Capote (60 page)

“All our acts are acts of fear,” Truman had written in one of his early stories, “Shut a Final Door.” For a long time thereafter his own fears had been largely disguised by his high spirits; they may even have contributed to that puckish, clownish side of him. A frightened child has a choice of either hiding in a corner or showing off, demanding the spotlight that will drive away the darkness. Truman instinctively chose the latter course, and for years that immature side of him had served him well. One of the secrets of his appeal was his infectious exuberance and his refusal to be bound by grown-up conventions, his willingness, so rare in adults, to show affection and dislike and to say exactly what he was thinking. He could brag, lie and behave outrageously, but his friends, recognizing the excesses of a child, adored him anyway. Even his anger at Maloff and the National Book Award committee was evidence of a refreshing candor. All good writers want recognition and feel wounded and resentful when their best work is rejected; few are willing to expose and perhaps embarrass themselves by saying so. But the rebellious child within him had usually been kept in check by an adult of exceptionally clear vision and sound judgment. A remarkably sensitive gyroscope had prevented him from leaning too far in one direction or another.

In the years after
In Cold Blood
, that gyroscope became less dependable and at last broke down altogether. “It’s as if two different people were inside of me,” he said. “One is highly intelligent, imaginative and mature, and the other is a fourteen-year-old. Sometimes one is in control, sometimes the other.” Flexing his muscles, the pugnacious adolescent more often pushed aside the increasingly weary adult, and the man in the middle, the Truman Capote the world saw, found it harder and harder to distinguish between the possible and the impossible, between reality and unreality. It is unlikely, for example, that the Truman of a decade before would have embarked on such a feckless enterprise as trying to make Lee Radziwill into a movie star; or that he would have responded with quite such self-lacerating bitterness to the slights by the award givers.

Contributing to the cloudiness of his judgment was an increasing dependence on pills and alcohol. Both had been part of his life since he was a teenager in Greenwich, stealing sleeping pills from his mother’s bedroom and sweet fruit brandies from Joe Capote’s bar. By the sixties, he had become addicted to tranquilizers and various other mood-altering pills, and alcohol, that old and trusty ally, had turned against him. “When I first knew him, we would have a little wine with lunch, then a martini,” said Phyllis Cerf. “But during the writing of
In Cold Blood
his drinking grew, grew, grew, grew. He would start with a double martini, have another with lunch, then a stinger afterward. That kind of heavy drinking was new with him.” By the early seventies, it had become obvious to him, as well as to everyone else, that he could no longer exist without the bottles in either his medicine chest or his liquor cabinet.

“This phenomenon” Cecil had once christened him, worrying that someone who lived so intensely might someday burn himself out, might be too astonishingly incandescent to last. For a decade and more Truman had proved him wrong, moving more feverishly than ever. But in the months that followed publication of
In Cold Blood
, Cecil’s prediction at last came true: the phenomenon of the forties and fifties was no more. “I secretly feel T. is in a bad state and may not last long,” Cecil wrote in the spring of 1966. “He has become a real neurotic case.”

From the first, Truman’s writing had been tinged with nostalgia, a yearning for a serene and smiling past that he himself had not known, nor given to his fictional characters. “Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky” was the song Holly had sung as she sat on her fire escape, plaintively strumming her guitar. But nostalgia did not provide him the bittersweet pleasure it offers many others. It was, rather, the manifestation of a pessimism so profound that it darkened every waking moment. “People think I do frivolous things, and I do,” he said, “but it’s in defiance of this feeling of mutability and death being the central factor of life.”

Since his childhood had not provided him with the parental love that usually brings later contentment, he had manufactured his happiness, conjuring it out of his imagination as he had his fiction. After
In Cold Blood
he was no longer able to summon the energy to perform that magic act. Nostalgia descended into sorrow, and to those who knew him well he seemed to be in perpetual mourning, overwhelmed by a sense of loss that was no less keen because he could not say precisely what it was that had been taken from him.

