Capote (74 page)

He planned to pattern that ending after the final paragraph of Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria, in which Strachey imagines the dying queen unconsciously calling up visions from her past: a wood full of primroses, her long-dead husband standing before her in his blue-and-silver uniform, rooks cawing a raucous lullaby in the elm trees at Windsor. “Strachey’s ending is the most beautiful I’ve ever read,” explained Truman, “and I said that I would use it someday. Mine is just as good. It’s like leaves falling gently from a tree. I could probably do without it, but I feel that I have to end the book with peace, to bring everything to rest, as I did with
In Cold Blood.
”

Those were his plans, and he talked as though the projected chapters were inscribed so vividly in his mind that putting them on paper was only a minor matter, like dusting off a car as it rolls off the assembly line. “I have it written in my head to such a degree that I could finish it tonight,” he impatiently exclaimed after the appearance of “Kate McCloud.” In June, 1977, he said that he had just completed “A Severe Insult to the Brain.” Nearly a year after that he confided that he was still polishing it. “I think there’s something wrong with a paragraph and go over it again and again, word by word. But even the most sensitive reader wouldn’t be able to tell that there’s anything wrong. I have an obsession, like those people who are always washing their hands or cleaning their houses.” But neither “A Severe Insult” nor any other unpublished chapter was found among his papers after his death. Had he destroyed, lost, or hidden them? Or had he never written them at all?

The answer is unclear, but if he did write more than was printed in
Esquire
, he almost certainly did not write much more. Indeed, his own contradictory comments confirmed that he had lost his way. He could not even make up his mind whether he was writing a long or a short book. Each year he gave a wildly different estimate of its length: eight hundred pages, then six hundred, then three hundred; later still, two volumes of four hundred pages each. “I see it much more clearly now,” he said in 1979, in a tired and unpersuasive voice. “I didn’t know it, but it was a little fuzzy about the edges before.”

He had given up on
Answered Prayers
, but he was too proud to admit it, even to himself. One summer afternoon in 1983, over drinks in Bridgehampton, he came close to confessing his failure. “Writing this book is like climbing up to the top of a very high diving platform and seeing this little, tiny, postage-stamp-size pool below. To climb back down the ladder would be suicide. The only thing to do is to dive in with style.”

T
HEY
both knew that their relationship had no future, yet Truman and John could not stay apart for long. After Truman fled the Malibu house at the end of May, 1976, the date of their next rendezvous could have been predicted almost as precisely as the first day of autumn, and in late September Truman anxiously headed West again, right on schedule. This time his destination was not California, but New Mexico. John had suggested that their hopes of starting afresh would have a better chance if they met in a quiet spot, far away from Truman’s celebrated friends, and Truman had chosen Santa Fe, where his old friend Mary Louise Aswell had found peace and contentment—her own Azurest.

They rented a house outside of town, Mary Louise gave them a welcoming party, and they attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, vowing their continuing sobriety alongside a grizzled old miner and three Indians. But John, who had been as eager for a reconciliation as Truman, had come under false pretenses. During the months they had been apart, he had found not only a new job, but also a new love, Joanne Biel, a female graduate student in philosophy at the University of Southern California. Every chance he saw, he sneaked away to cuddle with her on the telephone. It did not take long for Truman to realize that something was wrong, and finally, a week or so into their stay, John told him what was going on.

“Truman, I’m in love with this girl in California and it just isn’t working for us,” he said.

“But I came here in the expectation that we were going to make a life together,” replied Truman.

“Truman, we’ve done that dance so many times we’ve worn it out.”

“Yes, but now I’m going to be sober and everything is going to be straight.”

“I have a feeling that once you do become sober, Truman, you won’t even call me.” Within hours they had again parted, Truman flying home to New York, John driving back to Los Angeles.

It was one thing for Truman to reject John, as he had done three times already; it was another thing for John to reject Truman. When he had recovered from his shock, Truman was swept up by the same cyclone of anger and resentment that had engulfed him after Danny had left him and after John had gone swimming with his playmate in Key West. He wanted revenge, but as he had already deprived John of his family, his house, his job—even his dreams—what more could he do to him? Rick Brown, who was once again tending bar at the Club 45, had the answer: a muscular friend who, for a fee of ten thousand dollars, promised to break John’s arms, legs, or any other bones Truman wanted fractured.

