Capote (36 page)

A few weeks after Truman finished work on the Selznick film, Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, the director of some of Bogart’s best movies, including
The Maltese Falcon
and
The African Queen
, were sitting in George’s American Bar in Rome, drinking double martinis and gloomily discussing their problems. They had come to Italy to make a picture from a novel titled
Beat the Devil
, a mystery in an offbeat key, somewhat like the famous
Falcon.
They had hired a cast that boasted, besides Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, and Gina Lollobrigida, the gorgeous new Italian star. They had found a picturesque location, the village of Ravello, perched high on the Amalfi coast south of Naples, and they had procured financing, much of which Bogart had put up himself. What they did not have was a script: they both disliked the one prepared by two professional screenwriters. “Couldn’t read it,” said Bogart. “Neither could I,” admitted Huston. “Stinker, isn’t it?”

Hearing of their dilemma, Selznick said that he knew of just the writer for them—and as luck would have it, the man he had in mind was already in Rome. “I do urge you to consider calling in Capote, even if it is only for two or three weeks,” he wrote Huston. “His is, in my opinion, one of the freshest and
most original
and most exciting writing talents of our time—and what he would say through these characters, and how he would have them say it, would be so completely different from anything that has been heard from a motion-picture theater’s sound box as to also give you something completely fresh—or so at least I think. Moreover, I know you very well, and I know of very few writers other than Capote whose work is of the sort that I
know
would appeal to you. He can also be quite fast, but
only
if he is whipped every day. In this case, he can turn out
at least
one solid scene a day, and more if necessary, and certainly more in collaboration with you. Also, he is easy to work with, needing only to be stepped on good-naturedly, like the wonderful but bad little boy he is, when he starts to whine.”

Out of desperation, probably, more than desire, Huston and Bogart accepted Selznick’s advice, and on a chilly day in early February, 1953, wearing an overcoat that fell almost to his ankles and trailing a long lavender scarf, that wonderful, bad little boy arrived in Ravello. “Nobody was prepared for the entrance of this incredible figure,” said John Barry Ryan, a rich young New Yorker who was working as one of Huston’s assistants. In a letter to his wife, Lauren Bacall, Bogart described his own reaction to that incredible figure: “At first you can’t believe him, he’s so odd, and then you want to carry him around with you always.”

Truman did write at least one solid scene a day—without being whipped or stepped on—but he was never able to keep more than a day or two ahead of filming. Usually he wrote much of the night, testing out lines and ideas on Huston (who was listed as coauthor but almost certainly had little to do with the screenplay itself). Then, just before lunchtime, he sauntered over to the scene of the shooting with the following day’s script tucked under his arm. “He wrote it page by page and read it aloud to us all, page by page, every morning,” said Robert Morley. “He never seemed to manage to write very much on any one day, but then as we didn’t film very much either it didn’t matter.”

There were only two interruptions in that tight schedule. One occurred when Truman had to return to Rome. “Truman had to go back to his raven,” the production manager informed Morley. “The bird simply refused to talk to him on the telephone and may be quite ill. On the other hand, as Truman says, he may be just sulking.” In fact, the bird—Lola, of course—had flown off the terrace of the Via Margutta apartment and was never seen again. The other interruption was more serious. One morning Truman awoke with a swollen jaw, the result of a dangerously abscessed wisdom tooth, and he had to be rushed to a hospital in Naples. “I swear his face was twice its size,” said Huston. “But that night something like ten or twelve pages of script came back that he had written in the hospital! He was a bulldog.”

Something completely fresh Selznick had promised, and something completely fresh Truman delivered. Before anyone else knew what was happening, the offbeat mystery that Bogart and Huston had thought they were making disappeared, and a mystery-comedy of Truman’s own devising took its place: a plot of wild skids and hairpin turns, unpredictable characters, and nutty dialogue reminiscent of the screwball comedies of the thirties. Morley is the leader of a quartet of inept cutthroats who are on their way to Africa to steal title to uranium deposits. Bogart is their reluctant confederate, Lollobrigida is his Italian wife, and Jones, playing a character who seems particularly dear to her creator, is a liar of Rabelaisian ingenuity, someone who, in Bogart’s words, “uses her imagination rather than her memory.” All are stuck in Ravello, waiting for repairs on the freighter that is to take them across the Mediterranean.

