Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  Playing the busybody was about all he was able to do, and even the few words he managed to produce, a story titled “One Christmas” and a column of reminiscences, had a tired quality, reflecting his own unshakable fatigue. For most of the year he was even too weary to give much thought to John, who sent him at least two provocative letters. The first, in April, 1982, asked for money, which Truman apparently gave him. The second, a few months later, revealed that John no longer hated him. His sponsor in AA had convinced him that he could not find peace unless he expunged such negative emotions from his soul, John said, and that was his reason for writing. “So. Consider yourself forgiven and unhated by me… If my, selfishly, doing this gives you any peace and happiness I am glad; and I hope that you will consider the efficacy of acting likewise towards whomever you hate. Let it seep away, Truman, it is poison.”

  In prior years such a condescending letter would have evoked screams of outrage from Truman. But John was now too great a challenge to his depleted strength. Even with all of his nagging, Jack was the one he wanted to be with, and as fall of 1982 merged into winter, Truman made the same old plea: forget Switzerland. And he received the same old answer: no. But in truth, Jack was no longer much company even when he was in New York. On Christmas Eve, a night when, according to all the songs and carols, loved ones gather by the tree, Jack marched off to the opera, to the blood and betrayal of Verdi’s Macbeth, leaving Truman to fend for himself. A few days later, as Jack packed for Verbier, Truman checked into Southampton Hospital, where, alone again, he saw in the new year, 1983.

  Truman’s descent now accelerated at an alarming speed, and he was scarcely out of one hospital before entering another. An exact count of his stays is hard to come by; during the first few years of the eighties he was hospitalized in half a dozen states and Switzerland too. But the tally from Southampton Hospital, his favorite, gives an indication of the quickening pace of his decline: he registered there four times in 1981, seven times in 1982, and sixteen times in 1983. “It used to be that he would have a few good months between crises,” said Joe Petrocik. “Then it would be a few good weeks. Finally it was a few good days. Now it’s a few good hours.”

  In the first two months of 1983 he ricocheted from hospital to hospital: from Southampton Hospital to New York Hospital, from a clinic in Switzerland to Larkin General Hospital in Miami—then back to Manhattan and Mount Sinai Hospital. “If he straightens out, he has many, many years left,” said Bertram Newman, his doctor at Mount Sinai. “But if he keeps going the way he is now, he might just as well put a gun to his mouth. It would save everyone a lot of trouble. I feel so impotent because I know that he knows that this can all stop.”

  On March 1, 1983, the day he left Mount Sinai, Lester Persky and Alan Schwartz gave him an unwontedly stiff lecture at La Petite Marmite. Alan was moved to tears—“I recognized finally that he really was killing himself,” Alan said—but Truman was more irritated than touched. “I had an incredibly grim lunch with my lawyer and Lester Ever-Present Persky,” he said later that afternoon. “They told me I’d be dead in six months if I didn’t stop drinking. I wanted to say, ‘So what? It’s me, not you. Why do you care?’ They all act as if I’ve made no effort, but I’ve made a tremendous effort over the last five years. It’s almost as if they all have crossed eyes and can’t see.”

  Like Jack—indeed, like Truman himself—his friends began to speak as if he had a fatal disease, as if his death were an impending event whose date had not yet been determined. Some of his friends were reluctant to open the door to him, worried lest he fall asleep on their couch or in their guest bedroom and never wake up. Foreseeing that he would not live long enough to enjoy his money, Alan and Arnold Bernstein, his accountant, took the practical step of persuading Random House to immediately release sums scheduled for payment in future years. “I wanted him to have it right away, even if it meant he had to pay a little more in taxes,” said Arnold.