Truman was enthusiastic, but Rick soon had second thoughts. “If you do this, it’s going to be like a disease,” he warned. “If you do it once, you’re going to do it again. Why don’t you just save the money and drop the whole thing? Say: ‘All right, I got beat and that’s it.’ We’ve all been beaten. It happens to everyone. So forget about it! Go out and find yourself another man-friend! Write this one off to experience.” Fortunately for John, the bone-crusher became convinced that Truman was too unstable to keep their arrangement secret, and he backed out before Truman could make up his mind. If he could not have the satisfaction of hearing John’s bones cracking, however, Truman at least wanted to hear howls of anger, and after several days of nagging, he finally persuaded Rick himself to go to California. “I want you to find this guy and punch him in the nose, break his glasses, destroy his car—whatever” were his instructions as he sent Rick off.

“I found the building,” Rick soon reported.

“Oh, thank God!” said Truman, who had been waiting nervously by the telephone.

“And I know which is his window.”

“Ohhhh,” sighed Truman, who seemed to regard that as a discovery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

But Rick would not punch John in the nose or break his glasses, and after three days he returned to Manhattan. If Truman really wanted him to do John some serious damage, Rick said, he would have to give something in return: his help and name as the coauthor of a horror movie Rick had been working on. “Fine, fine,” said Truman, and after recruiting a giant-sized Navy buddy, Rick headed west again. “We’re going to find a guy and beat him up with a baseball bat,” he told his friend. But even with that intimidating hulk at his side, Rick’s heart was not in the maiming business, and he and his companion were no more of a threat to John than Joanne Carson and Myrtle Bennett had been to Danny. Following Truman’s directions, they did nothing more destructive than pour sugar into the gas tank of his car, then, like those earlier saboteurs, beat a quick retreat. It was not much of a revenge, but for the moment it seemed enough to satisfy Truman.

It was not enough, however, to stop him from sinking into perhaps the darkest depression he had ever known. “Johnny was the great love affair of my life,” he lamented. “I keep saying he’s out of my system, but he’s not. I know the best thing would be for me to forget him. But I can’t do that.” Forgetting the lessons of the Connecticut clinic and the pledge he had made at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Santa Fe, he drank more than ever. A fall during one drunken spell resulted in a bloody head and cracked teeth, and Rick was pressed into service once again to drive him to Miami for several weeks of rest and repairs.

Jack was usually not around on such occasions, escaping, as much as he could, to Sagaponack or Verbier. It would be unfair to blame him—living with an alcoholic requires more-than-human patience—and it is possible that his absence may have helped more than it hurt. When Jack was around, he tended to nag and lecture and hector, which only added to Truman’s guilt and anxiety; and Jack sneered at clinics and Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of relying on such aids, he maintained, alcoholics would do better to study the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola. Yet if it would be unfair to blame him, it would be fair to say that Jack did not offer Truman much emotional support during his alcoholic years, most often leaving it to others, Rick among them, to put him into hospitals and to look after him when he came out.

On his return from Florida in November, Truman sought the aid of two psychoanalysts, one male, one female. But neither did much good. Ten days before Christmas, 1976, he invited a friend to lunch at Quo Vadis. He wanted to talk, and through lunch, drinks and dinner, he kept his guest a virtual prisoner at their prized banquette near the entrance; then, as the restaurant emptied for the night, he dragged him to a bar across from the U.N. Plaza for still more drinks. For twelve hours Truman’s monologue continued, as he spoke of his apparently unquenchable despair and explained why, at the age of fifty-two, he was contemplating suicide.

“Every morning I wake up and in about two minutes I’m weeping,” he said. “I just cry and cry. And every night the same thing happens. I take a pill, go to bed and start to write or reread something I’ve written, and suddenly I start to cry. There’s just so much pain somebody can endure. How can I carry it around all the time? The pain is not about any one thing: it’s about a lot of things. I’m
so
unhappy. I just have to come to terms with something. There is something wrong. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t think any of these jerky analysts know either.

