Capote (78 page)

Lee’s “fag” remark changed hurt to rage, and Truman mapped out an attack on the “principessa,” as he now derisively labeled her, slowly rolling that flavorful Italian word around in his mouth before spitting it out like a bad piece of candy. “If the lovely, divine and sensitive Princess Radziwill has such a low opinion of homosexuals, then why did she have me for a confidant for the last twenty years?” he demanded.

Throughout the first weekend in June he hatched his revenge, and on Monday, June 4, his plan ready, he arranged to appear on Stanley Siegel’s TV show the following morning. If Lee thought he was just a fag, he said, he would do what fags are supposed to do: he would tell all, all of the stories she had told him over the course of those many years, all of her secrets, all of her love affairs, all of her feelings of resentment toward her sister Jackie. “When I finish with her tomorrow, the average rider of the New York subway system will see what a little cunt she is,” he proclaimed. “She and her beloved sister had better have ambulances waiting and rooms reserved at Payne Whitney, because they’ll be there for a long time. Believe me, you will never have seen anything like this.”

Until late Monday night he rehearsed what he called his “crazy queen” act, so that when he went before the cameras, he would be, as he phrased it, “as calm as a
bombe glacée.
” Then, early Tuesday morning,
The Washington Post
’s Sally Quinn met him in his apartment and rode with him to the television studio so that she could report the historic event. “A cassette of this show is going to be one of the great comic classics of all time,” he assured her.

And in truth, the first half of his performance, which he gave in a thick Southern accent, did have a certain lunatic brilliance. “I’ll tell you something about fags, especially Southern fags,” he said. “We is mean. A Southern fag is meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met… I know that Lee wouldn’t want me to be tellin’ none of this. But you know us Southern fags—we just can’t keep our mouths shut.” Opening his own mouth very wide, he began revealing the secrets he claimed Lee had confided to him: how envious she was of Jackie (“The princess kind of had it in mind that she was going to marry Mr. Onassis herself”), how she had once tried to steal William F. Buckley, Jr., away from his wife, and how deeply she had been wounded by the breakup of her romance with Peter Beard (“He met this chick with a little less mileage on her”). He was just hitting his stride when Siegel, who was becoming increasingly nervous at the direction his monologue was taking, interrupted, destroying the mood he had so carefully created and causing his speech to sputter to a depressing conclusion.

Brought suddenly down to earth, he invited Quinn back to his apartment and repeated for her, without the histrionics, the rest of his diatribe, which she duly reported in her newspaper: how Jackie had supposedly told Lee that Lee owed everything to her, for example, and how Lee had had a crush on both Jack Kennedy and Rudolf Nureyev—although she had been taken slightly aback when she saw pictures of nude men in Nureyev’s guest room. But most of all he confessed how hurt he was, and how keenly he felt the loss of one of his greatest friends. “Love is blind,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve been in love before with people who were just ghastly. I was in love with her like I would have been in love with anybody.” Why had she betrayed him? He believed he had belatedly deduced the answer: she was afraid of Gore, but she had thought that poor drunken Truman was going to die and that she could therefore disregard his feelings. “Unfortunately for Princess Radziwill,” he said, “this fag happens to be alive and well and in New York City.”

Having spoken so unwisely before, Lee now remained silent. Gore, always combative, did not. “This is pathology,” he said. “Real nut-house stuff.” If he had been devastated by publication of the depositions, Gore did not let on. Nor did he drop his suit, pursuing his complaint for four more years. It was finally settled out of court in the fall of 1983, when Truman wrote a letter of apology. “Dear Gore: I apologize for any distress, inconvenience or expense which may have been caused you as a result of the interview with me published in the September 1975 issue of Playgirl. As you know, I was not present at the event about which I am quoted in that interview, and I understand from your representatives that what I am reported as saying does not accurately set forth what occurred. I can assure you that the article was not an accurate transcription of what I said, especially with regard to any remarks which might cast aspersions upon your character or behavior, and that I will avoid discussing the subject in the future. Best, Truman Capote.”

