Capote (51 page)

There was no longer any point in isolating himself. It was time to go home, and in early March, after nearly three years away, he and Jack returned to America and once again took up residence in Oliver Smith’s basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights. For Truman, coming back to New York was like coming back to the world. “I lead such a monastery life,” he had grumbled in Europe. “No news at all.” Now, throwing off his monk’s robe—“
I need a rest from my book
,” he emphatically explained—he let loose and enjoyed himself, slipping into old routines as easily as he slipped into his old back booth at the Colony. He lunched with his favorite swans, spent weekends at Kiluna Farm with Babe and Bill Paley, and visited the Kennedys in the White House. As an emblem of his liberation, he bought what was to be one of his proudest possessions: a silver-blue Jaguar sports car. “It’s like Fabergé on wheels,” he bragged. “I sailed into the Jaguar place and said, ‘I’ll take it.’”

He was home in time to say a few last words to Newton, who died of pancreatic cancer at the end of March. Paradoxically, his arrest and the scandal over the pornographic pictures seemed to have strengthened Newton. Not only had he regained his self-esteem, but he had also acquired a stoical serenity he never before had possessed. From wisdom born of torment he said: “The staple of life is certainly suffering, though surely not its real meaning, and we differ mainly in our capacity to endure it—or be diverted from it.”

Some of Truman’s other friends could do neither. Montgomery Clift long since had descended into a netherworld of drink and drugs. Now he was joined by Cole Porter, whose buoyant spirit had succumbed at last to age, disillusion and the unrelenting pain caused by a long-ago riding accident. In the fifties, when Truman first knew him, Porter was a symbol of the sophisticated world he venerated. Lovingly decorated by Billy Baldwin, his aerie on the thirty-third floor of the Waldorf Towers was a cloud-capped citadel of elegance and luxury. The incandescent grin that once had illuminated those concinnous quarters disappeared with the decade, however. Guests who had once jumped at an invitation to dinner now came out of loyalty alone.

“Cole had a wonderful secretary who kept a revolving list of guests—he couldn’t get that many people to go there,” Truman recalled. “I would go about once every six weeks. I looked forward to dinner there like I looked forward to the guillotine. During his later days Cole wasn’t exactly
non compos
, but he wasn’t all there either. He was always immaculately dressed—I mean immaculately—and the food was superb. He would have one double martini before dinner, and after that he wouldn’t say a word for the rest of the night. He just sat there, not talking and not eating, and I would talk to myself. After a while I got used to it and really didn’t mind it so much. I would even turn on the television while we were eating. Then exactly at 10:30 his valet would come in and say, ‘It’s time for you to go to bed, Mr. Porter,’ and I would leave.

“Cole wasn’t always like that, of course. When I first knew him, he was very funny and witty. He used to describe his sex life in great detail—I think it excited him. I used a story in
Answered Prayers
about a wine steward he tried to get to go to bed with him.
⁵
Cole thought it was amusing, and now every time I see the man, who’s the maître d’ of one of the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan, I just smile. Because I know what his past was. But there was another story Cole told that I didn’t use because it sounded rather unpleasant—and I liked Cole. It was about his long affair with that actor, Jack Cassidy. Cassidy would say, ‘Do you want this cock? Then come and get it!’ Then he would stand away so that Cole, whose legs had been paralyzed in that awful riding accident, would have to crawl toward him. Every time Cole got near, Cassidy would move farther away. This went on for half an hour or forty-five minutes before Cassidy would finally stop and let Cole have it.”

Yet while he was dining with Cole, lunching with Babe, or sitting through Jackie Kennedy’s Mozart evening at the White House, Truman was thinking about, and usually talking about, his book. “If only I could empty my soul and heart and head of it for a while,” he lamented. But that he could not do—nor did he want to do.
In Cold Blood
had become part of his life: he could put it aside, but he could not forget it. “Eventually it began to own him,” said Phyllis Cerf. “Emotionally, it became something bigger than he could handle. Those boys began to own him, and the town [Garden City] began to own him.”