“Because of my childhood, because I always had the sense of being abandoned, certain things have fantastic effects on me, beyond what someone else might feel. That’s why people who I know love me, like Slim Keith, like Babe, like Marella Agnelli, are being stupid. They have a total misunderstanding of what it is I’m doing with
Answered Prayers
and why I’m doing it, and they’re being very cruel. They don’t know that what they’re doing is cruel because they don’t know that I spent three or four years of my childhood locked up in hotel rooms. I can name the people on one hand who really care about me and want me to see my way through my troubles. And though they’re friends, even they have some vested interest in me.

“I can go three or four months without having a drink. And then suddenly I’m walking down the street and I feel that I’m going to die, that I can’t put one foot in front of the other unless I have a drink. So I step into a bar. Someone who’s not an alcoholic couldn’t understand. But suddenly I feel so tired. I’ve had this problem with alcoholism for about fifteen years. I’ve gone into hospitals, I’ve tried Antabuse, I’ve done everything. But nothing seems to work. I keep thinking things will be right when I finish the book, when I dump Johnny O’Shea, or when I look beautiful. Well, the book is okay now—I can see the end. I finished with Johnny, and I dropped forty pounds. And things are
not
all right. I don’t know what to do next.

“I’ve asked myself a thousand times: why did this happen to me? what did I do wrong? And I think the reason is that I was famous too young. I pushed too hard too soon. I wish somebody would write what it’s really like to be a celebrity. People come up and ask me for autographs in airports, and I give them ‘cause otherwise I think they’ll hit me over the head. On Long Island they drove right into the driveway last summer—the gate didn’t stop them—and some car broke Maggie’s jaw and ripped her stomach open. Celebrity! All it means is that you can cash a small check in a small town. Famous people sometimes become like turtles turned over on their backs. Everybody is picking at the turtle—the media, would-be lovers, everybody—and he can’t defend himself. It takes an enormous effort for him to turn over.

“I feel that I should make this great effort with Dr. Kleinschmidt [his male analyst]. But I don’t have a lot of confidence in analysis. Kleinschmidt is so serious. I sometimes sit there for ten minutes and I don’t say a word to him and he doesn’t say a word to me. He did say one thing to me and that was: ‘I don’t think that this guy O’Shea is responsible for your problems. You’re using him as a red herring because you don’t want to finish your book.’ But I had known that all along. I don’t want to finish because finishing is like dying. I would have to start my life over again. He also said, ‘I think that you are going to kill yourself. It’s the number one thing on your mind.’ I never heard of an analyst saying that to a person, but the awful part about it was that it was true! I hadn’t realized how often I had talked to him about pistols. I have a .38-caliber pistol in a drawer, and it’s fully loaded. I also got prescriptions for Tuinal from him and from four or five other doctors, and I’ve saved them. I now have enough Tuinals to kill fifteen people!”

So it continued, his catalogue of despair, through that December afternoon and night. Finally, around midnight, Jack, who had been searching the First Avenue bars, burst in to escort him home. “It’s time to go, Truman,” he commanded, so impatient that he prevented him from signing an autograph for a waiting prostitute. Insulted, she seemed prepared to give battle; Jack took no notice. “Come on!” he barked. “
Tout de suite! Tout de suite
!” Truman meekly obeyed, looking like a guilty boy who had been discovered in some forbidden pleasure. A week or so later he spent a few days in the detoxification unit of Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital. But, as he had wearily observed, nothing worked, and almost immediately—on New Year’s Eve, in fact—he suffered an alcoholic blackout and disappeared on his way home from a party. When he returned to his apartment the next day, he was unable to say where he had been or what he had done.

At the end of January, 1977, he followed Jack to Switzerland and entered another clinic, where Jack visited him twice a day. In a letter to a friend, Jack contrasted the melancholy mood of those days to that of their first night in Verbier: “No! It was not sixteen yrs ago, but six hundred yrs ago. Indeed, it wasn’t at all. It was another world, another life, and we were all brave and warriors in it, and we were assuredly going to live forever—forever young!”