Capote (72 page)

The depositions provided the only comedy in an otherwise ugly confrontation. When had he last seen Truman? Gore was asked. At a party in the late sixties, Gore replied.

“Q: What occurred on that occasion?

“A: I sat on him.

“Q: What do you mean?

“A: I didn’t have my glasses on and I sat down on what I thought was a stool and it was Capote.

“Q: Where was Capote sitting at the time you sat on him?

“A: On a smaller stool.”

For his part, Truman managed to mangle the title of Gore’s first novel,
Williwaw
;
Willie Wonka
, Truman called it, thereby indicating how little he had thought of it. He also suggested that in bringing suit, Gore was behaving like a child. Although he considered some of Gore’s printed remarks about him to be libelous, he said, he would never lower himself by suing. “I just don’t believe in that. I especially don’t believe in writers or artists suing each other. I think that is very childish, but that is my own point of view.”

Exhausted and suffering from what he termed a “semi-nervous breakdown,” Truman concluded his readings at the end of April, 1976, and returned to his new house in California to recover. But recuperation was impossible in John’s company, and almost immediately they resumed their familiar routine of fights and reconciliations. Truman wanted to stay home. John wanted to go out, and when Truman refused to join his excursions, John went alone. It was as if, in a bizarre reversal of roles, Truman had become Jack, and John had become the Truman of old. “We’re on two different wavelengths,” grumbled Truman. “Johnny’s a very social, gregarious person, and no matter what I once was, I’m not a social person now. He’ll come in in the afternoon and say, ‘We’re having Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw to dinner tonight.’ And I’ll just want to go into the bedroom and hide. I like Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, but I don’t want to see anybody. Or we’ll be invited to a party. If he goes alone, I’ll be anxious because I’ll know that he’ll drink too much. And if I go with him, it will be even worse because there will be fifty people crowding me against the wall. That’s what you get for being the freak celebrity of the seventies.”

In the middle of May, John threw a huge party. He hired caterers and invited dozens of people to their hilltop hideaway. But at that moment a party was the last thing Truman desired, and he said so. “He made no bones about it, which was kind of unpleasant,” John recalled. “It was not his kind of thing, partially because it was what we used to call N.I.H.—Not Invented Here. In other words, if it had been Truman’s idea, everything would have been wonderful. But it was my idea.”

Three weeks after his homecoming, Truman had had enough. On May 23, taking advantage of one of John’s trips to the bars on the Pacific Coast Highway, he packed his bags and left for the airport. Returning later that afternoon, John found a short goodbye note: he was becoming nervous, Truman had said, and he was flying back to New York. In a phone conversation several days later, he added that he had decided to sell the house; John could stay on for several weeks, but then he would have to find a place of his own. That John eventually did. From a house with a view and a heated pool, he moved to a garage without even a toilet. To relieve himself, he either had to make rather primitive use of an adjoining alley or avail himself of the facilities in a nearby restaurant. His worst fears had been realized, and once again he had been left to hang by his thumbs.

Emotionally, Truman did not fare much better. A week after his furtive departure, his car struck an oncoming vehicle, and he was arrested for drunken driving on Long Island. Though no one was injured, the accident was reported across the country, putting his difficulties with alcohol into the public record for the first time. For once he was silent. “Capote Is Mum on Drunk Rap,” said the headline on the front page of the New York
Daily News.
Embarrassed and chagrined, he entered Silver Hill, an expensive drying-out clinic in Connecticut. “I’ve just got to pull myself through the depression I’m in,” he tearfully told a friend the night before he left. His un-doing, he maintained, was not liquor, but John. “My feelings for him are more intense than they were for Danny, and I cannot
not
identify with his problems. At the same time, I can see very clearly why my relationship with him doesn’t work. It’s like having double vision, of being able to see the truth beyond the truth.”