One night, at a dinner party given by Diana Vreeland, he spoke briefly about what he was writing, then, seeing the fascinated faces around him, continued, describing Holcomb and Garden City, the people who lived there, the Clutters, the killers—everything. “He spoke the way he wrote,” recalled D. D. Ryan, his old friend from
House of Flowers
days. “He was writing, but orally. It was all formed in his mind. This went on for two hours, maybe even three or four. Nobody said a word. Nobody moved all that time. It was the greatest tale-telling I’ve ever witnessed.”

The magnetic attraction of Kansas soon pulled him west again. In mid-April he set off in his Fabergé on wheels, detouring first to Monroeville to visit his remaining relatives—Jennie, the last of the Faulk cousins, had died in 1958—and to pick up Nelle Harper Lee, who was joining him again. On their way, they passed through Shreveport, Louisiana, where Arch now lived. “Well, should I?” Truman asked. “Why not?” Nelle answered, and they both giggled. Registering at a motel, he called his father, whom he had not seen since Nina’s death, nine years before. “My wife Blanche had never met him,” said Arch. “Never, not in eighteen years of marriage; and we had a lovely visit.”

It is impossible to know which of those tellers of tall tales, father or son, told more lies during their hours together, but the honor probably belonged to Truman. The Queen Mother’s words of praise, which would have turned anyone’s head, still rang in his ears like the chimes of Big Ben. In the months since November, Cecil’s lunch had been transformed into a royal tribute to Truman himself. As he recounted it, it had taken place not in Cecil’s house, but in Buckingham Palace—he even altered Cecil’s carefully chosen menu—and the Queen, not her mother, had been the hostess. (“I was in London last week, and the queen asked me to lunch,” he had written his grandmother. “She was very bright and charming, and very pretty!”) A version of the story found its way back to Cecil, who was understandably annoyed.

Arch had a photograph taken of Truman standing proudly beside his new car in the Persons driveway. Never one to overlook a promotional gimmick, Arch then had it printed on postcards, which he sent to his friends and customers. The caption underneath read: “Truman Capote, beloved only son of Arch Persons, owner of the Dixie Scale Co., on a recent visit to his father at Shreveport, La., in his new 1963 Jaguar Special. Author of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ ‘Other Voices Other Rooms,’ ‘The Grass Harp,’ ‘House of Flowers,’ and many other famous books, he is ranked among the first three of his profession throughout the nation. He was recently a guest at both The White House and at Buckingham Palace.”

Truman’s most important destination in Kansas was the State Penitentiary, a forty-minute drive from downtown Kansas City. Built in 1864, it resembled a turreted English castle; there was no disguising its grim purpose. Inside its walls, on the second floor of a small two-story structure, was Death Row, twelve cells, each of which measured seven by ten feet and was furnished only with a cot, a toilet and a basin; burning twenty-four hours a day, a bulb of low wattage emitted the glow of a perpetual twilight. The world outside was seen through a sliver of a window, which was barred and covered with black wire mesh. Inmates were let out just once a week for a three-minute shower and a change of clothing; during the summer, when temperatures inside sometimes reached 110 degrees, they were disgusted by their own odor. Although they were allowed newspapers, magazines and books, residents were not permitted radios or television sets. Perry and Dick could talk to each other from their adjoining cells—not that they had much to say to each other—but they had to be cautious in their conversations, which could be overheard by guards and other prisoners.

Truman had visited there twice before. But to finish
In Cold Blood
, the last part of which was mainly a history of their lives in those tiny cells, he needed regular communication with them. Gaining that right was not an easy task. Usually only relatives and lawyers were granted the privilege to come and go and exchange letters with condemned men. Prison authorities refused to cooperate with him, and finally, in desperation, he bribed his way in, he said, paying a powerful political figure to pull the right strings. “If I hadn’t got what I wanted, I would have had to abandon everything. I had to have access to those two boys. So I went for broke and asked for an interview with this behind-the-scenes figure, who was a man of great distinction and renown in that state. ‘I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you can arrange this,’ I said. I didn’t know if he was going to accept the money or not. He could have said, ‘The hell with you! Now you’ll never get inside that penitentiary!’ But I guess my offer was very tempting, and he just nodded his head.”

However the deal was managed, Truman was allowed to visit Perry and Dick almost at will and, beginning in June, 1963, to correspond with them as well. Their letters to him number in the hundreds—his to them were destroyed, alas—and they document more graphically than could any movie or play the endless tedium of hell, which is what Death Row was. Aside from their never-ending legal battles, Truman became the chief focus of their lives, their main contact with what Dick called “the free world.”

