Capote

by Gerald Clarke

  What probably happened, in any event, was that, as a result of a drug overload, he suffered a cardiac-rhythm disorder, a disruption of the normal electrical signals to the heart. Joanne’s readings of his pulse support such a conclusion. A disorder of that kind, which is common in alcoholics, would not show up in an autopsy. It can last for hours, during which time the victim can talk, and talk lucidly, as Joanne said that Truman did. It can also be interrupted if the victim receives medical attention. If the paramedics had been called, Truman’s life probably could have been saved. But that, clearly, he did not want, and perhaps it is not important to ask whether he had tried to commit suicide: even if he had, he had been given a reprieve, a second chance. But given a choice between life and death, he chose death.

  When Truman was a child of five or six in Monroeville, someone gave him a miniature airplane that he could pedal around the yard like a tricycle. It was a vivid green, with a bright red propeller, and one day Truman told his envious friends that he was going to fly, that he was going to take off down that dusty street in front of Jennie’s house, rise above the trees beyond, and soar across the oceans to China, that serene and mysterious land that he often dreamed about. He had convinced everyone, including himself, and furiously he pedaled, faster and faster… But he went nowhere at all. Now, sitting in his bedroom in Joanne’s house, knowing that something was terribly wrong with him, he was to have his wish.

  “Truman, I think you’re in a little trouble,” Joanne said once more. “Let me call the doctor. We can get you to the hospital.”

  “No,” he replied. “I don’t want to go through that again. No more hospitals. My dear, I’m so very tired. If you care about me, don’t do anything. Just let me go. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’ve decided to go to China, where there are no phones and there is no mail service.” He continued to talk, about his mother mostly, but also about his writing and Answered Prayers. Like leaves falling gently from a tree, he had promised its ending would be, and that is how his own last hours ended, as his life slowly drifted away. As his pulse grew weaker, his conversation was reduced to phrases. “Beautiful Babe” was one. “Mama, Mama” was another. Finally: “It’s me, it’s Buddy”—Buddy was Sook’s nickname for him. “I’m cold,” he said at last. Sometime before noon his breathing stopped, and Joanne called the paramedics, who pronounced him dead at 12:21 P.M.

  And so, moment by moment, he had returned to the beginning.

  Afterword

  If he had known how long In Cold Blood would take—and what it would take out of him—he would never had stopped in Kansas, Truman Capote later wrote. He would instead have driven straight through—“like a bat out of hell.” Midway through writing his biography, I sometimes said much the same. How much more serene my life would have been, I thought, had I said hello and good-bye to him in the same breath. When I began, I believed I would devote two years to Truman’s story, three at most; I actually spent more than thirteen. I envisioned a relatively short book; without notes and index, it is 547 pages. I thought writing Truman’s biography would be something of a lark, in short. It was, in fact, one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. And one of the most exhilarating.

  One of my predictions did come true. Many of our interviews took place in some very pleasant spots, often over lunch or dinner at one or another of Truman’s favorite Manhattan restaurants. Sometimes lunch faded into cocktails, then into dinner. One winter day I arrived for lunch and did not leave—he begged me to stay—until the restaurant closed nearly twelve hours later. Every time I got up to go Truman would grab my arm, pleading with me not to leave.

  By coincidence, Truman and I both had country houses, not more than five minutes apart, on eastern Long Island, and we were thus also able to talk under shady trees, on cool porches and in and out of swimming pools. It was while he was floating on a raft that Truman gave me a rundown, complete with verbal footnotes, of the real-life models for his characters in “La Cote Basque,” the story that made him a pariah to most of his rich and social friends.

  “But Truman, they’re not going to like this,” I warned him, a conversation I repeat in my book.

  “Nah, they’re too dumb,” he said. “They won’t know who they are.”

