Capote (70 page)

Truman wanted Bill to be aware that he was being ridiculed; otherwise the Sidney Dillon anecdote would have had no purpose. But so confused and contradictory were his thoughts, he also tried to convince himself that neither Bill nor some of the others he had made fun of would recognize themselves. One day in July he took a friend for a swim in Gloria Vanderbilt’s pool in Southampton—Gloria and Wyatt were away in Europe—and after the friend had read his manuscript, Truman identified, one by one, the models for his characters. “But Truman, they’re not going to like this,” protested the friend. Floating on his back and looking up at a sky of cloudless serenity, Truman lazily responded, “Nah, they’re too dumb. They won’t know who they are.”

But they did know, and when “La Côte Basque” reached the stands in mid-October, their wrath shook the ground beneath his feet. The first tremors were felt on October 10, even before it appeared. Learning of her own leading role—someone had smuggled her an advance copy of the November
Esquire
—Ann Woodward swallowed a fatal dose of Seconal, the same drug that had killed Nina Capote. Ann had been deeply depressed anyway, and “La Côte Basque” may only have been the catalyst that hastened the inevitable. What had bothered Ann most, a weary Elsie Woodward told a friend, was not Truman’s dredging up of the sordid past, but his suggestion that her marriage to poor Bill had been bigamous. Few regretted Ann’s death, in any event; the general feeling was that justice had been served at last. But many were angered by the embarrassment Truman had caused that beloved icon, ninety-two-year-old Elsie, who had spent twenty years trying to make everyone forget the scandal. Now, in a few paragraphs, he had destroyed all her hard work.

When “La Côte Basque” was available to everyone a week later, the earthquake itself struck, sending shock waves from New York to California, where Truman was beginning rehearsals for his movie. The reaction was most succinctly summed up by a cartoon on the cover of
New York
magazine: a French poodle—Truman, complete with glasses—disrupting a formal party with his sharp and rapacious teeth. “Capote Bites the Hands That Fed Him,” read the magazine’s headline, which expressed the shocked and outraged feelings of most of his society friends: their favorite household pet, their
ami de la maison
, had turned against them.

Within hours, phones were ringing all over the East Side of Manhattan. One of the first callers was Babe, who asked Slim to identify Sidney Dillon. “Who is that?” Babe inquired suspiciously. “You don’t think that it’s Bill, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” answered Slim, who knew very well who Dillon was meant to be—Truman had told her months before. But Babe found out anyway, and instead of accusing Bill of infidelity, she blamed Truman for putting such a distasteful tale into print. Although Truman had studied her with the rapt attention of a lover, he had failed to understand perhaps the most important component of Babe’s character: her loyalty to her family. Brought up to honor the stern Roman virtues of Old Boston, she had different values from many of her fashionable friends, including Slim. She believed, as Peg O’Shea did, that whether or not he had strayed, or whether or not he had humiliated her, a wife’s duty was to stand beside her husband. She was now standing beside Bill. In attacking him, Truman had also attacked her family and the code by which she lived, and she could not forgive him.

Nor could Slim. “You’re in it, Big Mama,” he had warned her; but expecting no more than a walk-on part, Slim was totally unprepared to encounter herself as the gabby Lady Coolbirth. “When you read it, there’s my voice, my armature, my everything!” she exploded. “She looks like me, she talks like me, she’s me! A mirror image of me! I was absolutely undone when I read it, staggered that he could be sitting across from me at a table and then go home and write down everything I had said. I had adored him, and I was so appalled by the use of friendship and my own bad judgment.”

Others were equally chagrined. “Never have you heard such gnashing of teeth, such cries for revenge, such shouts of betrayal and screams of outrage,” reported Liz Smith, who wrote the article that accompanied the
New York
cartoon. One cry came from the Logans, who were enraged by his witty gibe about their parties; “that dirty little toad is never coming to my parties again,” declared Nedda. Another came from Gloria Vanderbilt, who vowed that if she ever saw him again, she would spit at him. “After all,” explained her husband Wyatt, “they’ve known each other a long time. It’s not that a secret has been betrayed, it’s that a kind of trust has been betrayed.”

