Capote (69 page)

A
nswered Prayers
was pursuing him “like a crazy wind,” Truman had told Newton in 1958, and for the better part of two decades chase him it had, bawling in his ears like a sirocco. But for a moment at least, the publication of part of it, “Mojave,” had stilled that persecuting wind. Calling him “a modern master,”
Esquire
had given his story star treatment—the entire cover of its June, 1975, issue—and from those who read it he heard nothing but hosannas. Tennessee Williams, who was not usually an admirer, thought that it even demonstrated a touch of genius. “I’ve never read anything by him, except possibly ‘Miriam,’ that was comparable,” said Tennessee.

Such an enthusiastic reception erased all Truman’s worries and doubts, reducing his writer’s block to a small and contemptible pile of dust. At the age of fifty he still had what it took; neither alcohol and pills nor a series of disruptive love affairs had damaged the faculty he prized most: his magician’s power over words. Perhaps, he seemed to say to himself,
Answered Prayers
would be the masterpiece he had claimed; perhaps he would be the American Proust after all. Before “Mojave” came out, he had jealously guarded his book’s contents; now he could scarcely wait for everyone to applaud his achievement. To the astonishment of the editors of
Esquire
, he promised even more chapters. “We stood back on our heels in amazement that we were able to get from Truman Capote what other people hadn’t been able to get in such a very long time,” said Gordon Lish, the magazine’s fiction editor. “Each time he said yes, that he would go one segment further, we were beside ourselves with delight.”

If logic had prevailed, the book’s first chapter, “Unspoiled Monsters,” would have preceded “Mojave,” which was the second chapter. Just as many had suspected, however, he had not written as much of
Answered Prayers
as he had maintained; most of it was still in his head. “Unspoiled Monsters” was only half done, and as he resumed his affair with John and prepared to leave for Hollywood, he realized that he would not have time to finish it before the end of 1975. Rushing to give
Esquire
something new, he again disregarded chronology, plucking from his notebooks what was probably the only other finished chapter, the fifth of a projected eight. “It seemed to be complete in and of itself,” he explained. “So without really thinking about it, I sent it on.”

That fifth chapter borrowed its title, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” from Henri Soulé’s renowned restaurant on East Fifty-fifth Street, a popular gathering spot for the swans and one of the few Manhattan restaurants that possessed what Truman regarded as “established chic.” The action takes place on an afternoon in 1965 when P. B. Jones encounters his friend Lady Ina Coolbirth on the street nearby, and Lady Coolbirth, who has been stood up by her lunch date, the Duchess of Windsor, drags him along to fill the Duchess’ empty seat at one of Monsieur Soulé’s choice front tables.

Despite her title, Lady Coolbirth is an American, a “big breezy peppy broad” in her forties, who grew up on a ranch in the West and whose latest husband is a rich English knight. In looks, manners and speech, she resembles another big breezy peppy broad, who in 1965 was also in her forties, who also grew up on a ranch in the West, and whose latest husband was also a rich English knight. She is a photograph, in short, of Truman’s old friend Slim Keith. On this afternoon in 1965 the fictional Lady Coolbirth has a lot she wants to talk about, and over many glasses of Roederer Cristal champagne, talk she does. Using her voice as his own, Truman is able to stuff his narrative, like an almost infinitely expandable Louis Vuitton bag, with many of the secrets he had become privy to during his years of hobnobbing with the rich.

As Lady Coolbirth’s knowing eyes pass over the other patrons—a singular assembly that includes Babe and her sister Betsey Whitney; Lee and
her
sister, Jacqueline Kennedy; and Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Matthau—she becomes Truman’s mouthpiece. “The truth of the matter is that Lady Ina Coolbirth is me!” he later insisted. “I’m the person who gathered all that information, and her conversation is precisely the kind I might have had with somebody.” Lee, for instance, receives the usual valentine. “If I were a man, I’d fall for Lee myself,” says Lady Coolbirth. “She’s marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine.” Older sister Jackie is given the usual needle. “Very photogenic, of course,” Lady Coolbirth reluctantly admits, “but the effect is a little… unrefined, exaggerated.” But most of Lady Coolbirth’s monologue is devoted to two long and scandalous stories: a barely disguised account of the Woodward killing and a tale of a philandering tycoon’s comic comeuppance.

