Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Alarmed at the extent of his injuries, John made an urgent call to Dr. Harold Deutsch, Truman’s doctor in Miami, who rushed from a formal party with his wife and another couple. When they arrived at the motel, they found Truman with John and John’s son Brian, who was visiting from Jackson. Truman told Deutsch that he had been beaten by both father and son. (Brian later denied that he had been involved.) After setting his broken nose in his office, Deutsch, a plastic surgeon, put Truman into Miami’s Larkin General Hospital for treatment of his other injuries.

  Truman spent twelve days at Larkin, then returned to New York to report, unsurprisingly, that he and John had been fighting. Even so, he said, he planned to go ahead with the purchase of a new house they had agreed to buy on the peninsula’s west coast, on Marco Island—“Florida’s Fantasy Island,” as its ads boasted. “In a way it’s my revenge,” said Truman. “It’s the paradise Johnny’s always wanted, and now he can sit down there and rot!” Providing his lover with a place in paradise was a curious definition of revenge, and such a transparent rationalization served only to underline the flat, desolate but invincible truth: no matter what John did to him, no matter how many wounds, physical or emotional, John inflicted upon him, Truman would cling to him as fast as to life itself. Indeed, his bruises had hardly healed before he invited John to spend Easter with him in New York.

  A new factor, however, now intruded to further complicate their tangled relationship: Truman was beginning to suffer from paranoid hallucinations, the result, almost certainly, of too many doses of various prescription drugs. As they sat down on that Easter Sunday of 1981 for their holiday dinner at La Petite Marmite, a high-toned restaurant across the street from the U.N. Plaza, Truman squeezed John’s hand affectionately. Then, his mood altering so swiftly that for a moment John thought he was joking, he said, “You have behaved unbehavedly.” Repeating that odd and ungrammatical remark, Truman stood up, nearly knocking over a neighboring table. “You may finish your meal and I will pay for it,” he said before stumbling back to his building. “Then I never want to see you again.”

  Stunned, John followed ten minutes later, only to receive another shock when he entered the U.N. Plaza. Truman ordered the desk captain to evict him from his apartment. “Your trick didn’t work!” he cryptically shouted in John’s direction. Truman was still in the lobby, staring vacantly at the ceiling, when John angrily walked out with his bags and hailed a cab. By the time John phoned from the airport, Truman was back in his apartment. Remembering nothing of what had happened, he was dismayed to learn that John was terminating their happy holiday and flying back to Florida. “But what did I do?” Truman plaintively inquired. “What did I do?”

  After John’s return to Miami, Truman’s hallucinations worsened. At 6:30 on the morning of April 24 he woke up the elderly couple who lived next door, begging for asylum from assassins who he said had invaded his apartment. Using their phone, he called Bob MacBride, who arrived on a scene of pathetic comedy. Wearing only a filthy bathrobe, which hung open to reveal his nakedness, Truman was drinking a large glass of his host’s vodka and frantically trying to call Liz Smith at the Daily News. If she reported in her column the danger he was in, he said, the invading hit men would be forced to leave him alone—so powerful was his trust in the magic of publicity. Gently taking the phone away from him, Bob led him home and put him to bed.

  When he awoke in the afternoon, calm and clearheaded, Truman startled Bob by remembering everything that had occurred and by agreeing that he had been the victim of a psychotic attack—in fact, he had been aware of it at the time. Even as he was describing the hit men, part of his mind had been aware that they were imaginary; but like someone who has been bound and gagged and helplessly watches while thieves ransack his house, that rational part had been unable to intervene. Though he had been afraid to tell anyone, he confessed to Bob, he had suffered similar attacks in previous days and weeks.