There were even signs that he was growing disenchanted with the very rich and that, on occasion, he was bored by the swans. He had walked on Olympus and had discovered that those who resided there were not heaven’s anointed after all. It was a shock—not to his intellect, which had always known better, but to his emotions, which had not. The myth by which he had lived was starting to crumble. He floundered like a man who has lost his religion, and his confidence ebbed with his faith. The sunshine of prior years shone less and less frequently, the clouds gathering so swiftly that it seemed as if they had come from nowhere. That was not the case: they had been there, circling the horizon, all along.

The theme that ran through his life—a ceaseless but unsuccessful search for love—can be likened to a leitmotif in certain symphonies and operas. Surrounded by strings and trumpets at the beginning, the chord sparkles with optimism and laughter; all is possible, it seems to say. Then the tempo of the music slows, and mellow oboes and deep-voiced horns crowd out the lighter instruments that had danced around that melodic line; the best is over, the chord now seems to say, it is past and done. The same notes that once had sung with the high spirits of spring begin to speak of melancholy autumn and the winter that will come after. To the audience that still hears the exuberant echo of their earlier incarnation, they sound, indeed, heartrendingly sad.

“I
F
an idea is really haunting you, it will stay with you for years and years,” Truman had once said. “Drain you like a vampire until you get rid of it by writing it down.” So had he been haunted by the idea of
Answered Prayers.
Although he put it aside when he went to Kansas, he never doubted that one day he would return to it. “Oh, how easy it’ll be by comparison!” he told a reporter in 1965, a week or so after he had finished
In Cold Blood.
“It’s all in my head.”

But the day of return was continually postponed as he embarked on one bootless project after another, an increasingly lengthy list that included not only his ill-conceived television adaptations for Lee, but also his documentary on capital punishment,
Death Row
,
U.S.A.
, and a new second act for
House of Flowers
, which was being produced Off Broadway. Added to all the other diversions that are thrust upon a famous author, those endeavors disguised the fact that except for the few final pages of
In Cold Blood
, he had written scarcely anything of his own since the summer of 1964.

Perhaps, unconsciously, that was his wish, and haunted though he was, he seemed curiously reluctant to begin
Answered Prayers.
What had seemed an easy task in the summer of 1965, when it lay off in a hazy distance, appeared considerably more difficult when the time approached to sharpen his Blackwing pencils. One of the reasons may have been that the subject now repelled as much as it mesmerized him. He had not become fixed on Saint Teresa’s aphorism because he saw in it the kernel of a novel. He had fastened on it because it expressed his own bleak vision of life, his belief that fate punishes those it seems to favor by giving them precisely what they desire. It was a variation on an ancient adage: every large gift exacts a large price—“she who lent him sweetness made him blind,” said Homer. Again and again he had watched different casts reenacting the same pathetic drama.

In the fifties, when he first conceived the idea of transforming that theme into fiction, he could only have imagined, or have had a presentiment of, finding himself once again an actor in that mournful play. His greatest triumph was still ahead of him; his own prayers were yet to be answered. By the late sixties they had been answered, and he realized that he was paying a price for them. It must have occurred to him that
Answered Prayers
would not only be his most ambitious work; in the loosest sense, it would also be his autobiography. He would be writing about his own disenchantment, as well as that of his characters.

The other reasons for his hesitation were probably more practical. He shuddered at the prospect of another long and lonely labor. And he feared that even if he did make such a commitment, his talent might not match his ambition. Except for two short stories, “Among the Paths to Eden” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” he had not attempted fiction since
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
ten years before. As he thought again about
Answered Prayers
in the late sixties, he must have wondered if he were still in trouble; whether, indeed, he could still write a novel.

