Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Having spoken so unwisely before, Lee now remained silent. Gore, always combative, did not. “This is pathology,” he said. “Real nut-house stuff.” If he had been devastated by publication of the depositions, Gore did not let on. Nor did he drop his suit, pursuing his complaint for four more years. It was finally settled out of court in the fall of 1983, when Truman wrote a letter of apology. “Dear Gore: I apologize for any distress, inconvenience or expense which may have been caused you as a result of the interview with me published in the September 1975 issue of Playgirl. As you know, I was not present at the event about which I am quoted in that interview, and I understand from your representatives that what I am reported as saying does not accurately set forth what occurred. I can assure you that the article was not an accurate transcription of what I said, especially with regard to any remarks which might cast aspersions upon your character or behavior, and that I will avoid discussing the subject in the future. Best, Truman Capote.”

  His furies exorcised, Truman retreated to Long Island after the Quinn interview, and he returned to work, apparently unfazed by his week of melodramas. A little more than a week after the Siegel show, in fact, he was able to finish one of the best short pieces he was ever to write, his profile of Marilyn Monroe. So his days continued, productively and reasonably happily, during the months that followed, and he ended 1979—and the most troubled decade of his life—on a hopeful note of optimism. “Music for Chameleons will be just as good as Answered Prayers,” he said. “It has in it everything I know about writing. It’s the best I can do, and I want everyone to see that it’s the work of a great writer. When it comes out next year, my friends are going to be very proud. I think we’re going to win. In fact I know we’re going to win.”

  57

  Music for Chameleons had been the product of a supreme, almost heroic feat of concentration: he had wanted to make one last effort to show what he could do when he put his mind to it. Having done that, at the beginning of 1980 Truman surrendered to what he called “my demons.” Unable to sit still, he darted nervously from place to place—to California, then Switzerland, New York and back to California. “I’m like a shark,” he said. “The shark is the only animal that never sleeps. It keeps moving through the water, forever and ever.”

  He tossed off ideas for new projects with an energy no less scattered and feverish. One was a novella-length profile of Babe Paley, called Heliotrope, after the purple-flowered plant she so much admired. Another was an account of his friendship with Cecil Beaton, who died in January; The Siamese Twins Visit Siam Truman titled it, a reference to their 1958 trip to the Orient. For a time he also contemplated writing an autobiographical work about his alcoholic years with John, deciding in the end that their relationship defied his comprehension. “I don’t think I’ll ever write about what happened to me with John,” he sorrowfully concluded. “I don’t think I see the truth. What happened between us was too complicated, too idiotic. I could write it as a comedy, but it wouldn’t be true, because there was nothing funny about it. But if I wrote it as something serious, it would be ridiculous. People would say that if this person O’Shea is really as dreadful as all that, then Capote must be a complete moron for having become involved with him.”

  For a year it had seemed that he had managed to escape that complicated, idiotic relationship. But as the new decade began, it was clear that he had not: he was lost in a maze of multiple obsessions, a sunless labyrinth from which were excluded reason, understanding, sanity itself. Once more that most improbable of figures—an overweight, bombastic, and sometimes violent fifty-one-year-old alcoholic—occupied his dreams and dominated both his heart and his mind. “I told everybody I had forgotten about him, and I thought that I had,” he said. “But I hadn’t.”

  His excuse for starting up again was John’s request for permission to sell his television script of “Children on Their Birthdays,” a favorite story of Truman’s youth which Truman, in happier days, had encouraged him to adapt. When Truman now refused to grant him rights, claiming that he too had written a scenario, John irately demanded that Truman send it to him—he would judge its worth. “If Truman feels that some of the material in his lately-written script has enough merit to be included in my script,” he wrote Alan Schwartz on March 4, “I have no objection to appraising his version with the proviso that I will detail, in writing, precisely what items in his version which differ from my version, I might be interested in adding to my version.”

