Capote (29 page)

A swell, a spiffy dresser who had a haircut and manicure every week, he demanded much and gave little. “Now make me laugh!” he would command the radio when he sat down to listen to his favorite shows. He considered himself several steps above his wife, who could barely read, who drank her tea from the saucer in which she cooled it, and who was pregnant so often that he sarcastically nicknamed her Olan, after a Chinese peasant woman in Pearl Buck’s novel
The Good Earth.
Kate did have the patience of a Chinese peasant. Though he would often stay away for weeks at a time with one woman or another, she never murmured a word of complaint. “Here comes Father!” she would gaily yell when she finally saw him walking home to Gladstone Street.

Perhaps because he was her firstborn, perhaps because his father hated him so, she worshiped Jack. When he was little, he stood behind her at night and brushed her long hair; after the other children had gone to bed, the two of them often shared a bowl of ice cream, a special treat in a poor household; his was the only name she called on her deathbed. “All the little good in me, what kindness and courtesy there is, I count from her,” he wrote. “The nay-saying part of me is from him; the
Protestant
part.” As is often the case with fathers and sons, Jack became more like his hated parent than he probably knew. He almost always said exactly what he thought, without regard for the laws of tact and convention, and it was impossible to predict his sudden outbursts of anger, which arrived without warning, like tornadoes roaring across the prairie on a cloudless summer day. “You never know what Jack’s reaction will be to anything,” Truman was to observe. “You can say, ‘I think Horn & Hardart’s baked beans are better than Schrafft’s,’ and you will suddenly be in a fantastic quarrel with him.”

“Poverty is much more than a way of life,” Jack later wrote. “It goes much farther than skin-deep. It’s no tattoo that fades with time. Nor a brand that can be put out of mind except when faced. Poverty, if you’ve known it, is you.” So it was and so it remained for him. Quitting high school to earn his living in factories, he looked with gluttonous envy at the young men attending the University of Pennsylvania. Fired again and again—“I couldn’t stand an office or a set routine”—he began attending a school for professional dancers; he had an Irish love for dance and movement and had spent many hours practicing steps next to the coal bin in the basement. To his surprise, he discovered that he could survive by shuffling his feet. “I didn’t really have any talent,” he admitted, “but I was good enough to do the job.”

He married his classmate Joan McCracken, and they moved to New York, only to be temporarily separated when he landed a place in George Balanchine’s company, which toured South America for eight months. He had always wanted to be a writer, and it was on that trip that he began
John Fury.
“I wouldn’t have started it if I hadn’t been so lonely. When I wrote, I wasn’t lonely anymore. I cut myself off from the rest of the company. Everybody else would go out at night and screw. I would go up to my room, work, jerk off and go to sleep.”

Whatever abilities he lacked as a dancer and entertainer Joan possessed in abundance. They both landed small roles in
Oklahoma!
His remained small; hers expanded—indeed, exploded. “When she came to the audition, she was very poor, wearing a coat trimmed with rabbit fur,” recalled Agnes de Mille, whose innovative choreography turned that musical into a Broadway landmark. “I insisted that she be hired and created for her the part of the girl who falls down, which became a great gag. She was a memorable comedienne and an exquisite technician; she had short, dumpy legs, but she used them brilliantly. She was beautiful, with a dear little, heart-shaped face, and when she came on stage and smiled, the audience melted. You could have sopped them up with a piece of bread. She was irresistible. Her personality was that of a star.”

Jack, by contrast, avoided the spotlight. When De Mille thought up something that would have focused attention on him too, he turned her down. “I’m not interested,” he said. “Give it to one of the other boys.” His ambition, he made clear, lay elsewhere. When he went into the Army the following year, Joan dominated his thoughts; as with many other soldiers, all he thought about was going home to his wife. “I was like a sunflower,” he said, “and Joan was like the sun. I didn’t have any sex at all. I didn’t even masturbate.” She was not so chaste, and when Jack returned from Europe in 1946, he immediately sensed that she was devoured by guilt. Guessing what had occurred, he tried to reassure her. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. They were on their second honeymoon in the Caribbean when she received the telegram that ended their marriage: the French composer she had had an affair with had been injured in a plane crash, and he had asked for her to come to his bedside. Forced to confess, she flew back to New York. “I would have forgiven her,” Jack said. “She was like an island I had waited all my life for. But she was blackmailed in a way, made to feel guilty, by this little Jew fairy who fell out of a plane. When she left, it tore me to pieces, and a part of me died.” To his family, who loved her, he said only, “She ran off with a Jew.”

