Authors: Gerald Clarke
Truman had grown up, in Cecil’s opinion; he had changed from that “fluttery willowy little wraith” he had met in 1948 into a man of remarkable strength and vitality. “In some ways I feel anxious lest this phenomenon may be too extraordinary to last,” he confided in his diary, “and that like Bebe [Berard, a French artist who died in the late forties] he may not survive to old age. There is something almost frighteningly violent about the way he crowds so much into such a short lifetime. He sleeps so soundly, enjoying sleep so sensually; he gets such violent reactions to everything in life when once he has come out of his drowsy, slumbrous wakenings. He is so surprised, so full of wonder. He is so conscious of the deliciousness of rare & expensive things as well as the simple things. I feel slightly scared that someone who lives so intensely, so warmly, so generously, may be packing into a short span more than most people are capable of enjoying or experiencing in a long lifetime.”
Toward the end of October, Truman and Jack left Portofino. They spent several days in Switzerland, where they saw Oona and Charlie Chaplin, then proceeded to Paris, their last stop before they were scheduled to sail home on the
Queen Mary
in January, 1954. Those weeks in Paris were unrewarding for both of them. “I am working, but not well,” Jack wrote Mary Louise in an uncharacteristic note of near-despair. “Everything seems rather hopeless to me—my own work, that is—and I grow more unpleasant as a person day by day. Two or three drinks and I’m all bitterness and resentment—most of which is directed not half so much against others and their achievements, so much as against myself and my lack.” Saint Subber had appeared in Portofino while Cecil was there in August, making Truman feel so guilty for not having worked harder on
House of Flowers
that he sat down immediately after Saint left and did finish it. But now in Paris he reread what he had written and belatedly realized that he would have to rewrite the second half, “stem to stern,” as he told Newton. The prospect of long days and nights doing more rewrites in New York filled him with gloom. “Paris is cold and yellow, not very exhilarating,” he added. “But I dread the thought of N.Y. so much I’d hawk hot chestnuts in the Tuileries sooner than set sail a moment before necessary.” To John Malcolm Brinnin he wrote: “Nothing seems to be going right for me—I seem to be in a welter of unsolvable problems, literary and otherwise.”
He and Jack were not alone in their despondency, and in November Truman received a call from Carson’s husband, Reeves McCullers. “This is your friend from across the River Styx,” said Reeves—a bit of black humor that Truman did not fully appreciate until a few days later. Carson had angrily left for America, refusing to advance Reeves any more money, and Truman invited him to his hotel for dinner that night. Reeves never appeared, and it was that night, apparently, that he committed suicide, taking an overdose of barbiturates on top of liquor. “Carson treated him very, very badly,” said Truman afterward. “There was nothing wrong with Reeves except her. He should have been running a gasoline station in Georgia, and he would have been perfectly happy.” At Carson’s insistence, Reeves’s ashes were buried in France, rather than Georgia, as his family wanted, and Truman, much shaken, was one of only a handful who attended his funeral in early December. “My youth is gone,” he lamented to one of the other mourners.
It was a remark more prophetic than he knew. A few days after New Year’s, Joe Capote called from Manhattan with more bad news. After a night of heavy drinking, Nina had also swallowed a bottle of barbiturates—Seconals—and was in a coma. A second call quickly followed, telling him she was dead. Leaving Jack to sail home with the dogs, Truman flew to New York.
F
OR
several years Nina had managed to pull herself together, imbibing nothing stronger than coffee. Then, toward the end of 1952, disaster struck and her life suddenly collapsed beneath her. Joe lost his job and most of their money, and their comfortable way of living ended abruptly. She was back where she had been with Arch, examining every dollar as if it might be the last one she would ever see. With Joe’s job went both her self-respect and her hard-won sobriety. She began drinking again, more than ever.
In fact, the clouds had been long gathering. For years she and Joe had been spending more than he made as treasurer of his firm of Wall Street textile brokers, and the luxuries upon which they depended came from the profits of another textile concern he owned secretly with Nina’s brother-in-law James Rudisill, the husband of her sister Tiny. Over the years, their enterprise, the Rudisill Textile Company, did more than $550,000 worth of business with Joe’s Wall Street employers, Taylor, Pinkham and Company, whose other officers knew nothing of his involvement. That arrangement might have continued undetected had Joe not also begun gambling in the highly volatile textile commodity market. In that endeavor he was not so fortunate. He lost heavily, taking money from Taylor, Pinkham funds to cover his shortfall. When Taylor, Pinkham was purchased by the giant J. P. Stevens Company in 1952, his improprieties were discovered: close to a hundred thousand dollars was found missing from its books. He was dismissed, and the Manhattan district attorney began to investigate.