  Instead of laughing at such comical chutzpah, Truman was incensed. But what stuck in his eye was John’s further statement that his greatest desire was to forget “the strange interlude of our former relationship.” A hundred heartfelt pledges of love and devotion could not have reignited Truman’s ardor more successfully than those few contemptuous words. Forget! Truman would tell him when he could forget! And so resumed his never-ending struggle to humble Charlie Middleclass. “My big mistake was in not following through after his car was destroyed,” he said. “That really scared him. I should have had some guys take him out into the desert and beat him up. That would have fixed him.”

  Belatedly attempting to correct that oversight, he resurrected the hoary claim that John had stolen the “Severe Insult to the Brain” chapter of Answered Prayers. “I need those pages,” he avowed. “I can’t do without them. Every word was perfect. That chapter has the climax of the book, a real surprise that no one could guess, and I’ve always been afraid that John would show it to somebody who would give the secret away. It’s a terrible thing he did, but then he’s a terrible man. You think of the worst thing anybody could do—the absolute worst—and Johnny will do something three times as bad.”

  As John still kept his address secret, picking up his mail at a post-office box, Truman hired a Beverly Hills private detective, Joel Michael, to track him down and retrieve those precious pages. “Truman wanted to kill him, and I think he was deadly serious about it,” said Michael. “His suggestion was ‘Let’s find him and do something.’” But John, who had played this game of hide-and-seek before, was not easy to find. Learning that he was once more being sought, he moved around so quickly that even a professional like Michael was hard pressed to locate him. The one time the detective did spot him, walking along Santa Monica Boulevard, John managed to lose him.

  Eagerly following the hunt from New York and Long Island, Truman telephoned Michael late every night, Saturdays and Sundays included, to discuss possible leads. “After a time the manuscript became secondary to him,” said Michael. “It was the chase rather than the catch that interested him. He loved the idea that O’Shea was running and hiding and that we had scared the hell out of him. What really excited him—you could hear it in his voice—was the thought that O’Shea was literally falling apart.” That was not far from the actual fact, and on May 12, 1980, hoping to end the pursuit, John wrote Joe Fox at Random House to formally deny that he possessed anything “remotely connected” to Answered Prayers. If Truman claimed otherwise, John tartly advised, Random House should “consider the source, and refer to the expertise of Gore Vidal concerning T.C.’s veracity.”

  To refute that scornful indictment, Truman wrote a nineteen-page history of the events leading up to the theft nearly three years before: his weeks with John in Santa Monica, John’s secret romance with Joanne Biel, and finally, Truman’s horrified discovery that when he flew to New York to enter Smithers, he had left behind, hidden under the bed in their apartment, the manuscript John now denied any knowledge of. He ended his chronicle with an eloquent passage that might stand as the coda of his life. “I have been a writer and published a number of successful books during the last thirty-five years,” he wrote, “but this book in question, ‘Answered Prayers,’ is my final contribution for having served fifty years as a supplier at the altar of art. Of art; but especially literature. This has been my life. I am a childless man and my works are my children.”

  Translating his emotional narrative into the arid wherefores and t
herefores of a legal brief, his lawyers filed suit in California Superior Court on July 8. They asked for the return of “A Severe Insult” and two hardbound ledgers containing his notes for the last half of Answered Prayers, and they demanded that John and Joanne Biel also pay him damages of four and a half million dollars apiece. Michael served Biel with a summons the next day. “She went into total hysteria, completely flipped out and denounced Johnny,” chortled Truman, with considerable exaggeration. “It was like Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon.” But Michael was not able to give the elusive John his notice until July 16, when, staking out John’s post office, he saw him open his mailbox. John too reacted hysterically when Michael approached him, bolting out the door and running into an alleyway down the block.

  Though they did not know it, the detective and the lawyers had been working toward but one end: to force John back into Truman’s arms. In that they were totally successful, and after his panic-stricken dash from the post office, John phoned Truman several times, trying to work things out. But that was not the end of Truman’s triumph. During the course of his investigation, Michael had alerted California authorities to the false identity John had used on his driver’s license, and John, foreseeing more trouble, prudently decided to seek his sunshine in Florida. Thus, almost inadvertently, Truman had turned John’s life upside down again, compelling him to desert California and Joanne Biel as well.

