The death and life of Truman Capote.
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This story first appeared in the October 29 and November 26, 1984, issues of New York Magazine.
In the side room, C. Z.
Inexplicably, this group was scrunched uncomfortably into the dark area next to the kitchen.
We were the ones he really loved, Jan was saying while Mrs.
Guest managed to pretend her friends were really quite alone in the room.
Jack Dunphy, his companion of 36 years and heir, had left the service and stayed wisely private.
There were women who had used him for his fame and some he had used.
Except for C. Z.
Guest and Katharine Graham, all the stately women were gone.
The powerful men were gone, too.
None ofAnswered Prayershad been read at the tribute.
And so they searched, trying to find a secret drawer in a Chippendale chest.
under cabinets, even getting Dunphy to bring up the trunk of a Buick.
For over the last 16 years, Capote had said he was working.
He had given two friends an outline.
Whenever Fox and Schwartz would meet, they would have this exchange:
Has he shown it to you?
No, has he shown it to you?
Wouldnt he have shown it to me?
Truman showed what he did, butlout de suile!
He had to run down the road with it.
Dont you think he would have told me?
He was a great conjurer.
Itsinhim, says Dunphy.
He was reading magazines.
He was a magazine addict.
But how could they know, those capitalists and entrepreneurs who were minding the store.
They dont see backstage.
As much as he led people on, Capote tried to give clues.
Indeed, cartons and stacks of manuscripts had been carried away and sorted.
Norman Mailer finds this a distress call.
Capotes old antagonist Gore Vidal called his death, at 59, a wise career choice.
Id say, says Mailer, it was an inevitable career choice.
He had more pride than any writer I know.
Whatever sort of curator he was of his talent, Capote was a poor caretaker of his body.
He would cure it to abuse it.
He had a talent for putting himself in harms way, Schwartz said at his memorial.
At various times, Capote was reported to have throat polyps, prostate problems, a tic douloureux.
He could rejuvenate faster than anyone I knew, says a doctor who treated him.
For the last two years, be fought to stay alive.
It was a bad summer.
Its just bad luck.
Hed take Antabuse and drink right through it.
He loved to shock.
The mother of two famous sisters had called her daughters whores during one of their screaming fights.
The penis of one famous writer was actually a cross between a dimple and a bellybutton.
He had his web connection of informants and the classic gossips desire to know it all.
Capote was perverse in all things.
He was proud of Jack Dunphys writing all his life.
He waited at their hairdressers, waited in their libraries.
Wear glasses and low heels in reptile, he said to one, happily wasting his writers eye.
He tucked me in bed and told me bedtime stories and gave me a bit ofAnswered Prayersto read.
He was my mentor, says Kate Harrington.
With all hisenfant terriblebehavior, with me he was not that way.
He protected me at Studio 54.
We went looking at pictures, and he taught me to observe.
At the end of parties, he would sit on my bed and say, What did you see?
He taught me how to talk.
He loved people who were slightlymanque, and he loved pranks and mischief.
Hed call Krementz and imitate a telephone repairman.
When Aileen Mehle was going to London, he hurt her by lying about her and a British banker.
Capote had her go in for her next appointment and say, Doctor, Im so happy.
Ive finally found the man for me.
Hes warm and stable and everything you told me to look for.
A very nervous nurse came in just then to announce that Mrs. Xs fiance was in the waiting room.
And, laughing, out they ran to lunch at Quo Vadis.
He went from an imp to a gremlin.
From something adorable and sweet to hold in your hand to almost a rocklike creature, says a friend.
Truman Capotes best years ended in the 70s.
The mid- to late 70s were very hard times.
In 1977, he had walked onstage at Towson State University in Maryland announcing he was an alcoholic.
There was liquor set up in the library.
His aunts would look at him and say, Truman, we dont understand you.
All day you are a monster, and at night, youre so docile and sweet.
Id give him a tomato juice, says Judy Green, and hed put vodka in it.
He convinced one friend he was not a chemical alcoholic but a psychological one.
People like Truman and Tennessee were only alive because of the assertion of their wills.