To escape jail, he needed to repay what he had taken. Using what little capital he had left, he went into business with a Cuban manufacturer of sewing threads. “We’ll come back either broke or very rich,” Nina told Andrew shortly before they left for Havana, and they soon returned to New York, even poorer than when they had left. The best job Joe could find was an accounting job that paid only seventy-five dollars a week, and if it had not been for Truman, who sent them much of the money he had earned working for the movies, he and Nina would have had to move to a cold-water flat in the Bronx. “Everything would be fine, except for the terrible and constant worry about my mother and father—but I will not burden you with that,” Truman wrote Mary Louise in June, 1953. In October he elaborated to Newton: “Odd, I seem to think about money all the time; I used not to ever. But the whole Nina-Joe situation has given me such a jolt; and it goes on and on—and I have to pay straight down the line because I don’t know what else to do.”
As long as she had had money, Nina was able to maintain the pretense that she was a Park Avenue society woman. When the money disappeared, that facade was shattered, and during the weeks before her death, she avoided most of her old friends, too depressed and embarrassed to enjoy their company. “Do call her,” Joe urged Andrew. “She always enjoys your conversations.” But the last time Andrew saw her, walking down the street, he received the distinct impression that she did not want to see him or anyone else. Eleanor Friede, who had lunch with her at the Plaza, was surprised to find her acting wild and distracted, as if she were close to a nervous breakdown. Pretty Nina suddenly looked terrible, Eleanor thought. She was too thin, and her hair, which had always been so expertly dyed that Friede had assumed that she was a natural blonde, was showing both its darker roots and traces of gray—the beauty parlor was a luxury she could no longer afford.
A few days before New Year’s, her brother Seabon, whose wife was recovering from surgery in a Manhattan hospital, came to stay the night at 1060 Park. Nina was already drunk when he arrived, and when Joe went to bed, brother and sister sat drinking for another hour or two, until Seabon also said good night and retired into Truman’s room. In no mood for sleep, Nina then woke Joe, accusing him once again of infidelity and screaming that she had hired a private detective to follow him, which, according to Seabon, she in fact had done. Joe retreated into Truman’s room with Seabon, but her rage followed him there as well. Unable to escape her in the apartment, both men dressed and left about two o’clock. “Get out, both of you!” she yelled. “Get outta here!” Seabon drove Joe to the best hotel poor Joe could afford, the West Side Y.M.C.A, and then proceeded to Queens, where he worked, and bedded down on a couch in his office.
No one can know what went through Nina’s alcohol-befuddled mind after they left, but her future could scarcely have appeared bleaker and more hopeless to her. As she had done before, she swallowed a lethal dose of Seconals. She apparently had second thoughts about killing herself, however; when Joe discovered her the next morning, the phone was off the hook, indicating that she had tried to call for help, and the windows were open, as if she had hoped that the cold December air would prevent her from lapsing into oblivion. It did not, and she was lying unconscious on the floor when Joe unlocked the door in the morning. She was taken to Knickerbocker Hospital, where she lingered for several days. She died on the morning of Monday, January 4, 1954, a few weeks before her forty-ninth birthday. That night Joe asked Andrew to join him for dinner in a restaurant near the apartment. “Don’t stop talking,” Joe commanded. “Talk about anything, any subject in the world. Don’t worry about whether it will interest me or not. Just talk so I won’t break down.”
Truman had telephoned his mother just before Christmas. Then, in quick succession, came the calls from Joe. Truman left Paris for New York the next day. Jack described his sorrowful departure to Gloria: “When the night maid came in to make up the bed, he was in the bedroom and I was out here at my table. She asked him who was going to America—which of the two of us—and he said ‘me—I’m going.’ He sounded so little—so sad. He seemed to want her to
know
everything just by looking at him. I put him on the bus to the airport—he was the only one—all the other passengers had driven out, presumably in their own cars. The driver said: Look, Mr. C., you have a bus to yourself. Truman was holding his dog. He looked at the driver, then at me, and then, to please the driver, he said something he would never say if he’d not been so desolate: ‘That’s because all the other passengers are so rich,’ he said—making a joke. Then he drove away in that big blue bus. It began to snow. It sounds like a story, but it really did snow—and the wind rose—and it was freezing cold.”
