Authors: Gerald Clarke
His energies partly revived by his weeks in Switzerland, on February 21 Truman returned to Manhattan and the question that still dominated his thoughts: how could he get back at John? The answer soon presented itself. Since he had already separated John from his family, why not go one step further and take John’s place as head of the O’Shea household? He would become like a husband to Peg and like a father to the youngest children, Chris and Kerry. (Brian and Kathy, the two oldest, had already left home.) It may well be that he never consciously spelled out such a devious plot; and it is true that he was also motivated by affection and a sense of responsibility to the O’Sheas. Whatever the reasons for his actions, the result was the same. He was the man to whom John’s wife and children turned thenceforth when they wanted advice or help; John himself they dismissed with a derisive nickname—Mr. Wonderful. Could Truman have had any sweeter revenge?
He put Peg on the Bayouboys payroll again, at a salary of seven hundred and fifty dollars a month, and he began acting like a father to her children. When Chris, who was thirteen, was having problems in school, for instance, he invited him to La Côte Basque for a stern man-to-man talk. Worried that Chris was not being taught proper standards, he also sent him to an expensive summer camp in Colorado, where he bunked with the sons of millionaires. “It will let him know that there’s a world outside of that awful suburb,” Truman said. He cherished Chris’s letter of thanks, and cherished it even more when he mentioned it to John, whom he could hear almost sniffling with jealousy over the telephone. Truman was enjoying the role of daddy.
But most of his attention was focused on Kerry, who, at sixteen, was blossoming into an attractive woman, tall and slim, with dark hair and lovely blue eyes—more clay for Pygmalion. “I’ve always wanted to be able to mold somebody like this, but the right person never came along,” he said, thrilled by his unexpected good fortune. “Kerry is just right, so pretty, so natural, so intelligent.”
Once again he concentrated on creating the woman of his dreams, and he planned Kerry’s career as carefully as he had planned his own: first he would make her a model, then a movie star. But Kerry O’Shea was not the name for the goddess he was creating, and waving his hand as if he were Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner, he gave her a new one. Kate Harrington he called her, borrowing the first name from Katharine Hepburn and the last one from Peg—Harrington had been her maiden name. Kerry liked her new name’s elegant sound, and she was known as Kate Harrington from then on. Truman had not only assumed John’s place; he had also erased John’s name from his favorite child: he might just as well have rechristened her Kate Capote.
The first part of Truman’s scheme to make Kate a star had met with some success. He had persuaded Dick Avedon to photograph her and one of Manhattan’s top modeling agencies to represent her. At the end of April he began the second phase of his campaign and took the new Kate Harrington to California. Though he kept their presence a secret from John, he trumpeted it to everyone else. In his
Hollywood Reporter
column, George Christy reported that at one fancy gathering “there was news of Truman Capote arriving in town, with 17-year-old [sic] Kate Harrington who he believes will be a smash in films (Kate’s the daughter of Truman’s great friend, John O’Shea).” Helping him out, Carol Matthau gave a party at which he showed Kate off to thirty or so of his California friends, a group that included Johnny Carson, Robert Wagner, Cybill Shepherd and Irving and Mary Lazar. It appeared as if all of Hollywood had turned out to see her, and Truman could not restrain himself from bragging: “Kate does have a quality, but if it wasn’t for me getting all these people together and pushing her, she would be just another girl out of a doughnut factory.”
He spoke too soon. As his disasters with Lee should have taught him, even he, huff and puff as he might, could not make a Hollywood star. In fact, he could not induce Sue Mengers, the agent who handled some of the biggest—Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal and Mick Jagger—to take Kate on as a client; Mengers relented only enough to invite the two of them to a celebrity-packed dinner at her house in Bel Air. Truman had neither the will nor the strength to do much more, and he spent much of his stay in his bed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Propped up on several pillows and with a bottle of vodka by his side, he said: “I’m a compulsive, and compulsives have enormous amounts of energy for several days at a time. Then they collapse. I’m also an alcoholic. I’ve tried to say I’m not, but I am, I am—I am because I’m so unhappy. I’m going insane and nobody can bear to watch somebody going insane. Jack can’t. Even I can’t.”