  I was right about the reaction of his friends, though I was unprepared for the speed and the remarkable venom with which they turned on him. Some, in fact, had told me, just a week or so before the story appeared, how much they loved and admired him. But if I was right about their angry response, I was wrong about nearly everything else. For what I had not realized—what Truman himself did not know—was that, around the time I started work, he was beginning the long and dramatic decline that ended only with his death. And I became a part of that never-ending drama. As a writer, I had always kept myself in the background. Now I was pulled on stage to become one of the dramatis personae, a participant in the turbulent life of which I was writing. It was as if I were painting a portrait and suddenly saw myself peering out from the background—and wondering, to judge from the perplexed look on my face, how I had got myself into such a predicament.

  In the early seventies, I had done a series of magazine profiles of famous writers and poets. I had written about Gore Vidal for The Atlantic and about Truman, Allen Ginsberg, P.G. Wodehouse, and Vladimir Nabokov for Esquire. It was a stellar list, but it was the Truman profile that caught the eye of the publisher, who asked me to expand it into a biography. I called Truman to see if he would cooperate, and, after a pause of no more than thirty seconds, he said yes, no strings attached. He promised never to ask to read what I had written, and he never did. What more could a biographer want?

  Though we became close friends—it was impossible to know Truman and remain aloof—neither of us forgot our different and occasionally antagonistic roles. He was the subject who sometimes exaggerated. I was the prying biographer who wanted the facts. Our relationship, as a result, was not always smooth. He was annoyed when I seemed to doubt some of his stories, for example, and, as the months turned to years, he became exasperated that the writing was taking so long.

  I was a “hammock biographer,” he told a friend. I turned this way in my hammock, he said, then that way. But I didn’t put much down on paper. How could I tell him that he had changed the story on me? That the Truman about whom I had begun writing—the ebullient Truman who was on top of the world—no longer existed? That a new, uncertain and, yes, even tragic Truman had taken his place? And that I could not bring down the curtain until, one way or another, the drama ended?

  That ending, which surprised no one who knew him well, came on the morning of August 25, 1984, in Los Angeles, one of his least favorite cities. I finished my book a little more than three years later, and it was published in June 1988. Much has been written about Truman since then. I myself added to the list by editing a book of his letters. Too Brief a Treat I titled it, borrowing a phrase he used himself in describing the letters of his first editor, Robert Linscott. Truman has also been the subject of television documentaries and a successful Broadway play, Tru, in which I am an unseen character—Truman is supposed to be speaking into a tape recorder for my benefit.

  There have also been two movies about his In Cold Blood years. One, Capote, is very good; the other, Infamous, is very bad. I confess a prejudice in favor of Capote, which was adapted from my biography. But most moviegoers, I believe, agreed with me, and the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including those for Best Picture, Best Director (Bennett Miller), Best Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman) and Best Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hoffman went on to win an Oscar for a performance of uncanny sensitivity and accuracy. Watching him on screen, I frequently thought I was watching Truman himself. Yet despite all the attention Truman has received since my book was published—the articles, the television shows, the plays, and the movies—I can’t think anything of importance I would want to add or subtract.

  Many of those who have prominent roles in my biography have followed
Truman to the grave. William Paley. Alvin and Marie Dewey. Loel and Gloria Guinness. C. Z. Guest. John Malcolm Brinnin. Andy Warhol. Joe Fox. Leo Lerman. Christopher Isherwood. Mary Louise Aswell. Richard Brooks. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Oona Chaplin. Carol Matthau. Pamela Harriman. John Huston. Slim Keith. Irving Lazar. Doris Lilly. Andrew Lyndon. Norman Mailer. Harold Arlen. Peg O’Shea. Saint Subber. Oliver Smith. And, most important of all, Jack Dunphy, who had been Truman’s companion, lover, supporter, and scold for more than thirty-five years.

  In his final years Truman had been a source of constant anxiety to Jack, and, for Jack, Truman’s death was a kind of release. He moved from the apartment they had shared near the United Nations, with its battalion of uniformed doormen, into a walk-up in Greenwich Village. Obligated to no one but himself, he did just what he liked, and, perhaps for the first time, he had the means to do it. Truman’s will gave him a substantial annuity, and that, combined with the income from his own savings, allowed him to live very comfortably. Besides Switzerland, where he had long spent his winters, he now ventured to other locales as well. Every time I talked to him, it seemed, he had just returned from a trip: Dublin, Chicago, Boston, the West—I couldn’t keep track. Jack seemed happier than I had ever known him.

