Capote (79 page)

In accordance with the terms of their truce, Truman and John met in New Orleans on August 11. But the outcome was predictable. Truman was drunk—“gaga,” to use John’s word—as he stepped off the plane, and John, who had arrived a day earlier, was probably not much better. Believing, quite correctly, that he had been coerced into coming, John was even more belligerent than usual. In fact, they had not been together more than an hour in their suite in the Pontchartrain Hotel when, objecting to Truman’s remarks about Joanne Biel, John grabbed him by his shirt and ordered him to shut up. It was Truman’s turn to be frightened. After calling a doctor, he took to his bed and remained there almost to the day they parted, August 17. He was probably not much more sober when he left New Orleans than when he had arrived, and he ended the month, as he had begun it, in a bed in Southampton Hospital.

In September he flew to Los Angeles, ostensibly to monitor preparations for Hollywood’s adaptation of
Handcarved Coffins
, the rights to which he had sold for three hundred thousand dollars
¹⁵
to his friend Lester Persky, producer of such hits as
Taxi Driver
and
Shampoo.
Once in his suite at the Beverly Wilshire, however, he rarely ventured out. Responding to a drunken, incoherent call, Rick Brown rushed over to find him in bed, lying naked in his own wastes, his legs caked with dried excrement. Rick gave him a bath, fed him—he had apparently not eaten for a couple of days—and made arrangements to move him to Persky’s house in Bel Air. “Lester, this guy can’t stay alone,” he told Persky.

Setting up an informal rehabilitation clinic in Lester’s guest bedroom, Rick worked out an elaborate schedule, which he posted on a chart, to slowly wean Truman away from both alcohol and pills. “I can’t stop cold turkey,” Truman had warned him. But after a week or so of Rick’s increasingly spartan regimen, he rebelled, jumping on Lester’s bed and shrilly screaming, “This is too much! You can’t do this to me!” Lester, who suffered from angina, screamed right back—“get out of my room, both of you! I’m a sick man too!”—and ran into his bathroom to gulp down his heart medicine. “It was really very funny, like something out of the Marx Brothers,” said Rick. “Even Truman started laughing.”

Rick did not give in to his tantrums, and eventually Truman, sober and pill-free, prepared to leave California. But a few days before his departure he became so agitated that he begged Rick to at least return his tranquilizers. “I’ll give them to you, Truman,” Rick responded. “But first tell me what’s bothering you.” What was bothering him, Truman confessed, was that he was not planning to fly to New York, as he had said, but to Jackson, Mississippi, where John, making another detour on his journey to Florida, was temporarily living with his son Brian. Furious because all his hard work seemed likely to go to waste, Rick immediately canceled the plane reservation, and Truman meekly flew home to New York.

Back on Long Island in October, Truman was able to examine his situation more clearly. “John’s poison for me,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t seen him in New Orleans. He always disturbs me.” But that moment of insight was fleeting, and without Rick to say no, he was soon on the phone to John. In November they came together in Miami, where Truman rented a luxurious apartment, twenty-six stories above the sparkling waters of Biscayne Bay. “Am I right to come into Truman’s life again?” John asked Joe Petrocik, who came to visit with his companion, Myron Clement. “What can I say?” replied Joe, who, in truth, was appalled at the prospect. “I haven’t laid eyes on you in four or five years.”

The answer to John’s question was postponed until the new year, and Truman quickly returned to Manhattan, where he had scheduled two weeks of readings over the Christmas holidays. Although he had given readings in dozens of towns and cities, including New York, he had never appeared where the stars shine brightest, on Broadway itself. While
Music for Chameleons
was still fresh in people’s minds—still on the best-seller list, in fact
¹⁶
—he wanted to give a series of readings on the Great White Way. “I don’t want anything that even looks like Off-Broadway,” he loftily declared. After months of talking with producers and looking for the right house, small but prestigious, he chose Lincoln Center’s elegant Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, and it was there that he read during the last two weeks of 1980, from December 13 through December 28.