His correspondence started first with Perry, who immediately requested
Webster’s New World Dictionary
, which, along with the thesaurus that followed, became the source for the high-flown words he loved to use—and often misuse. To Perry a letter was an epistle, good weather was salubrious, and to be fat was to be adipose. He was fascinated by everything about Truman, the master of words. “Amigo mio, I have a multitude of questions I’d like to ask you,” he said, “and many diverse subjects I am desirous to discuss.” Constantly advising Truman to be careful, he would end his letters with such comments as “If you’re driving be extra cautious. Lots of crazy people on roads.”

A photograph of Truman with his Harrods bulldog touched him almost to the point of tears. “I have your picture with Charlie before me now. It packs a lot of affection. That half smile is infectious and I can’t seem to keep from smiling myself whenever I chance a glance at it. I cannot believe that I have ever seen a more pleasing and contented expression—it appears to have an effect on me similar to an anodyne and it would be useless for you to ask me to return it. (smile). A little poem comes to mind—please allow me to insert it here—it may help you to understand me and I must put it down on paper before it escapes me.

His compliments were more effusive than the Queen Mother’s. “I like talented personalities very much and I feel that you are a very perspicacious homo sapien.” Truman was father, mentor, perhaps even surrogate lover.

Perry scarcely tried to hide his jealousy at the fact that Dick was also receiving epistles from such a perspicacious homo sapien. He liked to point out to Truman that while he was requesting volumes of real literary value—works by Freud, Thoreau and Santayana, among others—Dick was asking for the potboilers of Harold Robbins. “This kind of literature is only degenerating minds that are already degenerated & perverted,” Perry angrily asserted. To Dick himself he sneered, “If you had any sense, you would realize that [Truman] thinks twice as much of me as he does you.”

His own letters from Truman Perry kept secret, but he expected Dick—“Ricardo,” he called him—to share his. When Dick once declined, Perry went into a deep sulk. “P. has another ‘madon’ at me because I won’t let him read your letters!” reported Dick. “Every time he knew I had heard from you, he asked to read it. To keep from hurting his feelings I would let him. Finally I got tired of his crust, and refused. It shows ignorance, ill-manners and no home raising to request the privilege to read someone’s mail—especially their personal mail.
I
would never have the gall to request the reading of P’s mail. I suppose I should over-look P’s faults, because he
is
kind of ignorant and stupid. He has a very low I.Q., and it is difficult for him to understand a lot of things.”

Dick’s own letters were more in keeping with those that might be expected from someone in his situation. They began in a fairly good humor—he had had a bedmate like Holly Golightly, he joked—and they became progressively darker. “Forty two months without exercise, radio, movies, sunshine, or any physical means of occupation, is a steady strain on a man’s nervous system,” he said in September, 1963. “Add the mental strain of facing a death sentence, and you have a man—or men—who slowly becomes an animal—or human vegetable.” He was, or said he was, sorry that the Clutters had been murdered, though, he claimed, probably accurately in Truman’s opinion, that it was Perry who had actually fired the fatal shots. “I doubt if hell will have me,” he declared at one point. “I’m feeling lower than whale manure, and
that
is at the bottom of the ocean,” he said at another. In April, 1964, he marked the fourth anniversary of his arrival on Death Row: “At times it seems
forty
years instead of four.”

After all those months without sun or exercise, prisoners 14746 (Dick) and 14747 (Perry) began to suffer from the illnesses of old age. Perry complained of excruciating pains and occasional paralysis of the shoulders and discussed possible cures with Truman, who was suffering from the similar symptoms of bursitis. In one or another of the many magazines Truman sent him, including
Science Newsletter
and
Nature & Science
, he had discovered a remedy for everything except what ailed him. At the same time, Dick’s eyesight began to deteriorate, and he was bothered by fainting spells. What seemed to cause him the most anguish, ironically, was the possibility that he might grow bald. “My hair line, at my forehead, has receded a full inch,” he said in September, 1964. “I’m almost frantic with worry about it. I certainly do not wish to be bald headed; I am ugly enough. Also,
no one
in my family was ever bald headed. If you have any suggestions, please state them in your next letter.” Truman, who was losing his own hair at an equal rate, was of no help.