Most little girls bought their first lipstick, their first perfume, from the toiletries counter at Kress. I loved the tool counter with different-size monkey wrenches and screwdrivers neatly lined up. Twenty-five cents would get you a good hammer. There was a shoe department with a very attractive smell of leather and the faint warmish aroma of coarse white tissue paper. The frame sections specialized in lurid reproductions of Scottie dogs, American Beauty roses,
Light of the World, Blue Boy,
and the Grand Canyon at sunset. But the frames were wooden, and the gold leaf was real. You’d have to get a bank loan to even touch one of those frames nowadays.
Mary Jane Scruggs and Margaret McAllister and Carolyn Cowden could be found gossiping and giggling at the soda fountain every Saturday afternoon. They all studied music, and they’d go to Jessie French Music Shop in the Saenger Building and buy their sheet music of “Clair de Lune,” “Whispering Silver Birches,” “Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” “Moccasin Dance,” then sail unswervingly down Dauphin to Kress for the “tutafo.” Every Saturday Kress had a five-cent special from tutafo (two to four). Some of them would probably be forbidden by the Department of Health nowadays, but we loved them. Imagine a mixture of neon artificial orange and root beer.
One Christmas, Agnes Griffith played tunes on an upright piano in the record department. She was a delightful lady who played the mighty console organ at the Saenger every matinee before the film. She specialized in “Peanut Vendor” with variations, but she played Christmas carols at Kress, and when she went to have lunch at the counter, they put on a record of Maurice Chevalier singing “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise…,” and a whole gaggle of sorority girls leaned on the counter and went all moon-cow.
The chicken salad sandwiches were famous, and I once talked to an old black cook who made them. “We puts a little mustard in the dressin’,” she told me, “and we uses
all
the chicken…. I cuts up the skin really small and uses the livers and the guzzards too…cut up little-bitty…that’s what gives the flavor….
”
Then the candy counter! Permanently stocked: cinnamon hearts, jelly beans (the black licorice ones separate), the chewiest gumdrops ever, heavenly hash, peanut brittle, chocolate-covered peppermints, and peppermint sticks. Those peppermint sticks were rather porous, and all the children then used them as straws in a glass of lemonade. About 1939 Kress suddenly stocked another kind of peppermint stick from some other manufacturer. They were solid, not porous. So long, peppermint lemonade. If only they’d bottled that taste.
There was also Fischer’s Toy Shop. I saw some things there—I still wish I had them. It was the toy theaters that threw me. Oh, those toy theaters. There was one that had the five settings for Balfe’s opera
The Bohemian Girl
and one extra set of an art nouveau hotel lobby not unlike the Cawthon Hotel. I wanted that. In the middle of the stage was a trapdoor. And there was a red velvet curtain with gold fringe you could pull. I must have written three thousand plays for that theater I didn’t have.
At that time, children were given nice toys, but you were expected to make things, and I used to turn the fire screen around for my theater. On the street corners in Mobile, there were Punch and Judy shows just like in England, exactly the same figures. When I first saw that Punch and Judy show, almost immediately I began making marionettes. I made marionettes, made up plays, and just turned the fire screen around for my theater. EVERYBODY was expected to attend my productions.
And life being what it is, after I recovered from scarlet fever, I was still frail and so I was given a week before going back to school. And Mr. Marsh had bought that theater for one of the Hempstead girls and given it to her as a Christmas present. Now the Hempsteads were cousins of the Marshes. And my uncle Francis married Martha Marsh. Well, Martha Marsh borrowed that theater and turned up at my grandmother’s house. “See, I thought little Gene might enjoy playing with this.” It was that theater with the five settings of
The Bohemian Girl.
So I had plays every night. Boy, if you didn’t sit down and watch my play, you were on my shit list.
And then, of course, it went back to the Hempsteads’ household because Louise Hempstead said, “Well, I’d give it to you, little Gene, but I’m keeping it for when I have children of my own.” When I got back from the Second World War, the first house I went to was the Hempsteads’ over on Dauphin Street. And I said, “Oh, Miss Louise, you know, Miss Margaret,” and then finally I said, “Well, you know, incidentally, you all had that toy theater.” “Oh,” she said, “we threw it out.” She said, “You know, it was under the stairs, and every time the stairs were mopped, we didn’t realize it but the dirty water got on it and we just threw it out.” And I went out of that house and never went back.