The appropriate pills could see him through anything, Truman believed, and on December 1, two weeks before his readings were to begin, he moved out of his apartment and checked into Regent Hospital for the month, putting himself under the full-time care of one of the country’s most prominent pill-pushers, Dr. Nathan Kline. A pioneer in the use of tranquilizers and antidepressants, especially lithium, Kline heartily shared Truman’s devout faith in the powers of mood-altering drugs. What poor Truman did not know was that just days before he entered Regent, the Food and Drug Administration had all but defrocked his white-whiskered Dr. Feelgood, charging him with a “lack of regard for the safety of human subjects.”

Truman was soon to make much the same complaint—Kline’s drugs had nearly killed him, he would assert—but he was able to get through his two weeks of readings nonetheless. Dressed by Halston to look like the author in his library—he wore gray slacks, a gray cardigan, a gray silk shirt and black velvet slippers—he drew enthusiastic audiences. Mitzi E. Newhouse herself flew up from Palm Beach for the opening. “Tonight was one of the great things in my theater,” she said proudly.

John flew up from Florida too, still wondering if he was wise to start up with Truman again. “It’s very hard to explain, but Truman was a man who had difficulty making his life,” he said. “I constantly told my hurt intellect, ‘Don’t get involved anymore.’” It was good advice, and they began bickering as soon as Truman came home from Regent. Within days Truman was seeking refuge with Joe Petrocik and Myron Clement. When John returned to Miami at the end of the first week in January, 1981, Truman spent a few days in a Manhattan hospital, then followed him South on January 14. “Remember, if something should happen to me,” he reminded Joe and Myron, “you promised you’d get even with that Irish bog rat.”

He was not joking. April Johnson, a journalist who had seen him in any number of emotional states, was surprised by a new one—he was afraid, obviously terrified of John. One night at dinner in her Coconut Grove house, he tagged along behind her like a clinging child; only when he joined her in the kitchen as she was cleaning up did she realize that he had been desperately trying to talk to her alone. “You’ve got to call me a cab!” Truman whispered. “I’ve got to get away from this man. He’s going to kill me.” While she phoned for a taxi, Truman slipped out the back door, sneaked around the side of the house, and met the cabdriver on the street. Soon noticing that he was missing—“I think he’s outside,” April vaguely said—John searched the yard. Coming back alone, John did not try to hide his chagrin at being so publicly embarrassed. “Drunken fool!” he bitterly exclaimed.

From April’s, Truman went to a motel, where he hid for two or three days. Apparently he phoned John to come and get him, and it was probably then, on Saturday night, March 7, that John, to use his own words, “beat the shit out of him. I was in a titanic rage because he was leaving again—I’d had enough of that—and I just blew my cork. I’m always sorry when something like that happens; it hadn’t happened in many, many, many years.” Truman had even more cause for regret: he suffered a broken nose, a fractured rib, a cracked finger, and abrasions and bruises of the face, hands, chest and thigh.

Alarmed at the extent of his injuries, John made an urgent call to Dr. Harold Deutsch, Truman’s doctor in Miami, who rushed from a formal party with his wife and another couple. When they arrived at the motel, they found Truman with John and John’s son Brian, who was visiting from Jackson. Truman told Deutsch that he had been beaten by both father and son. (Brian later denied that he had been involved.) After setting his broken nose in his office, Deutsch, a plastic surgeon, put Truman into Miami’s Larkin General Hospital for treatment of his other injuries.

Truman spent twelve days at Larkin, then returned to New York to report, unsurprisingly, that he and John had been fighting. Even so, he said, he planned to go ahead with the purchase of a new house they had agreed to buy on the peninsula’s west coast, on Marco Island—“Florida’s Fantasy Island,” as its ads boasted. “In a way it’s my revenge,” said Truman. “It’s the paradise Johnny’s always wanted, and now he can sit down there and rot!” Providing his lover with a place in paradise was a curious definition of revenge, and such a transparent rationalization served only to underline the flat, desolate but invincible truth: no matter what John did to him, no matter how many wounds, physical or emotional, John inflicted upon him, Truman would cling to him as fast as to life itself. Indeed, his bruises had hardly healed before he invited John to spend Easter with him in New York.