They reach a point where the will does not work anymore, and sort of expire.
But what was remarkable about that interview was the bravery and self-understanding that Capote displayed.
He performed almost in a trance, too tired and drugged to lie.
He was cut after 17 minutes.
My life is so strange its not like anybody elses, he tells Siegel.
You have had this history of alcoholism, says Siegel.
Oh, my God, alcoholism is the least of it.
Thats the joker in the cards.
My problem was never drinking.
[It was] taking different kinds of drugs, but not things that other people would consider drugs.
But the combination of drugs and alcohol, says Siegel.
I put them together like some sort of cocktail … Youve been doing it lately?
Ive been doing it for 20 years.
I can tell you in exactly one word: anxiety.
I think certain people have a feeling of anxiety.
I know people who do fantastic things because of anxiety.
It began a long time ago?
It began because I … because my mother.
It was all very simple.
Are you anxious now?
Well, I dont have that at all.
I couldnt care less.
Siegel asks if he is writing now.
Yeah, its almost finished, says Truman.
It just doesnt work.
Like Marilyn Monroe, for example?
I dont know what it is … a particular kind of sensibility.
Siegel wants to know if he could reverse the process.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Im not dishonest about it.
Friends tried to help by recommending analysts.
Years ago, Jack Dunphys wife, Joan McCracken, told Dunphy that Truman was very insecure.
Analysts were a waste of time and money.
Hed start to duel with them, and he was always brighter.
He was well known to the staff of Southampton Hospital.
Later, he saw Capote tied to the bed, a small swollen lump with only his sunglasses showing.
When he was drinking or on drugs, there was not much you could do, one friend says.
I tried, but when one thing stopped, another would start.
He could have died a year ago or a year from now.
I remember sitting on his bed and saying, Why are you doing this to yourself?
Then hed fall twice a year.
And finally, when I was 17, I said, Isnt it enough that you have me?
Id be heartbroken if you died.
Well, of course you would, he said.
For 40 minutes, he told Capote his forebodings.
The friends jaws fell slack.
Truman took it and was very quiet.
He stopped then for a few months.
Then, to offset the lethargy … he went to uppers.
Later, cocaine was added to the already dangerous equation.
First, he wanted to get truly well.
In the latter stages they merely served as three-day emergency rooms.
Which didnt serve cocaine.
He could get that only from his friends.
His addiction was more difficult to treat than most, since he was what is called a protected addict.
Capote knew almost too much about medicine.
When he died, the coroner found his death complicated by multiple-drug intoxication.
Hed taken pills for sleep, anxiety, leg pains, and epileptic seizures.
He was always bragging that he knew how much he could take.
He held up a new violet pill and said, Arent these the most beautiful pills youve ever seen?
They let me sleep four hours at a time, which Ive never been able to do.
It is, of course, presumptuous to go beyond Capotes own words to explain why this happened.
Even Jack Dunphy says he does not know.
It has to be destroyed.
Certainly, there were external events that hurt him.
He went from the pinnacle to the pits.
For, as Mailer says, he had tasted a renowned social power.
No one came near it, and he was probably prouder of that.
It was harder to do than was the writing for him.
His talent was his friend.
His achievement was his social life.
It hurt Capote to lose the friendship of the Paleys.
Babe was his Bobolink.
When she saw him later in a restaurant, he was invisible to her.
Then he seemed to disappear and begin his serious drug life.
Mailer thinks that La Cote Basque may have been Capotes deliberate effort to free himself.
Capotes immediate young fame, however desired, was something he always had to deal with.
In lulls, the celebrity absorbed his creativity.
One of the saddest sentences ever written about Capote probably made him the happiest.
The pain was always there inside him, says Kate Harrington.
He told me how he saw five things at once and how exhausting it was a flooding, constantly.
Others saw one or two levels, so his writing was his way of getting it out.
Even the first time I met this sweet little man, he had something hurt.
Maybe its how he became so scathing.
Some blamed his later companions.
But there was something wrong with them and Truman together.
It was said they mistreated him, made him suffer, and brought out his worst.
Like Truman, they drank.
Once, Capote passed out and fell from a bed he was sharing with one of them.