Even during their worst days, Truman and John had remained in touch: they were compelled to talk to each other, if only to trade insults. At the end of May, just three weeks after his return from California, Truman received a five-page letter in which a dispirited John described the downturn in his fortunes since Santa Fe. Without a job again, he was living on unemployment benefits, in a shabby apartment filled with shabby furniture; as a fitting emblem of his misery, he noted that his color television set displayed only a black-and-white picture. His message was crude but clear: he was broke and needed money.
Turning those pages over and over, Truman nonetheless searched for other meanings; “he was talking about that letter last night as if it were something from Saint Paul,” grumbled Jack. At the beginning of July, apparently having convinced himself that those mercenary words constituted a love letter, he traveled West, and he and John set up housekeeping in an apartment in Santa Monica. Truman later set down his version of what happened in the painful months that followed.
“When Mr. O’Shea came to see me at the [Hotel] Bel-Air in early July, he used all his wiles, con-trick gifts to convince me that he was now a changed person and had only my welfare at heart and deeply regretted that he had ever caused me so much distress. I should mention that at this time I wasn’t truly in control of my emotions or mental processes; I was not functioning in my normal manner due to an overuse of alcohol and sedatives.”
Unlike previous reunions, there was not a hint of a honeymoon this time. As Truman should have realized from John’s letter, John’s first concern was money: he needed cash not only to live, but also to pay his tuition at UCLA, where, his ambition leaping over his ability, he was studying to become an English professor. John’s request for dollars was disconcerting enough; far more distressing was Truman’s discovery that he was still secretly involved with Joanne Biel, frequently sneaking away to talk to her on the telephone or to visit her apartment. Bitter arguments ensued, and as so often before, more than once Truman sought refuge with Joanne Carson.
In August Truman interrupted their stormy summer with a trip to New York, returning to California in early September with twenty thousand dollars in cash. Their bickering resumed almost the minute John picked him up at the Los Angeles airport. “When we reached the apartment, I felt so weak and nauseated I fell on the bed and almost went to sleep. Almost, but not quite. I watched him expertly ruffle through my luggage. When he found the manila envelope containing the $20,000 he glanced at me sharply; I pretended to be asleep. He looked at his wristwatch; it was about 1:00 pm. He tucked the envelope with the money under his arm and on his way out of the room he stopped at the closet where I had hung the suit that I was wearing on the plane. He took my wallet out of the pocket; there was a little more than $500 in it. He took $300. He also tore several checks out of my check book. Then he left the apartment. I was not surprised. He had done things like this before. He knew that I was ill and helpless. I knew it, too; and also that I had become in some mysterious, psychological way, dependent on him. But what I felt most was: I felt I was in very great danger.”
John was usually away from 8
A.M.
until late at night, ostensibly pursuing his studies. Sometimes he would also tiptoe out of the apartment at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, drive away and return ten minutes later. “At last I figured it out,” Truman said. “He took these quick night drives to check on Miss Biel, see if her windows were lighted or if any strange cars were around. He was insanely jealous—and I mean that literally. The few times we went to a movie or restaurant, he would disappear for half an hour. I never bothered to ask where he had been. I knew he had been talking on the telephone, arranging some assignation.
“I felt I was losing my mind. I knew something was being planned, but I didn’t know what. Gradually, I began to feel like the blind man in Vladamir Nabakov’s [sic] novel ‘Laughter in the Dark’—the blind man who is being tormented by a silent boy and girl: he knows they are in his house playing wicked pranks on him, but he cannot see them.” On October 5, Truman packed and left for the last time, taking a taxi to Joanne’s, where he drank himself into senselessness.
John’s own account of those dark days was different—but with the exception of the disposition of the twenty thousand dollars, not necessarily contradictory. What should be said, to balance Truman’s version, was that even while they were fighting, John was doing his best to wean him from liquor, taking him to AA meetings and introducing him to a helpful doctor, a member of AA himself. His efforts may have had some influence, because when he emerged from his blackout in October, Truman decided to kick, once and for all, his dependence on drugs and alcohol.