*
Often my grandmother would send me to the Lyric Theater for the matinee of the vaudeville. Rebecca would take me—she loved it, too. We’d sit there and just aah. I was like five or six. It was a wonderful theater with this huge painted backdrop of the old square. It was painted to be broad daylight, but there were these little twinkling stars from where the performers had punched in to see how the audience was filling up, and the lights backstage would shine through the drop. One of my earliest memories is of staring at that curtain and wondering how the stars could be twinkling in broad daylight. There was a full orchestra in the pit, and a very good one.
All the shows were wonderful. I can remember a British comedian who sang Scottish songs, a pair of Russian dancers, Italian acrobats, W. C. Fields, Mae West. I’ll never forget Mae West, the singing comedienne with the long cigarette holders and this lamé dress. She sang, “I’m just wild about Har-ry, and Har-ry’s wild about me.” Or that grand mad star Eva Tanguay, in her high frizz wig and skintight silver lamé, who sang, “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care what people think of me,” ending her number with a high kick which sent her flying over the footlights and into the sponge-lined bass drum in the pit. Oh, Lord.
And the intermission was nothing like Coca-Cola and popcorn. Why, they wouldn’t have allowed popcorn in that velvet theater, with red velvet curtains with gold fringe and this polished marble foyer. What they had was a little counter with a little striped awning that sold George’s Chocolates. Rebecca always had a napkin in the pocket of her apron so she could unsmear me afterward.
One of the numbers—it was the only time I ever peed in my pants. It started very low, this music, with a lot of pizzicato. “Shine, little glowworm. Shine, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer…” Then there was this very pretty girl singing it. And it was this gorgeous backdrop of forests, a kind of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century operatic backdrop. You know, green and tangled trees, and all across the back were little lightbulbs twinkling. And she sang, “Shine, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer…
”
That was okay.
But then came four big green velvet frogs. And they picked her up and she sang the last verse sitting on their shoulders, and they put her down and she curtsied and then vanished somehow. Then they took their heads off and started tumbling like acrobats dressed as frogs with no heads, and I couldn’t take it. I peed in my pants. Lord, how I loved it.
*
On Saturdays at the Lyric Theater there would be a matinee for children. That’s where I met Truman Capote. We were never pals. We were acquaintances called Southerners. He came to Mobile on Saturdays to have his teeth straightened and go to the doctor and various things like that. He was Truman Persons from Monroeville, but he was called Bulldog. He had some funny underbite where the lower jaw sticks out, and he looked exactly like a bulldog. One night at this party in New York, suddenly, I looked across the room and there was Truman. And I said, “Bulldog! What are you doing here?” And he said, “Sh, sh. I’m Truman Capote now.” Well, see, I knew him as Bulldog Persons.
We both belonged to the Sunshine Club, which sponsored free matinees at the Lyric Theater for children. In the Sunday
Register
there was the Sunshine Page. This lady called Disa Stone had this children’s page and this Sunshine Club where children wrote and sent in what they wrote and vied for prizes. The grand prize was a pony. For his contribution to the Sunshine Page and for the contest, Truman had spied on this old man who lived up the street in Monroeville and was a real old crank. Even then he was already mixing fiction and reportage. Why not? But let’s not say he
invented
the reportage-fiction, fiction-reportage style. Daniel Defoe would be giggling in his grave at the thought, not to mention a dozen French writers. And some of his things are so full of Gothic narrative impossibilities that one wants to say, “Now, Cousin Truman, come down outa that tree!”
Anyway, he wrote this rather long piece called “Old Mr. Busybody, by Truman Persons.” His aunt, when he told her, rushed to Mobile and went to the
Register
and said: “You cannot publish that. It is too true a description of our neighbor. He’ll sue us, he’ll smash our windows, I don’t know what he’ll do. I want to take that back.” And she did. Years later when I saw him in Paris, the first thing Truman said to me was, “Oh, Eugene, I so wanted to win that pony.”