  Truman’s lawsuit had served its purpose—and its only purpose at that. Soothed by their friendly chats and by John’s pledge to meet with him, he agreed to drop his complaint (it was formally dismissed on January 14, 1981). “I don’t think the manuscript exists anymore,” he said. Then, all but admitting that in fact it never had existed, he added: “But now I don’t think I want it. It would confuse me. I don’t feel the same way about Answered Prayers as I once did. It doesn’t matter so much now.”

  He had obtained what he wanted, but the long obtaining of it had driven him back to the bottle, and on the night of July 29, Jack woke to hear his thin cries floating across the lawn that separated their two houses in Sagaponack. “He had fallen on the steps of his studio—in his own pee, of course, with broken glass around him—and he couldn’t get up,” said Jack. “So I took him to Southampton Hospital, and he did say something honest. ‘I drink,’ he said, ‘because it’s the only time I can stand it.’”

  In accordance with the terms of their truce, Truman and John met in New Orleans on August 11. But the outcome was predictable. Truman was drunk—“gaga,” to use John’s word—as he stepped off the plane, and John, who had arrived a day earlier, was probably not much better. Believing, quite correctly, that he had been coerced into coming, John was even more belligerent than usual. In fact, they had not been together more than an hour in their suite in the Pontchartrain Hotel when, objecting to Truman’s remarks about Joanne Biel, John grabbed him by his shirt and ordered him to shut up. It was Truman’s turn to be frightened. After calling a doctor, he took to his bed and remained there almost to the day they parted, August 17. He was probably not much more sober when he left New Orleans than when he had arrived, and he ended the month, as he had begun it, in a bed in Southampton Hospital.

  In September he flew to Los Angeles, ostensibly to monitor preparations for Hollywood’s adaptation of Handcarved Coffins, the rights to which he had sold for three hundred thousand dollars15 to his friend Lester Persky, producer of such hits as Taxi Driver and Shampoo. Once in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire, however, he rarely ventured out. Responding to a drunken, incoherent call, Rick Brown rushed over to find him in bed, lying naked in his own wastes, his legs caked with dried excrement. Rick gave him a bath, fed him—he had apparently not eaten for a couple of days—and made arrangements to move him to Persky’s house in Bel Air. “Lester, this guy can’t stay alone,” he told Persky.

  Setting up an informal rehabilitation clinic in Lester’s guest bedroom, Rick worked out an elaborate schedule, which he posted on a chart, to slowly wean Truman away from both alcohol and pills. “I can’t stop cold turkey,” Truman had warned him. But after a week or so of Rick’s increasingly spartan regimen, he rebelled, jumping on Lester’s bed and shrilly screaming, “This is too much! You can’t do this to me!” Lester, who suffered from angina, screamed right back—“get out of my room, both of you! I’m a sick man too!”—and ran into his bathroom to gulp down his heart medicine. “It was really very funny, like something out of the Marx Brothers,” said Rick. “Even Truman started laughing.”

  Rick did not give in to his tantrums, and eventually Truman, sober and pill-free, prepared to leave California. But a few days before his departure he became so agitated that he begged Rick to at least return his tranquilizers. “I’ll give them to you, Truman,” Rick responded. “But first tell me what’s bothering you.” What was bothering him, Truman confessed, was that he was not planning to fly to New York, as he had said, but to Jackson, Mississippi, where John, making another detour on his journey to Florida, was temporarily living with his son Brian. Furious because all his hard work seemed likely to go to waste, Rick immediately canceled the plane reservation, and Truman meekly flew home to New York.