The Woodward killing had intrigued the social world since 1955, when Ann Woodward had unloaded a double-barreled Churchill shotgun into the smooth and handsome face of her husband Bill. A sportsman, whose racing colors, red and white, had been worn by the great thoroughbred Nashua, Bill had been a popular figure in New York society; on the day of his funeral, his clubs had lowered their flags to half-mast, and servants all over Manhattan’s East Side had demanded time off to pay their respects. A Long Island grand jury had exonerated trigger-happy Ann, who asserted that she had mistaken him for a prowler; but most of Truman’s friends, who had heard about her fits of insane rage, believed otherwise. When she pulled the trigger, Bill had just emerged from the shower. How many burglars, they asked themselves, make their rounds in the nude?

When Truman began making notes for
Answered Prayers
in 1958, he apparently had planned to make Ann his central character; in a list of eight names he jotted down in his journal, hers was the only one he had underlined. By 1975 the Woodward affair was largely forgotten, and he had a different heroine. Ann Woodward—Ann Hopkins, he calls her, not even bothering to change her first name—has been reduced to a bit player whose entrance into La Côte Basque induces Lady Coolbirth to lay out the facts of that twenty-year-old case, or the facts as Truman and most of his friends understood them.

His Ann is a West Virginia hillbilly who becomes a Manhattan call girl, then a gangster’s moll, and finally, through luck and wile, the wife of one of society’s golden boys—Bill Woodward right down to his shirt size. Her career is a smooth glissando until her husband, who is tired of her flamboyant adulteries, learns that she has never dissolved a teenage marriage; in the eyes of the law, she is not his wife at all. Realizing that he is about to send her packing, Ann bangs away with her shotgun. She gets away with it, too, as old Mrs. Hopkins, willing to do anything to avoid ugly publicity, buys off the police and pretends, as Bill’s mother, Elsie Woodward, did, that her son has been the victim of a cruel accident. (“My son’s death was an unfortunate accident,” Elsie had actually insisted. “I have never thought otherwise.”) Ending her macabre little history, Lady Coolbirth says that now the old lady never gives a dinner party without inviting her daughter-in-law, the assassin. “The one thing I wonder,” adds Lady Coolbirth, “is what everyone wonders—when they’re alone, just the two of them, what do they talk about?”

The second of Lady Coolbirth’s cautionary tales is prompted by the sight of the wife of a former New York governor, who is also partaking of Monsieur Soulé’s expensive hospitality. One night at a dinner party, says Lady Coolbirth, Sidney Dillon—“conglomateur, adviser to Presidents”—found himself sitting next to the lady. He had always hankered after her, and since both their spouses were away, he invited her back to his pied-à-terre in the Pierre hotel, where, without any difficulty at all, he lured her into bed. It proved to be a disappointing conquest: she had neglected to warn him that it was the wrong time of the month, and she was menstruating—nearly hemorrhaging, in Truman’s grossly exaggerated account. When she left, the sheets were covered with bloodstains “the size of Brazil.”

Expecting his wife to return early the next morning, before the hotel maid came to make up the bed, Dillon struggled frantically to expunge the evidence of his infidelity, scrubbing those crimson sheets in the bathtub with the only soap at hand, a bar of Guerlain’s Fleurs des Alpes. “There he was,” related Lady Coolbirth, “the powerful Mr. Dillon, down on his knees and flogging away like a Spanish peasant at the side of a stream.” The sheets finally came clean, and after baking them in the apartment’s tiny oven, he made up the bed and crawled under the covers for a warm but somewhat soggy sleep. He was so exhausted that he did not hear his wife come and go, leaving an affectionate message on the bureau: “Darling, you were sleeping so soundly and sweetly that I just tiptoed in and changed and have gone on to Greenwich. Hurry home.”

Of all Truman’s writing, “La Côte Basque” is probably the one piece that can be called a tour de force: he has transformed a table in a Manhattan restaurant into a stage on which he has placed his own jet-set Vanity Fair. One by one, he shines a spotlight on his glittering cast, which includes, besides his fictional characters, the very real Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill. There is no plot—the only unifying element is a tone of profound disenchantment—and he has pulled off one of the most difficult tricks in fiction, which is the fashioning of a seamless narrative out of disparate characters and unrelated deeds. “La Côte Basque” is not great art, but it is superb craftsmanship, storytelling at its most skillful.