When another man discovered Truman lying on the floor, he said.
Why didnt you help him or call me?
The man said, What do you want?
lm sick, too.
They were toted along now, into worlds Jack had shunned, brought to lunch with Princess Grace.
It was hard for them.
They broke things in every way.
What is the good of being a famous novelist if you cant have a little vanity, says Mailer.
But he had an outrageously overweening store of it, and thats part of what killed him.
It was better to read magazines.
With Trumans cooperation, they made some tapes.
They decided to return for one lunch to La Cote Basque.
On the tape, Trumans voice is thick and very slurred.
He spent a lot of time at the beach last summer with Jack Dunphy.
Jack was always the boy he fell in love with.
Truman was so proud of everything he did, says a friend.
Kurt Vonnegut thinks Capote was trying to set up a new group of friends.
An arrest for drunken driving the previous summer had changed his life.
Always, at a pool, he would go to the edge and walk right in without looking.
At last he was too sick to swim, and the pool he liked was sold to strangers.
The week before he died, in August, Capote met Kate Harrington for lunch.
He was not feeling well.
He did not want to go back and stay alone in his apartment.
It was soundproof and even friends felt the silence.
Later, he spent the night at her place.
The next week, Kate and Lester Persky had two dinners with Capote.
During these last dinners, he said he was excited about the movie of Handcarved Coffins.
But still, says Persky, he had an idee fixe about getting to California.
He felt comfortable at the Jockey Club and was munching a huge amount of caviar.
but its no fun unless you order a pound, Truman said.
and he said, I dont know when.
But you do what I told you to do.
I know about these things.
All right, baby doll?
He was anxious to come to California, says Joanne Carson, his friend for 20 years.
Hed always arrive with a round-trip ticket, but he told her to make the reservations just one way.
I dont know how long I will stay, he said.
He kept calling, wanting to move up the trip, but she told him she was working.
They werent those women of fashion who would cancel anything to be with him.
It was almost as though there were less room for him in his world.
Truman was very much in touch with the childlike part of himself, says Joanne Carson.
There he always had his rooms.
She would cook special food, and she kept the pool heated to 92 degrees.
It was the first time he had come with a suitcase.
He brought out new clothes.
Friday he was tired, but he wrote under the umbrella.
Mrs. Carson had asked him to write something for her that would make him feel good.
He rewrote part of a piece fromMusic for Chameleons,which he called Remembering Willa Cather.
He was still rewriting, even this last story.
All day Friday, he swam and planned his birthday.
Usually he fell asleep in my room and then would go to his room and come back.
Id wake to his rustling newspapers.
He fell asleep about 2:30 with his notebook and glasses on the table beside him.
The next morning, she went in to see if he wanted breakfast.
He was struggling with his little bathing suit, and he let me help.
At noon, I went in with the pool towels.
The minute I walked in, the room was too still, nothing moved.
Here was the stillness of other rooms, the stillness of his New York apartment.
of the rooms he was locked in as a boy.
I usually brush his brow lightly, and I touched his forehead.
There was no pulse.
I called the paramedics and waited.
They exist in a limbo state not quite here or there.
Call it spectral fiction.
Call it spoken fiction.
Capote could and did recite parts from memory, they were so fixed in his mind.
At one time, he may even have written them down, but he would never send them forth.
He couldnt get them or let them out.
How are you comin with your writing, Truman?
his estranged aunt Marie Rudisill asked him in a making up conversation six weeks before he died.
Truman would have got $1 million if he had finishedAnswered Prayersand Random House had accepted it.
If he merely had said that he never would finish it, he would have got around $300,000.
He wanted the money, but he had a lot of pride, says his editor, Joe Fox.
Last summer, Truman Capote said he wanted to return in his writing to his past and the South.
He told his aunt he wanted to write a memoir of Monroeville.
Sometimes Truman Capote lied.
He was a deft liar.
As he told Donald Windham, I remember things the way they should have been.
He was an actor.
He was a salesman.
Truman put a magical drape over his life, his aunt says.
He was a foxy person.
He could make you believe black was white.
