Capote (71 page)

W
HILE
the drama of his social demise was being played out in New York, Truman was encountering different kinds of problems in California. One, which might have been anticipated, was his role in Neil Simon’s farce
Murder by Death.
Simon had chosen him as the model for his comic villain—a neat turnabout for the author of “La Côte Basque.” All Truman was supposed to do was portray someone much like himself: a weird eccentric who gathers the world’s greatest detectives to solve a murder he has thoughtfully arranged. It seemed like a not insurmountable assignment, and Truman had expected his debut as a movie star to make him the envy of both his friends and his enemies. “Gore Vidal must be dying,” he had gleefully declared. He had looked forward to his weeks in Hollywood as a holiday, a glamorous and well-paid frolic.
¹¹
The real acting was to be done by a cast of sterling professionals: Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Elsa Lanchester, Peter Falk, James Coco and Nancy Walker.

But standing in front of the cameras was not the romp he had imagined; it was hard and often boring work, as the screenwriter of
Beat the Devil
and
The Innocents
should have remembered. Most days he had to leave for the Burbank studio by 6:30 or 7
A.M.
and stay there, either working or on call in his trailer, until late afternoon or evening. At the best of times, such an arduous schedule, coupled with the tension he usually felt before public appearances, would have filled him with dread. But the days that followed publication of “La Côte Basque” were not the best of times. “Making that film knocked everything out of him,” said John. “It was probably the most exhausting thing he ever did psychologically. He used to get up in the morning as if he were going to the gallows, instead of a studio.”

If he had been content to play himself, as the producers had hired him to do, he might have shone like the star he longed to be; there have been a few films in which an amateur of a unique stamp has upstaged his experienced colleagues. But such a passive assignment was not enough for Truman. Since boyhood, he had dreamed of being in the movies; now that he was, he was not going to let his chance go to waste: he wanted to act. “The original intent may have been for me to parody myself, but that’s not how it’s going to work out,” he defiantly informed one interviewer. To another he jokingly added: “How am I as an actor? Let’s just say, ‘What Billie Holiday is to jazz, what Mae West is to tits… what Seconal is to sleeping pills, what King Kong is to penises, Truman Capote is to the great god Thespis!’”

The film premiered in the summer of 1976. That he looked the part of a dotty murderer no one disputed. Weighing far more than he ever had before, with cascading jowls and a stomach that threatened to burst the buttons of his gray vest, he appeared funny and sinister at the same time, like a giant frog preparing to pounce on his prey. Looks aside, he was not very good. His characterization was overwrought, a reflection perhaps of his anxiety, and curiously in-authentic—he did not play a convincing Truman Capote. He was the recipient of many harsh words from the critics, as well as a few kind ones, but Guinness’ critique—“godawful!”—was the most succinct, as well as the most accurate. That was not the only word, however, and Robert Moore, whose unhappy task it had been to direct him, laid the blame for his performance not on Truman, but on those, including Simon, who had picked him. “To put Capote at a table with international stars was too much of a test for any literary figure to withstand,” said Moore. “It’s like saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get [the President of the United States] to play the President of the United States?’ The answer is ‘No.’”

Truman’s second problem, which also might have been anticipated, was his volatile, up-and-down relationship with John. Their journey West had started well enough, with a long and relaxing drive through Canada and the Canadian Rockies, a kind of second honeymoon. That amicable mood had lingered even after Truman began working. Assuming the unaccustomed role of helpmate, John had shared his burden, waking up with him at dawn, driving him to the studio, and staying with him for the rest of the day. Only later, after Truman had become accustomed to the routine—and John had become bored with it—did John arrange for a studio driver to take over his chauffeur’s duties.

