Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  * * *

  WILL WAS DETERMINED TO FOLLOW his own path in life, free of his extraordinary parental or familial connections. And of the relationships he’d made at either Andover or Yale. He did not want to be remotely beholden to anyone or anything. He could have easily worked at the New York Times or pursued his political connections. Or, like so many of our generation, Will could have easily gone to Wall Street and become an investment banker or a trader. He could have made a lot of money. But none of these careers, or any other typical corporate job, was for him. Even though he told Mark Bodden he wanted to be a journalist, he did not pursue journalism. Even though he had enjoyed the political campaign he worked on in East Harlem, he did not pursue politics. In contrast with Clif, who eventually embraced his DNA and worked for a time at a newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, which was owned by the New York Times Publishing Company, Will wanted to be as far removed from his family as could be reasonably accomplished.

  There remained the unfinished Yale thesis, like some sort of Sword of Damocles. In October 1982, Will had written to Wallis, “Still haven’t finished my senior essay; however, as Mao was fond of saying, ‘There’s great disorder under the Heavens and the situation is excellent.’ And that’s Will in just succinctly describing this—that he hasn’t finished it, but all is well. It’ll get done.”

  That same month, the Daniel family reunited in Independence, Missouri, for the funeral of Bess Truman, who died at ninety-seven. She had outlived her husband by ten years and had spent most of that time in isolation in the big home they had shared together. The service for Bess Truman, at the same church in Independence where Will’s parents were married, was a “simple” one, Clif wrote. He and Will read passages from the Bible. Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter, and Betty Ford sat in the front row of the church, near his family. Wallis wrote a note of condolence to Will and received a note back in return: “Thanks for the kind words about my grandmother. She was the balls.”

  But behind the impressive tableau raged a titanic family feud, instigated by Clif, who had invited to accompany him to the funeral a random-seeming couple whom he had befriended. Clif’s invitation did not go over well, especially with his mother and Will. His brother’s “opposition” to the idea was “violently vocal,” he wrote. He recalled “an emotional scene” in the dining room at 830 Park, where Will referred to Clif’s friends as “leeches,” out only for “the thrill and the publicity.” Clif wrote that he did not view his friends this way in the least and that he had never been aware of people who befriended him as a way of somehow sharing in the Truman limelight. Will disagreed. Clif wrote that his brother hated the “thought of having his privacy invaded by Trumanophiles.” He quoted Will saying, “‘I was always made to feel like being Harry Truman’s grandson was the best part of me’”—a feeling he resented mightily, and so he hated “‘people coming up to me and wanting to talk to me just because some son of a bitch was my grandfather.’”

  Cytryn said that Will disliked Clif’s “opportunistic” bent when it came to the Truman name. “He was uncomfortable with his brother’s comfort level with being Truman’s grandson and trading on that,” she said. Will always said he did not want it to be that the first thing people thought of him was as Harry Truman’s grandson. “I had an adversarial relationship with him for years,” Clif said. “But that was just us. For everybody else, it was the opposite. He took care of a lot of people and he did not like being associated with our grandfather. I found that out the hard way.” He had just finished writing Growing Up with My Grandfather and was out at dinner at an Italian restaurant in New York with Will and two of Will’s friends. At one point, Will’s friends asked Clif what he did for a living. Clif said he was a writer. They wanted to know what he had written lately.

  “Well, I’ve just finished a book,” Clif said.

  “Well, really?” they said. “A book on what?”

  “On our grandfather,” Clif said. They looked at him blankly. “Who’s your grandfather?”

  Clif said, “And I looked at Will. Oh, he was mad. And I said, ‘Harry Truman.’ And they’re like, ‘Really?’ And, God, he took me apart afterward. He said, ‘Goddammit. I don’t tell people that.’”

  But Clif continued, “How was I supposed to know? And what was I supposed to do when they asked all the questions?… He didn’t tell anybody. So he didn’t want that to be who he was.”

  * * *

  WILL HAD INHERITED A TRUST fund when he turned twenty-one. Cytryn noted that Clif went through his trust fund quickly but Will was far more prudent. The trust fund enabled Will to be more cavalier about his Yale diploma than most other people might have been. He did not see it a prerequisite for a corporate job or even as a way to pursue a graduate degree (although he later would). If he got around to finishing his Yale undergraduate thesis, so be it; if not, well then, he would figure out how to still do what he wanted to do in life, even if he did not get the Yale degree.

  Will Iselin said that after Will came into his inheritance, he never felt the pressing need to get a summer job or pursue the kind of career path that others with less means would likely feel more compelled to do. “It wasn’t like he was spoiled or extravagant or anything like that,” Iselin said. But, he continued, the income from the trust fund was throwing off enough cash for him not to worry about getting a corporate job. There was also enough money “to buy plenty of recreational drugs,” he said. After college, he and Will would often meet up at the Daniel apartment on Park Avenue. “We’d sit in the library and we’d talk intense politics, literature, whatever—his brain was always incredibly sharp—and do a lot of coke,” he said. “Not all the time, but we’d drink a lot of bourbon, smoke a lot of cigarettes until three, four, five in the morning, and then I’d go home and go to bed and we’d get up and do it again the next night.”