He could make a worm stand on its tail if he wanted.
He lied with love to give people pleasure, and sometimes to give himself power.
He told two kinds of lies.
The life lies and the art lies.
They both sounded good.
And they both read so well.
Certainly, throughout his life he suffered more than he made anyone suffer.
In the end, his own excuses may have been lies.
He said his mother threw him from a train window and locked him in rooms.
He might have locked his mother in rooms, says his aunt.
He was the whole core of the whole family.
He was spoiled to death.
He was smothered with love.
But not by his mother.
She rejected him, and maybe she was all that mattered.
At times, Truman was a little tyrant.
If he loved, he wanted someone completely.
Truman stayed with the grown-up people, she says.
He was never a child until later, when he was never quite an adult.
Dunphy loved him but didnt live in his world.
He did his own writing and went off to ski.
Capote had the title since the 1950s.
Leo Lerman remembers him talking about a Proustian work then.
In 1966, he returned to it, signing his Random House contract.
He started to talk it up as the contemporary answer toRemembrance of Things Past, says an editor.
There was always the promise of great length.
In the 60s, he tried to sell parts of it toVogue.
Truman said that when he was in the middle, in 1977, he had a nervous breakdown.
Then, supposedly, came the period of rewriting.
Thus, theJournalwould get the stories she had heard Truman tell her over lunch.
Wicked stories, because he always had loved to shock.
She found the second set so terrible, scurrilous, and dirty that she never printed them.
These stories became the heart of La Cote Basque 1965.
If she had used them, Capotes social life would have been ruined a year earlier.
He marries her, backs her publishing venture, which fails.
The marriage is bad.
Finally, she says to him, Whats the matter with you?
and he answers, Nothing that a divorce from you wouldnt cure.
This exchange takes place between Lady Ina Coolbirth and her husband in La Cote Basque 1965.
Washing Up: A captain of industry lusts after a governors ugly wife.
He invites her to his apartment in a New York hotel, they go to bed.
She is very careful about keeping the lights out.
She bloodies the sheet.
Because his wife is due back the next morning, he washes the sheet.
My darling, I didnt want to wake you.
You looked so exhaustedly sweet.
So am going straight to Greenwich, she writes in her note to him.
Mr. Bojangles: A black entertainer blind in one eye falls in love with a blonde movie star.
Her studio head, Harry, sends hit men to Vegas.
Mr. Bojangles, youve got one eye now howd you like to try for none?
Soon after, he marries another vanilla number.
… And it isnt her fame, her beauty, her Swiss bank account.
She runs a permanent temperature of 104 degrees.
This story is not in La Cote Basque.
Probably Capote was saving it for his Hollywood chapter.
[Mary) Willows.
Peter falls in love with his second cousin and asks for a divorce.
Then she invents a prowler, sends the servants and children away.
They return from a party, he showers, she screams for help.
She shoots him and calls her lawyer.
Mrs. Willows Sr. covers it up for the sake of the children.
Mary goes to live in Europe, returning only for the annual party.
This is the story that was blamed for leading to Ann Woodwards suicide.
Her closest friends say she was already very depressed, and then she read it.
The fact that Capote was willing to publish these stories in 1974 in theJournaltells something about his motives.
These Blind Items are crude, roughly written, and full of signs of haste.
In the year between theJournaland theEsquirechapters, he must have done a lot of rewriting.
Then look to your left.
That sow sitting next to Betsy Whitney.
Here is the difference in just two passages.
He scrubbed and scrubbed.
Then he drained the tub and scrubbed some more.
To wash the sheets.
He soaked them in the tub in scalding water.
This story was widely reported to have cost him the friendship of Babe and William Paley.
The apartment and other details in the story reminded people of the Paleys.
Im going to write about them.
The haunting, precocious children, the smells and sights and tastes of the rural South were replaced.
There was nothing of beauty left in his world.
There was a day and night world in the Capote universe.
Bad night dreams versus daylight freedom and happiness.
Now the night vision and the bad corrupting dreams began to take over.
There were no gentle women.
A curtain was drawn back onto a room full of grinning monsters.
