Capote (34 page)

Bennett’s generosity was in a sense rewarded: the reviewers did not agree with him and Linscott, and
The Grass Harp
was generally, sometimes excessively, applauded. Truman’s second novel, said the Sunday
New York Herald Tribune
, showed “the maturing and mellowing of one of America’s best young writers.” Orville Prescott in the daily
New York Times
thought it a “vast improvement” over
Other Voices.
“Within the slim compass of this work, Truman Capote has achieved a masterpiece of passionate simplicity, or direct, intuitive observation,” said Richard Hayes in
The Commonweal.
With almost audible relief, several critics praised the absence of the homosexual theme that had bothered them in
Other Voices.
Bennett was also mistaken in suggesting that readers would not buy such a short novel (it came to only 181 pages). Sales totaled 13,500, almost double those of
A Tree of Night
and triple those of
Local Color.
“All books today are far too long,” Truman cheerfully informed an interviewer. “My theory is that a book should be like a seed you plant, and that the reader should make his own flower.”

“T
ELL
me, darling, do you know anything about a young man called Saint Subber?” Truman had inquired of Cecil in May. “He had something to do with producing Kiss Me Kate etc. What is his reputation—professionally, I mean. Because he has made a crazy proposition: wants to give me option money—
just
in the event I ever
do
write a play. It’s rather mad. I’m tempted only because at the moment I do need money. Should I?” In fact, Saint Subber had not just had something to do with
Kiss Me, Kate
, a Cole Porter musical that ran for more than two and a half years on Broadway; he had produced it, and he had come to Taormina to persuade Truman to move his tree house to a stage—to turn
The Grass Harp
into a play.

If he had taken his own lofty advice, Truman would have said no instantly. He had forcibly expressed his opposition to such adaptations just two years before, in a review of a dance interpretation of Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying.
“The transposition of one art form into another seems to me a corrupt, somewhat vulgar enterprise,” he had stated sternly. “Nature being what it is, these experimental inbreedings must logically make for Cretin offspring. Why can’t a novel be simply a novel, a poem a poem?” But he had been speaking then about an adaptation of another writer’s work; now that he had been asked to do one, the concept no longer seemed corrupt or vulgar. He had loved the smell of greasepaint ever since he had played Little Eva in the fourth grade, and, like many other writers, he envied the camaraderie of those who work in the theater. Beyond everything else, he was indeed short of cash—“more broke than Little Orphan Annie,” as he phrased it—and a Broadway hit was a money-making machine that would answer all his financial problems. If Carson could turn her slim novel
The Member of the Wedding
into dollars at the box office, why couldn’t he do the same with
The Grass Harp
?

He had ample time to answer that question during the weeks that followed Saint Subber’s departure. After their Venetian idyll, at the end of July he and Jack departed for home on another slow Norwegian freighter. In the middle of August, a few days after they docked in New York, he left for Cape Cod to spend the rest of the summer with Newton—old habits die hard. He undoubtedly discussed Saint’s suggestion with Newton, and by the time he received a contract, he had made up his mind. He signed it—and then sat down to master the unfamiliar art of creating dialogue for the stage. Thus, less than three months after he thought he had said goodbye forever, he reintroduced himself to his five fools in a tree.

Saint wanted to begin rehearsals as early as February, 1952, which did not give Truman much time to write a two-hour play, even if he did have an outline—the novel itself—already in front of him. As he sat down to write, he realized, moreover, that he had a bigger job than he had thought: substantial changes needed to be made to make
The Grass Harp
work dramatically. He discovered, for example, that he had not defined Collin sharply enough in the book to make a convincing stage character, and he merged him with the colorful and more robust Riley Henderson, eliminating Riley altogether. For the sake of simplicity, he also discarded the wandering evangelist, Sister Ida, and her fifteen children, who provide much of the book’s humor. To take their place, he gave a brief spot in the second act to a new comic character, a traveling cosmetics saleswoman he named Miss Baby Love Dallas.