T
HE
Tiny Terror,
Women’s Wear Daily
had christened him after “La Côte Basque,” and Truman, who had always boasted that he could be a dangerous enemy, rather fancied the title. He also fancied the notion that many of his friends, or former friends, were chewing their nails with worry about what he might say in forthcoming segments of
Answered Prayers.
The ability to make people jump was the kind of power he had always relished, and no one could be quite certain that he was joking when he wagged his finger and cautioned: “You’d better be careful, or you’ll be in it!” Capitalizing on his suddenly sinister reputation, in May, 1976,
Esquire
portrayed him as an assassin on the cover of its “Unspoiled Monsters” issue, dressing him all in black and thrusting an ivory-handled stiletto into his hands. “Capote Strikes Again!” declared the headline. “More from
Answered Prayers
: The most talked-about book of the year.”

But “Unspoiled Monsters” was not just more from
Answered Prayers.
It was a great deal more, about twenty-four thousand words; it was almost as long, in fact, as
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
It was also the first chapter, the key to everything that was to follow. Combined with the shorter second chapter, “Kate McCloud,”
¹²
which
Esquire
published in December, 1976, it set the tone of his novel, which is one of black comedy; it introduced his hero and heroine, P. B. Jones and Kate McCloud; and it outlined his basic story line, which seems to be a suspense drama.

“Somewhere in the world,” it begins, “there exists an exceptional philosopher named Florie Rotondo.

“The other day I came across one of her ruminations printed in a magazine devoted to the writings of schoolchildren. It said:
If I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet, Earth, and seek uranium, rubies, and gold. I’d look for Unspoiled Monsters. Then I’d move to the country. Florie Rotondo, age 8.

“Florie, honey, I know just what you mean—even if you don’t: how could you, age 8?

“Because I have
been
to the middle of our planet; at any rate, have suffered the tribulations such a journey might inflict. I have searched for uranium, rubies, gold, and, en route, have observed others in these pursuits. And listen, Florie—I have met Unspoiled Monsters! Spoiled ones, too. But the
un
spoiled variety is the rara avis: white truffles compared to black; bitter wild asparagus as opposed to garden-grown.

“The one thing I haven’t done is move to the country.

“As a matter of fact, I am writing this on Y.M.C.A. stationery in a Manhattan Y.M.C.A., where I have been existing the last month in a viewless second-floor cell. I’d prefer the sixth floor—so if I decided to climb out the window, it would make a vital difference. Perhaps I’ll change rooms. Ascend. Probably not. I’m a coward. But not cowardly enough to take the plunge.

“My name is P. B. Jones, and I’m of two minds—whether to tell you something about myself right now, or wait and weave the information into the text of the tale. I could just as well tell you nothing, or very little, for I consider myself a reporter in this matter, not a participant, at least not an important one. But maybe it’s easier to start with me.”

And so he does: the narrator and hero of
Answered Prayers
is an orphan who was abandoned in a St. Louis movie theater when he was a baby and who was raised thereafter by nuns. Their goodness did not rub off, however, and P.B. is an opportunist, a heel, a rat, someone who sells anything, including himself, to get what he wants. As a boy, he says, he was “a kind of Hershey Bar whore—there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for a nickel’s worth of chocolate.” At fifteen, he ran away and was picked up by a masseur of a Miami Beach hotel, who took him home and taught him his trade; in matters of sex, P.B. needed no lessons.

After that, much of P.B.’s biography is borrowed from his creator. Ambitious to be a writer, he heads North, where he sets out to conquer the New York literary world. He is taken up by a magazine editor, who is a fictional duplicate of George Davis, and he becomes the lover of Alice Lee Langman, “America’s first lady of letters”—Katherine Anne Porter. (In the latter instance, P.B. is modeled on Truman’s onetime friend Bill Goyen, who used Porter to boost his mediocre talents much as P.B. uses Miss Langman.) P.B. then travels to Paris, where he meets Denham Fouts, Natalie Barney and Colette; Colette gives him the same paperweight, a white rose, she gave Truman in 1948. Clearly, it is a game with mirrors Truman is playing. P.B. is even working on a novel titled
Answered Prayers
, which he is writing with Truman’s favorite Blackwing pencils.

But P.B., who for a time earns his living as a male prostitute, is not Truman’s self-portrait. He is rather his errant and amoral twin, a nightmare version of the man Truman thought he might have become, in spirit if not in fact. “P.B. isn’t me, but on the other hand he isn’t
not
me,” he said. “His background is totally different from mine, but I can identify with it psychologically. I’m not P.B., but I know him very well.”

