Capote (47 page)

A week before leaving Paros, he celebrated his birthday. Peering into the mirror that morning, he sadly observed that there had been a change: he no longer appeared ten years younger than he actually was. “My Birthday,” he noted in his diary: “34—and I almost look my age; wrinkles around the eyes.”

W
HEN
he docked in New York, in late October, 1958,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
was in the bookstores, and Holly Golightly had already taken her place in America’s fictional Hall of Fame. Of all his characters, Truman later said, Holly was his favorite, and it is easy to see why. She lives the Capote philosophy that Randolph and Judge Cool only talked about in
Other Voices
and
The Grass Harp;
her whole life is an expression of freedom and an acceptance of human irregularities, her own as well as everybody else’s. The only sin she recognizes is hypocrisy. In an early version, Truman gave her the curiously inappropriate name of Connie Gustafson; he later thought better and christened her with one, Holiday Golightly, that precisely symbolizes her personality: she is a woman who makes a holiday of life, through which she walks lightly.

Almost all of the scatty young women he had known and admired sat for her portrait: Carol Marcus, Doris Lilly, Phoebe Pierce, Oona Chaplin and Gloria Vanderbilt. In many ways she is also like the young Nina Capote, as seen through the blinders of childhood. Both Nina and Holly grew up in the rural South and longed for the glitter and glamour of New York, and they both changed their hillbilly names, Lillie Mae and Lulamae, to those they considered more sophisticated. But the one Holly most resembles, in spirit if not in body, is her creator. She not only shares his philosophy, but his fears and anxieties as well—“the mean reds” she calls them. “You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of,” she says by way of explanation. For her the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany’s; nothing bad could happen, she says, amid “that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets,” and her dream is to have breakfast in that soothing setting. Her wish—the title of his story—is also borrowed. Truman had once heard an anecdote and filed it away, waiting for the time he could use it. During World War II a man of middle age entertained a Marine one Saturday night. The man enjoyed himself so much in the Marine’s muscular embrace that he felt he should buy him something to show his gratitude; but since it was Sunday when they woke up, and the stores were closed, the best he could offer was breakfast.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked. “Pick the fanciest, most expensive place in town.”

The Marine, who was not a native, had heard of only one fancy and expensive place in New York, and he said: “Let’s have breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

With publication came what Truman called the Holly Golightly Sweepstakes: half the women he knew, and a few he did not, claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine. Shortly after it appeared, Doris Lilly telephoned Andrew. “Have you read Truman’s new book?” she asked excitedly.

“Why, yes,” said Andrew, who knew what she was really asking, but pretended to be ignorant. “Truman sent me a copy, and I enjoyed it very much.”

“It’s me! It’s me! It’s me!” she screamed, unable to play the game any longer. Andrew repeated the conversation to Truman, who said, “Honey, you tell her, her, her for me, me, me that it is her. But it’s also Carol Marcus and Oona Chaplin.”

Unfortunately, a Manhattan woman who bore the name Golightly also entered the sweepstakes. Charging invasion of privacy as well as libel, Bonnie Golightly sued him for eight hundred thousand dollars. Her case did not go very far. “It’s ridiculous for her to claim she is my Holly,” said Truman. “I understand she’s a large girl nearly forty years old. Why, it’s sort of like Joan Crawford saying she’s Lolita.”

Most of the critics were kind both to his Holly and to
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The most gratifying praise, however, came from a colleague who was usually as combative as Gore Vidal. “Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him,” wrote Norman Mailer. “He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, which will become a small classic.”
⁴

In the early spring of 1959, Truman went back to Russia to do more research on his Moscow piece. When he returned, he and Jack went to Clarks Island, a small island just off the coast of Massachusetts, for the summer. Although their house had neither phone nor electricity—light was provided by kerosene lamps—he told Cecil that it was “wonderful, big, clean, light and breezy, surrounded by beautiful tree-filled lawns sloping down to beaches—much the best place we’ve ever had. Wonderful for work.”