As devastated by the breakup as he was, Joan was unable to handle either her success or her life. She married Bob Fosse, who also became famous as a dancer and director, but she divorced a second time. She accepted the wrong roles—heavy dramatic parts—and her career foundered. “Hollywood was screaming for her, and she could have become a big star,” said De Mille. “But she got lost in being arty.” Although she appeared to want Jack back, he shied away. “I still liked her,” he said, “but I would never have gone to bed with her again. She destroyed herself. She was hurrying toward the abyss.” They remained fond friends anyway, and when she died in 1961 of a heart ailment, she left him three thousand dollars. “I looked at her face in the coffin,” said De Mille, “and it was still beautiful, still seemed to give out light. I thought of some lines of John Webster: ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.’”

“I would never have become homosexual if Joan had stayed with me,” Jack said, and it is probably so. He had had homoerotic fantasies before, and he had moved in a dance and theatrical circle that was largely populated by homosexuals, but his sexual experience, starting in his mid-teens with a high school teacher, had been entirely with women. He was not a man who could react in a moderate or measured way, and when Joan cheated on him, he turned against the entire female sex. “Women were very distasteful to me, and I decided I wanted to go to bed with men. I had had dreamy crushes on men before, but I had never thought of doing anything about them. I knew the jars of honey were there, but I didn’t know they could be opened.”

Remembering the advances made to him by an Army buddy, he took a bus to Florida, where the man was living, to see if the offer was still open. It was not; his friend was now thinking civilian thoughts of marriage and children. Jack was undaunted. The jars of honey were waiting for him in New York, as they had always been, and although he fumbled and sweated, he soon learned how to open them. “When I did turn to men, it was very difficult,” he explained. “I really had to work at it. Men’s legs were hard.” He was still working at it—he had been to bed with only two men—when Truman came through Leo’s door and showed him how easy it all was.

“I’ve spent all my life looking for the perfect boy,” Jack confessed long after, and Truman’s youth and effervescence appealed to him as they did to so many others. But Jack was not in love with Truman, as Truman was with him—and Truman knew it. Truman had spent his life learning how to please, however, and now those years of training got him what he desired. Quickly picking up on what Jack wanted, he offered him a free trip to Europe. “I love to travel,” said Jack, “and when he said, ‘Let’s go to Europe!’ that was it.” They waited until Truman’s collection of eight short stories,
A Tree of Night
, was published at the beginning of 1949. Then, on February 26, 1949, three months after they had met at Leo’s, they sailed for France on the
Queen Mary.
“I finally got him!” exulted Truman. “Completely, totally, and utterly.”

T
HEIR
scheme was to head toward the sun, meaning Sicily, where they could work for a few months. After a rough voyage that left them both with colds and raw tempers, they briefly stopped in Paris, then traveled to Venice and Rome, where they joined Tennessee and his new lover, Frank Merlo, on an excursion to the island of Ischia, offshore from Naples.

Truman and Tennessee were fated to be quarrelsome friends, and stopping in Naples, they had not one, but two disagreements. The first, which was relatively minor, came when they checked into their hotel. Truman, who was prey to any number of superstitions, looked at his room number and was horrified to discover that, added together, its digits made thirteen, which was a portent of disaster. Tennessee, who was no less superstitious, agreed to switch, but instantly demanded his key back when he learned the reason. “You’re not doing that to me!” he declared. “Get back in the other room!”

The second dispute was more serious. At dinner the night before they were to leave for Ischia, Truman told what he thought was a funny story: how Margo Jones, the director of Tennessee’s newest play,
Summer and Smoke
, had called the cast together during rehearsals and, in a macabre pep talk, announced. “This is the play of a dying man. We’ve got to give it all we’ve got.” Tennessee, whose exaggerated hypochondria had provoked her dire pronouncement, had not heard the story and did not find it amusing. He was, in his own words, almost hysterical with hurt and anger—Vesuvius could not have exploded with greater fury. “He suddenly picked up the entire table and turned it on top of me,” Truman recalled. “Then he ran out of the room and disappeared. Frankie was terribly concerned, and for some reason Jack was also annoyed that I had told the story. Well, I certainly didn’t tell it out of malice. I didn’t realize that I was touching the nerve nearest Tennessee’s heart. He claimed he was dying every other day. It was his favorite gambit for getting sympathy. ‘You don’t know it, my dear,’ he would say, ‘but Ah’m a dyin’ man!’”

