Authors: Gerald Clarke
It is impossible to conceive of so much excitement being aroused today by such a young writer with such a slim output. The New York that resounded with his name in those years just after the war has now vanished, and a new city, different in spirit as well as body, has taken its place. That Manhattan was the unchallenged center of the planet, “the supreme metropolis of the present,” as Connolly told his English readers; it was what London had once been and what Rome had been so long before that. The great capitals of Europe lay prostrate and impoverished from the battles that had raged around them; European intellectuals, who had sought refuge in seedy but congenial West Side caravansaries, lingered on; and the cities of the Sunbelt—there was no such word then—basked in sleepy obscurity, unaware that soon they would seek to become rival centers themselves. Political decisions were made in Washington, but most of the other decisions that counted in the United States—those involving the disposition of money and fame and the recognition of literary and artistic achievement—were made on that rocky island, that diamond iceberg between the rivers. No wonder successful New Yorkers felt proud, and perhaps a little smug, about being who they were and where they were: they had all climbed to the top of what Disraeli had called the “greasy pole.” And no wonder that Truman, who had arrived at that dizzying height before he was old enough to vote, found the view so exhilarating.
The El still rumbled along a dingy Third Avenue, coal dust had turned the limestone and brick of Park Avenue to a sooty gray, and summers, in that era before universal air conditioning, meant hot and sleepless nights listening to the sound of a whirring fan. But it was also a time, as John Cheever observed long after, “when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartet from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” For those who dwelt along those streets and avenues, there was a feeling of romance and wonder about their city that is now hard to reconstruct, even in imagination. Green-and-yellow double-decker buses, so elegant and imposing that they were called Queen Marys, after the Cunard steamer, cruised serenely down Fifth Avenue; incoming ocean liners preened themselves as they passed the Statue of Liberty; and a regal red carpet was rolled out at Grand Central Terminal each night when the
Twentieth Century Limited
arrived from the West with its pampered freight of Hollywood stars. The skyline itself was romantic: the first flat-roofed glass skyscraper had yet to be erected, and Manhattan was still an island of grand and ebullient architectural fantasies—minarets, ziggurats, domes, pyramids, and spires. Banks resembled cathedrals, office buildings masqueraded as palaces, and spike-topped towers unabashedly vied for a place in the clouds.
Except for a few seamy areas, people walked wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted: street crime was rare. Hustling for news, eight major papers made everything that happened in the five boroughs, no matter how trivial, sound grave and consequential, while a battalion of gossip columnists, like nosy telephone operators in a small town, made the city seem smaller than it was with their breathless chatter about the famous, and those who would like to be famous. Broadway was a never-ending feast; theatergoers, sated with the variety before them, probably expected every year to be as bountiful as 1947, which not only saw the openings of
A Streetcar Named Desire, Brigadoon
, and
Finian’s Rainbow
, but enjoyed also the continuing runs of
Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Harvey
, and
Born Yesterday.
To Connolly, and many others, so much exuberance and vitality painted “an unforgettable picture of what a city ought to be: that is, continuously insolent and alive, a place where one can buy a book or meet a friend at any hour of the day or night, where every language is spoken and xenophobia almost unknown, where every purse and appetite is catered for, where every street with every quarter and the people who inhabit them are fulfilling their function, not slipping back into apathy, indifference, decay. If Paris is the setting for a romance, New York is the perfect city in which to get over one, to get over anything. Here the lost
douceur de vivre
is forgotten and the intoxication of living takes its place.”
The darling of the gods, as Howard had called Truman, was becoming the darling of half of Manhattan as well. The members of New York’s smart set were as fascinated as nearly everyone else by “this extraordinary boy,” as Phyllis Cerf called him. In a scene that was repeated, with only slight variations, many times during that period, she described how easily, how seemingly effortlessly, he captivated one of her celebrity-crowded gatherings. “We were having a black-tie dinner party, and since I was short of men, I told Bennett to invite some of his Random House authors. He did, and as the guests were arriving, the butler suddenly came up to me. ‘Are you expecting a child?’ he asked. I said no, I wasn’t. Bennett said, ‘That’s Truman Capote!’ and rushed to greet him. Truman then came up the stairs, looking very thin, very waifish, very childlike, with his blondish hair and bangs, and walked into the room rather blindly—he wasn’t wearing his glasses. The first guest to arrive had been Edna Ferber. She had come when our son, Chris, who was then six or seven years old, came down in his pajamas to say good night. I introduced him to Miss Ferber and sent him off to bed. But throughout the evening she pointed Truman out to people and whispered: ‘Really! Things couldn’t have been so bad that Phyllis had to bring her own child to the table in a dinner jacket! When I arrived, that young man was in his pajamas.’”
