revenge, and on Monday, June 4, his plan ready, he arranged to appear on Stanley Siegel’s TV show the following morning. If Lee thought he was just a fag, he said, he would do what fags are supposed to do: he would tell all, all of the stories she had told him over the course of those many years, all of her secrets, all of her love affairs, all of her feelings of resentment toward her sister Jackie. “When I finish with her tomorrow, the average rider of the New York subway system will see what a little cunt she is,” he proclaimed. “She and her beloved sister had better have ambulances waiting and rooms reserved at Payne Whitney, because they’ll be there for a long time. Believe me, you will never have seen anything like this.”

  Until late Monday night he rehearsed what he called his “crazy queen” act, so that when he went before the cameras, he would be, as he phrased it, “as calm as a bombe glacée.” Then, early Tuesday morning, The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn met him in his apartment and rode with him to the television studio so that she could report the historic event. “A cassette of this show is going to be one of the great comic classics of all time,”
he assured her.

  And in truth, the first half of his performance, which he gave in a thick Southern accent, did have a certain lunatic brilliance. “I’ll tell you something about fags, especially Southern fags,” he said. “We is mean. A Southern fag is meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met… I know that Lee wouldn’t want me to be tellin’ none of this. But you know us Southern fags—we just can’t keep our mouths shut.” Opening his own mouth very wide, he began revealing the secrets he claimed Lee had confided to him: how envious she was of Jackie (“The princess kind of had it in mind that she was going to marry Mr. Onassis herself”), how she had once tried to steal William F. Buckley, Jr., away from his wife, and how deeply she had been wounded by the breakup of her romance with Peter Beard (“He met this chick with a little less mileage on her”). He was just hitting his stride when Siegel, who was becoming increasingly nervous at the direction his monologue was taking, interrupted, destroying the mood he had so carefully created and causing his speech to sputter to a depressing conclusion.

  Brought suddenly down to earth, he invited Quinn back to his apartment and repeated for her, without the histrionics, the rest of his diatribe, which she duly reported in her newspaper: how Jackie had supposedly told Lee that Lee owed everything to her, for example, and how Lee had had a crush on both Jack Kennedy and Rudolf Nureyev—although she had been taken slightly aback when she saw pictures of nude men in Nureyev’s guest room. But most of all he confessed how hurt he was, and how keenly he felt the loss of one of his greatest friends. “Love is blind,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve been in love before with people who were just ghastly. I was in love with her like I would have been in love with anybody.” Why had she betrayed him? He believed he had belatedly deduced the answer: she was afraid of Gore, but she had thought that poor drunken Truman was going to die and that she could therefore disregard his feelings. “Unfortunately for Princess Radziwill,” he said, “this fag happens to be alive and well and in New York City.”