Capote (43 page)

“‘There’s nothing going on between them,’ I said—and then he turned on me.

“‘What the fuck would you know about it?’ he asked me.

“‘Well, what the fuck I would know about it is that he’s gay, and all the affairs he has are with men.’

“‘That’s true, Bill,’ Babe said. ‘What Truman says is absolutely true.’

“‘I know a lot of guys who go around pretending that they’re gay,’ said Bill, ‘and they’re fucking everybody’s wife from here to Maine. It’s just an act. I don’t believe he’s queer at all.’

“‘Well, I can positively assure you of the fact he is,’ I said, ‘and I’ve known him a great deal longer than you have.’

“At that point he began throwing the furniture around the room, and Babe and I locked ourselves in one of the bedrooms. He tried to knock down the door and we put all kinds of furniture against it to keep him out. And he wasn’t drunk! He was just in a fantastic rage! He is a very violent man. Babe and I were quite calm. In a way we were amused. We were safe and we knew that nothing too terrible was going to happen. So we just waited in the bedroom until he had exhausted himself. I think we actually fell asleep during that incredible scene.
²

“Bill has the best taste of any man I’ve ever met, and I think he realized that Babe was ‘it’ so far as women are concerned. He married her because she was so chic. It wasn’t because of love and I don’t think it was because of her social position—though that certainly helped. To him she was the ideal woman, perfect in every way. But what he wanted was Marilyn Monroe, a sexy broad. I tried to tell her that he did love her, but she never believed me. She thought that love and sex had to go together.

“She had a love-hate relationship with him: she loved, loved, loved him and hated, hated, hated him. I have never met anybody who was so desperately unhappy as she was. Twice I saved her when she tried to kill herself. One time she took pills and the other time she cut her wrists. Once she was ready to leave him, and I sat her down and said, ‘Look, you don’t have any money and you’ve got four children. Think of them. Bill bought you. It’s as if he went down to Central Casting. You’re a perfect type for him. Look upon being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job, the best job in the world. Accept it and be happy with it.’ She cried and said, ‘I’ve got to think it over. Let me take a nap.’ She lay down and slept for a couple of hours. When she woke up, she shook herself and said, ‘You’re right.’ And that was the end of it.

“She had one affair with a man, now dead, who had been the American ambassador to an Eastern European country. She invited me over to a restaurant on the West Side for lunch with him. Their romance lasted a few months, but she broke it off because she was afraid that Bill would find out. She had everything: beauty, chic, all the money anyone could want. But she discovered when she got it that it wasn’t what she wanted. I regard her life as a great tragedy, though no one else in the world would agree with me.”

Yet if Bill behaved badly toward beautiful Babe, so did Truman himself, who betrayed her trust by putting the Paleys’ sex life, or, as he said, lack of it, at the top of his list of lunchtime stories. Perhaps—to make the best case for him—he thought that his disclosure would somehow diminish Bill in the eyes of his peers and gain sympathy for Babe. Or perhaps—to make the more probable case—he was such an addicted gossip that he could not resist telling a juicy story, making it clear that he was the only one to whom she had entrusted her embarrassing secret. In either event, he did her an injury, whether she knew it or not.

Whatever his motive, the reputation most tarnished by his breathless report was neither Babe’s nor Bill’s, but his own. “Babe made a mistake in trusting him,” said one of her friends. “My husband and I had lunch with him in the early sixties, just after he had spent some time with her. He told us that Bill would no longer sleep with her and that she was greatly bothered by it. We were both horrified by his indiscretion, and my husband wanted me to tell her. But I just couldn’t do that. I couldn’t tell her about Truman, and I didn’t want to humiliate her by saying that he had spread the intimate facts of her life from coast to coast. He didn’t tell just a couple of us who were closest to her. He told everybody.”

That is not the last word on Truman and the Paleys, however. Most close relationships between intelligent and strong-minded people suffer changes of temperature, heat and cold, sun and storm. And so did theirs, which was one of the most unusual combinations of all. He was their friend, their confidant, their child. He was also the sharer of all that was good and bad in their marriage. They depended on him; he depended on them. He loved Babe, and he liked Bill more than he disliked him. Through fair weather and foul, their great little trio endured for twenty years, and it was the wonder of all those who witnessed it.

