Authors: Gerald Clarke
A quick learner, Truman lacked only a good college English teacher, someone who could point out what was important to know, what was less important, and what he could safely skip. There was no better guide through the literary jungles than Newton, who had read everything and skipped nothing: Truman’s infallible divining rod had directed him yet again to the one person who could help him most at the moment when he most needed help. “I always thought Truman picked Newton because he believed he would be good for him,” said Andrew. “That was the idea he gave me, at any rate. Bragging about Newton, he once said: ‘He reads Greek at the breakfast table!’” Truman was not joking when he himself proclaimed: “Newton was my Harvard.”
He often sat in the back of Newton’s classes that fall of 1946, and, in what amounted to a crash course in the essentials of literature, also enrolled in a private, after-hours seminar at Newton’s Prospect Street apartment. “It was Newton who got me to read Proust and the Nineteenth Century American classics, Hawthorne and Melville, for example—though
Moby Dick
bored me to death. I had already read all the early Henry James novels and found them easy going, but I had trouble with the later things like
The Golden Bowl.
I would never have finished them without Newton. Not that I admire them; they’re too figured for my taste. I had read poetry before I met Newton, but I read a lot more afterwards. He made poetry accessible to me, whereas it had not been entirely so before. I remember one period of two months when I read dozens of American poets, from Walt Whitman to Wallace Stevens. We would talk about whatever I was reading, and he would open things up for me, showing me that what I thought was obvious was not necessarily so. He had a very original and curious mind, and he gave me a perspective on my reading.”
For his part, Newton was proud, even excited, to be his guide. Teaching was his life’s work, and far from feeling used or manipulated, he was eager to impart as much of his learning as he could. Indeed, he seemed to need to play Pygmalion, not only with Truman, but also with the other young men he was involved with over the years, as if by doing so he could legitimize his relationship with them and raise it above the purely sensual. “Newton was only interested in young men who had some kind of literary connection,” said Daniel Aaron, “and he liked to think that his solicitude was something more than sexual appetite, that he was actually being of help to them. It was not unlike the vaguely homoerotic feelings that Henry James had for his young protégés. If Newton liked somebody, he was almost angry if he didn’t write well. I remember his talking about Truman even before I met him: this marvelous boy, this genius, this incredible figure who was wildly uneducated and yet had this gift.”
Lover, teacher, editor, and admirer, Newton was also something else, the father Arch had never been. He was, in fact, only three years younger than Arch, and the role seemed to come naturally to him. His letters often began, “Dearest child,” “Darling child,” or “Darling boy.” Writing to Mary Louise, he worried that the life his “poor boy” was leading in New York was not right for his work and spiritual calm. “I wish I knew what his truest needs are in this respect and all others,” he said fretfully. “I am too fond of him to want to interfere at the wrong points or to fail him at the right ones.” The happiest picture of that paternal devotion dates from the following summer. Staying with them in a rented house on Nantucket, Mary Louise walked into the living room one day to find them sitting side-by-side on the couch, reading a book. “They looked like a father and his little boy,” she said, and they were so absorbed in the words in front of them that they were unaware of anything else, including her, the house, and the sea outside.
“I
T
is beautiful here, the weather, crystal” was Truman’s rhapsodic report from Northampton in October, 1946, to which, in a letter to Mary Louise, he added: “The mountains rimming the town are burning green and blue and there is the cold brown touch of Autumn everywhere. An enormous apple tree, very heavy with fruit, grows under the window; aside from burning leaves, is there anything more nostalgic than the odor of ripening October apples? I am working hard, and
thinking clearly
, and am so very happy here with Newton: he is so good to me, and for me.” To Howard he wistfully observed: “I love October so much I wish it could always be.” Most of his problems had disappeared with the hot weather, his career was back on schedule with the publication of his two pieces in
Bazaar
, and, most important, he was in love. All would have been as idyllic as that scene he pictured for Mary Lou if it had not been for one seemingly insoluble concern: Nina.
