Capote (40 page)

Still,
House of Flowers
lasted nearly five months, closing on May 22, 1955, after 165 performances. Like
The Grass Harp
, it had fanatical admirers. The last show was a sellout, which turned into what the
Daily News
called “a ripsnorter of a wake that kept the capacity audience in its seats until the early hours.” At the end, Pearl and Juanita Hall sat on the edge of the stage, throwing roses into the audience. Tears rolling down her cheeks, Hall asked, “Where were all you people last week?” When the audience finally departed, the party moved to El Morocco. Then, his bags already packed, Truman went to the airport, on his way to a two-month vacation in Europe.

A
LTHOUGH
he was disappointed by his two failures in the theater, Truman seemed otherwise unfazed. He may have been finished as a playwright, but he was still in demand as a writer. Indeed, he had rarely appeared more self-assured, optimistic, and high-spirited than he did in the weeks and months that followed the closing of
House of Flowers.
He had made many new friends from show business and high society—the peacocks, Jack called them—and doors were being unlocked all around him. One by one and with breathless impatience, he was opening them all. His life seemed to be exploding, so swiftly was everything happening, and yet he had never been as firmly, as confidently in control.

Most of his new friends, like so many of his old ones, were women: his rapport with the opposite sex had now flowered into perfect communion. Discovering a marvelously apt entry from the journal of a nineteenth-century romantic, he quoted it in a
Harper’s Bazaar
article to express his own rhapsodic admiration of women, beautiful women: “Sat on the stone wall and observed a gathering of swans, an aloof armada, coast around the curves of the canal and merge with the twilight, their feathers floating away over the water like the trailing hems of snowy ball-gowns. I was reminded of beautiful women; I thought of Mlle. de V., and experienced a cold exquisite spasm, a chill, as though I had heard a poem spoken, fine music rendered. A beautiful woman, beautifully elegant, impresses us as art does, changes the weather of our spirit; and that, is that a frivolous matter? I think not.”

Truman thought not as well. No Casanova had ever admired lovely women more fervently or had been so fervently admired himself. He flattered them, consoled them, tried to guide their destinies. When they came to him with their problems, he could be depended on to ask the right questions and give the right answers. “That’s just fine,” he would say, or, “Oh, that’s not good for you, honey. You shouldn’t do that.” Pygmalion was his favorite role, and any woman who took his advice, whatever her age or position in life, he looked upon as his protégée, a work of art that needed only his word or hand to bring her to perfection. Women delighted him, and he pleasured them in every way but one—the physical act of love.

His ability to mold and influence them was a kind of sexual power, however, and probably not the least potent kind at that. A woman might go to bed with other men, but she listened to Truman. “He would tell me things, what to wear, for instance,” said Carol Marcus. “He was very smart about those things, and I don’t mean in that supercilious, chic, or homosexual way at all—he really knew what was right. He thought about it and got the sense of what a person wanted to be, or how she wanted to appear, and then he helped her to achieve it. It was his way of getting close to her. He was the best pal ever, someone who would coo at you and tell you that you were wonderful. What’s love? It’s a mirror saying you’re a perfect person.”

When all else failed, he employed the most irresistible of the seducer’s arts: he humbled himself and begged for love. “We were once in Copenhagen,” recalled Slim Keith, one of his new, glamorous friends, who was then married to the Broadway producer Iceland Hayward. “When we came back to the hotel one evening, he said, ‘Let’s talk.’ I told him that I was so tired that I was going to get into bed, and I did.

“‘I’m gonna tuck my Big Mama in, I love her so much,’ he said.

“‘Well, I love you too, Truman,’ I told him.

“‘No, you don’t,’ he said.

“‘Yes, I do,’ I replied.

“‘No. Nobody loves me. Do you have any idea what it is to be me? I’m a dwarf…’ And he listed all the things he thought were wrong with him. It was the most heartbreaking little monologue I’ve ever heard. He was testing me to see if I really cared.”