  After Jack’s own death, other provisions of Truman’s will went into effect, with income from his estate going to scholarships for aspiring writers and to valuable prizes for outstanding literary critics. Truman’s decision to leave money to young writers came as no surprise to me: he always went out of his way to help others entering the field. But the generous prizes for literary critics, probably the largest such awards in the world, puzzled me. Never really accepted by the literary establishment, Truman shared my own dim view of most contemporary critics, and he said so many times, in pungent language I could scarcely imitate.

  The puzzle was solved, at least partly, when I saw that Newton Arvin’s name was also attached to the awards. Several decades after their romance, Truman still revered the memory of Arvin, who, in his mind, was the ideal critic—a man of learning, judgment, and an understanding of the creative struggle. Unlike many critics who followed him, Arvin was also an excellent stylist, a master of clear yet elegant prose.

  Besides paying tribute to Arvin’s virtues and the happy memory of their months together, Truman also had another motive, I suspect. At the time he made his will, Truman was probably angry at Jack—the two were often at odds in those last years. What better revenge could Truman have had than for Jack to know that Capote and Arvin, not Capote and Dunphy, would be so boldly—and so permanently—entwined?

  Truman’s death was followed by a funeral in Los Angeles and by a crowded memorial in New York’s Shubert Theater. But his ashes, housed in a heavy bronze box, sat lonesomely and rather uncomfortably, I imagined, on a bookshelf in Jack’s apartment. After Jack died, they came to me, in my capacity as Jack’s executor, and I decided to find them a permanent and more suitable home. And what was more suitable, I thought, than Sagaponack, the place Truman and Jack loved more than any other?

  Jack had left their Long Island property to The Nature Conservancy, an organization devoted to protecting nature and its beauty, and I suggested that it dedicate a preserve in their memory. So it was that on October 1, 1994, the only rainy Saturday in an otherwise golden autumn, forty or fifty of Jack’s and Truman’s friends gathered at a Conservancy sanctuary, Crooked Pond, a couple of miles from where they had lived. Surrounded by thick woods, Crooked Pond is a spot so still and private that it seems almost incongruous in the increasingly crowded Hamptons. Sometime around noon I opened the bronze box containing Truman’s ashes while Jack’s nephew opened a cardboard box holding Jack’s. We then sprinkled their ashes into the water, letting them fall and mingle together as if they were one.

  The downpour put a quick end to the eulogies Jack’s brother, Bob, and I had prepared. It was just as well, for Truman and Jack had written words more appropriate than any we might have uttered. At the water’s edge the Conservancy had planted a memorial stone, engraved with quotations I had chosen. “The brain may take advice, but not the heart,” Truman had written in Other Voices, Other Rooms, “and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.” Jack’s quotation was from Dear Genius, the memoir he wrote after Truman’s death. “I was grieving the way the earth seems to grieve for spring in the dead of winter, but I wasn’t afraid, because nothing, I told myself, can take our halcyon days away.”

  After their deaths, many writers, even very good ones, even those who had made regular visits to the best-seller lists, enter the twilight realm of the barely remembered. Truman has done the opposite. Interest in him grows every year—thanks to the Internet, I receive messages from people from all parts of the world—and a whole new generation seems drawn to his writing and fascinated by his singular personality. “What was he really like?” I am often asked, a question I have tried to answer in my book. But to those who demand a quicker reply, I say only: the Truman Capote I knew was often in emotional pain, but when he was at his best, he transformed his own life, and the lives of those around him, into a high-speed adventure, an intoxicating journey into lands unknown.

  —Gerald Clarke

  Bridgehampton, N.Y.