  Before Bob’s arrival that morning, Truman had also phoned Joe and Myron. Call Jack in Paris, he had beseeched them, and beg him to hurry home—he needed him. But Jack, who was planning to come home in three days anyway, refused, making no secret of his irritation at being bothered. His return did not help, in any event. Almost immediately Truman was on the phone to Bob again, pleading to be rescued from Jack himself, who he said was holding him prisoner and plotting to kill him. Increasingly disturbed, Bob confronted Jack a few days later in what was to be their first and last encounter. Truman’s condition was so serious that he should go into a psychiatric hospital, Bob insisted, and all his friends, and Jack most especially, should join in pressuring him to do so. But Jack was offended by what he regarded as Bob’s presumption and said he would do no such thing. “Where do you pick your friends?” Jack disdainfully asked Truman afterward. “Bellevue?”

  Bob might have asked the same question. “I had always heard from Truman what a prince Jack was,” he said, “and what did I find but this rather helpless, querulous old woman who had no idea what to do except fulminate against the evils of drink. Within five minutes he was even getting on me for drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. All he did was complain about his own problems, that he had things to do, but that he couldn’t leave Truman alone. ‘Look, go ahead and do what you have to do,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch Truman while you’re gone.’ As soon as he left, Truman, who had ostensibly been asleep, came tiptoeing out of his room and begged me to buy him a bottle of vodka. When I said no, he put on his clothes to go out and get it himself. At which point I stood in front of the door and said, ‘Truman, you’re not going anywhere. Get back into bed.’”

  Frustrated by his failure to get anywhere with Jack, Bob wrote Alan Schwartz the next day and repeated his appeal for common action by Truman’s friends. “It is my opinion that if T.C. does not get to a good doctor and a good psychiatric facility—not another drunk farm—he will shortly die, either by an overdose like his mother did, or by something more drastic. (The roof of UN Plaza is just a short elevator ride.) He is fully aware of this, and he is very worried about it.” Bob had not exaggerated Truman’s anxiety. On May 14, Truman voluntarily checked into a rehabilitation center on the Hudson River north of Manhattan; in early June, he entered another clinic on Long Island.

  Neither was the kind of psychiatric hospital Bob had recommended, and his hallucinations resumed when John accepted his invitation to come North again in mid-June. John had not been staying with him long before Truman again mistook him for an intruder. But this time, instead of calling Bob or the building’s desk captain to help him, Truman phoned the police. The entire force, it seemed, was curious to see the inside of Truman Capote’s apartment, and a squad big enough to subdue an army of terrorists was obligingly dispatched from the nearby headquarters of the Seventeenth Precinct. Only when John was surrounded by a wall of men in blue did Truman snap out of his delirium and admit that he had been confused. When the same thing happened several nights later, John decided that it was time to look for quieter accommodations. “Oh, fuck this! Let me out of here!” he shouted as he packed his bags and prepared to leave for the airport.

  Being subjected to Truman’s hallucinations was, quite literally, a sobering experience for John, and the next day, June 21, he went back into AA, pledging never to take another drink. “I will do anything to stay sober,” he wrote Truman, who, he belatedly realized, had not been responsible for his actions. With the enthusiasm of a fresh convert, John suggested that they start a new life together, sober and drug-free. He was willing to do anything, John said, including spending four months with him at Hazelden, to help Truman gain the sobriety he was now enjoying. “Truman, let’s live!” he pleaded. “We have a chance to live! What we’ve been doing isn’t living.”

  58

  BUT Truman did not want to live without alcohol and drugs. Life with them was intolerable, but life without them was unthinkable. They had become his constant companions, his most dependable chums. Sometimes, late at night, he would take hi
s pills and capsules out of his bag—the yellows and reds, the whites and blues, the browns and blacks—count them five or six times to reassure himself that they were all there, and fondle them, as a person of a different piety might caress the beads of his rosary. Merely touching them gave him comfort. “Isn’t it beautiful!” he exclaimed one day at lunch, holding up a newly acquired and especially powerful sedative—Lotusate it was poetically named—and turning it round and round, as if it were a sapphire in whose frozen heart he could see the light dancing. “It’s the only beautiful drug I’ve ever seen, a lovely lavender. Because my system isn’t used to it yet, it puts me to sleep immediately. I can sleep for five hours; then I wake up and take another one.”