She did care, of course, and her company, and the company of attractive women like her, helped to brighten the weather of his spirit—and that, most certainly, was not a frivolous matter. He sought out and became the loving mirror to a whole new group of such remarkable women. He danced with Marilyn Monroe at El Morocco, he conspired with Elizabeth Taylor to save Montgomery Clift, he talked through long nights with Jacqueline Kennedy, and he became the trusted confidant of the most regal of his armada of swans, the grand and social ladies whose very names prompted floor-sweeping salaams from headwaiters on both sides of the Atlantic.

John Huston introduced him to Marilyn Monroe early in her career, and they formed a close, if brief, bond. “By the time you get this, Marilyn M. will have married Arthur Miller,” he reported to Cecil in June, 1956. “Saw them the other night, both looking suffused with a sexual glow; but can’t help feeling this little episode is called: ‘Death of a Playwright.’” He later picked her to play Holly Golightly in the movie version of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, but Hollywood, which had different plans for his heroine, chose Audrey Hepburn instead. “Marilyn would have been absolutely marvelous in it,” he stubbornly maintained. “She wanted to play it too, to the extent that she worked up two whole scenes all by herself and did them for me. She was terrifically good, but Paramount double-crossed me in every conceivable way and cast Audrey. Audrey is an old friend and one of my favorite people, but she was just wrong for that part.”

He last saw Marilyn a few weeks before her death in 1962. “She had never looked better. She had lost a lot of weight for the picture [
Something’s Got to Give
] she was going to do with George Cukor, and there was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly anymore. If she had lived and kept her figure, I think she would still look terrific today. The Kennedys didn’t kill her, the way some people think. She committed suicide. But they did pay one of her best friends to keep quiet about their relationship with her. The friend knew where all the skeletons were, and after Marilyn died, they sent her on a year-long cruise around the world. For a whole year no one knew where she was.”

Elizabeth Taylor he enjoyed for her raucous sense of humor, for what he called her “hectic allure,” and for a lively intelligence that surprised him. “She’s a very unusual girl, really bright. She was always finding unknown novels by well-known writers, and she would give me rather interesting, curious books. She was the first person who ever gave me a P. G. Wodehouse book to read, for example. I’ve seen her with three or four husbands, and Mike Todd was the only one who really knew how to handle her. He loved her, but he also knew how to say, ‘Screw you!’ Not long after they were married, I visited them in Connecticut, where they had a house. It was a beautiful day in early summer, and they were lying on the grass together with about ten Golden Retriever puppies climbing all over them—Elizabeth loves animals. It was my idea of perfect love.

“For some reason Todd liked that dreary little Eddie Fisher, who was like his son or younger brother. When Todd was killed in the plane crash, Fisher and Elizabeth just naturally got together. She never really loved him. I happened to be staying at the Dorchester Hotel in London when she was waiting to make
Cleopatra
, and we used to make bad jokes about him. We called him the Bus Boy. He was so boring! But I felt sorry for him too. He was so much in love with her, and she was so rude to him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody as rude as she was to him.

“That was the time she got so desperately ill that she nearly died. She had a tracheotomy, and they put a cork in her throat to plug up the hole in her windpipe. I used to take her champagne, which she wasn’t supposed to have, and we hid it under her hospital bed. One night Fisher and I were leaving her room at the same time and he said, ‘I’m afraid we’re going to lose our girl.’ Little did he know! I asked him if he’d like to have dinner, and the next day she said to me, ‘You won’t believe it, darling, but the Bus Boy thought you were making a pass at him!’ At that moment she played a trick on me and pulled the cork out of her throat, spurting champagne all over the room. [“I thought Truman was going to pass out!” she gleefully recalled. “He turned green and sort of huddled into his sheepskin coat.”]

“I spent several days and evenings with her and Richard Burton. That’s when they used to sit up all night, drinking champagne. Theirs was an affair based entirely on tension. They would have terrific but at the same time sort of affectionate rows. They really riled each other up, and I always felt that they did it on purpose so that they could have a big makeup in bed. She was faithful to him, but he was never faithful to her. He flirted with everything and made dates with waitresses practically in front of her. She put up with an awful lot from him. He was terribly indiscreet. ‘Oh, I’m just getting too old for him,’ she would say. ‘We could be perfectly happy as long as I didn’t mind his running around with all these chicks. But I just can’t take it.’ He was obsessed with money. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with him in which at least half of it was not about money. That was the career he wanted—money, money, money. He married her because he wanted to be a movie star. She loved him, but he didn’t love her.”

