Capote (25 page)

In some ways he was as naive and untutored as he seemed. A Fiji Islander who spoke only pidgin English could scarcely have landed at Southampton with such a murky idea of where he was. Someone had kindly arranged a meeting in Cambridge, for instance, with E. M. Forster, the living novelist Truman most admired. Thinking to save himself a second trip, Truman planned to amble over to Forster’s rooms after his lunch with Lord Cecil. Only as he was finishing his coffee did he discover that Oxford and Cambridge were not within ambling distance, and that the only way he could make his appointment with Forster was through divine intervention, which was not forthcoming. “I had it fixed in my head that Oxford and Cambridge were the same place, sort of Oxford-and-Cambridge,” he blandly confessed, without a hint of embarrassment. “It was not until I inquired the way to Mr. Forster’s house—not until then did I learn that Cambridge is far more than a hundred miles in the opposite direction. Though I was very sunk indeed, I believe the incident amused Mr. Forster; at least he wrote a charming letter, regretting my error.”

More such comical errors were probably prevented by Waldemar Hansen. He and Truman had been casual acquaintances in New York, and when they met in London, Waldemar volunteered to be his guide. “I was very impressed by
Other Voices
, and I took him up with open arms,” said Waldemar, who was only twenty-five himself. Charming in manner and amusing in speech, with a thin, bony face surmounted by thick glasses, Waldemar was a poet who had worked as Beaton’s secretary and ghostwriter; now he was the lover of Peter Watson, a millionaire patron of the arts. Through the two of them, Waldemar knew virtually everybody worth knowing in literary and artistic London; those Truman did not encounter on his own, he was introduced to by Waldemar. “Truman wasn’t interested in seeing things like the Tower of London,” he said, “and we didn’t do the usual tourist route.”

For Truman, and many others that year, two weeks in England was more than enough: in 1948 London was a depressing city, gray, dowdy and dispirited. Stringent rationing was still in effect, good food was all but impossible to find, and to conserve electricity, theaters raised their curtains at seven o’clock; by ten o’clock the streets were all but deserted. Victory over Germany had not brought the expected surcease to Britain’s privations, and the whole country seemed pervaded by a mood of hopelessness and peevish exhaustion, a kind of national acedia.

Waldemar had been a great help to an innocent abroad, and now, as he prepared to leave for Paris, Truman returned the favor, instructing him how to put back together his rapidly disintegrating romance with Watson. It is easy to imagine with what delight Truman’s eyes sparkled as he heard Waldemar’s woeful story, which undoubtedly aroused his interest far more than anything he would have seen in the British Museum, had he cared to venture into that august institution. Pygmalion was the role he enjoyed most, and the management of other people’s lives was his happiest pursuit.

He listened carefully, deliberated, then announced his conclusion: Waldemar had been too compliant; Watson, a tall, slim, attractive man of forty who had taken up temporary residence in the Pont Royal Hotel in Paris, did not feel challenged by him. “If you’re going to be a grand courtesan,” Truman explained, “you’ve got to play hard to get.” But obviously, he added, Waldemar could not play hard to get at a distance—he would have to accompany Truman to Paris, telling Watson, of course, that the only reason he had come was to show the sights to someone who knew only two words of French, the “
mille tendresses
” with which, imitating Newton, Truman sometimes ended his letters. “Let’s beard the lion in his den!” Truman bravely declared. Waldemar did not require much persuasion, and, reserving two of the best seats on the boat train to Paris, they dispatched a telegram to Watson: “Changing voices, changing rooms. Two dancing daughters arriving Pont Royal Sunday evening. Perhaps they can fit you in for a tango.”

The Paris that greeted the two dancing daughters might well have been on the other side of the planet, so different was its mood from London’s. Although rationing-imposed shortages caused hardship and discomfort in France too, spirits were so high as to be giddy: the oppressor was gone and life was beginning again. A few weeks before, a simple command had turned on hundreds of floodlamps, and the monuments that had been dark since 1939—Notre Dame, the Arch of Triumph, the Place de la Concorde—once again decorated the night, like precious crystal that had been brought out of hiding. Another command had turned on a multitude of long-dry fountains, and their cascading waters strummed a song that had been forgotten during the decade of darkness; for months afterward their unfamiliar spray tasted like sparkling wine to light-headed Parisians, who, happy merely to be alive, could scarcely comprehend their further good fortune.