He did not do much work, however, and, to judge from his letters, even in that isolated spot he was mesmerized by the biggest society drama since the Woodward killing: Leland Hayward had left Slim for Pamela Churchill. “Your item about Leland and Pam C.
stunned
me,” he wrote Cecil, who had informed him of the news. “I’d heard nothing about it! Babe, who is in Biarritz, did not mention it in her last letter, though that reached here several weeks ago. Toward the end of May, just before I came here, I saw Leland and Mrs. C. in tete-a-tete at a restaurant—and I kidded them, and said I was going to write Slim (who had already left for Europe, where Leland was supposed to join in a week—but never did). As a matter of fact, with my usual gaucherie, I
did
write Slim asking if she knew her husband was running around with the notorious Mrs. C. Oh dear! Are you sure it’s true? Has he really left Slim?
Please
write me what you know. I am devoted to Slim; I’m amazed she hasn’t written me, I must find out where she is at once.”

Cecil’s news was indeed true. In New York, Bennett Cerf told Truman, people were taking sides—for Slim or Pamela—as if they were watching a World Series. In August, Truman visited the Paleys at their retreat in New Hampshire and dispatched a report to Cecil. “There was much talk about what is termed ‘Topic A’—the Hayward-Churchill fandango. I had a long letter from Slim, very touching, very regretful, but full of good-sense; it seems that Leland has
never
asked her for a divorce, though Mrs. C. tells everyone she will be Mrs. H. in November. The whole thing has caused a ‘situation’ among the Cushing girls: Babe and Minnie have vowed undying enmity to ‘that bitch,’ while sister Betsey is Mrs. C’s greatest partisan (so grateful is she that the threat to her own happy home has been removed).

“Tout New York is divided into warring camps—the pro-Slim contingent, led by Mrs. Paley with Jerome Robbins and Mainbocher [America’s reigning dress designer of the forties and fifties] as seconds in command, have already sent Mrs. [Arthur] Hornblow to the firing-squad because she gave a dinner for Leland and Mrs. C.—which
was
odd, considering she has always been so close a friend of Slim’s. No doubt Mrs. C. will be the winner in the coming contest. Needless to say, I am a Slimite to the death.” Mrs. C. was the winner, and she became the new Mrs. Leland Hayward on May 4, 1960. Shortly thereafter, Slim cabled Truman. “I wonder,” she said bitterly, “if she tied a ribbon on it.”

Truman remained a Slimite. A year or so later he telephoned her, begging for help. “What possible trouble or disaster could befall Pamela?” he inquired.

“I don’t know. Why?” demanded Slim, who had probably been asking herself the same question.

“Well, I sent a cable to Gloria Guinness saying, ‘Isn’t it a shame about Pam?’ Now I know I’m going to get a cable back, saying, ‘What do you mean?’ And I’ve got to invent something quickly. But what can it be? She can’t be pregnant.”

“No. She can’t be pregnant. We
know
she can’t be pregnant. I don’t know what it could be, but I’ll try to think of something.” Slim was as good as her word, and her telegram soon arrived with the answer: “How about clap—as in applause?”

After finishing forty pages of his Moscow article, Truman went to William Shawn with an embarrassing confession: he could not complete it. If he did, he said, and his subjects’ pro-Western views were revealed, they might be sent to Siberia, or perhaps even a firing squad. He offered to give back his advance, but Mr. Shawn graciously told him to keep it, to apply it to his next project for
The New Yorker.

Although he still talked about
Answered Prayers
, Truman’s mind was really on nonaction. “I like the feeling that something is happening beyond and about me and I can do nothing about it,” he explained to a reporter. “I like having the truth be the truth so I can’t change it.” He was too restless to settle down to fiction, he told the now elderly Glenway Wescott. “I couldn’t sit there to write,” he said. “It was as though there were a box of chocolates in the next room, and I couldn’t resist them. The chocolates were that I wanted to write fact instead of fiction. There were so many things that I knew I could investigate, so many things that I knew I could find out about. Suddenly the newspapers all came alive, and I realized that I was in terrible trouble as a fiction writer.”