Jacqueline Kennedy he also met in the mid-fifties, when she was the wife of a glamorous but still relatively unknown senator from Massachusetts. “I used to have dinner with her and Jack when they had this awful old apartment on Park Avenue, around Eighty-sixth Street. But mostly Jack was out-of-town, and she and I would have dinner or go to the theater by ourselves. We used to sit talking until four or five o’clock in the morning. She was sweet, eager, intelligent, not quite sure of herself and hurt—hurt because she knew that he was banging all these other broads. She never said that, but I knew about it rather vaguely. What I don’t understand is why everybody said the Kennedys were so sexy. I know a lot about cocks—I’ve seen an awful lot of them—and if you put all the Kennedys together, you wouldn’t have one good one. I used to see Jack when I was staying with Loel and Gloria Guinness in Palm Beach. I had a little guest cottage with its own private beach, and he would come down so he could swim in the nude. He had absolutely nuthin’! Bobby was the same way; I don’t know how he had all those children. As for Teddy—forget it.

“I liked Jack, and I liked many things about Bobby. But I wouldn’t have wanted him to be President. He was too vindictive. Teddy is crazy. He’s a menace. He’s a wild Irish drunk who goes into terrible rages. I’d want anybody to be President before him.”

Truman visited the Kennedy White House on several occasions. Andrew was present when he received his first invitation, a telephone call from Jackie asking him to what she promised would be the best party she had given since Jack was inaugurated. “Madame Queen Kennedy was talking, telling him about the evening and the music they would hear,” recalled Andrew, “and suddenly Truman interrupted, ‘But, Jackie! Isn’t that an opera?’ He was just wailing! She had told him that one of the selections would be from
The Magic Flute.
But she quickly assured him that it wouldn’t go on too long and that after everyone else had left, they would go up to the private apartment.”

Jack Kennedy found Truman almost as entertaining as his wife did, occasionally calling him himself. He liked to show off the detective powers of the White House operators, who were famous for their ability to find anyone anywhere; without giving them his unlisted number, he would put them to the test by asking them to ring Truman. They almost always located him, once tracking him down in Palm Springs, where he was visiting a friend who also had an unlisted number.

When their newborn son Patrick Kennedy died, Truman sent the bereaved parents flowers and a seven-line letter of condolence. “I keep thinking what power a great writer has,” Jackie responded. “All the things you write move people. It is a selfish thought—but if all you have written all your life was just training to write those seven lines which were only seen by me—and Jack—I am glad you became a writer.” On the first anniversary of the assassination he gave her a porcelain rose. Obviously touched, she wrote, “Dear Truman, thank you for thinking of me always—in times that are difficult for me with such beautiful things.” He wrote her another letter after the murder of Bobby Kennedy in June, 1968, and she replied: “All the times of insouciance so long ago, when we all first knew each other—and now these numb, numb letters we write—”

They remained friends a year or two more, until he made the mistake of bragging about their intimacy. They were so close, he said, that she invited him into her bedroom while she was dressing to go out for the evening. That indiscretion was repeated to her, and it was enough to cause her to drop him, as she had many other people in her life. When they saw each other afterward, as they inevitably did, they spoke as if nothing untoward had occurred. But they were no longer friends.

“There is some Myth for every man,” said Yeats, “which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all that he did and thought.” Truman’s myth can be expressed not by words but by an image: the young Nina sweeping into the fusty old house on Alabama Avenue, dazzling him with her sleek silk dresses, making him dizzy with her fragrance, then, after a day or two, driving away again, leaving him choking in a cloud of red dust, lonelier and more forlorn than if she had never come at all. To his child’s eyes, she was the embodiment of sophistication, and it did not matter that by the standards of Park Avenue or Lake Shore Drive she was still a country girl, that her clothes were not really smart, or that her perfume was common and inexpensive. She was a symbol of style, and his memories of her visits helped to shape his entire life.