While Tennessee sulked, Truman and Jack left the next day for Ischia. Frankie and Tennessee followed twenty-four hours later; but Tennessee had not forgotten. “I think you judge Truman a bit too charitably when you call him a child,” he wrote Donald Windham. “He is more like a sweetly vicious old lady.” He admitted, however, that part of the reason for his eruption was his jealous suspicion that Frankie preferred Truman’s company to his own, which may at times have been true. “Frankie was a terrific person,” Truman said, “very smart, very special. He was the best person Tennessee ever took up with.” Yet Truman, ironically, also kept a close eye on Frankie, convinced that he was attracted to Jack. “Frankie had a great crush on Jack—there was a whole group of people that had a great crush on Jack. So I said to him, ‘Try it on for size, Frankie, and if it fits, wear it.’ At the same time I said to Jack, ‘You’d better not do it!’ I didn’t take him away from everybody else to lose him to Frankie!” Frankie’s childlike candor and unassailable integrity appealed to most people. When Jack Warner, who was entertaining Tennessee in his private dining room on the Warner Brothers lot, asked him what he did for a living, Frankie looked at him evenly and replied, “I sleep with Mr. Williams.”

Once settled, in a pension in the tiny village of Forio, Truman and Jack forgot about Sicily: Ischia’s eighteen square miles of volcanic rock, bathed by sea and sun, had everything they had been looking for. “What a strange, and strangely enchanted, place this is: an encantada in the Mediterranean,” Truman wrote Bob Linscott. “It is an island off the coast from Naples, very primitive, populated mostly by winegrowers, goatherders, W. H. Auden and the Mussolini family.” To Cecil Beaton, with whom, during his days in England, he had formed a close attachment, he observed: “It is really very beautiful and strange: we have almost a whole floor on the waterfront overlooking the sea, the sun is diamond-hard and everywhere there is the pleasant southern smell of wisteria and lemon leaves.” Auden, who had rented a house nearby, extolled its blessings in verse.

But Auden confined his rejoicing within the boundaries of that poem, and his prickly and tyrannical personality did not win him many dear friends on Ischia. “What a bore Auden was!” complained Truman. “He had not a spark of humor or wit. He was all intellect. I gave a party on the roof of our pension. I decorated it with Japanese lanterns, and about fifty people came, including the most beautiful fishermen on the island. Everybody had a good time. Everybody, that is, except Wystan, who wouldn’t dance or talk to anyone and sat all by himself in a corner, looking as glum as he could. That’s my image of Auden: sitting all by himself in a corner, looking glum.” Auden and his companion, Chester Kallman, were agreeable, after their fashion, to Truman and Jack, but for mysterious and inexplicable reasons, they went out of their way to snub Tennessee and Frankie. “What Wystan saw in Chester, who was one of the meanest men I’ve ever known, I’ll never understand,” Truman added. “Auden was already pretty well known as a poet, but the way Chester acted you would have thought that behind the scenes he was the important one. Chester was extremely rude to Tennessee and Frankie, and he made it a point not to invite them to their house. Tennessee was very hurt.”

Truman and Jack had come to Ischia to work, not to dance on the roof or feud with their neighbors, and that they did. Although their pension, the Lustro, had no running water, it did provide, for only two hundred dollars a month, two pleasant rooms, breakfast, and two five-course meals a day, along with good Ischian wine with which to wash them down. Truman’s routine was a familiar one: work in the morning, usually in bed; lunch and a swim; more work in the afternoon; and an evening of society, if any was to be found. If not, he read; he was belatedly discovering the sly pleasures of Jane Austen. Most of his working time was occupied by his second novel,
Summer Crossing
, the book about a Manhattan society girl he had put aside to write
Other Voices.
“I have fine hopes for
Summer Crossing
,” Truman wrote Linscott on April 1, “and I feel alive and justified in doing it, but it makes me nervous all the time, which is probably a good sign, and I do not feel like talking about it, which is another.”