  And so the downward spiral continued, hastened by a series of small shocks, including a rejection slip from Vanity Fair for his column and a gratuitous assault by his aunt Tiny Rudisill, who, in March, 1983, published Truman Capote, a singularly silly account of his childhood. Although her portrait of him was unflattering, what disturbed him more was her malicious depiction of his mother—Tiny’s sister—as a slut whose “only enduring passion” was not for Arch, or Joe Capote, but for Teshu, a Creek Indian with a voluptuous mouth and a habit of speaking in romance-novel dialogue. “I have never seen so many misstatements of fact per sentence as in that book,” said Harper Lee, who was one of its chief characters. Mary Ida Carter, one of Tiny’s other sisters, was so disgusted that she dumped it in the privy behind her house—the “outdoor convenience,” as she called it—and pushed it out of sight with a long pole. Yet ludicrous as it was, Tiny’s book did have a modest sale and was, unfortunately, accepted by many as factual.17 It even reached the hands of Slim Keith, who, in her sleepless rage, sent Truman a brief but uncommonly venomous letter. “So amusing,” she said, “to read of your pathetic antecedents & childhood.”

  Wounded by such an unkind blow from a blood relation, in April Truman flew to Alabama and the comforting arms of Mary Ida, the only one left on his mother’s side of the family whom he liked and trusted. But he never reached Monroeville, and after an overdose, wound up in Montgomery’s Baptist Medical Center instead. “I put a knapsack on my shoulder and some old shoes and went to homeland, where decent people are,” he joked. “But on the way I had an accident.” Returning North, he suffered another sort of accident: on July 1 he was arrested for drunken driving in Bridgehampton and was forced to spend a night in the Southampton Town jail. “Capote Mixes Drinking and Driving Again,” said the headline in the New York Post.

  A longer jail sentence seemed possible—there was a rumor that the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office planned to make an example of him—and Truman did not do his case much good by showing up for his hearing in dark glasses, a summer jacket and walking shorts. “People don’t come to court dressed like that,” angrily declared the judge, who, after allowing Truman to stew for several months, let him off with nothing more serious than a five-hundred-dollar fine and a three-year probation. “I’m not going to Sing Sing after all!” exclaimed Truman.

  For much of 1983 he might just as well have been in Sing Sing, however, so little was he aware of where he was or what he was doing. He was so incoherent at a party for Liza Minnelli in December, for instance, that the other guests ignored him, surrounding him with a cordon sanitaire of politely averted eyes and blank smiles. Dismayed to see him sitting alone, the gossip columnist Liz Smith organized a relay team, people who agreed, as an act of charity, to stay with him in shifts of half an hour apiece. “It made me so sad,” said Liz, who could recall other nights, not so very long before, when they all would have formed a circle around him, eager to hear the latest witticism from the mouth of Truman Capote.

  “He could rarely remember the earlier days,” Truman had written in his notes for Answered Prayers. “Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days [that] are so voluminously documented.” And so, once again, he had unwittingly predicted his own future. The triumphs of the past now seemed to echo from an immeasurable distance, while the dark days of the present stretched to the horizon and beyond. Many of those who had given him pleasure were dead: Bennett Cerf, Babe Paley, Cecil Beaton and Gloria Guinness; even Tennessee Williams, to whom, after a belated reconciliation, he had dedicated Music for Chameleons. Many others would no longer speak to him: Marella Agnelli, Lee Radziwill, Pamela Harriman and of course the vengeful Slim. The years, more destructive than a hurricane, had dispersed his armada of swans, and perhaps only he, who had admired them most, could recall how sublimely satisfying it had been to watch their serene progress through a room, and the smiles of awe and wonder they left in their wake.

  Their passing might have been expected: beautiful women age, die and make way for other beautiful women. Before
Babe there had been Mona Williams, and before Mona there had been Consuelo Vanderbilt—the list was long and illustrious. But sometime between the fifties, when Truman had scaled the heights of golden Olympus, and the eighties, the chain had been broken. There was a new generation of beautiful women, of course, but none who possessed the style of a Babe or a Gloria or the matchless Mona. The spirit those three represented had gone out of fashion, and a new kind of glamour, based solely on publicity, had taken its place. The rich had multiplied beyond all reckoning, but partly as a result, Olympus itself, that preserve of the stylish few, had disappeared. To those who came afterward it doubtless sounded more like a poetic invention—like Xanadu or Camelot or the lost city of Atlantis—than the land of sunshine and laughter Truman had known. As he talked about it on still summer afternoons, he might have been the lone survivor of some great catastrophe, the last one on earth who still remembered how things had been.

