Capote (67 page)

John may have had second thoughts about their relationship, but Truman had not: he was besotted, and to keep his new companion from returning to banking, he more than doubled his salary, to thirty thousand dollars a year. If John had wanted to, he would have been hard pressed to refuse such generosity. Whatever doubts he had were put aside, and he invited Truman home for dinner: it was time he met the family.

Despite John’s guilty conjecture, Peg did not suspect that he was Truman’s lover. It was inconceivable to her that her husband could have an affair with another man. Far from being angry or jealous, she was delighted by their family’s good fortune. “Truman had doubled the salary he was making at the bank,” she said. “I thought he had found a marvelous job. Wouldn’t anybody?” Nor, as John had also dourly imagined, had she been humiliated when he flew off with the world’s most famous admitted homosexual. Their neighbors were apparently as innocent and trusting as she was. As best anyone in the family could tell, there had been no sly winks around the barbecues that summer, no whispers over backyard fences.

When John told her that his new boss was coming, her only reaction therefore was nervousness. “What should I serve him?” she anxiously inquired. “Lamb chops,” replied John, and out she went to buy fourteen lamb chops, an expensive cut unfamiliar to the budget-minded O’Shea household. “I told the kids that instead of saying, ‘What’s that?’ they should say. ‘Oh, no, not lamb again!’ Knowing that Truman was Southern, I also had a friend bring some black-eyed peas from a black area of the Bronx. But I didn’t know how to cook them, and I left them on the stove all day. When it came time to serve them, they were mush. If my husband’s job had depended on that dinner—as I thought it did—we would have been lost. Little did I know that Truman would become my best friend. I liked him immediately.” Returning a few days after Christmas, Truman gave each of the O’Shea children a hundred-dollar bill, fresh from his cash drawer.

Settling into his job, John actually did begin to manage Truman’s career—probably to Truman’s surprise, most certainly to his consternation. John’s first major act was the negotiation of a lucrative contract, a minimum of ten thousand dollars a week plus expenses, for Truman to write about another murder case—this one involving sex and torture—for
The Washington Post
and its syndicate. The accused was one of two teenage boys who had allegedly helped a Houston electrician sexually abuse, torture and then kill other teenagers before he himself turned around and shot the electrician.

Interest in the case was not so much in the murders—the electrician had killed at least twenty-seven—but in the circumstances that had allowed them to go unnoticed. How could so many boys have vanished so quietly, without arousing the curiosity of the community, the police, or the newspapers? That, at least, was the question Truman planned to ask. “I see the trial as a jumping-off point,” he told an interviewer, “to really tell about this whole extraordinary culture—in Texas and the Southwest, all the way to California—of aimless wandering, this mobile, uprooted life: the seven-mile-long trailer parks, the motorcycles, the campers, the people who have no addresses or even last names.”

Despite his public enthusiasm, it was not an assignment he cherished. He only accepted it because John had pushed him, and John might not have pushed him if he had been at all familiar with his writing habits. Truman had rarely written on deadline, much less a daily deadline, as the
Post
expected, and the prospect of dictating into a telephone every night, like any other reporter on a fast-breaking story, must have filled him with terror. In any event, the ambitious piece he had outlined could not have been written in small doses; it would have required an effort on the scale of
In Cold Blood.
The project was doomed, and Truman must have known it.

Nonetheless, he and John set out by car for Houston in the first week of January, 1974. Stopping overnight in Washington, they stayed with Kay Graham, who was no more impressed by John than she had been by Danny. “A horrible man! Horrible!” she said. They then proceeded to Monroeville, where Truman’s relatives gathered at his aunt Mary Ida Carter’s house for the old-fashioned kind of Southern dinner Sook used to make. “I’ve never enjoyed so much food in my life,” said John. In Houston they stayed with Truman’s friends Lynn and Oscar Wyatt, who were rich even by Texas standards, and explored the lower-middle-class neighborhood where the electrician had slain his victims.