That congenial spirit soon began to evaporate, however, as the same old difficulties surfaced in the same old ways. Though Truman drank a little less while he was working on the movie, John drank even more. On Thanksgiving he was feeling so low that he poured his first drink at 9
A.M.
He and Truman celebrated at Joanne Carson’s, and by late afternoon, when the turkey was served, he was so drunk and belligerent that he spat in the face of one of her other guests, then wandered away to pass out on the floor in another room. (Truman had bragged so much about John’s sexual equipment that another member of the party surreptitiously followed him and, taking advantage of his stupor, unzipped his trousers to inspect that anatomical wonder. “It’s pretty good,” he reported to another member of the party. “Truman didn’t exaggerate.”)

Late one night a week or so later, they had a fight in their own house in Beverly Hills, which Joanne had rented and helped decorate for them. John became so violent, smashing every glass object in sight, that Truman was forced to flee. Dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, he walked barefooted to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he telephoned Joanne. When she picked him up a few minutes later, he was shaken and white, and his feet were bloody from the broken glass. He and John soon reconciled, but two weeks later they had another fight and Truman again sought refuge at Joanne’s.

Destructive as it was, alcohol merely fueled their arguments, which centered, as always, on power: who was to exercise control? John was desperate for that privilege, and once again tried to interpose himself between Truman and the rest of the world. “I’ve always [concluded] that the best way to handle Truman’s affairs was to keep him away from any substantive discussions of money, and to prevent him from making stupid or excessive commitments,” he told Alan Schwartz. Not only did he open Truman’s mail, but he also gave the studio guards a list of visitors who were to be denied entry into his trailer. Above the name of one man, with whom Truman had enjoyed a brief fling, John wrote the word “
NO
,” which he underlined three times.

John’s arguments for taking command were familiar; indeed, they had the perfunctory tone that comes from useless repetition. If he shouted louder, if he tried even harder to look important, it was only because he realized that he was being ignored. After two years of fruitless struggle, he knew that Truman would never let him, or anyone else, guide his career. “Truman and I have talked this to death,” he wearily confessed to Alan. “Nothing changes.”

Although he continued to bluster about the prerogatives that should have been his, John’s real demands were now quite modest. In return for his companionship, he asked for only two things from Truman. The first was a place to live. “John was always talking about security,” recalled Joanne. “That was his big cry. He said that he had burned his bridges in New York and that he depended on Truman. ‘If we have our own house, nobody can bother us,’ he said.” The second was help in finding employment. He wanted Truman to whisper a good word in the ear of someone—Truman’s tycoon friend Bob Anderson was the one he had most in mind—who might give him a job. “It’s all very interesting being with you, Truman,” he said, “but you have repeatedly done this number where you take off like a big bird and leave me hanging by my thumbs. What I want to do is establish myself in business, and I can’t do that if I’m flitting around the country with you. So the first thing I need is a place to live. The second thing I need is to get some kind of career going so that if you take off one time and never come back, I’m not going to be bereft.”

The first condition, providing him a place to live, Truman grudgingly agreed to. “I want something dramatic that looks over the ocean down a mountainside,” Truman proclaimed, possibly assuming that no such house was on the market at a price he could afford. But something dramatic was precisely what Joanne found in the hills above Malibu: a small, two-bedroom house with a sweeping view of the sea, much like the one Truman had enjoyed from the Fontana Vecchia in Taormina. Nor could he object that Joanne’s discovery was too expensive; by local standards it was a bargain, his for just under one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Even if he had wished to, Truman could not have said no. Taking possession early in 1976, he immediately redecorated, painting the living room a bright salmon and filling it with comfortable white wicker furniture.

Once having committed himself, he even talked about abandoning Manhattan, where so many had already abandoned him, and he ordered an appraisal of his apartment at the U.N. Plaza. In the future, he said, he would divide his time between two oceans, between his house in Malibu and his cottage on Long Island, between John and Jack. In John’s eyes, it was an ideal arrangement. “Truman didn’t want to spend three hundred and sixty-five days a year with me,” he said. “He didn’t want to spend three hundred and sixty-five days a year with anybody. And at one time he very frankly acknowledged that.”