In that mood he opened
The New York Times
on Monday, November 16, 1959. There, all but hidden in the middle of page 39, was a one-column story headlined, “W
EALTHY
F
ARMER
, 3 of F
AMILY
S
LAIN
.” The dateline was Holcomb, Kansas, November 15, and the story began: “A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged.”

I
N
describing the genesis of a successful work, a writer often will say that he stumbled across his idea, giving the impression that it was purely a matter of luck, like finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. The truth, as Henry James observed, is usually different: “His discoveries are, like those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than alert recognitions. He
comes upon
the interesting thing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in the right direction for it.”

So it was that Truman, who had been moving in the right direction for several years, came across his San Salvador, his interesting thing, in that brief account of cruel death in far-off Kansas: he had been looking for it, or something very much like it. For no apparent reason, four people had been slain: Herbert Clutter; his wife, Bonnie; and two of their four children, Nancy, sixteen, and Kenyon, fifteen. As he read and reread those spartan paragraphs, Truman realized that a crime of such horrifying dimensions was a subject that was indeed beyond him, a truth he could not change. Even the location, a part of the country as alien to him as the steppes of Russia, had a perverse appeal. “Everything would seem freshly minted,” he later explained, reconstructing his thinking at that time. “The people, their accents and attitude, the landscape, its contours, the weather. All this, it seemed to me, could only sharpen my eye and quicken my ear.” Finally he said to himself, “Well, why not
this
crime? The Clutter case. Why not pack up and go to Kansas and see what happens?”

When he appeared at
The New Yorker
to show Mr. Shawn the clipping, the identity of the killer, or killers, was still unknown, and might never be known. But that, as he made clear to Shawn, was beside the point, or at least the point he wanted to make. What excited his curiosity was not the murders, but their effect on that small and isolated community. “As he originally conceived it, the murders could have remained a mystery,” said Shawn, who once again gave his enthusiastic approval. “He was going to do a piece about the town and the family—what their lives had been. I thought that it could make some long and wonderful piece of writing.”

Truman asked Andrew Lyndon to go with him, but Andrew was otherwise engaged. Then he turned to Nelle Harper Lee. Nelle, whose own book,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, was finished but not yet published, agreed immediately. “He said it would be a tremendously involved job and would take two people,” she said. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.” Watching with some amusement as the two amateur sleuths nervously made their plans, Jack wrote his sister: “Did you read about the murder of the Clutter family out in Kansas? Truman’s going out there to write a piece on it. The murder is
unsolved!!
He’s taking Nelle Harper Lee, an old childhood friend, out with him to play his girl Friday, or his Delia Street (Perry Mason’s sec’t.). I hope he’ll be all right. I told him curiosity killed the cat, and he looked scared—till I added that satisfaction brought it back.”

He also enlisted the aid of Bennett Cerf, who, he correctly assumed, had well-placed acquaintances in every state of the union. “I don’t know a soul in the whole state of Kansas,” he told Bennett. “You’ve got to introduce me to some people out there.” By coincidence, Bennett had recently spoken at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and had made a friend of its president, James McCain. By further coincidence, McCain had known the murdered Clutter family, as he did nearly everyone else in Finney County. He would give Truman all necessary introductions, he told Bennett, if, in exchange, Truman would stop first at the university to speak to the English faculty. “I accept for Truman right now,” Bennett responded. “Great!”

Thus assured, in mid-December Truman boarded a train for the Midwest, with Nelle at his side and a footlocker stuffed with provisions in his luggage. “He was afraid that there wouldn’t be anything to eat out there,” said Nelle. After a day and a night in Manhattan, where the Kansas State English faculty gave him a party, they rented a Chevrolet and drove the remaining 270 miles to Garden City, the Finney County seat. They arrived at twilight, a month to the day after he had come upon his interesting thing in the back pages of the
Times.
But if he had realized then what the future held, Truman said afterward, he never would have stopped. “I would have driven straight on. Like a bat out of hell.”