Her drinking had grown steadily worse in the previous months, and the ugly scenes that forced him to fly around the corner for refuge at Leo Lerman’s were becoming increasingly common. Most of her alcoholic rage was directed at Joe, whose infidelity was a constant and unslackening torment. They still loved each other—that much was obvious—but that did not prevent him from making a habit of stopping off to visit other women on his way home from Wall Street, or prevent her from inspecting his underwear for semen stains while he was taking his evening shower. “He’s so stupid, Lyn!” she would say to her friend Lyn White. “There were pecker tracks all over his shorts!”
To some outsiders, the resulting battles, which usually ended in embraces and kisses, seemed to be a part of their marriage, a necessary Elizabeth Taylor–Richard Burton kind of ritual that demonstrated the depth of their passion. “I thought that they had a wild and romantic relationship,” said Nina’s friend Eleanor Friede. “She always used to threaten him. ‘I’ll take a butcher knife to you!’ she would say. ‘Don’t you ever do that again!’ But that was just their way. I thought they were a glamorous, flamboyant, marvelous couple.” More and more, however, particularly when the Scotch bottle was nearing empty, their fights were becoming squalid brawls. She slapped his face during a dinner party; in retaliation, he pushed her out of her chair, causing her to cut her lip so badly that a doctor had to be called. Another time, while they were fighting in their bedroom, she grabbed his testicles so hard that they bled, sending him to the hospital in his bathrobe. The months after that marked the lowest point in their marriage: he moved out and embarked on a romance with another woman, and she engaged in affairs of her own—her only way of revenging herself against his philandering, she said.
Joe’s infidelity was perhaps even more wounding to her than it would have been to many other women, who did not take such almost insolent pride in their ability to attract men. Now in her early forties, Nina was still vivacious and attractive, still slim, chic, and stylish. Carefully dressed and meticulously groomed, with frequent visits to a beauty parlor that kept her hair a continuous blond, she seemed, to a younger woman like Friede, to be the embodiment of sophistication. But now for the first time she appeared a little lost, like one of the women in a Tennessee Williams play who nurses some vague hurt or disappointment from the past. “There was a tragic aura about Nina,” said Michael Brown, a songwriter who observed her at many late-night parties. “There was something almost hysterical in her fluttering, in her incessant flow of words, in her Southernness.”
She was more destructive to herself than she was to Truman or Joe, and sometime during that troubled period she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills; but like Newton, she was saved when a friend summoned help. “A day or so after she did it, Truman called me and asked me to come over,” said Andrew. “We knew by then that she was all right, but through some mixup he had just received the note she had left him. She had written the usual farewells, then added: ‘I am putting my jewelry in a box under the radiator in the dining room. I don’t want that woman to have my things. They’re for you. Love, Mother.’ It was a very dignified letter except for the P.S., which went something like this: ‘On second thought, you had better rent a safety deposit box for my jewelry at the Chase Manhattan Bank. You’re rather careless sometimes, and I will want to know where my things are when I need them.’ I think she really intended to kill herself, though; she was still a Southern belle, and she didn’t like her man doing anything wrong.”
Her alcoholic anger was not directed at Joe alone, and when Joe was away, Truman was her target—for all the old reasons. Truman had not wound up on the streets or in jail, as she had predicted, but she rarely hid from him the fact that despite everything he had accomplished, he had let her down: he had not been the boy she had hoped for, and he was not now the man she wanted her son to be either. “She was a wonderful person when she was not drinking, impossible when she was,” he said. “She was a Jekyll and Hyde, much more neurotic and difficult than anybody realized.”
She might have overlooked his behavior herself—she became very chummy with some of his homosexual friends—but she could not ignore the judgments of others. No one hears so many whispers, real or imagined, as someone who has been brought up in a small town, and talk about Arch’s embarrassing escapades and scrapes with the law, along perhaps with questions about her own fast life, may have left her unusually sensitive. She was worried to a morbid degree about what people would say about her and hers, and she was always watching for a sign of disapproval, straining to hear derogatory remarks in conversations across a room. “She was the most uptight person I’ve ever met,” said Harper Lee, “pulled taut just like a violin string.”