To do that, he made arrangements to spend a month at the Smithers clinic in Manhattan, an institution so tough and uncompromising that some of its successful graduates, like John Cheever, looked back on their stays there with profound dislike. The Devil’s Island of alcoholism clinics, Truman termed it, and he seemed genuinely afraid that he might not survive the course. “He feels as if he’s died already, and he wonders what he’ll be like when he comes out,” said Jack, who talked to him by phone. “He was so sad, so elegiac the other night. ‘When we sat in Harry’s Bar, it all seemed so innocent,’ he said.”
He was resolved despite his fears, and on October 12, the day before he was to leave Los Angeles, he asked Jack, who was on Long Island, to meet him in New York; he did not want to be alone on his last night as a free man. But Jack was not sympathetic, making it clear that he did not want to rush into town on a fool’s errand. It was not a proud moment for either one of them, and Truman’s half of their conversation, which Joanne recorded, sounds as poignant today as it must have sounded then: Truman believed that Smithers was his last chance, and he was begging for assistance. “It’s always been my nightmare that I would go there,” he said. “It’s a real charnel house. I talked to John Cheever on the phone yesterday. He said, ‘Listen, Truman, it’s the most terrible, glum place you can conceivably imagine. It’s really, really, really grim. But I did come out of there sober, and I have been sober for two and a half years.’ I’ve tried everything else,” Truman added, his voice breaking into sobs. “I am really frightened about it. I feel that it’s the end of everything. I’ve got to get all of this out of my system, because if I don’t, nothing is ever going to work.” Jack could not resist such a plea and he did drive into Manhattan.
Smithers was as tough as Truman had feared. “I hate this place,” he said shortly after his arrival. “They wouldn’t give you an aspirin if you had pneumonia.” But he soon had to admit that the Smithers regime was working; for the first time in many years he found that he could get through the day without pills or alcohol. Overlooking their just-concluded battles, he and John planned yet another reconciliation after his release—a sober Christmas in Palm Springs.
That happy moment never arrived, and as the day of Truman’s release approached, John grew more and more apprehensive, afraid that the cure had not taken and that Truman’s drinking would threaten his own fragile sobriety. Finally, in his own words, he “freaked out” and ran away. When Truman called their Santa Monica apartment, he heard only a recorded announcement saying that the phone had been disconnected. A second call, to their landlady, informed him that John had vacated, taking everything with him. Still a third call, to his lawyer, Alan Schwartz, brought news of a farewell letter. Truman would be happier without him, John said—he was going off to live in the wilderness.
As if that were not enough, John himself phoned the U.N. Plaza the night of Truman’s discharge, blaming him, as Truman told Joanne, for ruining his life. After they had hung up, Truman went out and bought a bottle of vodka, which he drank to the last drop. His month in Devil’s Island had been wasted, and his post-Smithers abstinence could be measured not in weeks, or days, but in hours. In the game of revenge, John was now the winner.
Truman enacted most of the dramas of his life in public, and taking Peg and young Chris O’Shea along with him, he foolishly kept an engagement to speak the following day, November 13, at Towson State University, just outside Baltimore. Only after they had arrived at their hotel did Peg realize that the bottle he had hugged so tightly in the limousine had been filled not with Tab, as he had claimed, but with vodka. “I am an alcoholic, a genuine alcoholic,” he announced to a local reporter, “not just a fake, phony alcoholic, a real alcoholic.” As if to prove it, he tripped as he approached the podium; once there, he rambled aimlessly. “I’m not going to let this go on,” said the man in charge, and Peg sent Chris to lead him from the stage. The next morning’s headline in the New York
Daily News
read: “Is Truman’s Song: ‘How Dry Am I?’”
However much he had hurt John, John had always hurt him more, or so it seemed to Truman, and as if by reflex, once again he called on Rick Brown to come to his aid. Not only had John taken the twenty thousand dollars he had brought from New York, he told Rick, but he had also filched an unpublished chapter of
Answered Prayers
—the only copy in existence. The first complaint had some truth, although John contended that Truman had in fact given him the twenty thousand dollars as a kind of security deposit, to protect him in the event of another breakup. The second complaint was almost certainly untrue. Truman could not even remember what had been stolen, whether it was two hundred pages, as he originally asserted, or three hundred and twenty pages, as he claimed later.