“When I started, only John and I knew what the story was, and I have a suspicion that John wasn’t too clear about it,” Truman said. But it is doubtful that Truman was entirely clear either: though he may have known where he was going, he did not know how he was going to get there. The plot veered this way, then that, and characters grew larger or smaller, or changed their personality, a practice that dismayed a methodical actress like Jones. “I always wanted to know where my character was going, whether she was going to drop dead or jump in the ocean or be knocked over the head. The beginning, the middle and the end was the way I was structured, so it sometimes threw me a little bit not to know from day to day what she was going to do or not do.”

Playwriting had not come naturally to Truman. Screenwriting did, giving him the same opportunity as prose to paint visual images without the restrictions of a proscenium stage. He did not have to be taught how to write for the screen: he knew how. Greenwich’s Pickwick Theater had been his classroom, several hundred Hollywood movies had been his teachers, and hours of drinking sweet brandy and making up new dialogue with Phoebe Pierce had been his homework. Now, writing a screenplay for real, he packed it with everything he found funny, from Lollobrigida’s comic malapropisms to his favorite cinema clichés, which, as one critic was to observe, he put within the faintest of mocking quotation marks. “It was perfectly obvious,” said John Barry Ryan, “that he was making a movie for his own amusement. I always meant to sit down with him and ask: ‘Truman, were you doing what we all thought you were doing? Was it really all a game to you?’”

By some mysterious alchemy, the mood of a movie set is often reflected on the theater screen. One of the reasons
Beat the Devil
is such a lark to see is that, as Huston recalled, “it was a hell of a lark doing it.” For ten weeks Ravello was one giant house party. Huston was the indulgent and genial host; Jones and Bogart were the guests of honor; and Truman, of course, was the entertainer, the Puck. “Things happened that could only have happened on a John Huston set in winter in an Italian town where there was no heat, no electricity, and nothing to eat or drink except what was shipped in,” said Ryan. “Every night there was a great poker game, with Huston, Bogart and David Selznick. Jennifer was being pursued by a tall Italian lesbian, who was in turn being pursued by a short, dumpy Italian lesbian. David was trying to fight everyone off, and Truman was encouraging the whole thing, the marvelous turmoil that he loved to create.”

Bogart nicknamed him “Caposy” and liked to tease him until one day Truman showed he could dish it out as well as take it. “We were all in the lobby of the Hotel Palumbo,” he remembered, “and Bogie was arm-wrestling with the crew. He kept winning over and over. I was just watching, and he called over, ‘How would you like to take me on?’ I said okay. We used to arm-wrestle all the time in school. We put our arms together, and I immediately pushed his arm down. I’ve never seen a look of such complete sorrow on anyone’s face. ‘Would you mind doing that again?’ he asked. ‘Yes, for fifty dollars,’ I said. He put the fifty dollars on the table, and we did it a second time. Bang went his arm again.

“‘I don’t get it. How did you do that?’ he asked. ‘It’s just a trick,’ I said, and as we stood up, he caught me in a bear hug. He meant it affectionately, but there was also a certain kind of frustration–malice in the way he did it. ‘Cut that out, Bogie!’ I said. But he kept on squeezing me. ‘Cut that out!’ I said and hooked my foot behind his leg and pushed. Boom! He fell down and fractured his elbow, which was a big disaster, because it meant two or three days lost in shooting. But I think that that incident, more than anything else, is what made us very good friends. After that he knew better than to fool around with me. I really liked Bogie. He was one of my all-time favorite people.”

Hearing of the amusements in Ravello, other movie folk, such as Orson Welles and Ingrid Bergman, stopped in to say hello. But the visitor who occasioned the most affectionate talk had nothing to do with show business. She was Truman’s old friend the regal Carmel Snow, who came for a weekend and had such a good time that she stayed for a week. Mrs. Snow being Mrs. Snow, she did not watch silently. The women’s dresses were unacceptable, she proclaimed, and summoned from Paris her new discovery, Hubert de Givenchy, to redesign them. That done, she left, waving a white-gloved hand as she marched through the lobby of the Palumbo.