Saint Subber met his plane in New York and drove him to 1060, where Truman immediately went back to his room to lie down. “Truman’s in the back,” Saint said when Andrew arrived a few minutes later. “You’re the only person he wants to see. Go on back there.” He had been crying, Andrew said, and he was so tired—transatlantic flights took more than fifteen hours in those pre-jet days—that he had not even bothered to take off his overcoat. “She didn’t have to do it,” he told Andrew. “She didn’t have to die. I’ve got money.” Andrew lay down beside him and held him, as he had done so many times before.
The funeral was on Thursday, January 7, at Manhattan’s best-known funeral parlor, Frank Campbell’s, on Madison Avenue at Eighty-first Street. Two of Nina’s sisters, Tiny and Mary Ida, came North for the services, but cousin Jennie, who, at eighty, was the last survivor of the house on Alabama Avenue, stayed in Monroeville, angry, it was said, because Nina’s body would not be brought home for burial. In fact, there was to be no burial; to the dismay of her Baptist relatives, who did not believe in cremation, her remains were cremated and the ashes were placed in a crypt in a Westchester County crematorium.
Except for Joe, who had been drinking so steadily since her death that he was scarcely able to walk, everyone appeared composed, and the service proceeded so quickly and quietly, without outward signs of grieving, that Leo Lerman was almost shocked. “I’m a Jew,” he said to Andrew. “Is that how Christians bury people?” Afterward, some of those in attendance walked back to 1060 for a somber wake. Dorothy Kilgallen, one of the Hearst chain’s top gossip columnists, infuriated Mary Ida by immediately asking for a drink. “People don’t ask for a drink after a funeral,” said Mary Ida. “Even if I come out of the backwoods, I know that that’s not good manners. Not to me, it isn’t!” Jennifer Jones, on the other hand, won her heart by bringing homemade cookies. “I was so astounded that a movie star would make cookies!” While they were all there, a reporter from
The New York Times
called to ask if it was Truman Capote’s mother who had died. “Hang up!” Joe ordered, and the phone was put back on its cradle.
Although most people knew better, outsiders were told that Nina had died of pneumonia. “Well, I’ll eventually find out the true story,” Harper Lee said to herself, and she did. For years to come, Truman almost never talked about the way his mother had died. He mentioned it just once to Phoebe Pierce, and then only after Phoebe’s own mother had killed herself. Yet, as with all children, including Phoebe, who have lost a parent to suicide, the manner of her death never ceased to bother him. “I don’t think Truman has ever written a word about Nina,” said Phoebe. “I don’t see anything of her in any of his characters. But I know that when my mother killed herself, it almost killed me as well. You can bury such a thing miles deep, miles and miles and miles deep, but it must be a central experience in your life.” Lyn White, Nina’s best friend, was one of those privy from the beginning to the family’s secret. “You know, Lyn, my mother loved you more than anybody but Papa and me,” Truman told her. “But this is all so sordid.” White barely held herself back from making a sharp reply. “I didn’t think it was sordid,” she said. “I thought it was a tragedy.”
Arch appeared several days later, sniffing around, or so it appeared, to determine if there was any estate he could share in. There was none, of course, and Truman angrily told him so. “There’s nothing here for you,” he said. “You’re not my father. Joe’s my father. He’s taken care of me.” It was a brutal but accurate statement of fact, and since Nina had conveyed him North in 1933, Truman had seen very little of Arch, who had remarried, been widowed, then remarried again. In 1941 and 1942, Truman spent parts of two summers with him in Mississippi and Louisiana. They got along well, but, true to his nature, Arch disappointed with a promise he had no intention of keeping. He gave Truman a white Cadillac convertible, then snatched it back a week later. “He was always one with the grand and hollow gesture” was Truman’s bitter comment. “He never did anything for me.” When he was living in New Orleans two years later, struggling financially while he was working on
Other Voices
, Arch was one person he did not call upon for help.