His furies exorcised, Truman retreated to Long Island after the Quinn interview, and he returned to work, apparently unfazed by his week of melodramas. A little more than a week after the Siegel show, in fact, he was able to finish one of the best short pieces he was ever to write, his profile of Marilyn Monroe. So his days continued, productively and reasonably happily, during the months that followed, and he ended 1979—and the most troubled decade of his life—on a hopeful note of optimism. “
Music for Chameleons
will be just as good as
Answered Prayers
,” he said. “It has in it everything I know about writing. It’s the best I can do, and I want everyone to see that it’s the work of a great writer. When it comes out next year, my friends are going to be very proud. I think we’re going to win. In fact I know we’re going to win.”

Music for Chameleons
had been the product of a supreme, almost heroic feat of concentration: he had wanted to make one last effort to show what he could do when he put his mind to it. Having done that, at the beginning of 1980 Truman surrendered to what he called “my demons.” Unable to sit still, he darted nervously from place to place—to California, then Switzerland, New York and back to California. “I’m like a shark,” he said. “The shark is the only animal that never sleeps. It keeps moving through the water, forever and ever.”

He tossed off ideas for new projects with an energy no less scattered and feverish. One was a novella-length profile of Babe Paley, called
Heliotrope
, after the purple-flowered plant she so much admired. Another was an account of his friendship with Cecil Beaton, who died in January;
The Siamese Twins Visit Siam
Truman titled it, a reference to their 1958 trip to the Orient. For a time he also contemplated writing an autobiographical work about his alcoholic years with John, deciding in the end that their relationship defied his comprehension. “I don’t think I’ll ever write about what happened to me with John,” he sorrowfully concluded. “I don’t think I see the truth. What happened between us was too complicated, too idiotic. I could write it as a comedy, but it wouldn’t be true, because there was nothing funny about it. But if I wrote it as something serious, it would be ridiculous. People would say that if this person O’Shea is really as dreadful as all that, then Capote must be a complete moron for having become involved with him.”

For a year it had seemed that he had managed to escape that complicated, idiotic relationship. But as the new decade began, it was clear that he had not: he was lost in a maze of multiple obsessions, a sunless labyrinth from which were excluded reason, understanding, sanity itself. Once more that most improbable of figures—an overweight, bombastic, and sometimes violent fifty-one-year-old alcoholic—occupied his dreams and dominated both his heart and his mind. “I told everybody I had forgotten about him, and I thought that I had,” he said. “But I hadn’t.”

His excuse for starting up again was John’s request for permission to sell his television script of “Children on Their Birthdays,” a favorite story of Truman’s youth which Truman, in happier days, had encouraged him to adapt. When Truman now refused to grant him rights, claiming that he too had written a scenario, John irately demanded that Truman send it to him—he would judge its worth. “If Truman feels that some of the material in his lately-written script has enough merit to be included in my script,” he wrote Alan Schwartz on March 4, “I have no objection to appraising his version with the proviso that I will detail, in writing, precisely what items in his version which differ from my version, I might be interested in adding to my version.”

Instead of laughing at such comical chutzpah, Truman was incensed. But what stuck in his eye was John’s further statement that his greatest desire was to forget “the strange interlude of our former relationship.” A hundred heartfelt pledges of love and devotion could not have reignited Truman’s ardor more successfully than those few contemptuous words. Forget! Truman would tell him when he could forget! And so resumed his never-ending struggle to humble Charlie Middleclass. “My big mistake was in not following through after his car was destroyed,” he said. “That really scared him. I should have had some guys take him out into the desert and beat him up. That would have fixed him.”

Belatedly attempting to correct that oversight, he resurrected the hoary claim that John had stolen the “Severe Insult to the Brain” chapter of
Answered Prayers.
“I need those pages,” he avowed. “I can’t do without them. Every word was perfect. That chapter has the climax of the book, a real surprise that no one could guess, and I’ve always been afraid that John would show it to somebody who would give the secret away. It’s a terrible thing he did, but then he’s a terrible man. You think of the worst thing anybody could do—the absolute worst—and Johnny will do something three times as bad.”