He was also well acquainted with Kate McCloud, who might have become the most remarkable of his heroines. If Holly Golightly is a reincarnation of the Little Miss Bobbit of “Children on Their Birthdays,” then Kate is a reincarnation of Holly. But she is a beautiful, rutilant Holly, with hair the pale red of a winter sunset and eyes as green as emeralds; an older Holly, twenty-seven when P.B. meets her; and a more sophisticated Holly, the embodiment—indeed, the apotheosis—of the high style Truman revered. Of all his swans, fictional and real, Kate was the closest to his heart. As P.B. exclaims: “Kate! McCloud! My love, my anguish, my Götterdömmerung, my very own
Death in Venice
: inevitable, perilous as the asp at Cleopatra’s breast.”

His heroine underwent several transmogrifications before reaching that glorified, if somewhat forbidding form. After rejecting Ann Woodward as his model, Truman chose Pamela Churchill, whose romances, particularly a long fling with Gianni Agnelli, had provided copy for two decades of gossip columnists: the “famous international siren,” Cholly Knickerbocker had titled her in the fifties. “We spent a lot of time on yachts together,” said Truman. “Anybody becomes a confidant on a yacht cruise, and I think I’ve lived through every screw she ever had in her life. Believe me, that’s an Arabian Nights tale of a thousand and twelve! She’s interesting because she has fantastic taste and she knows everything about everything, but she has absolutely no intellectual capacities at all. She’s some sort of marvelous primitive. I don’t think she’s ever read a book, or even a newspaper, except for the gossip column. I guess it’s because she comes from one of the oldest families in England, the Digbys, and they figured they didn’t have to learn to read or write.

“Pamela’s a geisha girl who made every man happy. They just didn’t want to marry her. Gianni really did want to, and she even converted to the Catholic faith and learned to speak perfect Italian—everything! But his family were just all going to throw themselves into some Venetian canal and drown if he married her. So at the last minute he married little Marella. Pamela was devastated, but I must say he gave her a very, very handsome settlement, including one of the most beautiful apartments in Paris I’ve ever seen.”

Rose Grantwell was the name of Truman’s Pamela-inspired siren, and about her he wrote in one of his early notebooks: “There are certain women, and a few men too, who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to
be
rich. By and large, these persons are artists of an odd variety; money, in astronomical amounts, is their instrument—they require it as a violinist requires a violin, a painter, paint. Without it, they are creatively impotent; with it, they fuse material elements—from food to fine motors—into fantasies that are both visible and tactile. In other words, they know how to spend dough; but in a manner that, while morally arguable, is at least aesthetically valid. The Duchess of Windsor is such a person; and so, to cite other examples from so-called ‘real’ life, are Mrs. Harrison Williams, Mrs. Paul Mellon, Mrs. Loel Guinness.”

By the seventies, the image of Pamela had been largely erased. Truman now borrowed some biographical details for his new heroine from Cappy Badrutt, a charming American gold digger of the sixties and seventies who numbered among her husbands a scion of the Badrutt family that owned the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. But his chief model for Kate McCloud was the aforementioned Mrs. Harrison Williams. Born shortly before the turn of the century, “Marvelous Mona,” as the newspapers had called her, had been a swan of the generation that preceded Babe, Marella and Gloria Guinness. With her perfect posture and vast, exquisitely shaped blue eyes—she was, to Cecil’s expert eye, “fascinatingly beautiful, like a rock crystal goddess”—she could stand proudly beside any of them. In the grandeur of her artistic design, her creation being her own incomparable self, she outshone them all.

She came from a modest but genteel Kentucky family, and when she was in her teens, her father was hired to run a Lexington horse farm for Harry Schlesinger, a rich man from Milwaukee. She had not given a second glance to the local swains, but when her father’s boss proposed, she said yes immediately. She was too big for Milwaukee as well, and her marriage lasted only long enough to provide her with two hundred thousand dollars, a wealth of social connections, and a son, whom she left with his father after their divorce. She married and divorced again, and then, in 1926, landed the Croesus for whom she had been searching: Harrison Williams, a utilities magnate from Elyria, Ohio, whose fortune was estimated at close to seven hundred million dollars, the equivalent of several billion in today’s punier currency.