Raising the level of his anxiety even higher was an ambition that had grown beyond the bounds of reason. Inspired by the example of Flaubert, he had always set for himself the most elevated standards—“I aspire,” he had jotted in a schoolboy notebook—but until
In Cold Blood
he had been a practical perfectionist. He had aimed high, but he had not insisted that he produce a great work every time he picked up his pad. That sensible approach was another victim of his malfunctioning gyroscope: his expectations now exceeded rational limits.
Answered Prayers
had to be a masterpiece. Nothing less would do if he were to be true to his art and, at the same time, thumb his nose at those mocking, smirking faces in the literary establishment. “When I didn’t get those prizes, I said to myself: ‘I’m going to write a book that will make you all ashamed of yourselves. You’re going to find out what a really, really gifted writer with a great determination can do!’”

Setting such an extravagant goal did not send him rushing to put words on paper, however. It did for him what it probably would have done for any other writer: it constructed a writer’s block as impenetrable as the Great Pyramid. His approach toward his craft, so admirable in theory, was well-nigh paralyzing in practice. Even the steady and productive hand of Henry James, the Master himself, would have shaken if he had sat down at his desk every morning with such a warlike, uncompromising spirit.

Small wonder that Truman stopped and allowed himself to be continually detoured from his path and purpose. Looking at that most intoxicating but daunting of sights—a blank sheet of paper—he must have wondered: had he taken on more than he could handle? could he create another masterpiece? did he in fact want to live with characters whose unhappy experience mirrored his own? He might have said, as Flaubert did when he prepared to write
Bouvard and Pécuchet
: “How scared I am! I’m on tenterhooks! I feel as if I were setting off on a very long journey into unknown territory, and that I shan’t come back.”

By the fall of 1967 it was clear that Truman could no longer delay starting his own journey. He had publicly announced his title and theme: a dark comedy about the very rich. He had received a twenty-five-thousand-dollar advance from Random House, and without showing anybody as much as the first line of the first chapter, he had sold movie rights to Twentieth Century-Fox for the staggering sum of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars—a figure one would have to multiply at least three times to find an equivalent in today’s dollars. All he had to do for that money was sit down and write the contractually guaranteed minimum of sixty thousand words: a short novel, in other words, of less than two hundred and fifty pages. But where was he to sit and write those pages? New York, with its distractions, was not the place. Nor was Long Island; although it had heat, his cottage in Sagaponack had been built for warm weather, not cold, and the flat potato fields that surrounded it, which were so lovely in other seasons, were unrelievedly dreary in winter. Verbier was the obvious spot, but the tiny apartment there was too confining and contained too many memories of the tortures of
In Cold Blood.

He settled the question, at last, by renting a house in Palm Springs, Hollywood’s favorite retreat. It had an ideal winter climate. It was small, yet, unlike Verbier, had all the sybaritic services he enjoyed and was now able to afford. It was out of the way, yet within convenient reach of his California friends, a number that now included even the Governor. “I have a strange new friend—Ronald Reagan,” he informed Cecil, adding, as if he were already hearing snickers from London: “Yes, I
know.
But really he’s
very
nice and we get on just fine.” Reagan had helped him by pulling strings so that he could visit San Quentin for his TV documentary. Truman in turn had helped Nancy Reagan raise funds for one of her own pet projects, the restoration of the executive mansion in Sacramento, by introducing her to some of his rich friends. “Write when you can,” she admonished him in November, 1967. “I don’t want to lose touch.”

At the end of December, Truman headed west in a Buick station wagon. Donald Windham was in the front seat beside him; Happy, a newly adopted black cat, was in the back; and Charlie was halfway in between, panting in Donald’s face as he put his paws over the top of the seat to see where they were headed. Averaging five hundred miles a day, the four of them arrived in Palm Springs shortly after New Year’s, 1968, and Truman was pleased to discover that his rental, an ordinary but comfortable house at 853 Paseo El Mirador, had exactly what he needed: absolute privacy. A high wall enclosed the garden and pool, and all that could be seen of the world outside was the tops of nodding palm trees and purple desert mountains. “It was a perfect setup for working,” said Donald, “especially as no one Truman knew was there.”