But Truman had more than literature in mind when he wrote “La Côte Basque.” He also used it to get back at some of his rich friends who, for one reason or another, had offended him over the years. Wrapped inside it is a hit list. Ann Woodward is on that list, of course. Besides being fascinated by her rather compelling biography, he remembered a much-talked-about meeting in St. Moritz in which she had called him a “fag,” and he, in return, had nicknamed her “Bang-Bang.” Also on his roster are Princess Margaret (“I was about to doze off, she’s such a drone,” says Lady Coolbirth, who had the misfortune to be stuck with her at a party); J. D. Salinger, who was one of Oona Chaplin’s early beaux (“It seemed to me he must be a boy who cries very easily,” Carol Matthau thought after reading some of his letters); Gloria Vanderbilt, who is made to appear so vacuous and self-absorbed that she cannot even recognize her first husband when he stops by her table to say hello (“Oh, darling. Let’s not brood,” says Carol consolingly. “After all, you haven’t seen him in almost twenty years”); and Josh and Nedda Logan, whom Truman had not forgiven for sabotaging his
New Yorker
article on the filming of
Sayonara
(How was the Logans’ party? Carol asks Gloria. “Marvelous,” replies Gloria. “If you’ve never been to a party before”). All those names might have been anticipated. But one is a startling surprise, and that is Truman’s old friend Bill Paley, who is his model for Sidney Dillon, the millionaire turned laundry man.

In an earlier version, Dillon had been based on W. Averell Harriman; the woman he had been in bed with was his mistress, not someone he had lured home for a night; and the bloodstain she had left behind had been a mere spot, not a splotch the size of Brazil. By the time it appeared in “La Côte Basque,” the episode had been radically altered. Dillon was no longer, like Harriman, a WASP patrician; he was now a rich and attractive Jew who yearned to be a WASP patrician. He wanted to go to bed with the former governor’s wife not because she was appealing—in fact she “looked as if she wore tweed brassieres and played a lot of golf”—but because she was a symbol of what he most desired. “It was simply that for Dill she was the living incorporation of everything denied him, forbidden to him as a Jew, no matter how beguiling and rich he might be,” says Lady Coolbirth, “the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White’s—all those places he would never sit down to a table of backgammon, all those golf courses where he would never sink a putt….” Conversely, the reason she had agreed to go to bed with him was so that she could humiliate him with those bloody sheets; it was her way of putting him in his place. “She had mocked him,” concludes Lady Coolbirth, “punished him for his Jewish presumption.”

Few readers could have guessed that Dillon was supposed to represent Bill Paley. He did not look or act like Bill, and there were no obvious hints, as there usually are in
romans à clef.
But to some of those who knew Truman and the Paleys well, it was clear that Bill was his target. The first clue was his description of Dillon’s deceived wife, Cleo—“the most beautiful creature alive,” in Lady Coolbirth’s reverential words. Truman employed such extravagant language to describe only one mortal, Babe Paley; even Lee was not accorded such an encomium. The second clue was his emphasis on Dillon’s hungering for WASP gentility; Truman was convinced that Bill Paley shared that appetite as well. In any event, he thought that by means of such cryptic signals he was doing to Bill what the former governor’s wife had done to Dillon: putting him in his place. Through words, he liked to think that he was hitting perhaps the only vulnerable spot possessed by a man of such monarchical self-confidence: his sensitivity about being a Jew.

“Truman told me that the point of the bloody-sheets story was that Bill Paley was a Jew from the Midwest who was doing a number on a New York WASP,” recalled John, who proofread “La Côte Basque” before it was sent off to
Esquire.
Offended by the anecdote—“That’s gossip! that’s bullshit!” he exclaimed—John tried to shame him into removing it. He pointed out that they had been the Paleys’ guests at Kiluna Farm a few weeks before, that over the years the Paleys had laden him with gifts, and finally, that he might hurt Babe, who, as they had had sad occasion to observe, was gravely ill with lung cancer. Take the Dillon section out, John urged him; but Truman could not be persuaded. “It was a vicious story,” said John, “and I’ve never understood, and will never understand, why he put it in. There’s something there that defies analysis.”

Only someone who had observed that curious trio—Babe, Bill and Truman—in earlier times could have fathomed Truman’s tangled reasoning. He liked and admired Bill; some even speculated that he had a crush on Bill as well as Babe. But he was also jealous of him, as he would have been jealous of anyone married to Babe. Yet at the same time, he resented Bill’s inexplicable failure to appreciate that glorious woman; he was infuriated by what he saw as Bill’s put-downs of her, his insufferable condescensions. Divine Babe! Revered by Truman and so many others, but mocked and belittled by her own husband! Contemplating the unfairness of it all was more than Truman could bear. She was the one person in the world he loved without qualm or reservation, and he alone realized how unhappy she was. Now that she was dying—for that was the case—he was avenging her in the one way he knew how: by holding up to ridicule the man who had caused her so much hurt.