  Cocaine received a similar encomium—“so incredibly subtle,” he called it—and he publicly bragged about how much he consumed. Oblivious to the harsh penalties of the law, he partook of it with blissful indiscretion, interrupting a dinner at La Petite Marmite, for example, for a quick snort in the glass telephone booth near the entrance. Unperturbed, the headwaiter politely suggested that his dinner guest stand in front and block him from view. For a time there was a rumor that he had given up cocaine, and his suppliers, unhappy at the prospect of losing such a good customer, sent him envelopes containing free samples. But the rumors were false. Leafing through a magazine in the U.N. Plaza apartment, Joe Petrocik discovered three coke-filled packets that Truman had hidden between the pages, then inconveniently forgotten. “That’s just what I need!” screeched Truman, who instantly grabbed them and ran into the next room to inhale their contents.

  Yet just as some part of his mind remained rational while the rest of it was conjuring up a roomful of assassins, so did some part of him stand coolly aside and declare that coke and pills were not what he needed, that in fact they might someday destroy him. A depressed glance around his apartment, littered with pills and the containers they had come in, one night caused him to issue another of his ominous predictions. “First there was Marilyn, then Monty,” he said. “I’m going to be the next one. You’re going to read about me on the front page of the Daily News one of these days. It’s a sure sign when you start seeing pills and pill bottles in corners.”

  Before the summer of 1981 ended, his prophecy seemed close to fulfillment. On the morning of August 1 he suffered a convulsive seizure, something like an epileptic attack, in front of the Sagaponack General Store and was taken to Southampton Hospital in an ambulance, convinced that he was on the verge of dying. “I was dead for thirty seconds, alive for four hours, then dead for thirty-five seconds,” he said, repeating what he had been told by hospital attendants. “If I had been dead for two more seconds, I would have been dead for good. Little children are brought up to believe that death is awful. But this was quite, quite pleasant.”

  After nearly a month in the hospital, he traveled into Manhattan, only to suffer a second attack in the hallway outside his apartment shortly after noon on September 15. “Truman Capote Rushed to Hospital,” blazoned the headline on the front page of that afternoon’s New York Post, which also displayed a picture of him strapped to a stretcher, unconscious, with his eyes closed and his mouth agape. His condition was not so grave as the photograph suggested, and after six days in New York Hospital he returned to Long Island, pointedly disregarding the admonitions of his doctors, who blamed the attacks on alcohol, by stopping off for a couple of drinks at a friend’s house on the way home. In the weeks that followed, he continued to drink as if nothing had happened, as if his weeks in the hospitals had been erased from his memory.

  By so casually ignoring the dramatic—indeed, providential—warnings of his seizures, he all but announced what had long been evident: he had lost his will to survive. “Everything is difficult, painfully hard for him now,” said Jack. “All the energy he has goes into keeping up a front, into putting up scrims that make people think he’s all right.” Many days that autumn he could not do even that, lacking sufficient vigor to wash, shave and put on clean clothes. Sometimes he could not even make the effort to walk to the toilet, causing the back steps of his studio, which he often used instead, to stink of urine. “Go some place where they teach people to piss in a bowl!” was Jack’s sarcastic advice.

  Seeing how helpless he was, well-meaning friends wanted to hire someone to look after him, a combination nurse and companion. His Long Island doctor, William Diefenbach, even volunteered to take a year’s leave from his practice to look after him—if only he would spend his time writing. Every possibility was considered, but Truman rejected them all, and Jack, who should have welcomed assistance, was predictably scornful. “What would Truman do with a male nurse?” he asked. “He’d probably teach the nurse to take heroin; or the nurse would introduce him to another drug.”

  Through some particularly melancholy irony, Truman had become like that wraith of his youth, Denham Fouts, who during the last months of his life had rarely left his gloom-shrouded, opium-scented apartment on the Rue du Bac. Truman had been so disturbed and frightened by Denny’s withdrawal into the netherworld of drugs that he had soon fled his company. In fact, he had seen in Denny the ghost of things to come, and more than thirty years later, he had become what he had then feared, a semi-invalid who often could not manage the simplest tasks on his own and who relied on a dwindling circle of friends to take care of him. On his good days he could still charm, amuse and even write; on his bad days he was a burden that many found exceedingly heavy to bear.