When she discussed Truman’s homosexuality with Lyn White, she clenched her hands so tightly in anger and frustration that her knuckles blanched. “Nina, would you rather have a football player or a genius for a son?” asked White, an ebullient, free-spirited young Texan. “Oh, Lyn,” she would reply. “You just don’t know what it’s like!” What it was like for her was almost unceasing humiliation, and she almost certainly would have wished her son to be a linebacker rather than a genius, or, more particularly, a homosexual genius. She could have looked at Truman in many ways, but sadly for her, as well as for him, she most often saw him not as an almost spectacularly successful young writer, but as an oddity who generated looks and snickers and prompted a delivery boy to scrawl on the wall outside her own apartment: “
CAPOTE THE FAG.
”
She was a woman of stark contradictions—still the good Nina and the bad Nina—and she seemed destined to carry her ambivalence about him to her grave. She was too intelligent, drunk or sober, not to appreciate his achievements, and there were moments when she even seemed resigned, however reluctantly and with however much exasperation, to who and what he was. Both the resignation and the exasperation were evident in an amusing exchange that Truman and his friends quickly turned into legend. Cheryl Crawford, who was an important Broadway producer, telephoned one day, and not finding Truman at home, asked Nina to tell him that “Miss Crawford” had called. Confused by Crawford’s voice, which was unusually low for a woman, closer to bass than that of many men, Nina answered: “You know, whatever you boys do is perfectly all right with me. But I do think it’s going a little far when you start calling yourself
Miss!
” And she hung up the phone.
There were periods, too, when, like one of Williams’ self-deceiving, aging Southern belles, she would simply brush away the disagreeable truth and pretend, even with close friends like White and Friede, that Truman was just an ordinary young man with ordinary inclinations. She was puzzled, she said, why he could not meet a nice girl and settle down. “Lyn, would you marry my son?” she asked White. “Nina,” answered White, who did not want to play her game of make-believe, “I don’t think your son would be any more interested than I am.” To Friede her display of feigned ignorance was almost embarrassing. “We were so intimate that she would even tell me what she and Joe did in bed,” said Friede. “But here she was indulging in this fantasy about Truman. Of course she knew about him, but she
wouldn’t
know about him. He was her brilliant son who one of these days was going to knock off playing around with the boys and raise a family. What was I going to say to that? I didn’t say anything. I just looked the other way.”
There were few hours of peace at 1060 Park Avenue during the fall of 1946, and the never-ending turmoil was exacting its price on Truman. “T.C.—pale and tired-looking, poor child, after a horrible scene with Nina,” Newton noted in his diary early in September. Recurring tonsillitis forced him to have his tonsils removed at the end of October, but there was another horrible scene even while he was in bed recuperating. That night Newton outlined in his diary what had happened: “Two calls from T.C.—one from 1060 Park Avenue in the morning (when he seemed well) and one early in the evening from Leo’s—whither, it appeared, he had been driven from a sick-bed by his mother’s insane behavior. The poor poor child.” What led to his flight into the chilly night, a reason that the poor child probably kept to himself, was his discovery that she had been reading the dozens of letters Newton had written him since June. “I had put them into a drawer,” he said. “One day they weren’t there, and when I found her reading them, I went into a rage! A fury!” He had forgiven much, but she had finally done something unforgivable, and he decided at long last to move as far away from her as he could get—to Brooklyn.
He made the decision after a visit to Andrew Lyndon, who was living there in a rooming house owned by two elderly ladies who ran a telephone-answering service in the basement. Spying his salvation, Truman soon joined him. “I have changed addresses, have moved to a little lost mews in darkest Brooklyn,” he told Brinnin, making the mud towers of Timbuktu sound less distant and mysterious than the borough across the Bridge. “I wanted most to get away from hectic, nerve-racking influences, to escape and get on with my work. I had reached a point where I was so nervous I could hardly hold a cigarette, and my work was not going too well.” For the sum of ten dollars a week, an astonishingly low figure even in 1946, he was able to rent two sunny rooms. Filled with enough Victoriana to make even George Davis envious, the house, at 17 Clifton Place, in the Clinton Hill section, was clean, well heated, and as quiet as a church. Aside from the owners, who only occasionally ascended for air, he and Andrew were the only occupants.