An early photograph, taken beside the Paley pool in Jamaica, gives an indication of the nature of that curious alliance. Bill, the robust tycoon in his middle fifties, is in sport shirt and shorts, beaming as confidently as the sun itself. Babe, no more than forty or forty-one, is smiling radiantly, immaculate and serene. Truman, shirtless, in white trunks and a jaunty striped cap, is holding an apple and grinning impishly, as if the camera had caught him in the midst of some devilment, which he will resume the instant the shutter clicks.

No three people could have looked happier together, and on that cloudless, sun-drenched afternoon Truman might have borrowed a line from Proust himself: “Greedy for happiness, I asked nothing more from life, in such moments, than that it should consist always of a series of joyous afternoons.”

I
N
the spring of 1955, while
House of Flowers
was still playing, Truman made certain that he and Jack once again would be able to spend the summer by the sea. Hearing about an isolated cottage on Fire Island, he telephoned the owner. “How many of you would be staying there?” asked the man. “There would just be two of us,” said Truman. The owner was dubious. “It’s kind of lonely for two girls out there,” he volunteered, which caused a scream of displeasure on the other end of the line. “This is Truman Capote!” A deal was soon struck, and Truman was able to leave for Europe with some of his new fancy friends. From Venice—which to Truman of course meant Harry’s Bar—Angelo, the headwaiter, dispatched a touching note to Jack. “Dear Mr. Jack,” he said. “We miss you, and wish you were here with our beloved Mr. Truman.”

By July 6, when he joined Mr. Jack and the two dogs on Fire Island, Truman was rested and eager to begin writing once more. At least some good had come from all his wasted efforts in the theater: he now knew what road his career should take. Bob Linscott had been right all along; his talent did shine brightest on the printed page. An apostate no longer, he worshiped once again at the altar of prose. “Now, true to my word, I’ve settled down to work,” he wrote his old editor, “and hope that I will have something interesting to show you come September.”

The something interesting was the novella that he had already titled
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Before he could get very deeply into it, his attention was diverted anew, however, this time not by the theater, but by a form of prose that had long excited him: journalism. For years he had wanted to test his skills at it, and now Harold Arlen suggested an almost irresistible subject. Arlen’s friend Robert Breen was the director of a company, the Everyman Opera, that had performed George Gershwin’s opera,
Porgy and Bess
, around the world. At Christmastime, Arlen said, Breen’s mostly black troupe was going to make its most daring expedition of all. Taking advantage of a thaw in the Cold War, it was going to carry the Stars and Stripes into the center of the enemy camp, becoming the first American company to perform in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution. Truman should go along, the composer said, and write an account of the group’s adventures. Truman agreed;
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
would have to wait.

The New Yorker
, which promised to publish the story he brought back, paid his expenses; Babe Paley presented him with cold-weather gear from Abercrombie & Fitch; and to repel the fierce Arctic winds, he bought himself a yellow cashmere scarf, three or four times the ordinary width. All bundled up, “he looked just like a little bunny,” said one of Breen’s troupe. Thus attired, he crossed from West Berlin to East Berlin on December 19, 1955. There, along with more than ninety other nervous Americans, he boarded the
Blue Express
which was to convey them to the frozen heart of Muscovy: first to Leningrad, where
Porgy
was to open the day after Christmas; then to Moscow itself, where performances were scheduled to begin January 10, 1956.

Breen, his wife, Wilva, and most other members of their hardy band regarded their trip as a historic event that would raise the Iron Curtain for further Soviet-American cultural exchanges. The Russians seemed to share their hopeful opinion. “Your visit is a step forward in the march toward peace,” proclaimed their chief host, a representative of the Ministry of Culture. “When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent; when the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”

But Truman was not interested in writing an account of a historic event; indeed, he was probably constitutionally incapable of such a portentous undertaking. Almost immediately, probably before the
Blue Express
had left the East Berlin station, he realized that in Breen’s history-making enterprise there was also material ideally suited to his comedic talents. Writing later, he said that he imagined
The Muses Are Heard
, which is what his chronicle was titled, as a brief comic novel. “I wanted it to be very Russian, not in the sense of being reminiscent of Russian writing, but rather of some Czarist
objet
, a Fabergé contrivance, one of his music boxes, say, that trembled with some glittering, precise, mischievous melody.”