  To his tired eyes, everything now looked stale. He had, as he often said, used up the world: there was no place that could provide him contentment, no place for him at all. Manhattan, which had excited him since he was a teenager, presented no delights, not even wicked ones like Studio 54, which had closed after two of its owners had been jailed for tax evasion. The one place he still loved, that flat stretch of Long Island between Southampton and East Hampton—it measured a mere eleven miles—had been disfigured by developers, and around his studio had risen costly houses of bizarre and almost uniformly hideous design. Forbidden to drive by the State of New York, he was unable to enjoy his stays there, in any event. No longer was he seen tooling through the countryside in Jack’s red Mustang, all but hidden behind the wheel as, drunk or sober, he terrified other motorists by his nearly total disregard of the rules of the road.

  In the first six weeks of 1984, he had two bad falls, one of which resulted in a mild cerebral concussion, and after three more trips to Southampton Hospital, he flew to Los Angeles to be nursed by Joanne Carson. A week later, on February 27, her doctor sent him back to the hospital, to Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for treatment of a new and potentially fatal illness: phlebitis, a swelling of the veins that had painfully enlarged his left leg. He was well enough to return to Manhattan on March 11, but the phlebitis quickly flared up again and five days later he was in New York Hospital. Blood clots had formed in his lungs; until they were dissolved by a blood-thinning drug, he was in constant danger. Jack was concerned enough to come back early from Switzerland.

  For several weeks after he got out, Truman followed his doctor’s orders, which forbade alcohol. “They were sitting around at Alcoholics Anonymous in heaven and asked what they could do to make me stop drinking,” he said. “This disease was it.” But as soon as the phlebitis had been brought under control, he ran to the bottle. When Jack threw out his vodka, he turned to the alcoholic’s last resort, NyQuil, a cold medicine that is twenty-five percent alcohol. A new doctor, George McCormack, Jr., gave him the usual lecture: “I think it’s criminal what you’re doing to the talent you’ve got.” Instead of pouting, as he usually did, Truman listened and in June agreed to try a rehabilitation clinic near Philadelphia, Chit Chat Carom Hospital. “I’ll do as you suggested, provided you take me,” he informed McCormack. The prospect filled him with dread, nonetheless, and as the day for checking in—Saturday, June 23—approached, he became more and more anxious, drinking measurably more each day. “I think I’ve made a mistake to say I’ll go there,” he fretted. “The minute I get out I’ll go back to my old ways. I know me. I’m just the person I am and I’m not going to be any different. I’m always going to drink. Undoubtedly it will kill me in the end.”

  Equally dubious about his prognosis, Jack was not only unsympathetic to the Chit Chat venture, but almost gratuitously mean—there is no other word to describe his behavior—to Truman. He would not help him pack for the trip, and on Truman’s last night in Sagaponack Jack locked himself in his darkened house, not allowing Truman to stay with him, to visit him, or even to speak to him, except for a shouted exchange through his bedroom window. “For thirty-five years he’s had to pay nothing,” said Truman, so hurt and angry that his voice quavered as he talked. “And now he says, ‘I’m not going to let you into the house.’ I haven’t done anything to him to make him act that way. He’s a monster! A monster!”

  Jack did drive him into Manhattan, and Truman was dutifully waiting in the lobby of the U.N. Plaza when Dr. McCormack picked him up Saturday morning for the journey to Pennsylvania. He began shaking so badly, however, that halfway there, McCormack had to stop at a liquor store to buy him a pint of vodka, afraid that without it, he might go into convulsions. By the time they reached the clinic, Truman was so drunk that he needed aid to get out of the car and undress for bed. “This is not my tasse de thé,” he mournfully observed when McCormack said goodbye. Nor was it. A few days later McCormack received a call from Chit Chat’s director, who reported that Truman was preparing to flee. “Not only is he leaving, but he’s induced two other people to go with him!” said the director.