  Back on Long Island in October, Truman was able to examine his situation more clearly. “John’s poison for me,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t seen him in New Orleans. He always disturbs me.” But that moment of insight was fleeting, and without Rick to say no, he was soon on the phone to John. In November they came together in Miami, where Truman rented a luxurious apartment, twenty-six stories above the sparkling waters of Biscayne Bay. “Am I right to come into Truman’s life again?” John asked Joe Petrocik, who came to visit with his companion, Myron Clement. “What can I say?” replied Joe, who, in truth, was appalled at the prospect. “I haven’t laid eyes on you in four or five years.”

  The answer to John’s question was postponed until the new year, and Truman quickly returned to Manhattan, where he had scheduled two weeks of readings over the Christmas holidays. Although he had given readings in dozens of towns and cities, including New York, he had never appeared where the stars shine brightest, on Broadway itself. While Music for Chameleons was still fresh in people’s minds—still on the best-seller list, in fact16—he wanted to give a series of readings on the Great White Way. “I don’t want anything that even looks like Off-Broadway,” he loftily declared. After months of talking with producers and looking for the right house, small but prestigious, he chose Lincoln Center’s elegant Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, and it was there that he read during the last two weeks of 1980, from December 13 through December 28.

  The appropriate pills could see him through anything, Truman believed, and on December 1, two weeks before his readings were to begin, he moved out of his apartment and checked into Regent Hospital for the month, putting himself under the full-time care of one of the country’s most prominent pill-pushers, Dr. Nathan Kline. A pioneer in the use of tranquilizers and antidepressants, especially lithium, Kline heartily shared Truman’s devout faith in the powers of mood-altering drugs. What poor Truman did not know was that just days before he entered Regent, the Food and Drug Administration had all but defrocked his white-whiskered Dr. Feelgood, charging him with a “lack of regard for the safety of human subjects.”

  Truman was soon to make much the same complaint—Kline’s drugs had nearly killed him, he would assert—but he was able to get through his two weeks of readings nonetheless. Dressed by Halston to look like the author in his library—he wore gray slacks, a gray cardigan, a gray silk shirt and black velvet slippers—he drew enthusiastic audiences. Mitzi E. Newhouse herself flew up from Palm Beach for the opening. “Tonight was one of the great things in my theater,” she said proudly.

  John flew up from Florida too, still wondering if he was wise to start up with Truman again. “It’s very hard to explain, but Truman was a man who had difficulty making his life,” he said. “I constantly told my hurt intellect, ‘Don’t get involved anymore.’” It was goo
d advice, and they began bickering as soon as Truman came home from Regent. Within days Truman was seeking refuge with Joe Petrocik and Myron Clement. When John returned to Miami at the end of the first week in January, 1981, Truman spent a few days in a Manhattan hospital, then followed him South on January 14. “Remember, if something should happen to me,” he reminded Joe and Myron, “you promised you’d get even with that Irish bog rat.”

  He was not joking. April Johnson, a journalist who had seen him in any number of emotional states, was surprised by a new one—he was afraid, obviously terrified of John. One night at dinner in her Coconut Grove house, he tagged along behind her like a clinging child; only when he joined her in the kitchen as she was cleaning up did she realize that he had been desperately trying to talk to her alone. “You’ve got to call me a cab!” Truman whispered. “I’ve got to get away from this man. He’s going to kill me.” While she phoned for a taxi, Truman slipped out the back door, sneaked around the side of the house, and met the cabdriver on the street. Soon noticing that he was missing—“I think he’s outside,” April vaguely said—John searched the yard. Coming back alone, John did not try to hide his chagrin at being so publicly embarrassed. “Drunken fool!” he bitterly exclaimed.

  From April’s, Truman went to a motel, where he hid for two or three days. Apparently he phoned John to come and get him, and it was probably then, on Saturday night, March 7, that John, to use his own words, “beat the shit out of him. I was in a titanic rage because he was leaving again—I’d had enough of that—and I just blew my cork. I’m always sorry when something like that happens; it hadn’t happened in many, many, many years.” Truman had even more cause for regret: he suffered a broken nose, a fractured rib, a cracked finger, and abrasions and bruises of the face, hands, chest and thigh.