I thought he was a hoot. He was this tiny little thing with a tough little bulldog body and a high squeaky voice. But there was this bully boy, J. L. Bedsole, who was very tall, a basketball player, and had a good opinion of himself. His family was very wealthy—the Bedsole Drugs and all. J.L. was always teasing this little thing and doing crazy things to him. Truman would just say, “Leave me alone,” but one day he had had enough of it. One day Bulldog backed all the way across the lobby—he looked exactly like an English bulldog—and he put his head down and charged, hitting J.L. right in the genitals. J.L. never went near that bulldog again, ever.
I saw him off and on in Mobile, and I saw him a couple of times in New York. Then, when I was in Paris, where I helped start the
Paris Review
, I heard he was coming to town. I thought that would be a great interview for our interview series. So I sent a note to him and said, “I’ve got to interview you.” He said, “Okay, fine, come on over to my hotel, we’ll talk for a while and go have dinner.” I went to his hotel, and a sort of servant or something took me into this sitting room, and suddenly here came Truman, this small bulldog. What I saw had nothing to do with the famous chaise-longue, checked-vest photograph that amused half of America and made the other half nervous in 1948. I said, “Bulldog! You haven’t changed a bit!” I hadn’t seen him in six years. Then out of the bedroom behind him came this white bulldog, looking just like him. I said, “Bulldog!” It was too much. The two of them, looking just alike.
He was a charming person. He was an imp. He was a real imp. His sense of humor was unbelievable. After he got into New York and all that thing of drink and drugs and fancy New York society—that wasn’t the Capote I knew. I remember one typical Bulldog story. We had lunch in New York in a restaurant that was upstairs. You went into a kind of bar, and then the dining room was upstairs. We were very late and I called and said, “How late do you serve?” and they said you can order until so-and-so and you can stay until—I don’t know—four o’clock or something. So we went there and we started talking about the South and about Mobile and about Monroeville. We just got going as Southerners always do. Got going on the South. You know, Southerners together in New York City: Lord. It got very late, and the waitress came up and she was making comments—hinting—that it was time for us to leave, but we still hadn’t overstayed. So he said, “All right.” He was very courteous, very sweet. And with a haste that I shall never forget, he went to every table and loosened the metal cap on the salt shaker. She was coming up the stairs with the bill. He got back to his table and was sitting there. He did all of the tables in about two minutes. A very Bulldogian joke.
He was not a bitch. He became that after so many people had made fun of his being small, and the fact that he had an early success made a few other writers nasty toward him. We always got along well together. But he and Gore Vidal had a strange feud. Gore Vidal’s mother was the daughter of an Oklahoma senator, and he was a snob. He always thought that Truman was kind of poor white trash. They feuded from day one. It was verbal more than anything: rival writers, rival Southerners. The two biggest backbiters I have ever known are Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. And they were both backbiting each other. Mention one to the other and right away they would start in. I don’t feel that way. I feel that we’re all in this fight together. Don’t you bite my ass, and I won’t bite yours.
Not a Usual Childhood
Then came a moment of confusion and funerals. My grandfather’s business failed just after the 1929 crash, and not long after that, he died. Then a few years later, my grandmother died. About two or three years after my grandmother’s death, my father died of a heart attack. That began this other period of my life, when I lived with Mr. Gayfer at Dog River and was chauffeured to Murphy High School in a limousine. I took three hundred-something stools and set them up at thirty-something tables to earn my breakfast and lunch because Mr. Gayfer thought I needed that experience. Then after school I was picked up by the chauffeur and driven home.
There are at least sixteen stories about how Mr. Gayfer got me. One, of course, is that I was his illegitimate child. One is that he was a wicked old queer and I was his lover boy. Another is that he bought me from my grandmother because he wanted someone to live in his house and keep him amused. God knows I kept him amused. Some say that my grandmother left me to Mr. Gayfer in her will as a surprise. But the truth is, Mr. Gayfer came forward when my grandmother died because her family, the Luenbergs, had taken on his three orphaned great-aunts from Switzerland in the 1870s.