The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (3 page)

After the discovery of the nailed Bibles the 'Cult' Theory gained currency for a while. The kids were being killed to satisfy the rituals of some voodoo brotherhood; several of the children had been carefully washed, after all, and laid out in stylised postures. For a short time in 1980, and again in the last three months, the monthly cycle of the killings encouraged the 'Disturbed Female' Theory. Perhaps a failed mother or a childless woman was acting out a complicated revenge on the living world.

Are the killers white or black? To begin with, of course, this was the crucial question. Several of the kids were picked up in areas where a white man would stick out like a pink elephant. The city population splits 60-40, but the street presence is much more one-sided than that, if the murderers and the victims turned out to be the same colour, the Killings in Atlanta would accord with the mainstream of American crime. Blacks make up an eighth of the US citizenry, and a half of its prison population. Most crime is still segregated. To a wildly disproportionate extent, violence in America is black on black.

Atlanta is a scattered city, surrounded by a lot of open and unfrequented country — lakes, wide plains, woodlands. The killers use all this space and are heavily reliant on their mobility. It sometimes seems that only a black could go to work with the unobtrusive speed and freedom that he needs.

In Chesterton's story, 'The Invisible Man', the detective Father Brown orders four people, two of them policemen, to keep watch on the only entrance to the flat of a potential murder victim. The murder takes place, the four men claim that 'no one' went through the door. Oh yes he did, says Father Brown — and he walked past you all with the body in his arms. 'The Invisible Man?' someone asks. Correct, in a sense. The murderer was the postman, and he carried the victim in his sack.

A uniform confers facelessness, jurisdiction, and a degree of invisibility. 'Now that could be anyone,' said a local crime reporter, 'delivery man, bus driver, utility worker... or a cop.’

The switch from a white to a black administration has happened only over the last few years. A lot of people were edged out in that shift. Many white cops, in particular, got sacked or passed over for promotion (with accompanying scandals: exams were rigged to favour black candidates, and so on). Now, if the motive was to discredit and humiliate the black-run police force, then the 'Rogue Cop* Theory has life in it.

Perhaps, though, motive is the wrong thing, the irrelevant thing, to look for. It is possible that the twenty murders will break down into four or five weird clusters. What strikes you again and again is that the Killings in Atlanta have been so easy to do. Despite the propaganda, the campaigns, the fear, kids still go with strangers. Last month black and white plainclothes-policemen drove in unmarked cars round the housing projects, the vacant lots, the shanty houses with ripped car seats on their patios. There are no adults about, there is no authority, there is not even a memory of the survival instincts of the old ghetto. 'Hey, kid,' the decoys would call to the children they found, 'you want to earn ten bucks? Hop in.' They got a rider
every time.

6.
The View from Peachtree Plaza

The Peachtree Plaza Hotel is the centrepiece of downtown Atlanta. It is a billion-dollar masterpiece of American efficiency, luxury and robotic good manners. 'Mm-hm. Mm-hm,' everyone says five times a minute as they glide across its fountained halls.

Among its other accomplishments, the Peachtree is the tallest hotel in the world. If it's essence of vertigo you want, take the scenic elevator to the seventy-second floor and enjoy a Cloud Buster ('a refreshing blend of coconut milk, pineapple juice and vodka served in a souvenir replica of the Hotel' - $7.95. 'Thank you.' 'Mm-hm') in the revolving Sundial Lounge.

There you will see the scalextric of the city, with its flyovers and chicanes, the dwarfed high-rise car-parks, the windshields blazing in the malls, the elevated trains,
equitable, omni, life of georgia,
thruways glistening like canals... and the acres of toytown prefabs on the criss-crossed suburban streets, where a person or persons unknown is still stealing the kids off the streets.

To the south-east lies Miami. Last May, four white policemen were acquitted there after the fatal beating of a black suspect, Arthur McDuffie. It happened on the street, after a chase. The medical examiner said that McDuffie's injuries were consistent with 'falling four storeys and landing between your eyes'. When the acquittal was announced there were three days of rioting:
16
dead, 400 injured, $ioo million worth of damage.

In Buffalo, New York, last September, four random blacks were shot in the head by the same white man. A fortnight later, two black cabbies were found with their hearts ripped out. In Oklahoma City, a black man and a white woman were shot to death in a parking lot. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, black leader Vernon Jordan was shot in the back while climbing out of a white woman's car. In Johnstown, Philadelphia, a mixed couple were murdered as they walked across the street. In Salt Lake City, Utah, two black men were shot while out jogging with white wortien.