A new factor, however, now intruded to further complicate their tangled relationship: Truman was beginning to suffer from paranoid hallucinations, the result, almost certainly, of too many doses of various prescription drugs. As they sat down on that Easter Sunday of 1981 for their holiday dinner at La Petite Marmite, a high-toned restaurant across the street from the U.N. Plaza, Truman squeezed John’s hand affectionately. Then, his mood altering so swiftly that for a moment John thought he was joking, he said, “You have behaved unbehavedly.” Repeating that odd and ungrammatical remark, Truman stood up, nearly knocking over a neighboring table. “You may finish your meal and I will pay for it,” he said before stumbling back to his building. “Then I never want to see you again.”

Stunned, John followed ten minutes later, only to receive another shock when he entered the U.N. Plaza. Truman ordered the desk captain to evict him from his apartment. “Your trick didn’t work!” he cryptically shouted in John’s direction. Truman was still in the lobby, staring vacantly at the ceiling, when John angrily walked out with his bags and hailed a cab. By the time John phoned from the airport, Truman was back in his apartment. Remembering nothing of what had happened, he was dismayed to learn that John was terminating their happy holiday and flying back to Florida. “But what did I do?” Truman plaintively inquired. “What did I do?”

After John’s return to Miami, Truman’s hallucinations worsened. At 6:30 on the morning of April 24 he woke up the elderly couple who lived next door, begging for asylum from assassins who he said had invaded his apartment. Using their phone, he called Bob MacBride, who arrived on a scene of pathetic comedy. Wearing only a filthy bathrobe, which hung open to reveal his nakedness, Truman was drinking a large glass of his host’s vodka and frantically trying to call Liz Smith at the
Daily News.
If she reported in her column the danger he was in, he said, the invading hit men would be forced to leave him alone—so powerful was his trust in the magic of publicity. Gently taking the phone away from him, Bob led him home and put him to bed.

When he awoke in the afternoon, calm and clearheaded, Truman startled Bob by remembering everything that had occurred and by agreeing that he had been the victim of a psychotic attack—in fact, he had been aware of it at the time. Even as he was describing the hit men, part of his mind had been aware that they were imaginary; but like someone who has been bound and gagged and helplessly watches while thieves ransack his house, that rational part had been unable to intervene. Though he had been afraid to tell anyone, he confessed to Bob, he had suffered similar attacks in previous days and weeks.

Before Bob’s arrival that morning, Truman had also phoned Joe and Myron. Call Jack in Paris, he had beseeched them, and beg him to hurry home—he needed him. But Jack, who was planning to come home in three days anyway, refused, making no secret of his irritation at being bothered. His return did not help, in any event. Almost immediately Truman was on the phone to Bob again, pleading to be rescued from Jack himself, who he said was holding him prisoner and plotting to kill him. Increasingly disturbed, Bob confronted Jack a few days later in what was to be their first and last encounter. Truman’s condition was so serious that he should go into a psychiatric hospital, Bob insisted, and all his friends, and Jack most especially, should join in pressuring him to do so. But Jack was offended by what he regarded as Bob’s presumption and said he would do no such thing. “Where do you pick your friends?” Jack disdainfully asked Truman afterward. “Bellevue?”

Bob might have asked the same question. “I had always heard from Truman what a prince Jack was,” he said, “and what did I find but this rather helpless, querulous old woman who had no idea what to do except fulminate against the evils of drink. Within five minutes he was even getting on me for drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. All he did was complain about his own problems, that he had things to do, but that he couldn’t leave Truman alone. ‘Look, go ahead and do what you have to do,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch Truman while you’re gone.’ As soon as he left, Truman, who had ostensibly been asleep, came tiptoeing out of his room and begged me to buy him a bottle of vodka. When I said no, he put on his clothes to go out and get it himself. At which point I stood in front of the door and said, ‘Truman, you’re not going anywhere. Get back into bed.’”

Frustrated by his failure to get anywhere with Jack, Bob wrote Alan Schwartz the next day and repeated his appeal for common action by Truman’s friends. “It is my opinion that if T.C. does
not
get to a good doctor and a good psychiatric facility—not another drunk farm—he will shortly die, either by an overdose like his mother did, or by something more drastic. (The roof of UN Plaza is just a short elevator ride.) He is fully aware of this, and he is very worried about it.” Bob had not exaggerated Truman’s anxiety. On May 14, Truman voluntarily checked into a rehabilitation center on the Hudson River north of Manhattan; in early June, he entered another clinic on Long Island.