  The one who found the burden most onerous was Jack, who looked forward to his departure for Verbier each year as a convict might look forward to the day of his release from prison. As the drama of Truman’s decline entered its last act, Jack seemed to regard himself as a spectator, not as a leading character, and certainly not as the one who should have led the rescue efforts, however doomed they might have been. It never seemed to have occurred to him that thirty-three years of companionship carried a special obligation. What hitherto had been obscured by the choler and fury of his personality, the eruptions of anger and outrage, was now obvious: it was Truman who had dominated their relationship, Truman who had decided where they would travel and where they would live, and Truman who had been the one who had loved, Jack the one who had been loved. Jack’s affection for him had been real, but for the most part he had been remarkably passive and removed—cold and hyperborean, as he himself had observed. He had demanded only one thing and that was that he not be bothered.

  Now, at the age of sixty-seven, Jack remained as self-absorbed as he had always been. He still did not want to be bothered, and he responded to the burden that Truman had become by escaping to Switzerland; or, even when he was home, by shifting responsibility onto other shoulders. In January, 1983, at one of the lowest of Truman’s many low points, Joe Petrocik thought of cabling Jack in Verbier and asking him to return to New York; then, imagining his response, Joe threw up his hands. “What would he say? ‘I’ll be there when the ski season is over.’”

  It was Truman’s fate, and the most melancholy irony of all, that at the end of his life, as at the beginning, he was rejected by the one who was closest to him. Like Nina, Jack was ambivalent about him during his final years, expressing love and contempt almost in the same breath. And like Nina, Jack could be counted on only when it suited him, only when he was not otherwise engaged. “Truman’s beyond help,” he declared. “What am I supposed to do? I think I’m terrible for him. I’m always lecturing him. I’m not able to handle him any more than I can carry a handful of water from here [Sagaponack] to East Hampton. How can you live with a thing when you’re watching it burn down before your eyes? Truman’s dying. He’s a dying man. But I can’t die with him.”

  Lonely and frightened by his seizures, Truman clung to Jack nevertheless, and at the end of 1981 he battled bitterly to prevent him from leaving for Switzerland. “He holds on to me like I’m a raft,” said Jack. Jack’s refusal to stay with him ushered in some of the worst weeks in their relationship. When pleas and persuasion
failed, Truman used economic blackmail for the first time, threatening to sell the apartment in Verbier. When that did no good either, he angrily struck out, accusing Jack of having put the ailing Maggie to sleep—her hind legs had become paralyzed—simply so that he would be free to travel.

  That charge wounded Jack most of all. “Oh, God!” he groaned. “How I fought for that little dog’s life! Truman’s vindictiveness is fantastic. He’s taken the whole fabric of our life together and ripped it up. The love of his life left him, and Truman thought he was going to come back to paradise with Jack. But he can’t. He’s changed. But maybe somebody will come along for him. After all, more than half the world still believes in the Messiah. I dread weekends and holidays with him now. For the first time in years I feel I can’t get out of bed, I’m so depressed. Everybody who lives with an alcoholic gets to hate him. We’re like soldiers after the battle. There’s nothing to say.”

  There was more to say, of course, and Truman had said it not long before: “I can’t break the connection with Johnny, but somehow I always know that I will die living with Jack.” A thaw came with Jack’s return from Switzerland in the spring of 1982, and for a few weeks the clock seemed to have been turned back to a more congenial time. Truman sneaked peeks at Jack’s newest book—“I love it,” he reported, midway through—and interjected himself into one of the decade’s most celebrated court cases, the trial of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of his wife Sunny. Siding with the defense, which maintained that Sunny’s addiction to drugs and alcohol had caused the coma in which she lay, Truman stated that he had known her and that, contrary to prosecution claims, she was both an alcoholic and a drug abuser: she had even shown him how to give himself injections.