Not since the doughboys landed in 1917 had Americans, their liberators, been so welcomed by the French. University students swayed to swing music, smoked black-market Lucky Strikes, and drank Coca-Cola. At Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a gathering place for artists and writers since the twenties, Robbie Campbell, a boyish, light-skinned black from New York, put on dungarees and a straw hat to sing “Nature Boy,” which was then on the
Hit Parade
back home. “Nature Boy!” or “
Jeune vagabond noir!
” passersby would shout affectionately when he walked through the streets of the Left Bank. “The French loved the world then,” said Campbell. “Everybody was beautiful, everybody was bright, and everybody drank champagne.” For Americans, perhaps even more than for the French, it was a memorable moment. Because of an exchange rate that was heavily tilted in their favor, they could, as in the twenties, live more cheaply, and with far more style, in France than at home. Suites at the Ritz cost about eleven dollars a day; good hotels on the Left Bank, much less. “It’s very hard to describe what Paris was like then,” said Vidal. “It was a glamorous, golden time for all of us. Prices were low, the food was marvelous, and there was little traffic and no pollution; the light was extraordinary. In one’s memory it will always be summer, with empty streets, all that light, and just one taxicab slowly approaching in the middle distance.”

For a few days, while he was feigning polite indifference to Watson, Waldemar had time to show Truman the only monuments Truman wanted to see: Le Boeuf, of course; the Café Flore, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sat arguing existentialism; and La Vie en Rose, an all-male club where, under a twirling ball of spangled mirrors, two middle-aged Hungarian transvestites sang and danced as Les Sisters B. Soon, however, Waldemar had no time to play tour guide. Truman’s analysis of Watson had been both accurate and acute. Watson was an emotional masochist who was aroused not by affection, but by rejection. Whispering directions from behind the scenes, Truman choreographed a passionate reconciliation, the tango he and Waldemar had coyly referred to in their cable. “Truman gave me very good advice,” said Waldemar, “and I think he prolonged my relationship with Peter by about a year.”

Despite his ignorance of the language, Truman did not really need Waldemar to guide him around Paris, where his name and face were almost as well known as they had been in London—the
Other Voices
picture of the writer recumbent was rapidly becoming as famous as the Mona Lisa. The tabloid
France-Dimanche
sent two reporters to interview him at the Pont Royal, and even intellectuals like Jean Cocteau, the master of all arts, were curious about him. Hearing that his friend Karl Bissinger had an assignment to take photographs on the set of Cocteau’s new movie,
Les Parents Terribles
, Truman insisted on tagging along, trailing behind him, despite the season, one of his long Bronzini scarves. “You don’t haul your friends along to see a famous director,” said Bissinger, “and if I had been more sophisticated, I wouldn’t have taken Truman. But that
Other Voices
photograph had dominated the year’s gossip, and, as it happened, Cocteau was fascinated by him. He called him ‘the infant.’” Cocteau later introduced the infant to others, who, following the pattern set in New York and London, introduced him to still others, so that in just the month he was there, Truman again met a gallery of literary and artistic celebrities: from Colette, bedridden but still noticing everything with her catlike, kohl-encased eyes, to the designer Christian Dior, whose New Look of 1947 had forced fashionable women the world over to drop their hems almost to the ankle.

Truman had many well-positioned sponsors in Paris. “The other day at Natalie Barney’s Mrs. Bradley was full of the new young Parisian hero—Truman Capote,” Alice B. Toklas, who had been Gertrude Stein’s companion, reported to friends in America. “Gallimard is launching his novel with immense publicity and as Mrs. Bradley is his agent she has every interest to make the most of the sensation he is causing.” An elderly Frenchwoman of formidable presence—her last name came from her American husband, who had died before the war—Jenny Bradley was more than an agent. She had been on first-name, often intimate, terms with many of the century’s great writers, a list that only began with Joyce, Pound and Proust. (“Ah, poor Marcel,” she said. “Those sad Jewish eyes. I found him slightly ridiculous as a human being. There was no common measure between the man and his work, which is often the case.”) She still represented the best American writers to French publishers and the best French writers to American publishers. Every Saturday afternoon, she served champagne to a select group in her apartment on the Ile-St.-Louis, in a house that had belonged to Louis XIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu.