  Will moved around a lot, mostly in and around New York City. He lived on 100th Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. He lived on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. He lived in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. He talked about leaving New York City completely, and moving to Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. He never moved to either one. He lived in Hoboken for a while, in a firehouse once owned by Frank Sinatra’s father. He eventually moved to a rental apartment in Englewood, New Jersey, an upscale suburb just north of New York City but an easy commute into it. He lived simply. “He didn’t have a lot of furniture,” remembered Clif. “You remember how you guys used to live at Andover? Cinder blocks and boards for shelves, stereo, couple of comfortable chairs, mattress. He did not spend a lot of money on furniture.”

  After a few years working at NRDC out of his apartment in Greenwich Village, Will decided to start a program to register the homeless to vote. He recruited both Cytryn and Bodden for the board of directors. “It was a huge idea at least at the time to support, to re-enfranchise the most disenfranchised into the system so they could represent their own interests and have a voice,” Cytryn said. “There were some substantial court cases and then there were the homeless voter drives. That was the kind of thing that Will had passion for. That was rewarding.”

  Benjy Swett, another Andover friend, was working for a time for the New York City parks department. Swett remembered Will calling him at the parks department and asking him if he wanted to join him in Fort Tryon Park as he visited the homeless and tried to get them to register to vote. Swett agreed. Since he knew the park well, from living nearby, he knew where the homeless tended to congregate. He and Will went into the park and immediately saw a homeless man sleeping. “He had sort of a plastic thing over him,” Swett recalled. “And Will just started talking to him. And the guy opened up to him. And Will had this way. He didn’t say ‘homeless.’ He said, ‘How long have you lived outside?’ And he had worked out ways of talking to homeless people where it felt he was going to approach them right. He got the guy’s name. And he gave the guy information about how he could register to vote. He had this long conversation.”

 
From there, the two Andover graduates headed farther up the park, to the area north of the Cloisters. It was very woodsy, and there were many homeless people living there. “We went to all the most dangerous parts of the park,” Swett said. “And Will just approached people and got them talking and somehow got them interested. People who you wouldn’t know how to approach exactly. Somehow he was able to go up to them and start something. It just really impressed me.”

  He noted that Will “was not that social” and the only other times he would hear from him were when he was having trouble getting a permit to access the softball fields in Central Park. While many other people his age and status were busy during the summer with their rentals in the Hamptons, Will wanted nothing to do with such things. He rarely would go to visit his parents in Fire Island. Instead, he was very committed to playing softball in Central Park. Swett was the one who put Will in touch with the guy who was in charge of the softball field permits in Central Park. “After that, every year at permit time he would call me up for his softball permit,” Swett said.

  In 1986, while still living in Wilmington, North Carolina, and working for the newspaper there, Clif married Polly Bennett, a waitress at a local restaurant. Will spent the night of Clif’s wedding in jail, in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, after he had been arrested for drunk driving. Miriam Cytryn had gone with Will to his brother’s wedding and spent the night in jail, too. She had been a passenger in the car, but was not arrested. She just felt that she belonged next to Will that night. “When you think back about your life,” she said, “buried in some of the funniest moments are some of the scariest moments. And a really high percentage of them have Will in them.”

  A few months before Clif’s wedding, in the spring, Will’s penchant for idealistic principles nearly caused a national incident, and certainly resulted in a healthy dollop of family embarrassment. In May 1986, the navy invited Margaret Truman and her family to rededicate the USS Missouri, a World War II–vintage battleship that had been rebuilt with nuclear power and nuclear missiles. In January 1944, when she was Senator Truman’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Margaret Truman had christened the Missouri with a bottle of sparkling wine made from Missouri grapes. Forty-two years later, she had been asked to do it again.

  For several months before the actual event, Cytryn discussed with Will whether he could behave sufficiently to attend. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to do this?” she asked him. “Can you just act as your mother’s son? Can you not be Will Daniel, thinking man, man with opinions?” Will gave her questions serious consideration. He decided he could do it, even though he was passionate about his opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

  The navy flew the Daniel parents to San Francisco for the event, along with Clif, Polly, Harrison, and Will. Will invited Miriam to go along, too, as his date. For her, that meant getting a bunch of new clothes she could ill afford. They all flew from the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport. “Will came along for the ride in person, if not in spirit,” Clif remembered. “The day we flew out of New York, he was wearing a black NO NUKE button on his jacket lapel.” According to his brother, Will objected to Ronald Reagan’s remilitarization efforts, including the creation of a six-hundred-ship fleet, and how Reagan was diverting billions of dollars to the military and away from social programs that might help the less fortunate. A naval escort met the family, and they were ushered by limousines into town. Clif wrote that when the Daniel family got to their hotel in San Francisco, there were protestors behind barricades. He allowed that had the rededication been back in New York City, Will would have been out protesting it, too.