But to John’s dismay, Truman rejected John’s second condition point-blank; he adamantly refused to help John find work. “He never helped me—he could not do it—because he was such a possessive fanatic that he didn’t want me out of the house,” said John. “He knew that if I had a five-day-a-week job and he suddenly got an inspiration to go to Rio, I couldn’t go with him.” John’s analysis was undoubtedly correct. Truman did not want an independent lover; he wanted one who was subservient, in fact if not in manner. But it was probably also true that he perceived that his only hold on John was financial, and that if John ever did find a job, John would be the one who would fly off like a big bird. That was not a chance Truman was willing to take.

At the end of 1975 Truman finished work on
Murder by Death.
He returned briefly to New York, then in the middle of January began a speaking tour that was to take him to thirty colleges and universities. Almost immediately he recognized his mistake. Although he had given readings in the past, they were usually isolated, separated by many months. Never before had he undertaken such a rigorous schedule, which kept him constantly on the road, like a politician running for office.

John Knowles saw him at the University of Florida, where, to accommodate a large and eager crowd, his hosts had arranged for him to speak outdoors. His reading was a singular success, as was the question period that followed. “Are you a homosexual?” asked one truculent young man. With perfect timing, Truman paused, then brought down shouts of laughter on the young man’s head with a sly question of his own. “Is that a proposition?” he inquired. But when Knowles visited his hotel room afterward, he discovered that once off stage, Truman had retreated into a numbed daze. “With the jet lag and endless motels, he hardly knew where he was. He had a couple of vodkas to revive himself, and he was on the moon. He just dwindled away. His energy was gone; his coherence was gone.”

Some writers thrive on public readings. Others do not. That Truman ever agreed to undertake such a series was yet another sign that he was out of touch, even with his own body and soul. Perhaps he thought, quite erroneously, as his accountant, Arnold Bernstein, could have told him, that he needed the money (fifty thousand dollars, after expenses and agents’ fees) to help pay for the house in Malibu. Perhaps he hoped to draw attention to the next chapter of
Answered Prayers
, which was to appear in the May
Esquire.
Perhaps, after all the screaming over “La Côte Basque,” he merely needed assurance that he was still loved and admired. Whatever he expected, it was insufficient reward for a tour that he soon confessed was “the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. It’s like going from one torture pit into another.”

Adding to his despondency was an unexpected assault from another quarter: Gore Vidal. In a boozy interview he had given some months before, Truman had inadvertently handed Gore the weapon he seemed to have been waiting for. Gore, he had asserted, had once become so inebriated and obnoxious that he had been ejected from a party at the Kennedy White House—literally thrown out, like a drunk at a rowdy bar. “It was the only time he had ever been invited to the White House and he got drunk,” Truman had said. “
Annnnnd
… he insulted Jackie’s mother, whom he had never met before in his
life
! But I mean insulted her. He said something to the effect that he had always hated her. But he’d never even met the woman. And she just went into something like total shock. And Bobby [Kennedy] and Arthur Schlesinger, I believe it was, and one of the guards just picked Gore up and carried him to the door and threw him out into Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Not untypically, Truman had embroidered events. Gore had indeed said or done something to alienate the Kennedys during a White House party in November, 1961. He admitted, in fact, to a sharp exchange of words with Bobby Kennedy, in which, sounding more like New York City taxi drivers than the Attorney General of the United States and a writer famous for his wit, they had snarled, one after the other: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.” But Gore had not been thrown bodily out the door, and Truman’s comments, which were printed in
Playgirl
, were, at the very least, injudicious. Gore intended not only to brand him a liar—“I’m looking forward to getting that little toad!” he announced—but also to wound him financially. To those ends, he filed suit in a New York State court, charging that Truman had libeled him and caused him “great mental anxiety and suffering” and demanding both an apology and one million dollars in damages. The Capote–Vidal feud, which had seemed to amuse the participants as much as it did most of the rest of the world, had suddenly turned extremely nasty.