  Back into his life for a brief moment came John, who had visited him in the hospital in Los Angeles, their first face-to-face meeting in more than two and a half years. John had suffered a heart attack the summer before, and in contrast to Jack, he seemed sympathetic to Truman’s emotional and physical ailments, as if his own flirtation with death had purged him of his old anger and resentment. They talked on the phone after the hospital visit and made plans for a later reunion in Florida, where John was working as a salesman in a furniture store. “Truman is just exactly the way he was four years ago—all fucked up,” said John. “He doesn’t want to get sober, but I want him to come here so that I can have a last crack at him. I just want to set him down and say, ‘Truman, what can I do to get you out of this?’”

  John was not to have that last crack. On August 2 Truman was taken by ambulance to Southampton Hospital, suffering from his worst overdose yet. The pupils of his eyes were fixed and dilated, and he needed a machine to help him breathe, the first time such assistance had been necessary. “I think he came pretty close to death this time,” said Dr. Diefenbach. “It’s just in the lap of the gods whether you can sleep such a thing off without your breathing stopping.” On his occasional trips into Manhattan, Truman was prey again to hallucinations. One night he saw ghosts, Joe Capote’s among them, and was so scared that he banged on the doors of his neighbors, begging to be let in. Afraid to stay by himself in New York and unhappy in Sagaponack, he made plans to spend a few weeks in California with Joanne, even though it meant missing Jack’s seventieth birthday. “I’d like to get away from Jack and his harassments,” he said. “Every other sentence he’s nagging me.” The tension between them continued until the day he left, and when he arrived in Los Angeles, he told Joanne, “It’s all over with Jack. Fini.”

  But that was a word that might have been applied to everything Truman had known and loved, including his writing. It was all over and done with—fini. Not long before, a friend had asked how Answered Prayers was progressing. “Let’s not talk about that,” he petulantly replied. Then, his expression softening into a look of both puzzlement and sadness, he added: “I dream about it and my dream is as real as stubbing your toe. All the characters I’ve lived with are in it, so brilliant, so real. Part of my brain says, ‘The book’s so beautiful, so well constructed—there’s never been such a beautiful book.’ Then a second part of my brain says, ‘Nobody can write that well.’”

  59

  TRUMAN was still a month away from his sixtieth birthday when he reached Los Angeles on the afternoon of Thursday, August 23, 1984. But a Polaroid picture Joanne took that evening shows the face of an older man, so tired that his features are almost indistinct, as if they were made of melting wax. He seemed to revive the next day, but his weariness returned on Saturday. When Joanne went to wake him early in the morning, he said he was still tired and wanted to sleep. When she tried to rouse him at noon, he was dea
d.

  That, in any event, was the story Joanne told the police and reporters. But that, as she later confided, was not what happened.

  What happened was that when she came to wake him that Saturday morning, probably around 7:30, he looked so pale and exhausted that she felt his pulse, which was fluttery. She thought that breakfast might pick him up, but he prevented her from leaving, grabbing her hand and pulling her down beside him on his bed. “No,” he said, “stay here.”

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “No, I’m not,” he answered. “But I soon will be.”

  “Truman, I think I want to call the paramedics,” she said, starting to rise. Once again he held her down, and for the next three and possibly four hours he talked and talked, until he could talk no longer.

  The autopsy, which was performed by the Los Angeles County coroner, could find no “clear mechanism of death,” as doctors like to phrase it. “It has been determined that he died as the result of liver disease which was complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication” was all the coroner’s office could say. But in fact he had shown no symptoms of serious liver disease. His liver had been tested by Southampton Hospital just a few weeks earlier, and the worst that could be said about it was that it was precirrhotic—that it showed signs, in other words, of the cirrhosis that might come. The doctors at the coroner’s office seemed puzzled.

  What, then, killed him? Since there was no alcohol in his blood—for once, he had not been drinking—the most likely culprit was those beautiful little pills he loved to cuddle. In the hours and days before his death he had consumed great quantities of drugs: Valium, Dilantin, codeine, Tylenol and two or three different barbiturates. The Valium alone, about forty milligrams, was enough to put a person who was not accustomed to it, as Truman was, into such a stupor that a shout in the ear would not have awakened him. A healthy person might have survived such an assault on the system. An unhealthy person, particularly one with the slight liver problem Truman had, might not have, and there is every possibility that he took a fatal overdose. The only outstanding question can never be answered. Was it a deliberate or an accidental overdose?