In Birmingham, Alabama, there is a Ku Klux Klan military training camp, called My Lai in honour of the war criminal William Galley. In Greensboro, North Carolina, last November, an all-white jury acquitted six Klansmen and Nazis of the murder of five black and white Communists. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, acquittals and dropped charges have released five Klansmen accused of killing five black women on the streets.

Are these things connected? Are the Killings in Atlanta connected, to these killings or to each other? It is very tempting to see patterns here, or simply a change in the emphasis of murder in America.

Atlanta looks peaceful enough in the mild winter light. Atlanta in August will be a different proposition from Atlanta in January. The killings will not have been solved; and by then, too, President Reagan's passive attitude to pro-black legislation will have begun to hurt. Anyway, the summer is the time for racial anger and despair. In summer, the ghettos always heat up. They will expand and swell in the sun. Some will burst.

Observer
1981

*
*
*

Postscript
Early in 1982, an irregularly employed black disc-jockey called Wayne Williams was convicted of two of the Atlanta child murders and, by implication, some or all of the remaining twenty-seven. There was much that was unsatisfactory about the trial. The evidence for the prosecution centred on the (circumstantial but compelling) fact that 'fibres' found on the victims matched the Williams family carpet. Williams's defence was agreed to be feeble verging on incompetent. The trial raised all sorts of questions about the exertion of public — and media — pressure to effect a palliative outcome. It seemed to me weirdly characteristic that the first thing Williams did, on his arrest, was call a press conference. Meanwhile, serving his life sentence, Williams ponders the legal options, his hand occasionally strengthened by such things as Abby Mann's five-hour drama-documentary for CBS,
The Atlanta Child Murders,
which was very partial, very anti-establishment and very pro-Williams (the killer, Mann implies, was probably white). Have the murders come to an end? The violent death of poor American blacks, unless given urgency by politics, has never much exercised the American judiciary; and some observers suggest, most depress-ingly, that the Atlanta murders continue, as they always have and always will. Perhaps, then, the Killings in Atlanta are over, while the killings in Atlanta go on.

It was, I hope and trust, a radically below-par Truman Capote who received me at his UN Plaza apartment on an equatorial New York afternoon.

'Truman's sort of sick,' said the lady from Random House who answered the door.

'Oh dear. Would you rather I... ?’

'No, he can talk. So long as he can rest at the same time.’

I was led past a couple of reception rooms, beyond whose jungly curios and foliage you could glimpse the burnished leagues of the East River. Then, from the gloom at the end of the passage, emerged the helpless, tottering figure of Mr Capote, who let out a soft wail of greeting and extended a tiny hand.

For pity's sake, I wanted to say — never mind the interview. Let's call an ambulance. Or I can take him there in my briefcase, I thought, as I contemplated the childish, barefoot, night-shirted figure, sixty-three inches tall and barely a hundred pounds. But Truman clutched me dramatically by the hand and urged me towards the bedside chair. The lady from Random House then took her leave with a calming smile.

At once Truman disappeared for a long and complicated session in one of the nearby bathrooms (the first of several noisy visits during my two-hour stay). Shrugging, I looked round the room. Saul Bellow has a thousand ways of describing the human face; Truman Capote, in his fiction and journalism, is the litanist of habitats, furniture, surfaces, clothes, scents.

The room was plain, almost functional. The curtains were three-quarters drawn behind the wickerwork headboard of the bed. The white bedside tables were stacked with medicines, magazines and books — Di-Gel,
Vogue, Interview,
Kenneth Tynan's
Show People, The Great Houses of Paris.
Next to the glass-fronted bookcase lay three pairs of sorrily crumpled shoes. The half-darkness held the authentic, sleepy tang of the convalescent room.

Following a final, convulsive series of nose-blowings and bark-like sneezes, Truman tiptoed back into the room and lowered himself gingerly on to his cot. Poor Truman. In his long-nailed fingers he furled a pink silk handkerchief.

With the great man at such an obvious disadvantage, I naturally felt that I needn't mind much what I said to him. Although Capote is doubtless as touchy as the next Great American Novelist, he gives off very little
amour propre.
He generates vulnerability and candour, and has none of the regality of, say, his old friend Tennessee Williams or his old enemy Gore Vidal. As Capote points out in his new book,
Music for Chameleons:
'I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.' As casually as I could, I asked the recumbent Truman about his current relationship with pills and drink.