“Why, honey, what’s wrong? Ain’t we chic enough for you?” Bogart inquired.

“My dear man, compared to you my life is lived in a salt mine,” she said as she got into her car. “No, it’s just that now I must straighten my face and stop having fun.”

“Well, remember, I like you, honey,” he said, leaning in the back window. “You’re a very ballsy-type type.”

Mrs. Snow, who had been given the Legion of Honor by the President of France, regarded him coolly for a moment. Then, perhaps deciding that she had just received an accolade that was almost as good, she replied: “Am I? Well, so are you. Bye-bye, tough boy.”

“Bye-bye, tough gal.” And off she went.

In April, the company moved to England to shoot interiors in the Shepperton Studios. This time, Jack, who had never visited the Ravello set, came along, enjoying three or four weeks at Claridge’s, all expenses paid by the production. As a demonstration of the company’s affection, Jack Clayton, the associate producer, gave Truman a puppy, an English bulldog. To repay so much hospitality, Truman gave a dinner party. “[It] ended with John Huston and Humphrey Bogart fistfighting,” Jack wrote his sister Gloria. “But it appears they always act that way. All concerned in the movie were nice to Truman. But I suppose he’s nice to work with, if only because he’s sane and they aren’t.”

Huston may well have wondered if the order of that equation should not have been reversed. As he sat down to edit the movie he and Truman had made, it must have looked odder and odder. Instead of giving it the standard praises, he warned the critics not to expect very much from it. “This is such a slight, tiny picture in this age of great ones,” he said. “You can’t get more trivial.”

In fact, many of the critics loved it.
The New Yorker
thought it was “hugely entertaining,” and
Time
called it a “screwball classic.” The public, however, agreed with Huston, and it never made a profit. “Personally if you don’t see this picture you are not missing much,” said a theater owner in Michigan, who bought a newspaper ad to apologize to his patrons for showing it. Even those dearest to Truman disliked it. Jack did not understand it, and Newton walked out after half an hour. One Hollywood wit declared that no matter where you came in, you seemed to have come in in the middle.

Yet the film has survived in revival houses and probably will continue to entertain for a long time to come. Writing in 1975, Charles Champlin, the critic of the
Los Angeles Times
, offered the appreciation of an aficionado. “However antic and loopy the circumstances of its making may be,
Beat the Devil
holds up as a fast and disciplined comedy, with a richness of invention which even now, after fifteen or twenty viewings, I find astonishing.” Huston may have been more prophetic than he knew when he told Jones, who had won an Oscar for
The Song of Bernadette
, “Honey, this is the picture for which you will be remembered.”

F
OR
both Truman and Jack, summer always meant the sea, and in the spring of 1953 they moved to Portofino, a fishing village south of Genoa that was a magnet for chic tourists. “Fortunately,” said Noel Coward, who was one of them, “the Americans don’t care for it much because there is no sandy bathing beach and nothing to do.” But the two Americans who arrived with a pair of noisy dogs in a red Renault disproved his snobbish theorem; they were as enchanted as he was and found perhaps too much to do. Taking the top floor of a house on the harbor, they sunned themselves, swam, snorkeled, and worked. Jack was revising a novel; Truman was busy finishing the script of
House of Flowers
and attempting, after a long hiatus, to write short stories again.

“I need to write short stories now,” he explained to Linscott, whose paternal presence had been largely forgotten during the months of movie madness. “Partly because they interest me and, perhaps more importantly, I am entering a new area of style, developing a different cast of characters and themes—and only when this is set in my mind can I really write a novel. I
have
a novel to write—but I want to try, with a short story, trial and error, to set my guns right.” A few weeks later he plaintively added: “I wish so much I could talk to you right now, Bob—about my work. I have so many plans, ideas—maybe you could help me sort them out. I do need counsel—no two ways about it. I could
write
it all, I suppose—but it would take 50 pages. However, I am coming to New York the middle of October—then you really must devote some time to me. I’m looking forward to seeing you far, far more than anyone else!”