But these were men who knew and valued his work.
Neither was he satisfied by the company of academics, critics, and other writers.
He had given most of them up in his early 20s.
Capote always had to have the other real society, even cafe society.
He was jealous of his unique position in it.
It was almost comic.
After all, he was a Park Avenue boy who went to Trinity, graduated from Franklin.
And all along he took on as pseudo-families the real families of his married lovers.
Truman wrote about his early social friends inBreakfast at Tiffanys.
The two main characters were identifiable to those who knew them.
His creativity switched them, says Phyllis Cerf Wagner.
He borrowed heavily from their speech patterns.
He rewrote and rewrote, trying to make them less identifiable.
But friends saw Carol Matthau in Holly and Gloria Vanderbilt in Mag Wildwood.
One never says a quarter of what one knows.
Otherwise, all would collapse.
How little one says, and they are already screaming, Camus wrote.
The screaming had begun after La Cote Basque.
It was the most expensive thing he ever did.
The ice curtain fell.
Most invitations stopped, his calls werent taken, friends ostentatiously changed their tables when he appeared in restaurants.
He was surprised by their hard-hearted reaction.
He told Judy GreenAnswered Prayerswas better than Proust because he was more accurate.
He didnt intend to disguise his characters.
There was a vicious tilt, whole lives expressed by the worst things that were done.
There was only a skein of truth, says Aileen Mehle.
How could his character wash out blood in hot water?
a female writer complained.
But this was fiction.
All his claims of truth hurt him at last.
He ran after his fame.
In offering his Hollywood chapter to Clay Felker atEsquire, Capote had described it.
It takes place in Kate McClouds bedroom at 550 Park Avenue.
It ends with the suicide of fashion editor Margaret Case.
Kate sees her, some say dressed in a raincoat, falling past her window.
(Random House owned first-serial rights.)
Petrocik says, I never saw one line written on a page.
Capotes friend Kate Harrington read bits and pieces of this.
In oneEsquirechapter, Capote describes the Nigger Queen Kosher Cafe.
Jones, would commit for Kate McCloud, presumably the kidnapping of her son.
(Kates first husband is 22 and she is just 16 when they marry.)
Mona had emerald-green eyes.
Mona was the best-dressed, most social figure of her era.
Her first husband got custody of her child.
Her third husband was the immensely rich Harrison Williams.
How like Capote it was to have listed her among the swans of our century inAnsweredPrayers.
He always played little jokes in his work he even had his narrator, P.B.
This outline does not mention Kate McCloud or La Cote Basque 1965.
It seemed to be a work in progress, he says.
Capote compared readingAnswered Prayersto walking through an aquarium with round windows and scenes inside each one.
Certain fish would swim from one window to the next.
Tropical fish go on long journeys only to wind up in a tank.
(Marianne Moore.)
Capote said writing his chapters was like making stained-glass windows that had to be put in place.
At another time,Answered Prayerswas like a wheel with a dozen spokes all pointing in different directions.
Certainly, they seemed to be self-contained like the perfect short works he wrote before and afterIn Cold Blood.
He also had problems with the style he would use.
Finally, there was the problem of getting it done.
Out into the ether.
It was timing too.
He was prepared to writeAnswered Prayersbefore his research forIn Cold Bloodtook him too far.
He is said to have used cocaine to get himself writing again in the early 80s.
A doctor to whom he read his cocaine writing found it to be gibberish.
Capote kept his cocaine in a hollowed-out Bible on the top of his toilet.
Capote took it back to make revisions.
It was never seen again.
Their estrangement, after her book, preyed on my mind.
He called one night at 12:30.
Finally, she wanted to destroy every copy.
Ive been through that, he said.
It caused me more unhappiness.
I lost every friend I ever had, he said to her.
Truman cared, she says.
He had that little air that he didnt, but he did.
Im bored with most of them, he said, and I think theyre getting tired of me.
He was going back to the big white house with the bone fence and its old timey roses.
Joanne Carson claims he was doing the story about Willa Cather as a present for her.
The magical drape prevailed.
Truman Capote wrote his last words and left everyone guessing.
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