But Truman’s
Houston Diary
, as his account was to have been titled, ended the instant the young defendant was led into the courtroom. “I’ve seen this before,” said Truman, referring to a similar entrance by Perry and Dick fourteen years earlier, and he marched out, with John at his heels.
¹⁰
Packing their bags, they drove on to Palm Springs. Truman’s Random House editor, Joe Fox, was assigned the task of breaking the bad news to the editors of
The Washington Post.
Truman, he cabled, was hospitalized at an undisclosed location in the West and would not be reporting on the Houston murders.

Joe Fox was telling the truth. On his arrival in California, Truman entered the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Desert, suffering from what the hospital characterized as a respiratory ailment. How sick he was, or whether he was sick at all, is a matter of disagreement. According to John, he was using illness as an excuse to wriggle out of his contract with the
Post.
But Truman wrote Jack, who was in Verbier, that he was very sick, that in fact he had pneumonia. “Most people talk themselves up, Truman talks himself down,” Jack told his sister Gloria. “So you never know with him. Much of his trouble has to do with drinking too much. (Says I!) When will it end! He only communicates to me in crises. When it’s bad. Otherwise he says nothing.”

Though Truman, looking for sympathy, may have exaggerated his illness to Jack, he probably was debilitated by the binge he had been on ever since he had met John, and he may well have had some form of pneumonia. Dispirited he indisputably was. Needing more support than John could give him, he summoned other companions to Palm Springs. His cousin Joe Faulk came from San Diego, and from New York came Saint Subber and John Knowles, a fellow writer and friend from Long Island.

Most of Truman’s friends had regarded Danny and Rick as inappropriate but inoffensive. With a few exceptions, John aroused far stronger and far more negative emotions. “When he was cold sober, he was all right, rather mannerly,” said Knowles. “But the moment he got a drink in his hand, he thought he could just let it all hang out. He was crude-mouthed beyond belief—‘this fucking place, fucking town, fucking restaurant’—and it was unbelievably wearing to have to listen to that barracks talk. He would lurch into Robert and Natalie [Wood] Wagner’s house, put his feet up on a table, and start spewing his obscenities. To me, he was a phony in every sense of the word, a fake tough guy with nothing tough about him. ‘You’re a marshmallow trying to act like a crowbar,’ I thought to myself. ‘Who do you think you’re kidding?’” Kay Graham probably spoke for the majority when she threw up her hands at the mere mention of his name.

Even Truman’s amiable cousin Joey Faulk thought that John went out of his way to irritate and embarrass Truman, starting arguments, stalking out of restaurants and slipping away late at night to a popular hangout. “He was always playing some kind of game with Truman and doing mean little things to get him upset,” said Joey. “Apparently he was also under the impression that he never paid for anything when he was around Truman. I went out to dinner alone with him once, and he just kept ordering drinks, and then dinner, and never offered to pay. I was living on just the G.I. bill, but I paid for everything.”

Yet what most alarmed Truman’s friends, then and in the months to come, was John’s apparent attempt to become his Svengali. John went so far, according to Knowles, as to have the telephone moved into his Palm Springs bedroom, ostensibly so that he could screen Truman’s incoming calls. He seemed to regard himself not only as Truman’s business manager, but also as his keeper, and he became furious if Truman refused, as he often did, to accept his instructions. Mixed in with his frustration and anger was an undisguised rage, verging on contempt, toward a man who seemed so incompetent in so many ways, yet who was, in the end, the master of John’s own destiny. “I’ve never seen a situation,” John wrote Alan Schwartz, “where there was such ignorance of basic personal business; lack of common sense; and childish impulsiveness as a compulsion. I feel like a trust officer dealing with the senile and the infantile.”

To make sure that he held the strings—that all of Truman’s business mail and phone calls went through him—he ordered Bayouboys stationery, listing his address and phone number rather than Truman’s, and he wrote a form letter which he sent out, over Truman’s signature, to various of Truman’s friends and associates: “As many of you are aware, communications with me are often difficult, sometimes impossible, to establish or maintain because of the vast amount of travel I enjoy. To facilitate communications I have asked my associate, John O’Shea, to function as my business manager, agent, secretary and advisor. Mr. O’Shea is completely and constantly attuned to my interest in, and availability for, new projects; and knows the current status of present undertakings. He can and will speak with authority in the functional areas described above. Please communicate with us through the phone and address on this letterhead only for prompt response.”