'No, I'm just — exhausted ... Did four
hours
of TV interviews about the new book ... No, you know, I uh never drank that much! I mean ... I just developed a kind of — suddenly an
allergy.
It would make me, not exactly — oh, well, very, very sick, like someone who's drunk a quart and a
half
or something. Norman Mailer must drink... twenty times as much as I ever did. In one
day,
you know, and it doesn't seem to affect him. Irwin Shaw!... drinks a
tremendous
amount. Practically everyone I
know
does. Tennessee! Edward Albee!’

I had read somewhere that Capote's voice was thin and high. But nothing had prepared me for this quavering, asthmatic singsong, a mixture of Noel Coward and Lillian Carter.
Turds, ee-bait, inner-stain
and
wide-ass,
for instance, are his renderings of 'towards', 'about', 'understand' and 'White House'. Capote was born in New Orleans, and was then farmed out to rural relations; much of his childhood was spent as a resident of Monroeville, Alabama. There is still something of the erudite hillbilly about him, and this perhaps explains how his obsession with the
beau monde
co-exists so peacefully with an interest in the underworld of murder and madness. He gives new scope to the cliche about 'knowing everyone'. Capote knew Bob Kennedy, but he also knew Sirhan Sirhan.

Capote knew Jack Kennedy, but he also knew Lee Harvey Oswald — whom he met in Moscow in 1959, at which point Oswald was a gibbering paranoid considering defection to the East ... When I mentioned early on in our talk that I also worked for the
Observer,
we discussed the paper's relationship with its current owners, Bob Anderson's Atlantic Richfield Company. Capote then added reliably: 'I know Bob Anderson very well. He's one of my closest friends. He's a very cultivated man, you know — a charming man, a shy man. We went to Iran together once, had the most fantastic day with the poor old Shah.' (Laughter and coughing.) 'You know, this oil business, this ARCO thing — that's just a sideline for Bob. He's the world's largest single property-owner. Brazil, Arizona, New Mexico, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles of ranches. As a matter of fact it was me who told him to buy the
Observer.’

'Well, could you tell him not to sell it,' I said.

'Oh all right. If you want.’

Fame and its mysteries have always been intimately bound up with what Truman Capote does and is. 'I knew damn well I was going to be rich and famous,' he has often said. He appears to have sensed early on that celebrity, particularly in America, can be self-generated.

His first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
published in 1948 when Truman was Z3, received as much attention for the pretty-boy photograph on the book's jacket as for the precocity of its contents. 'I didn't even
choose
that photograph!' protests Capote. Ironically, he is the scandalised one these days, 'It was not even posed! I was just lying on the couch after lunch! I didn't even choose it, I said just take any old photograph from the
drawer!’

Capote's early novels and stories, with their cloying Southern settings and high incidence of snaggled grotesques, would have seemed to place him in the Gothic tradition of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. But in mid-career his work became squibbish and metropolitan. Above all, his novelistic ear proved adaptable: the novella
Breakfast at Tiffany's
(1958) showed that he could listen to New York as sharply as he had listened to New Orleans, At this time Capote was also turning out some exceptionally acute and original journalism — a cruelly finessing portrait of Marlon Brando, an hilarious account of a trip to Russia with a company of black Americans playing
Porgy and Bess.
During these years Capote became convinced that an unnoticed art form lay concealed within the conventions of journalism: the idea was that a true story could be told, faithfully, but so arranged as to suggest the amplitude of poetic fiction.

That idea eventually became
In Cold Blood
(1966), the story of the apparently pointless murder of the Clutter family in Garden City, Kansas. Capote spent six years 'on and off — and mostly on' following the trail in 'this fantastically depressing Mid-West town, where, you know, there was
nothing.
The shaken townsfolk never took to Capote, and he had to withstand a good deal of local hostility. One day he sauntered into the courtroom and was confronted by a squad of glowering sheriffs. 'Oh, you don't look so tough to me,' said Capote in his highest voice. One of the men stood up and punched his fist through the courthouse wall. 'I'm beside myself, I'm beside myself!' cried Capote in a sarcastic wail. 'Those years were nerve-shattering,' says Capote now. 'I mean, I never knew whether I had a
book
or not.’