The combination of that little-boy facade with an acute adult intelligence only made him more intriguing to the Cerfs’ high-octane guests. The women in their jewels and gowns instantly surrounded him after dinner—“really instantly,” insisted Phyllis—and listened intently as he told his well-polished stories about fortune-tellers and bragged about his hitherto undisclosed ability to foresee the future. “They were absolutely enchanted by him,” said Phyllis, “and from then on people of that group began inviting him to parties themselves.”
No one invited him more often than the Cerfs, and he was often a guest at that brownstone on East Sixty-second Street or at the Columns, their estate in Mount Kisco. Phyllis adored him, and Bennett may well have recognized a kindred spirit behind those deceptively innocent blue eyes: like a teddy bear, which exists only to be hugged. Bennett too was desperate for the spotlight, which he finally received a few years later as one of the panelists on the popular television quiz show
What’s My Line?
“Everybody always said, ‘Oh, Bennett Cerf, he’s kind of a joke. He just wants to be on television and make those dreary puns,’” said Truman. “And there was that side of him, to be sure. But he was also an extremely sensitive and sound person—you could really talk to him. His advice was always excellent; he had very, very good taste; and he knew the difference between good and bad. People thought he didn’t, but he knew the difference better than anyone else.”
Along with Bob Linscott, Bennett advised Truman, sometimes becoming so fatherly in his attentions that Truman liked to embarrass him with affectionate embraces and cries of “Big Daddy.” Bennett later admitted, “I do things for Truman that I wouldn’t do for any other writer. I love him.” For fear of hurting Truman’s feelings, Bennett would deputize his wife to issue his scoldings. Intelligent and sympathetic but also extremely tough and even pugnacious—Bennett himself called her “the General”—she would usually convey his advice over lunch. Truman did not always follow it, but since it was delivered by Phyllis, he accepted it in good humor. “I loved her,” he said. “Very few people did. But she was a really feisty, good-hearted, loyal person who would do anything for you if she really liked you—and anything against you if she didn’t. If she didn’t like you, it was best to get a passport and leave the country.”
Rarely has a young novelist, particularly an unpublished young novelist, been as praised and petted by a publisher as Truman was by Random House. In those more luxurious days, the company maintained its office in one of those commercial buildings masquerading as palaces, a mock Italian palazzo on Madison Avenue. No other publisher in New York could boast such an impressive suite of offices, and Truman seemed to believe that if he did not own it, he had, at the minimum, a long-term lease. William Goyen, a novelist who was signed by Linscott after Truman, had a similar impression: “He was considered a kind of naughty but very talented little kid at Random House, like somebody from an
Our Gang
comedy. ‘Look out,’ everybody seemed to say, ‘or the little devil will trip you up on a banana peel!’ I have a vivid memory of coming in those great doors one time and finding him sitting on a bench by the reception desk, a baseball cap on his head and his feet not touching the floor. It was as if he were saying: ‘This is my place. It’s a wonderful place, and I’m going to take you all through it and introduce you to everybody.’ And he did take me to people, give me hints about what to do, and make me feel more at home there.”
It was his place, that magnificent Renaissance building, the first home Truman had felt himself welcome in since Jennie’s house on Alabama Avenue. The Cerfs had all but adopted him, and true to his word, Linscott took special care of him, wrapping him in a blanket of satiny solicitude. As he had done with Carson McCullers and a few others, Linscott, who was a widower, gave him a key to his apartment on East Sixty-third Street so that he could have a quiet place to work during the day; he told Truman to bring Newton along for weekends at Linscott’s farm, which was only twenty miles from Northampton; and he constantly lauded him to everyone within hailing distance. “Bob believed Truman led a madly glamorous life,” said Linscott’s assistant, Naomi Bliven, “that he knew everybody there was to know and that he could give him tips to all the best places. My husband and I often had dinner with Bob, and we always went to restaurants that Truman had suggested. We finally wound up going only to the Plaza Hotel because Truman had recommended their chicken hash.”