It was in that spirit of mischief that he observed his fellow travelers, beginning with the performers themselves, who were exuberant, uninhibited and, not unpredictably, more concerned about getting ahead than in improving East-West relations. Truman shared a compartment with two of them, Earl Bruce Jackson and Helen Thigpen, who planned to be married in Moscow. “Bound to be a big story,” predicted Jackson, who had purchased a special wedding suit, brown tails with champagne satin lapels, before he left Germany. “The first couple of Negro Americans married in Moscow. That’s front page. That’s TV.”

Next Truman cast his eye on the Breens, who viewed their role as cultural ambassadors with exaggerated gravity, and on Leonard Lyons, the columnist of the
New York Post
, who, in an unconscious parody of the old-fashioned newshound, saw banner headlines everywhere he looked. Despite a serious space squeeze aboard the train, Lyons commandeered an entire compartment for himself, evicting his erstwhile roommates. “I can’t write with a lot of characters sitting around,” he announced. After Lyons, Truman shifted his gaze to the wife of
Porgy
’s coauthor, Mrs. Ira Gershwin, in whom he saw a flighty
arriviste
who indiscriminately sprinkled her speech with such terms of endearment as “darling” and “love” and who never appeared, even at breakfast, without her diamonds.

Finally, with far more affectionate amusement, he examined Breen’s secretary, Nancy Ryan, who also shared his compartment. A tall blonde, three years out of Radcliffe, she was the ideal Capote woman, bright, brash, and somewhat scatty. By curious coincidence she possessed many of the traits of Holly Golightly, the heroine of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
She was also almost as attractive as her mother, Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, one of Manhattan’s most famous society beauties. When she had read
Other Voices
as a teenager, Nancy had shown her mother the picture of the author reposing on the dust jacket. “I think he looks capable of deviltry,” that formidable woman had said. Watching Truman watching everyone else, a worried Lyons had the same impression. Taking Nancy aside, he asked, “Is Truman planning something really evil?”

Truman is also a protagonist in
The Muses Are Heard
, which he wrote in the first person, as he did all of his comic, sunlit works. He injects himself so far as to note that his presence caused stares on Soviet streets, but he leaves the reader with the impression that any American would have received the same attention. Of all those who reviewed the book, only the English critic Kenneth Tynan, who knew him, guessed that the Russians were not staring at just any American, but at one in particular. “I think it only fair to point out,” Tynan wrote in the London
Observer
, “that his somewhat unusual appearance—elfin, diminutive and extravagantly animated—has often created similar commotions in his native land.”

If he was not wearing his yellow stole, Truman was trailing the flaming red scarf that Lenore Gershwin had given him, or covering his head with it, as if it were a babushka. On at least one occasion pedestrians tittered when he walked by. “Laugh, you dreary people,” he replied. “But what will you do for laughs next week, when I’m gone from here?” One day Breen was talking with his Russian hosts in the lobby of Leningrad’s Astoria Hotel, where the company was staying, when Truman appeared at the top of the operatically grand marble staircase. Conversation stopped in mid-sentence. Mesmerized, the Russians followed his stately descent. Without giving any indication that he even knew he was being observed, much less that he was being spotlighted, Truman walked majestically past them and through the revolving door. Then, just when they thought they had seen the last of him, he reappeared, having made a full circle with the door, kicked up his right heel in their direction and disappeared for good. After that eloquent exit, there was a long silence, which was broken at last by the somber man from the Ministry of Culture: “Ve have them like that in the Soviet Union, but ve hide them.”

Not everyone laughed or stared at him. Although none of his work had been translated into Russian, his writing had been read surreptitiously by a few people, who greeted him with discreet enthusiasm. His most ardent fan, an English professor at the University of Leningrad—Boris the Bunny, Truman called him—took him drinking. That night Nancy found them sprawled in Truman’s hotel room, which was connected to hers by a common bathroom. “Found them totally potted in his room, both of them somewhat disheveled,” she wrote in her diary. “Incoherent tales of vodka, caviar, ‘the most absolutely
divine
restaurant.’ Morning after, T crawled into my bed and was fed Alka-Seltzer. Felt ghastly all day.” Describing Boris to Newton, Truman said he was “witty and charming and fun: qualities rarer than platinum in the Soviet.”