“I can see Truman now, sitting near the mantelpiece,” she said. “He would tell his stories and meet very interesting people, whom he would sometimes charm. He reminded me a little of Ford Madox Ford in that one could not very well distinguish between what was true and what was not true. He was making up his stories as he told them. They had nothing to do with reality, and that rather charmed me. There was something naive about him, which was probably half natural and half put on. He had a kind of simplicity, which was a real gift. He was what we call
sur-doué
, an overly gifted young boy. He looked about sixteen, and at moments he could be childish. He went to the flea market one day, for example, and came back with a leather belt, which had copper locomotives running around it. Extraordinary idea! But he was so proud of it. ‘Look at my belt,’ he would say. ‘Isn’t it a beauty?’”

Through Mrs. Bradley, Truman became friendly with Natalie Barney, one of the several rich and exceptional American lesbians who had settled in Paris around the turn of the century. Miss Barney also had known many of the century’s great poets, writers, and musicians, some of whom had read or performed from the steps of the small Greek temple in her garden on the Rue Jacob. Forty years previously her many love affairs had been thought a scandal. When Truman met her, she was in her early seventies, but she was still, wonderful to say, finding new romances. Anyone who did not know her might have mistaken her for a society woman from Dayton, Ohio, which is where she and her money came from. “She was plump, pigeonlike,” said Truman, and “very small, shorter even than I am. She had lovely skin, fine features, and beautiful, cool blue eyes. She always wore gray—dark gray shoes and little gray suits with a flower in the lapel; even her car was gray.

“One winter, a year or two after I met her, she said she wanted to take me to lunch and then show me something that few people had even seen. After lunch, she took me to an ordinary-looking apartment house near the Eiffel Tower, and we walked up four flights of stairs. She made me stay outside while she went into a room and turned on the lights. Finally I was let into an enormous room with perhaps a hundred pictures on the walls, each covered by a curtain: it was the studio of her lover, Romaine Brooks. We went around to each picture, and she pulled back the curtain, explaining who the woman was—only two of them were men—and what that woman’s relationship was with the women in all the other pictures. It was like reading a fabulous novel. There was a portrait of Miss Barney too, but she wasn’t this cozy little Miss Marple type that I knew—she was a wild thing with one hand on her hip and the other carrying a whip. I had never heard of Romaine Brooks before, but her paintings were wonderful, and we stayed up there about two hours looking at them. Miss Barney had a lot of stories to tell.”

Truman claimed to have had a brief affair of his own in Paris: with Albert Camus. “He was a homely little thing,” he said of the future Nobel Prize winner, “but attractive, with sensitive eyes and a compassionate face. He was my editor at Gallimard, and he took me to dinner. One thing led to another, and one afternoon he came to my room and we just went to bed. It was as simple as that. I don’t think he was homosexual in any way. But that was the period when I looked my best. When he met me, he was sort of startled. I must have touched some nostalgic nerve in him, reminded him of something that happened in adolescence.” That Truman knew Camus there can be no doubt; whether he went to bed with such a renowned womanizer is a question that can never be answered. It may have been one of the tales he made up; or, despite hoots of disbelief from both friends and enemies, it may have been true. In matters of sex there is only one guide: almost anything is possible.

As Waldemar had predicted, Truman wasted no time in looking up Denham Fouts, whose check he had politely returned, but whose invitation to visit he had eagerly accepted. One of those people whose only ambition was to attract other people, Denny was superb at his job, affording it no more thought or effort than a flower gives to enticing the bees that buzz before its fragrant blossoms or than a tropical fish gives to those who admire its peacock fins from the other side of the aquarium glass: he was a male whore from Jacksonville, Florida, the grand courtesan Waldemar never was, nor hoped to be. He was so fascinating a figure, as dark angels always are, that he has achieved minor immortality in several works of fiction, including Isherwood’s novel
Down There on a Visit
, Vidal’s short story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” and “Unspoiled Monsters,” which relates Truman’s own, sometimes inaccurate version of the Fouts saga. “Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me,” Truman wrote, “a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.”