Capote (61 page)

Truman did not appear to do much work, however, during the two weeks Donald was with him. Much of his time was spent on the phone to New York, conferring with Harold Arlen, who was trying to put together the new
House of Flowers
, and with the women friends who were arranging dinners before the show and a charity party on stage afterward. Less than three weeks after arriving, he interrupted his stay to fly back to Manhattan for his play’s January 28 opening. But the renovated
House of Flowers
fared even less well than the Broadway original. “Whatever changes have been made, it is difficult to imagine that they are improvements,” said Clive Barnes, the drama critic of the
Times.
The show closed after only fifty-seven performances, and the usually genial Arlen put much of the blame on Truman. “If he had stayed for rehearsals instead of going off to Palm Springs, I think we would have had a fighting chance,” he said.

Truman quickly returned to Palm Springs, where a reporter for
West Magazine
, C. Robert Jennings, described a life that seemed to consist mostly of work, massages at The Spa, and frequent stops for drinks. What came through most clearly in Jennings’ piece, if only between the lines, was something Truman doubtless did not mean to disclose: the aimlessness of his life in that plush oasis. Although he had many friends there, he was depressed and lonely. “I don’t get bored here at all,” he said, but added rather poignantly: “But then I have an infinite capacity for boredom.”

In fact, just the opposite was true: Truman had little capacity for boredom, and he could scarcely sit still inside his protective walls. In the middle of March he left for ten days in Europe, half of which he spent in London, probably with Lee Radziwill, who had visited him in California only a few weeks before. Returning in late March, he awaited the arrival of Jack. He did not want to spend his winters in Verbier anymore, and he hoped that Jack would join him in making the descent from the Alps. At first, that seemed possible, and Jack was entranced by the desert’s strange beauty. “I’m told not to walk out on the desert because there are snakes,” he wrote his sister Gloria, “but it is hard not to, the evenings being so beautiful.”

Jack’s good opinion quickly changed. “Thirst’s End” he called Palm Springs, adding, with his peculiar touch of poetry: “Every time I raised my eyes, they bumped into mountains the color of turds.” He also hated Truman’s house, which he thought was common, and Truman’s life in it, which he thought was insanely frantic. “There was something terribly wrong with his life,” Jack said. “The doorbell kept ringing with people asking him to do this and that. He was under terrific stress. He was going crazy. He was like a person who has gone into a dangerous nightclub and can’t get out. He had gone too far. I didn’t say anything, but I just caved in, I felt so lonely. I’ve never known such depression. The boredom was almost frightening. Pretty soon I began to reel. I went black.

“One day I ate two fried eggs and then went swimming in the pool. Suddenly I had a funny feeling around my heart. I thought I was having a heart attack and was going to die. Truman called a doctor, a tough little Jew, who actually came to the house and gave me a pill—what I had was a terrific case of indigestion. Truman watched me: he had been trying to get me to do something I could not do, which was to stay in a place I loathed so much I couldn’t physically be there. He knew what was happening to me. I think he hated it himself. ‘You’ll be all right when you get wheels under you,’ he said. And he was right. As soon as we drove away, I felt better.”

In mid-April, two weeks before the lease on the house expired, they started back to New York. “God, what a big lonely country the USA is, and how beautiful,” Jack wrote Gloria from Sagaponack. “But I like Long Island best. My heart’s here. Here I feel home.” He never returned to Palm Springs. But Truman did, buying that rented house and remodeling it to his liking. At the time it seemed like a logical thing to do. Only later did he realize his mistake. “Buying the house in Palm Springs was the beginning of the end for me.”

I
N
much of the world, and America in particular, 1968 was a year of riots, protests, and assassinations. Although Truman cared nothing about politics—he and Jack were both proud to say that they had never voted—he did have strong views about crime and criminals. He had, after all, just finished interviewing a large number of convicted murderers for his television documentary. A few days after returning to New York, he made his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
to declare that the FBI was looking for the wrong person in its search for the man who had killed Martin Luther King, Jr., in early April. He had carefully studied the record of James Earl Ray, the fugitive suspect, Truman said, and had concluded that Ray was “not capable of this particular kind of very calculated, and exact and precise kind of crime.” Ray was, in his judgment, a pawn in an elaborate plot and had himself been murdered at least ten days before King.

A week later, having delivered that portentous opinion, he flew with Frank and Eleanor Perry to France, where
Trilogy
, a combination of three of his stories that they had adapted for television, was contending for a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. “The people who ran the thing wanted big stars and big celebrities, and our picture was accepted on condition that we deliver Truman Capote,” said Eleanor. “Of course Truman agreed. Everybody’s expenses were paid, so what was the pain? We received royal treatment. We were met at the airport, I got flowers, and there were lunches and dinners for Truman. We were big deals.”

But that year’s unrest had spread to France as well, and shortly after they arrived, the entire country erupted in strikes and protests. “We went into the Great Hall where some Spanish director’s film was about to be screened, and it was chaos,” recalled Eleanor. “Geraldine Chaplin was holding the curtain shut, people were screaming and punching one another, and Jean-Luc Godard was knocked into some plastic flowers. Everyone was told that this marked the end of dinner jackets, starlets, bikinis and all the other crap that was associated with the festival. From now on Cannes was only going to have real movies for the people, we were told. Our picture was canceled before it was shown. There was nothing else to do, so we beat it.” Eager to take part in the developing drama, Eleanor suggested that they go to Paris, to witness the far more serious disruptions that were occurring there. But Truman, who was no more interested in French politics than he was in those of his own country, said no, and they returned to New York by way of Venice.

He was back in Sagaponack, listening to the radio in the early hours of June 5, when he heard that Robert Kennedy had been shot in Los Angeles. They knew each other from dinner parties and had many friends in common, including Lee and Jackie. Truman was convinced that Bobby’s influence over Jackie was so great, in fact, that if he had lived, he would have dissuaded her from marrying Aristotle Onassis. Truman had the impression that although he himself made Bobby uncomfortable, Bobby believed that he should like him, in the same way that some people who fail to appreciate opera grit their teeth and go anyway, in hopes that someday they will get the point. “I always felt that he was asking himself, ‘Well, what is this all about?’ There was something exotic about me that he couldn’t entirely accept.” Bobby tried nonetheless. Also a resident of the U.N. Plaza, Bobby occasionally called Truman on the house phone to ask if he could stop by for a drink before heading out for the evening, and he had read at least some of Truman’s books. His favorite, he said, was not
In Cold Blood
, as might have been expected from a former Attorney General, but
The Muses Are Heard
, which made him laugh, Bobby said, more than any other book he had ever read.

The last time they met was on an early morning in May when they were both walking their dogs. Bobby, characteristically, had stopped to give a spirited lecture to two boys he had caught smoking. “One of the kids looked up at him,” Truman recalled, “and said, ‘Honestly, honestly, Mr. Kennedy. I swear we’ll never do it again.’ It was as if he was some sort of avenging angel who had fallen out of heaven upon them.” A month later Truman attended Bobby’s funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Feverish with the flu, he could not bring himself to ride the special train that carried Bobby’s body to Washington for burial, however, watching that long journey on television instead and crying so much that he became even sicker. In response to his letter of condolence, Rose Kennedy thanked him, sadly adding, “I keep thinking of Hecuba’s Lament in Euripides’ Trojan Women.”
⁸

Truman’s credentials as an expert on crime were somewhat tarnished when James Earl Ray—far from being dead, as Truman had assured the audience of
The Tonight Show
—was arrested in London. That did not stop Truman from going on the program again on June 13 to expound a second and even more bizarre theory that connected the King assassination to those of both Bobby and John Kennedy. It was possible, he said, that all three murders were part of a giant scheme to destabilize the United States by killing its leaders. He was not the only one to harbor such suspicions during that bloody year, but he went further than most, pointing his finger at a specific group, the theosophists. Such a plan of wholesale murder, he said, had been expounded in the nineteenth century by Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy; he noted darkly that soon after his arrest, the man accused of Bobby’s murder, Sirhan Sirhan, had asked for a copy of Madame Blavatsky’s
The Secret Doctrine.

His second theory was as shaky as his first, as the angry theosophists were quick to point out. “Mr. Capote is in complete confusion or abysmally ignorant of the society, its aims and teachings,” said Joy Mills, the president of the Theosophical Society. In fact, Madame Blavatsky promoted brotherly love, not murder, and Truman may have confused her with nineteenth-century Russian anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin, who did advocate assassination. Newspaper commentators accused him of irresponsibility, an editorial in the
Christian Science Monitor
adjudging that “the entire discussion was utterly in bad taste.”

In July he removed himself from the American tumult to cruise the Mediterranean once again on the Guinness yacht. But he no longer derived pleasure from such luxurious excursions. “It was the third time I had done the Turkish coast and I was absolutely frantic! Every day we would drop anchor and get off to look at some ruins, some dumb old rocks in the middle of nowhere. There was even a professor from some university in Italy who would explain what these incredible heaps meant.

“Finally I said, I believe it was to Babe: ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I want off! I want to go back to New York or Long Island.’ And she said to me: ‘Don’t go with us when we get off. Stay on the ship, swim, play phonograph records, drink, get drunk, have a good time.’ So that’s precisely what I did. I went swimming, read books and played records—the yacht had a wonderful stereo—and got a terrific tan. Tan is scarcely the word! I looked like a mulatto! I would be relaxing when the others would all come back fatigued and dripping with sweat, just because they had gone to see some big old bunch of fucking rocks someplace in Turkey.

“‘Truman, I really don’t understand why you’re not coming with us,’ Gloria would always say to me. ‘We’re seeing some quite extraordinary things.’

“‘Gloria,’ I said. ‘What you’re doing is the single most boring thing I can conceive of. I have been on six cruises with you, but never before have I been crucified like this. I don’t care anything about these things, and I am not getting off this boat to look at those old dead tombs and rocks!’”

A greater disappointment awaited him in the fall when ABC, employing a logic unique to the entertainment industry, refused to run
Death Row
,
U.S.A.
The program was too grim, said the network, a remark that prompted Truman to retort: “Well, what were you expecting—
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
?” He was the victim of a not uncommon corporate shuffle. The program had been commissioned by ABC’s former president, his friend and Palm Springs neighbor Thomas Moore, but the network’s new president, Elton Rule—“that sun-tanned Uriah Heep,” Truman derisively labeled him—wanted nothing to do with such a somber subject. Though Truman declared himself “terribly disillusioned” by the outcome, his chief regret was that he had wasted a year and a half of his time. “My primary thing is that I’m a prose writer,” he said rather lamely. “I don’t think film is the greatest living thing.”

He had begun 1968 with a firm resolve to work. He ended it with little to show for his efforts—in either film or prose. “I have been working hard, doing nothing else,” he wrote Cecil. “But it all has been so fragmented—writing my book, and doing (all by myself) a very complicated documentary film. That, and all the tragedy in our American lives, has kept one feeling like an insoluble jigsaw puzzle.”

Shortly after Christmas he left for Palm Springs again, accompanied this time by C. Z. Guest and his cousin Joey Faulk, one of Seabon’s three sons. Joey, a former Army paratrooper, did the driving; C.Z., who was not used to traveling by car, sat beside Joey in the front seat asking questions about the towns they were passing through; and Truman, reading books and magazines, reclined regally in the back seat with Charlie. (Happy, the misnamed cat, had been killed by a car on Long Island.) They reached California at the beginning of January, 1969, and C.Z. stayed with him about two weeks, Joey a little longer. His routine was much like that of the year before, but, no longer pretending to be locked in seclusion with
Answered Prayers
, he became an active member of a winter party circle that included Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Walter Annenberg, the owner of
TV Guide.
At Eastertime, Joey returned to drive him back to New York.

He had not completed his book by January, as he had predicted, but in May, Random House gave him a generous new contract nonetheless. As an advance against his next three books, it delivered him title to five blue-chip stocks valued at seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars; the details ran to many pages, but the end result was that his Random House portfolio was supposed to provide him with a safe and substantial yearly income. A new deadline was set for
Answered Prayers:
January 1, 1971.