  March 18, 2010

  Acknowledgments

  A writer likes to think that a book is all his own. But that is clearly not the case with a biography, and I am indebted to hundreds of people, not all of whom I have been able to mention in my source notes. Foremost among them, of course, is Truman Capote himself, who for more than nine years allowed me to observe and, indeed, to take part in his life. That is a debt I can never repay, alas, and I confess that I find myself missing his company, good and bad, more than I would have thought possible. Jack Dunphy, Truman’s companion for thirty-eight years, gave me the same high privilege, with no strings or conditions. My book would have been greatly diminished without his help. Rick Brown and John O’Shea, who shared Truman’s life for lesser periods, were equally forthright, and my final chapters would have been incomplete without their cooperation. Alan U. Schwartz, Truman’s executor, very generously permitted me access to Truman’s papers and other invaluable information. Arnold Bernstein, Truman’s accountant, steered me through the mysterious jungle of financial figures. Joe Fox, Truman’s editor at Random House, provided help, as well as wise counsel, in more ways than I can readily enumerate.

  At Simon and Schuster I was guided and protected by what I believe to be one of the most talented teams in publishing: my editor Bob Bender, whose steady voice helped me through many trying moments and whose keen eye caught my mistakes; his assistant, Betsy Lerner, whose efficiency and good humor never wavered; my former editors, Diane Cleaver and Joni Evans, whose enthusiasm was constantly invigorating; Vincent Virga, who discovered photographs in the most unlikely spots and, sometimes through charm alone, secured permission rights; Eric Rayman, who gave my manuscript a shrewd but sensitive legal reading; and Richard Snyder, chairman of Simon and Schuster, Charles Hayward, publisher of Simon and Schuster’s trade division, and Michael Korda, Simon and Schuster’s editor-in-chief, who offered encouraging words at the right times. With almost saintly patience, Barbara Shalvey typed transcripts of hundreds of hours of tape-recorded interviews and showed great ingenuity in collecting odd facts in odd places. I have been singularly lucky in the choice of my two agents. Gloria Safier saw me safely through ten years of frustration and occasional heartache; my greatest regret is that she could not have lived to read this book. Taking her place, Helen Brann has offered me comforting words, as well as her own good judgment, and she has seen me to the finish line.