When he had finished, the first act followed the original plot fairly closely, but the second act was greatly different, concluding on a considerably happier and more upbeat note: the criticisms of Bennett and Bob Linscott had produced results they could not have imagined. “I think I do like to work under the pressure of a deadline,” he told one interviewer. “There’s something exciting about knowing you have to get something done by a certain time. It’s not at all like having months to write in.” His breathless pace eventually exacted a price, sending him to the hospital in November with a combination of flu and fatigue. But he met his deadline; in early January, 1952, less than five months after he began, he handed Saint two polished acts. “I have been working so hard and under such pressure,” he said when he had finished, “that I feel as if I were in a perpetual coma.”

His exhaustion was physical, not emotional, as it had been during the last few weeks of writing the book, and busy and harried as he was, Truman was having fun. All the people he knew were talking about him, his name was popping up with gratifying frequency in the papers and magazines, and most of Manhattan seemed to be lining up to buy tickets for the first play of its favorite
Wunderkind.
Sassy was a word he applied to himself, and sassy he was. “Well,” he told a reporter who requested a description, “I’m about as tall as a shotgun—and just as noisy.” Like a traveler returning from some primitive spot where he had been required to eat tasteless meals out of cans, he greedily feasted on the rich and delicious gossip that, as far as he was concerned, was the native cuisine of that skyscrapered island. “Isn’t it extraordinary about George Davis getting married?!!!” he wrote Cecil, joyfully indignant at the latest and perhaps most curious episode in the chronicle of that singular man. “And to
that
Lotte Lenya. I’ve always thought myself a lad of the world; but this beats all—and is in such bad taste, don’t you think?”

He may not have been quite as loud as a shotgun, but Truman did make his voice heard, much more than freshman playwrights usually do, in the maneuvering that precedes any large theatrical enterprise. He stipulated that
The Grass Harp
had to have a “topflight production,” and he insisted that topflight people be in charge. Shy and soft-spoken, Saint regarded him with some awe and usually let him have his way, just as Linscott did. Clearly, the director had to have imagination and insight, and Truman wanted Peter Brook, who, though only twenty-six, had already demonstrated the remarkable range of his invention to the British theater and opera world. He also wanted Cecil to design the sets, Virgil Thomson to compose the incidental music, and Alice Pearce, a nightclub comedienne, to play Miss Baby Love Dallas. Saint concurred on all four, and they both agreed that the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, would be perfect as Dolly and Verena.

Cecil, Thomson, Pearce, and the Gish sisters all said yes, but Brook declined, and his refusal caused a key part of Truman’s cherished plan to unravel. His replacement, Robert Lewis, had a long history on Broadway and had recently made a success of another play with a fantastical theme, the Lerner and Loewe musical
Brigadoon.
But Lewis did not want the Gish sisters, and Saint, taking the recommendation of an experienced director over that of an inexperienced playwright, dropped them from the cast list. The central role of Dolly went instead to the accomplished Mildred Natwick, the part of Verena to the less well-known Ruth Nelson.

Hiding his chagrin, Truman tried to convince himself that after Brook, Lewis was the best choice for director. “Between us, he has a certain vulgarity,” he wrote Cecil, “but, kept within check, I am perfectly certain he is the right director for us—he does really understand the play, has a very real sensitivity and also a strong realistic sense—which, as you pointed out, is so necessary to a play such as this.” A certain vulgarity Lewis did have—he startled Truman by informing him that he knew his play better than Truman did himself—but he also knew how to direct. Invited to the final rehearsal before the play was sent on the road, two hundred guests were enchanted, “crying buckets” at the end, according to Virgil Thomson, just as they were supposed to. Saint was so encouraged that he moved the New York opening up a week to beat the March 31 deadline for Pulitzer Prize consideration.

Few audiences ever cried again. The first indication that something was wrong came during the tryout in Boston, where Cecil’s sets—Dolly’s kitchen and the tree—were unwrapped. With no regard for budget, Cecil had bought lavishly at Madison Avenue antique shops, packing Dolly’s kitchen with everything he thought an old maid might have, including upholstered Victorian furniture and red velvet draperies for the windows; Escoffier could not have been better provided for. “Honey, you know,” said Alice Pearce to Andrew Lyndon, whom Truman had got a job as Lewis’ assistant. “Is that what a kitchen in the South looked like?” Cecil’s tree was even more impressive: twenty-four feet high, thirty-four feet wide at its broadest point, it might have been a soaring sequoia rather than a humble Alabama chinaberry, so completely did it dominate the stage of the old Colonial Theater. By comparison, commented one awed newspaperman, all other stage trees he had seen looked like shrubs. In Lewis’ eyes, that was precisely the problem. “Cecil, this is not a play about a tree,” he tartly observed, but Cecil gave him only a haughty stare in reply.