When Kay Graham saw the copy that was sent to
The Washington Post
, she exclaimed to her secretary: “Liz, how ghastly!” So said, in those words or words like them, many of Truman’s friends.

B
ORED
and depressed in Palm Springs, in late March, 1974, Truman gathered Joey Faulk, John Knowles and Saint Subber and, leaving John O’Shea behind, drove over the Mexican border to a health spa—a fat farm—in Tecate. They expected to be pampered, to read, relax and sink into soothing whirlpool baths. Instead, on their very first night they were fed nothing but pureed vegetables and scheduled for early-morning exercise classes. They fled back over the border the next morning, Saint and Knowles not stopping until they had reached New York, Truman and Joey continuing up the coast to San Francisco.

There was no happy reunion when they returned to Palm Springs two weeks later, however, and the tension between Truman and John, which had been accumulating over the months, quickly erupted into angry words. When John said that he wanted to attend a track meet in San Diego, Truman assumed the role of tough boss. “You can’t take my car!” he declared. But when he and Joey went out to dinner that night, John did take his car, calling from San Diego to say that he was in Phoenix—on his way to New York. Truman knew him well enough to know that he was lying, and when John came through the door twenty-four hours later, he had prepared his own unpleasant surprise. “I have an airline ticket for you to New York,” he said coldly as he handed him an envelope with the ticket inside.

After John flew East, Truman stayed only long enough to sell his house, accepting, in his haste to be rid of it, an almost ludicrously low offer of sixty-three thousand dollars. Jack’s premonition had proved altogether accurate: the sunny hideaway in which Truman had planned to finish
Answered Prayers
had instead been the scene of some of the worst hours of his life. For him, Palm Springs had indeed been Thirst’s End, as Jack had called it, the place in which hope had died and despair had been born. Belatedly realizing what had befallen him in that seemingly peaceful spot, Truman must have felt some bitterness, as well as relief, as he packed up his belongings, said goodbye to Myrtle (who was to succumb to cancer two years later) and joined the exodus back to New York.

“For better or worse,” John said, “Truman and I are attached to each other by an invisible umbilical cord for the rest of his existence.” So it was to be, and Truman had no sooner landed at Kennedy Airport than they had reconciled. But the confrontation in Palm Springs was only the first of many, and even at its best, their relationship seemed to provide little real enjoyment to either one of them. After spending a weekend in May with them on Fire Island, Donald Windham concluded that John lacked any of the “mental traits” that would have interested the Truman he had known, that the only link between them seemed, in fact, to be pathological. “[Truman] watched Johnny with an obsessed nervousness, but without pleasure, like a man staring at a mirage,” wrote Donald. “The effort seemed to drain him.” Though Truman allowed John the appearance of power, in most major matters Truman did just what he wanted. “Please be nice to Johnny,” he told Alan Schwartz, carefully adding that if Alan should have any problems with John, he should call him privately: he would set things straight. It did not take long for John to catch on to what was going on behind his back and to realize that he was only a make-believe vice president. He was proud enough to resent it and combative enough to keep fighting for what he considered his rightful position.

John’s major complaint, however—and the cause of most of his arguments with Truman—was Truman’s refusal to break with Jack. It was a source of intense bitterness to him, as it had been to Rick, that he was expected to be constantly on call, whereas Truman, who acknowledged no similar obligation to him, could take off for New Orleans or Mexico with Lee, or bury himself for weeks on end with Jack in Sagaponack. In John’s not unnatural view, such an arrangement was distinctly inequitable, and time and again he demanded that Truman leave Jack. At one point Truman appeared ready to do so; but he eventually found a good excuse to change his mind, as he always did. “He couldn’t separate from Jack,” John reluctantly conceded. “They were too much the same person.”

Once he realized that, John could not even look at him without seeing the shadow of Jack in the background. “I could never have committed myself totally to Truman because I suspected his purported love,” John said. “I could not understand someone who could say, ‘I love you, but I have to go home to Jack.’ Or, ‘I love you, but I have to go to Mexico with Lee.’ Or, ‘I love you, but I’m going to be in California for six weeks, and, no, you can’t come.’ I always had the feeling that I was the tail on the dog, and that when he had used me—when it suited his fancy—he would walk away.”