  That night, there was a dinner in San Francisco in honor of Margaret Truman and the Missouri. Clif thought a US senator spoke, as did a navy clergyman. They both criticized the protestors. Will lost it. “Will could not sit in his seat,” Miriam remembered. “He was breaking out in hives. He couldn’t go through with it. And basically all I could do was say, ‘Let’s talk about it after dinner.’ We went to the bar. We had a couple drinks and he said, ‘We need to leave. I can’t do this.’” She urged him to sleep on it; if he still felt he could not attend the ceremony, she would leave with him. His objection was a simple one: Nobody would give Will the assurances that the Missouri would never be nuclear-armed. As a result, he couldn’t sanction the recommissioning. He told his mother that he was sorry but he could not attend the ceremony.

  Cytryn wished it had not turned out this way. “That was not the first time in my friendship with Will that something would be over the top,” she said. “Moderation was not his skill set, or at least his strongest skill set. Part of the excitement of being around him and with him were the wonderful, wonderful highs. But there were absolutely terrible lows and there were absolutely terrible out of bounds, too. So let me put this in the bucket of that. I would not have expected it. We talked about it ahead of time so there was some recognition that this could pull a string and create a reaction. But I thought the talking-out of it meant we had explored it and it wouldn’t happen.”

  * * *

  WHEN MELISSA BANK MET WILL, in 1990, he was running the homeless voter program out of his dingy West Village apartment. They were introduced by two friends of her brother. There was a birthday party out in Westhampton—where Will rarely went—and her two friends thought she should meet Will since she had recently broken up with her boyfriend. “Then I fell in love with Will,” she said. “I was with him on and off for about four years.” She said she had an immediate physical attraction to him. “I was crazy about him,” she said. “I really was.” Thanks to her friends, who had known Will at Andover, she knew about his family background. But, she said, “in all the time that I knew him, I never remember him telling anybody about his family. In fact, when somebody would say something, he would turn to me and say, ‘How did she know about my grandfather?’ or something like that. He wasn’t secretive exactly, but it wasn’t something he told other people.” She remembered that once they were discussing the likely prospect that his mother didn’t write the mystery novels that carried her name. He thought that his mother was “capitalizing” on the family name. For some reason, she asked him, “Would you mind very much if when I publish, if I publish a book, if I call myself ‘Melissa Truman’? And he said, ‘Why don’t you just call yourself Harry Truman?’ So, yeah, I think he did want to go his own way.” (In June 1999, Bank did publish a novel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, under her own name, about finding sex and love in the big city. She included a chapter about one boyfriend who bore more than a striking similarity to Will.)

  Bank convinced Will to buckle down, finish his thesis, and graduate from Yale, which he did—finally—in 1991, just as Yale’s ten-year statute of limitations was expiring. She told him it was “stupid” and “pointless” that he had been so foolish to let getting his college diploma hang over him. “He just decided at a certain point that he was going to do it and he did it,” she said. To celebrate, she threw a small graduation party for him and a few friends. “He didn’t seem really happy about it,” she recalled. She conceded there were plenty of ups and downs in her relationship with Will. “He was really always wearing the white hat,” she said. “I liked his politics and he just always seemed to be on the right side.… Will and I had a lot of fun. We just had a lot of fun.” But it was also often really tumultuous. “He was somebody who was really depressed and I didn’t really understand depression yet,” she continued. “He’d gone through a lot of analysis and was still going through analysis, and I had very limited experience with therapy, and there are things that I sort of understand now that I really didn’t then. He was a really angry guy.… It may have been that his upbringing made him angry or made him who he was, but anger was a feature. It was a personality trait. It wasn’t that he would become furious with his parents when he got angry. He was a really tormented man.”

  In January 1992, Will wrote Wallis a letter. “Here in the city that never sleeps,” he
allowed, “we are too afraid of getting robbed. I’m working part-time with homeless people in the main bus terminal, so I don’t become homeless myself. I’m looking for a real job somewhere in city government. Looking for work in this economy is like looking for sushi in George Bush’s refrigerator.” He then referred to Melissa Bank. “I’m also still with the woman I met 14 months ago making this the longest running relationship I’ve had since 1973,” he continued. “Actually it’s very hard to reconstruct them all with any exactness. Somehow we got at the point where she tells me she wants to make it permanent and I change the subject. And she gets really bummed out. And I feel really guilty. And we didn’t split. Now what?”