Lewis was also displeased with Truman’s creation of Miss Baby Love Dallas. Her comic routine, he maintained, interrupted the mood of the play. “Tell y’ what,” Truman said reassuringly. “It needs an audience. If it doesn’t work in Boston, I’ll change it. That’s why we go on the road, isn’t it?”

Unfortunately, the Boston tryout, which began March 13, did not give a clear signal as to what worked and what did not. The local critics were evenly divided. “A moving and tender drama,” said one of them; “thin, vague and unconvincing,” said another.
Variety
, the show-business weekly, ominously predicted that “without a pretty extensive rewrite, the sound of
The Grass Harp
will probably not be long heard in the land of Broadway.” But there was no rewrite. Back in New York before the official opening, Truman ran into his old friend Paul Bigelow. How was his play going? Bigelow asked. Marvelously well, Truman said; nothing had to be changed. “I was astonished,” recalled Bigelow, “because I was used to working in the vulgar Broadway theater. And to have a playwright come back into town and say that nothing had to be changed! I remember walking back to my office, thinking: you know, that play is going to fail.”

Early on opening night, March 27, 1952, Truman and Andrew sat in a bar near the Martin Beck Theater and leafed through a thick stack of congratulatory telegrams. “All good wishes for tonight from your admirers,” said Lynn and Alfred—the Lunts. “Good wishes for your great and glowing success tonight and our love,” added Vivien and Larry—the Oliviers. “We are all thinking of you and praying for your success tonight. All love, Daddy”—Arch. Half an hour or so before curtain they walked back to the theater. “My, my, I think something’s happening down the street,” Truman said in mock surprise when they spied the glittering crowd that was beginning to gather on Forty-fifth Street. “Let’s see what the excitement’s about.” Forbidden by Lewis from going backstage—the presence of the author upsets the actors, he claimed—he then joined Saint across the street, where the two of them watched a regiment of celebrities step out of their limousines. Mingling with that glamorous throng were Jack and Newton, who did not meet, and Joe and Nina, who looked beautiful in a formal gown and mink coat.

When the curtain had descended, Linscott rushed to a pay phone to tell Bill Goyen what all those famous people had thought. “Well, it’s not going to work,” he declared. “I walked through the lobby and I heard voices saying, ‘It’s too thin,’ and ‘The characters are not really believable.’ I think Truman’s in a lot of trouble.” Truman and Newton nervously waited for the reviews in the Beekman Place apartment where Newton was staying. The
Times
was the first and most important paper to be delivered, and its critic, Brooks Atkinson, contradicting all that Linscott had overheard, quickly decorated the room with smiles. “Out of good impulses and sensitive perceptions Truman Capote has written a beautiful play,” he said.

But the other papers, which arrived all too quickly, erased those happy smiles. Several other critics also saw merit in the play—and promise in the playwright—but none shared Atkinson’s enthusiasm. “Seeing
The Grass Harp
is like coming across a handful of flowers in an old scrapbook,” said Walter Kerr in the
Herald Tribune.
“The flowers have been pressed into attractive patterns, but they are quite dead.” The critic of the
Times
can sometimes kill a play, but he cannot save one, and Truman’s nostalgic little drama lasted only thirty-six performances.

Every lost battle is refought by the defeated generals in their memoirs, and each of those involved had his own explanation for the failure of
The Grass Harp.
Thomson blamed Cecil’s overpowering sets. Lewis faulted both the sets, particularly “the goddamn tree,” and what he thought was the disruptive inclusion of Miss Baby Love Dallas. Saint accused Lewis for not having used the Gish sisters and himself for not having demanded them. “I didn’t serve Truman well, because I should have insisted on them,” he said. “I believe if they had been in it, the play would have been a success.” Truman also criticized Lewis, who, he concluded, had never understood his work at all. Most of all he condemned himself. “Frankly, I don’t think it was a very good play,” he later confessed. But it had ardent fans who did not agree, selling out the Martin Beck on April 26 to yell, scream, and cheer at the final performance.