Capote's 'non-fiction novel' earned him several million dollars — and a highly ambivalent critical reception. The most serious attack came from the late Kenneth Tynan, who accused Capote of hastening the execution of the two murderers in order to safeguard the profitability of his book. 'The opposite was true,' says Capote. 'I was just — so shocked. Right up to that moment I thought Tynan was my friend — What did he die of, anyway?' Although Capote seems to have behaved pretty well irreproachably throughout, the controversy surrounding
In Cold Blood
could be seen as the start of our present permissiveness about turning tragedy into entertainment. 'It was an interest in the
form
that made me write that book, nothing else.' In terms of technique,
In Cold Blood
was seminal, and much-imitated. Capote himself is still following up its implications.

Meanwhile, of course, the stylish Mr Capote had ensconced himself as the ubiquitous lap-dog of high society. I imagine he cut a reassuring and innocuous figure, spryly perched on the edges of sofas and beds, with his crooning, questioning voice, no threat to the menfolk — no threat to anyone, it would seem. Capote's presence immediately induces a mood of sympathetic intimacy — why, I myself nearly poured out my fears and hopes to him. 'But I'm a writer,' says Capote with a thin-lipped smile. 'What did they expect?’

Capote is referring here to the elaborate scandals created by
Answered Prayers,
his unfinished autobiographical novel 'about the Very Rich'. Four sections of this labyrinthine
roman
à
clef
appeared in
Esquire
in 1975, precipitating many a broken íriendship, ostracism and snub — as well as Truman's brief bout of pill and drink cross-addiction. Nowadays he tends to pooh-pooh the extent of his own distress at the time; you feel that what bewildered him most was the fact that he had miscalculated, and so gravely. 'I thought they'd all think it was funny.
I'd
have thought it was funny ...”

Acrimony on this scale has a habit of feeding off itself. Soon afterwards, Capote found himself engaged in litigation with his one-time friend Gore Vidal. In a 1975 interview with
Playgirl
Truman claimed that Gore had been 'thrown out' of the White House after drunkenly insulting Jackie Kennedy (Gore and Jackie, after all, had a step-father in common).

'It's been printed about
nine times,'
says Capote, his eyes bulging indignantly.

The spat spread to include Jackie's little sister, Princess Lee Radziwill. Lee was Truman's source for the anecdote; she then 'betrayed' him by signing an affidavit for Vidal and telling a New York gossip columnist: 'They are two fags. It is just the most disgusting thing.' An infuriated Capote went on a local TV chat show to poormouth the Princess. 'I know that Lee wouldn't want me tellin' none of this,' he simpered, 'but you know us Southern fags. We just can't keep our mouths shut.' The litigation with Vidal continues. So does the book. 'Just wait till they see the rest of it,' broods Capote.

Music for Chameleons
was published in New York during the week of my visit. Capote had already made $4 million from this stop-gap collection of stories, journalism and non-fiction fiction, and, as I talked to him that afternoon, he lay swaddled in reams of laudatory press clippings. Not bad going, you think. For all his fragility, Capote is an operator, and a shrewd and confident one. Evidently he spends months planning the promotion of each book. Up there in the UN Plaza, I was simply a minor puppet in Capote's vast dream. 'The thing about people like me', he says firmly, 'is that we have
always
known what we were going to do. Some people never really find out.’

At this point I nerved myself to ask Capote about his love life — an exiguous topic these days, it would seem. It has been Truman's complex affliction always to be attracted to upright heterosexuals, rather as E.M. Forster was (Forster is, coincidentally, the English writer whom Capote most admires). Such men seem to relish all the difficult ramifications — consternated wives to placate, and so on. Again like Forster, Capote has also been known to hanker for representatives of the less privileged orders. He once squired an ex-prison guard to a dinner-party thrown by Princess Grace at her palace in Monaco. 'At dinner a man sitting next to him said, "Is this your first time in Europe?" And he said, "Yes it is, except for that time in Vietnam."‘

'I don't
have
a love life any more,' says a stoical Capote. 'You see, I'm attracted to practically «obody. It's just — sad. I just don't find many people - I really have to
like
them, you know? No, I don't have a love life. It's too exhausting,' he said with a yawn.

Capote had seemed to be on the point of fitful sleep at several stages in the course of the interview; so I now thought it prudent to take my leave.

'Would you be kind enough,' I asked reflexively, 'to sign my copy of your book?’

'Oh, certainly,' he said warmly. Rousing himself, Capote sat up in bed and began to fuss with his pen. He opened
Music for Chameleons,
and stared for several seconds at its blank first page. To my alarm, I realised that he had forgotten my name — if indeed he had ever known it. He sniffed, and looked up cautiously.