As John still kept his address secret, picking up his mail at a post-office box, Truman hired a Beverly Hills private detective, Joel Michael, to track him down and retrieve those precious pages. “Truman wanted to kill him, and I think he was deadly serious about it,” said Michael. “His suggestion was ‘Let’s find him and do something.’” But John, who had played this game of hide-and-seek before, was not easy to find. Learning that he was once more being sought, he moved around so quickly that even a professional like Michael was hard pressed to locate him. The one time the detective did spot him, walking along Santa Monica Boulevard, John managed to lose him.

Eagerly following the hunt from New York and Long Island, Truman telephoned Michael late every night, Saturdays and Sundays included, to discuss possible leads. “After a time the manuscript became secondary to him,” said Michael. “It was the chase rather than the catch that interested him. He loved the idea that O’Shea was running and hiding and that we had scared the hell out of him. What really excited him—you could hear it in his voice—was the thought that O’Shea was literally falling apart.” That was not far from the actual fact, and on May 12, 1980, hoping to end the pursuit, John wrote Joe Fox at Random House to formally deny that he possessed anything “remotely connected” to
Answered Prayers.
If Truman claimed otherwise, John tartly advised, Random House should “consider the source, and refer to the expertise of Gore Vidal concerning T.C.’s veracity.”

To refute that scornful indictment, Truman wrote a nineteen-page history of the events leading up to the theft nearly three years before: his weeks with John in Santa Monica, John’s secret romance with Joanne Biel, and finally, Truman’s horrified discovery that when he flew to New York to enter Smithers, he had left behind, hidden under the bed in their apartment, the manuscript John now denied any knowledge of. He ended his chronicle with an eloquent passage that might stand as the coda of his life. “I have been a writer and published a number of successful books during the last thirty-five years,” he wrote, “but this book in question, ‘Answered Prayers,’ is my final contribution for having served fifty years as a supplier at the altar of art. Of art; but especially literature. This has been my life. I am a childless man and my works are my children.”

Translating his emotional narrative into the arid wherefores and therefores of a legal brief, his lawyers filed suit in California Superior Court on July 8. They asked for the return of “A Severe Insult” and two hardbound ledgers containing his notes for the last half of
Answered Prayers
, and they demanded that John and Joanne Biel also pay him damages of four and a half million dollars apiece. Michael served Biel with a summons the next day. “She went into total hysteria, completely flipped out and denounced Johnny,” chortled Truman, with considerable exaggeration. “It was like Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in
The Maltese Falcon.
” But Michael was not able to give the elusive John his notice until July 16, when, staking out John’s post office, he saw him open his mailbox. John too reacted hysterically when Michael approached him, bolting out the door and running into an alleyway down the block.

Though they did not know it, the detective and the lawyers had been working toward but one end: to force John back into Truman’s arms. In that they were totally successful, and after his panic-stricken dash from the post office, John phoned Truman several times, trying to work things out. But that was not the end of Truman’s triumph. During the course of his investigation, Michael had alerted California authorities to the false identity John had used on his driver’s license, and John, foreseeing more trouble, prudently decided to seek his sunshine in Florida. Thus, almost inadvertently, Truman had turned John’s life upside down again, compelling him to desert California and Joanne Biel as well.

Truman’s lawsuit had served its purpose—and its only purpose at that. Soothed by their friendly chats and by John’s pledge to meet with him, he agreed to drop his complaint (it was formally dismissed on January 14, 1981). “I don’t think the manuscript exists anymore,” he said. Then, all but admitting that in fact it never had existed, he added: “But now I don’t think I want it. It would confuse me. I don’t feel the same way about
Answered Prayers
as I once did. It doesn’t matter so much now.”

He had obtained what he wanted, but the long obtaining of it had driven him back to the bottle, and on the night of July 29, Jack woke to hear his thin cries floating across the lawn that separated their two houses in Sagaponack. “He had fallen on the steps of his studio—in his own pee, of course, with broken glass around him—and he couldn’t get up,” said Jack. “So I took him to Southampton Hospital, and he did say something honest. ‘I drink,’ he said, ‘because it’s the only time I can stand it.’”