Many writers eventually felt let down by Linscott, whose enthusiasm, which was so invigorating when he was happy with a manuscript, could turn to gelid disdain when he was disappointed. During the twelve years they worked together—Linscott retired in 1957—he was never seriously disappointed by Truman, however. From Truman’s standpoint, he was an ideal editor, one who was perceptive enough to occasionally make helpful suggestions but shrewd enough to realize that his real job was not to pencil copy but to hold hands. “As an artist, a craftsman, [Truman] is completely sure of himself,” Linscott told an interviewer in 1948. “As a human being, he has a great need to be loved and to be reassured of that love. Like other sensitive people he finds the world hostile and frightening. Truman has all the stigmata of genius. I am convinced that genius must have stigmata. It must be wounded.”
N
EW
York is like a city made out of modeling clay,” Truman once said. “You can make it whatever you want. It’s the only city in the world in which you can have totally separate lives, groups of friends that don’t know one another or anything about one another.” What he made it in those postwar years was a never-ending party, with clusters of people scattered around a vast room that extended all the way from Ninety-sixth Street down to Greenwich Village. The Cerfs and the high-powered people he met through them were in one corner, the Leo Lerman set was in another, Mary Louise Aswell and all those who looked to her for warmth and advice were in a third, his close homosexual friends were over by the windows, and the nonaligned singles, a varied list that included Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Parker, and Tennessee Williams, were conveniently close to the bar. During the course of a month, he saw nearly all of them at least once, darting from one to another like a hummingbird on a long summer’s day, determined to extract nectar from every flower in the garden before dusk turns to dark. When he said that Truman had a great need to be loved, Linscott did not realize just how great—how boundless and insatiable—that need actually was.
A few times when Joe and Nina were away, and a couple of times when they were not, he brought his separate lives together at 1060 Park. “Truman had really begun to move in New York,” said Phyllis Cerf, recalling what was probably his first big party, which brought out everybody from Marlene Dietrich to Walter Winchell. “It was staggering to see who was there; an extraordinary group. But Truman didn’t have any concept about how to give a party, and his mother was absolutely horrified at the number of people he had invited. It was a madhouse, hilarious, as if somebody had said, ‘Come and get a thousand dollars!’ There was no room to get in, get a drink, or get out the door again.”
In addition to his trips to Northampton, he occasionally traveled outside the city to visit the Cerfs or the composers Gian-Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber, who shared a house in Mount Kisco—Capricorn it was called—with Robert Horan, a talented young poet. Many people passed through Capricorn, and Bill Goyen, who was Barber’s lover for a while, described Truman’s arrival at the Mount Kisco station. “We all went to meet his train, and he appeared with a flourish. He was all in velvet—he liked lots of velvet—and his descent was so measured that it seemed to take him at least five minutes to get down the steps. He seemed to think the press was waiting for him, but it was just us guys.”
When it came to grand flourishes, however, even Truman had to give way to Tallulah. “She drank a lot, and she used to call me up at two o’clock in the morning,” Truman said. “She talked about every romance she had ever had, every person she had ever been to bed with, and all the fights she had ever had. She had done everything, including going to bed with women, although I don’t think that was much of a thing with her.” She came by Capricorn once when he was there and shocked the neighborhood with her flamboyance. Wilted by the heat, the whole party moved to a cooler house nearby, where the hostess, offering them bathing suits, invited them for a swim in her pool. “I never wear a suit,” declared Tallulah, who, good as her word, was soon standing on the diving board dressed in nothing but her pearls. “Everybody, particularly the teenage boys, looked on with open mouths,” said Horan. “But it was a typical Tallulah scene, down to the fact that her chauffeur had to go back later and fish the pearls out of the water. When I asked her why she had done it, she said, ‘I just wanted to prove that I was a natural ash blonde.’ She had the bravura, the grand theatricality, which carried those things off. I never felt that way about Truman. His performances were rather small-scale, defensive and extremely human. I understood them. They were acts of defiance, as if he were saying: ‘I’m really quite vulnerable, and so before you wound me in some way, I’m going to assert myself.’”