  I regret that I can offer no more than a mention to many of those who follow, some of whom have given me hours and hours of their time: Daniel Aaron; Edward Albee; Robert O. Anderson; Harold Arlen; Mary Louise Aswell; Richard Avedon; Julian Bach; Don Bachardy; Pierre Barillet; Peter Beard; Sybille Bedford; Lucia Jaeger Behling; Pearl Kazin Bell; Andrew Bella; Brigid Berl
in; Paul Bigelow; Janice Biggers; Karl Bissinger; Naomi Bliven; Paul Bowles; Jenny Bradley; Susan Braudy; Wilva Breen; Gerald Brenan; Nancy Ryan Brien; John Malcolm Brinnin; John Broderick (chief of Manuscript Division, Library of Congress); Richard Brooks; Stella Brooks; Andreas Brown; Joy Brown; Michael Brown; Rick Brown; C. Bruner-Smith; Patricia Burstein; Paul Cadmus; Maria Theresa Caen; Robin Caldwell; Robbie Campbell; Sandy Campbell; Joe Capote; Marjorie Capote; William F. Carroll; Joanne Carson; Marco Carson; Jennings Carter; John Byron Carter; Mary Ida Carter; Bill Caskey; Lord (David) Cecil; Vincent Cerow; Herbert Chaice; George Christy; Ina Claire; Patsy Streckfus Clark; Jack Clayton; Myron Clement; Walter Clemons; Bob Colacello; Meghan Robbins Collins; Mary Ellen Connolly; Wyatt Cooper; Donald Cullivan; Charlotte Curtis; Joe Curtis; Mina Curtiss; Thomas Quinn Curtiss; Olive Daley; Jimmy Daniels; Matthew Dann; Buster Davis; Susan Davis, curator of manuscripts, New York Public Library; Agnes de Mille; Alice Denham; Harold Deutsch, M.D.; Alvin Dewey; Marie Dewey; William Diefenbach, M.D.; William E. Dorion; Frances Doughty; Irving Drutman; Dominick Dunne; Gloria Dunphy; Robert Ellsworth; Lin Emery; Don Erickson; Joe Faulk; Seabon Faulk; Dorothy Finnie; M. F. K. Fisher; Thomas Flanagan; Ruth Ford; Frederick Fouts; Eleanor Friede; Otto Friedrich, John Galliher; Mrs. Ira Gershwin; John Gielgud; Brendan Gill; Milton Goldman; John B. L. Goodwin; William Goyen; Katharine Graham; Mary Garrison Grand; Judith Green; Graham Greene; Frank Grisaitis; C. Z. Guest; Alec Guinness; Loel Guinness; Brion Gysin; James Hagerman; Ronald Hallett; Waldemar Hansen; Curtis Harnack (executive director, Yaddo); Mrs. Lester Harp; Kate Harrington; Bill Harris; Mercia Harrison; Rex Harrison; Crawford Hart, Jr.; Lillian Hellman; Audrey Hepburn; Shirley Herz; Themistocles Hoetis; Kinmont Hoitsma; Geoffrey Holder; Dolores Hope; Robert Horan; Leonora Hornblow; Eileen Hose; Albert Hubbell; John Huston; Christopher Isherwood; Carl Jaeger; Jo James; Marion Javits; April Johnson; Jennifer Jones; Judith Jones; Ebba Jonsson; Pauline Kael; E. J. Kahn, Jr.; Father Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D.; Donald Keene; Robert Keene; Lady (Nancy) Keith; William Kessler; Wilma Kidwell; Eugene Kinkeid; Carol Knauss (secretary, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference); John Knowles; Ronald Kornblum, M.D.; Louis Kronenberger; Eleanor Lambert; John Lasher; Rupert Latture; Barbara Lawrence; Alice Lee; Harper Lee; John Lehmann; Leo Lerman; Lyle Leverich; Doris Lilly; Elizabeth Linscott; Gordon Lish; Carl Little, M.D.; Andy Logan; Kennth A. Lohf (librarian for Rare Books and Manuscripts, Columbia); Andrew Lyndon; Robert MacBride; Jordan Massee; Carol Matthau; George H. McCormack, M.D.; Frances McFadden; Landis McMillon; Kay Meehan; Gian-Carlo Menotti; Oliver Messell; Joel Michael; Thomas Moore; Truman Moore; Robert Morley; Alice Morris; Ruth Mortimer (curator, Smith College Rare Book Room); Howard Moss; John Moxey; John Bernard Myers; Bertram J. Newman, M.D.; John Nicholson; Scott Nixon; Louis Nizer; Marion Jaeger O’Niel; Brian O’Shea; Chris O’Shea; John O’Shea; Margaret O’Shea; Bernard Perlin; Eleanor Perry; Frank Perry; Lester Persky; Arch Persons; John Knox Persons; Joseph Petrocik; Robert Phelps; Edward Pierce; Arthur Pinkham; Ron Portante; Katherine Anne Porter; Frank Price; Marilyn Putnam; Dotson Rader; Lee Radziwill; Marcus Reidenberg, M.D.; John Richardson; Nathan Rogers; Ned Rorem; Katherine Rowley; Marie Rudisill; D. D. Ryan; John Barry Ryan; William Shawn; Neil Simon; Jeannie Sims; Harrison Smith; Liz Smith; Oliver Smith; Steve Sondheim; M. C. Spahn; Francis Steegmuller; Jean Stein; Verne Streckfus; Saint Subber; Georges Tardy; Mrs. Roland Tate; Virgil Thomson; Diana Trilling; Hugo Vickers; Lucia Victor; Gore Vidal; Robin von Joachim; Diana Vreeland; Phoebe Pierce Vreeland; Phyllis Cerf Wagner; Theodore Walworth, Jr.; Howard Weber, Jr.; Kay Wells; Jann Wenner; Glenway Wescott; Lyn White; Tennessee Williams; Donald Windham; Catherine Wood; Lynn Wyatt; Marguerite Young; Hortense Zera (librarian, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters).