Authors: Gerald Clarke
With that sweeping charter, the “fantastic T. Capote,” as Southern labeled him, joined the Stones in late June, midway through their thirty-one-city, two-month tour. It was an easy mix: the Stones liked him, he liked them, and he was stimulated by their company, the like of which even a planet-wanderer like him had never encountered. After attending their last performance at Madison Square Garden on July 27, he went out to Sagaponack, where he sifted through his notes and started his story. Its title, “It Will Soon Be Here,” he borrowed from a nineteenth-century painting of Midwestern farmers rushing to save their bay from an oncoming storm. To his mind, that title had an ironic symbolism: in the twentieth century things had been so turned around that instead of rushing from the storm—the Stones and the chaos they represented—the young descendants of those God-fearing farmers were running toward it, desperate to be engulfed in the maelstrom.
His first deadline passed, and then his second, and although he read part of it to Beard, “It Will Soon Be Here” never reached its destination. He could write no more than a few pages. It may have been that he did not have the energy or power of concentration to devote himself to any significant piece of prose; or it may have been that, on examination, the idea bored him. The tour had been a new experience for him, he said, but in no way surprising; everything that had occurred, including the hysterical outbursts of the fans, had been coolly and efficiently manufactured by the Stones and their managers. “Since there was nothing to ‘find out,’” he explained, “I just couldn’t be bothered writing it.” Later, in a long interview with the magazine, he admitted that if he had been twenty-five years younger—and if he had not already written a history of a musical tour—he just might have been bothered. But why, he asked, “should I do a game that I’ve already done?”
It was a good question, but it did not stop him from engaging in other games he had already done: a film script, a television play, a documentary, and three crime shows for ABC. The first three he did with Robert MacBride, a free-lance writer he met in the summer of 1972 in a Rockefeller Center bookstore. Theirs was a bond of brothers rather than of lovers, according to MacBride, and Truman may have latched on to Bob MacBride because he could see in him traces of the Jack of earlier years. The physical resemblance was obvious. At forty-six, Bob too was thin and ascetic-looking, with rust-colored hair and pale, bleached skin. “He seemed sort of uncooked, like a blancmange that hadn’t been in the oven long enough” was the way Slim Keith described him.
There were also other, equally striking similarities. Bob too had grown up in Philadelphia, and he too was mostly self-educated, with an astonishingly diverse knowledge, ranging from computers and the navies of the Civil War to space and sculpture. Like Jack, he also spoke fluent French. Although the pliable Bob lacked Jack’s percussive temperament, he had the same unsettling habit of grabbing a conversation and turning it into a monologue. “When I see Jack is going off on one of his tantrums, I just tune out,” said Truman. “I don’t hear a thing, and then when he’s done, I tune back in. I do the same thing with Bob when he starts talking about space, stars and the universe. I don’t understand a word of it.”
Bob was married, not happily, to his second wife when he met Truman, and he supported his six children as a commercial artist and as the author of corporate brochures. His labors with Truman promised greater reward, and during the next year, from the summer of 1972 to the summer of 1973, they worked together on their three projects, none of which was ever produced. Working with Bob much as he had with Wyatt on
The Glass House
, Truman sketched out his ideas over lunch or dinner; Bob then sat down by himself and filled in the details, which Truman revised at another lunch or dinner. For Truman at least, it was a pleasant and painless process, as little like work as work could be.
In the fall of 1972 they flew to New Orleans, where they examined locations for their murder mystery,
Dead Loss.
In the winter they put together
Second Chance
, a TV documentary about transsexuals. Finally, in mid-June, 1973, they drove to Canada, where, during two weeks in a Montreal hotel and a nearly empty, out-of-season ski lodge, they completed
Uncle Sam’s Hard Luck Hotel
, a TV play about a California halfway house. Their relationship was entirely amicable, and Bob was therefore puzzled and hurt when, not long after their return from Canada, he detected a distinctly gelid tone in Truman’s voice over the telephone. “It was obvious that he didn’t want to talk to me,” Bob said. Without explanation or apology, Truman was giving him the brush-off. His wife soon complained of Truman’s “perfidy,” and Bob, who had expected much more from their collaboration, agreed. In October he wrote in his diary: “Dreamed that Capote returned.” But that Truman did not do.
The explanation was simple: Truman was in love again. Not merely in love, as he had been with Danny, but enraptured and enthralled. His new lover’s name was John O’Shea, and although Truman thought that he was “one of the best-looking people I’ve ever seen in my life,” most other people described him as nondescript. He was five feet ten inches tall, and he had the build, neither fat nor thin, of the average man of forty-four. He had dark brown hair, pronounced eyebrows, and blue eyes that were magnified by thick glasses. In every way he looked like what he was, a low-level bank vice president.
“Charlie Middleclass,” John jokingly called himself, and search as he might, a sociologist could not have found a better representative of the typical American, circa 1973. He and his devoutly Catholic family lived in a split-level house in a middle-class development about forty-five minutes from Manhattan. Both his wife, Peg, and his son Brian, who was sixteen, were leaders in their parish; his daughter, Kathy, who was fifteen, was one of the top students in her class; and his two youngest, Kerry and Chris, twelve and nine, were training to be runners—in his spare time John was a track coach, and a very good one at that.
That was only half of the picture, of course, and John too bore the wounds of a terrible childhood. His parents had come to New York from Ireland, and when his father, who was a skilled carpenter, could not find work, his mother supported their family with her job at the telephone company. Disappointed with his life and longing to return to Ireland, his father became an alcoholic who regularly beat his wife and two sons. John grew up, and one day, after his mother had been thus roughed up, he threw his father out of their Bronx apartment. But that solved only half of his parental problem. His mother was perhaps even worse than his father. Her idea of an Irish lullaby was to hear him howl with pain. When he caught poison ivy, she poured ammonia on him in the shower. When she wanted to punish him, she made him sit in the bathtub and whipped him with an electric cord; naked wet flesh is easier to hurt than dry, she had learned.
Like his father, John grew up to become a profoundly disappointed man. After serving in the Navy, he spent a year at a college in upstate New York, then returned to the Bronx to take a job in a bank, marry Peg and start their family. At that point what appeared to be a modest success story took an unexpected turn. Although his banking career slowly advanced, he was dissatisfied; his real ambition, which he nurtured at night and on weekends, was to be a novelist. Nor was he happy with his marriage, and he saw prison walls wherever he looked. “He was just a classic Irish guy,” said his son Brian. “He got beaten growing up, he went into the Navy, he came back, and when he woke up, he had a house and a bunch of kids. He never had a life.”
Emulating his father again, John became an alcoholic, “an extraordinarily violent man,” in Brian’s words, who beat Peg and Brian both. But Brian grew up and became something of a martial-arts expert. One Sunday, when his father disrupted a family dinner—John threw vegetables at Peg—Brian angrily rose from his chair, and using a trick he had learned, he stuck a finger up each of John’s nostrils, sending him crashing to the floor, and, for a moment, knocking him unconscious. So did hostility and violence descend through three generations. Like his father, John had lost control even in his own house.
Such was his situation when he met Truman, probably in the first week of July, 1973. He had come into Manhattan to be interviewed for a job he had been all but guaranteed; but to his surprise and chagrin, he did not receive it. When two tranquilizers failed to relieve the resulting tension and anger, he decided, as he sometimes did when he was anxious, to pay a call at a gay bathhouse near the Plaza Hotel: he looked upon the sex he had there as a form of masturbation; he did not consider himself homosexual. “An older guy was doing a number on me,” he recalled, “and I looked to my right, and there was Truman. I felt compelled to talk to him, thinking he’d be sympathetic to my plight. I wanted to unravel my whole tortured existence, to tell him how I had been impressed into working for a bank when I was really a writer. He would tell me how to write.”
In a private room Truman had rented upstairs, John did spill out his woes, and Truman was, or pretended to be, sympathetic. Once again Truman was swimming in the treacherous currents of nostalgia, reaching out for the absolutely average. But there was more to John’s appeal than his ordinary condition. Like Danny, he unwittingly pressed a button in Truman’s memory. Just as Danny had reminded him of a military-school classmate, so did John remind him of a Monroeville boy, a boy whose personality had stamped itself so indelibly on Truman’s memory that he had made him the title character in his story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Only later did Truman recognize how accurate and prophetic that association was: that boy was the school bully who had made his days miserable and filled his nights with foreboding. Odd Henderson he had called him, “the meanest human creature in my experience.”
He did not find John mean on that afternoon in the baths, however. Telephone numbers were exchanged, and they met again, and again after that. By the end of July their affair was on and, in John’s words, “flying like a kite.” Each saw in the other what he most desired. For Truman, John was the satisfaction of a passion; he was in the grip of an obsession that was sexual, as well as psychological. He never had enjoyed the lurid, promiscuous sex life he sometimes claimed, and like many men his age who feel that the best is behind them, he keenly regretted his omissions. Ever since he had met Danny, he had been trying, albeit with only limited success, to make up for lost time. Now, as he was approaching fifty, Truman had found someone who was all he desired in a lover, who was both exciting in bed—“on a list of my all-time favorites, Johnny was the best, Jack was second and Danny was third”—and a never-ending challenge.
What John saw in Truman was opportunity. Truman did not appeal to him physically; he may even have repelled him. A few years before, recalled Brian, his father had angrily switched channels when Truman walked onto
The Tonight Show
—“damned fag!” John had muttered. But like Danny and Rick, John believed that that damned fag could make his dreams come true. Scrambling to find a device that would enable him to turn Truman’s infatuation to his own advantage, he hit at last upon what seemed to be, in his words, “a wonderful solution.” Truman did not know how to manage money; he did. What Truman needed, he concluded, was someone who could take that burden off his shoulders, who could be his factotum, agent and business manager.
Truman agreed, as he probably would have agreed to any proposal that would tie them together, and papers were drawn up. Conveniently enough, Truman already had a paper corporation called Bayouboys, Ltd.—Alan Schwartz had established it as a tax shelter—that could give John a fancy title and a salary. Quitting his bank job, John was appointed executive vice president at an annual salary of fourteen thousand four hundred dollars. He was starting a whole new career; soon, he believed, he would be managing not only Truman’s affairs, but those of Truman’s rich friends as well. “I’m breaking out!” he told Brian. “I’m getting out of here, out of this middle-class bullshit! I’m going to manage money for writers, movie producers and winners.”
His family, who had not believed that he even knew Truman until they heard his baby voice on the telephone, were informed that John’s new duties required extensive travel, and in early August the president and executive vice president of Bayouboys were on their way to Los Angeles, and then, on September 3, to Europe. Flying first to Athens, they later were lifted by Aristotle Onassis’ helicopter to the island of Spetsai, where Slim Keith was vacationing, along with such other fashionables as Mary Martin and Stavros Niarchos. Renting a house, they remained there for three weeks, sunning and sailing. “They were lazy days and everything was wonderful,” said John.
After a trip to Istanbul, which they hated and quickly departed, they rode the Orient Express to Venice, where they commuted between the Gritti Palace Hotel and Harry’s Bar, with a few stops at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo in between. After three weeks, they traveled on to Switzerland, staying in Verbier and making several visits to Charlie and Oona Chaplin in nearby Vevey. Touched by Charlie’s husbandly devotion—“so sweet, so endearing,” John thought—John began feeling guilty about his own wife and family. He still carried with him the expression on Peg’s face as she had said goodbye at Kennedy Airport: it said to him that she did not believe for a second that he was merely Truman’s business manager, that she knew exactly what was going on between them. “It must have been a terrible ordeal for her to tell her friends that her husband had flown off with the world’s number one queer,” he said.
Thus, when Marella Agnelli asked them to prolong their trip and cruise the Greek islands on her yacht, a luxurious excursion John could scarcely have dreamed of when he was sitting behind his desk at the bank, he did not hesitate to say no. “I’ve just ordered Truman to turn down Marella Agnelli’s offer,” he proudly wrote Peg. “He agreed but thinks it’s a first for them.” To Truman he spoke more directly: “Fuck the Greek islands! I’m going to New York!” In late October they flew home. The honeymoon was over.