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer,” Somerset Maugham had said, and in the end Truman had elected to be the latter. He had broken the rules of the club, and he had to be punished. Just as it once had been the fashion to take him up, now it became the fashion to put him down, “the chic of the week,” as Charlotte Curtis phrased it. Those who were not hurt by “La Côte Basque” were often as angry as those who were. Marella Agnelli, who more than once had begged him to be her guest on one Mediterranean cruise or another, could not even bring herself to mention his first name. “Capote despises the people he talks about,” she complained. “Using, using all the time. He builds up his friends privately and knocks them down publicly.” Overnight, doors slammed in his face, and except for a few hardy loyalists like Kay Meehan and C. Z. Guest, who had not been made fun of, his society friends refused even to speak to him. Not since Franklin Roosevelt came to power had the rich felt themselves so misused by someone they had considered one of their own. Truman had been accepted, pampered and allowed into the inner recesses of their private lives; in return, he had mocked them and broadcast their secrets. He was, in their opinion, a cad and a traitor.

“In society a great friendship does not amount to much” was Proust’s cynical observation, and so it seemed to be, as even Cecil, who was eagerly following events from England, rushed to join the pack of Truman-haters. Forgotten were the unblemished days he and Truman had enjoyed together in Tangier, Portofino and Palamós; disregarded the many words of sticky adulation Cecil had scribbled about him in his diary; banished from mind the time Truman had rescued him from the two sailors in Honolulu. After having dedicated most of his life to protecting his place in the front ranks of fashion, Cecil did not want to be left behind now.

Actually, Cecil, whose chief defect was not snobbery, as many assumed, but a consuming envy, had secretly turned against Truman a decade earlier, after the success of
In Cold Blood.
“The triumph of Truman is salt in one’s wound,” he had bitterly noted in his diary at the end of 1965. The further triumph of the Black and White Ball had inflamed him still more. For ten years he had waited for the weather to change. To Cecil’s envious ears, the howls of indignation he now heard from the other side of the Atlantic were as soothing as a lullaby—Truman’s most venomous enemy could not have taken more delight in his downfall. “I hate the idea of Truman,” he happily confessed to one correspondent. “How low can he sink?” Even Truman’s erstwhile best friend had pronounced his name anathema: there could have been no clearer confirmation that he had been expelled from Olympus.

Naïveté may be a necessary armor for writers who, like Truman, closely pattern their fiction on real people and real incidents. How, after all, could they ever write anything if they could foresee what their words would cost them? Only such protective ingenuousness could explain how Thomas Wolfe, for example, could have imagined that his family and friends would not have been wounded by
Look Homeward
,
Angel.
Only such deliberate blindness could account for Proust’s surprise when some of his titled friends were offended by their portraits in
Remembrance of Things Past.
And only such obstinate self-deception could explain the astonishment and dismay with which Truman now watched the reversal in his fortunes that followed “La Côte Basque.”

He had of course hoped to raise the blood pressure of people like the Logans and to cause momentary annoyance to a few more, like Bill Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt. What he had not anticipated was the disaster, complete and absolute, that had now befallen him. Forced to remain in California while he was making his movie, he kept in touch with events from afar. “He was the most surprised and shocked person you can imagine,” recalled Liz Smith, “and he would call to ask me—torment me—about what people in New York had said about him. After ‘La Côte Basque’ he was never happy again.” Joanne Carson watched helplessly as he rambled around her house in a near-daze, repeating over and over, “But they know I’m a writer. I don’t understand it.”

He telephoned Slim to make up. When she refused to take his call, he persuaded John to phone her. Although Lady Coolbirth may have borne a superficial resemblance to her, John was instructed to say, she was really supposed to represent Slim’s old enemy Pamela Hayward, the new Mrs. W. Averell Harriman. “Truman’s very upset by your reaction,” John said. “He thought it would make you laugh.”

“I didn’t,” retorted Slim, who, quite the contrary, had consulted her lawyer about suing him.

“Don’t you think it’s well written?” John asked.

“No. It’s junk,” said the implacable Slim, who at that point detected breathing on the other end and hung up, realizing that Truman was listening in on an extension phone. Truman persisted nonetheless, and at the end of the year he sent her a cable in Australia, where she was vacationing. “Merry Christmas, Big Mama,” he said. “I’ve decided to forgive you. Love, Truman.”

Bracing himself for more harsh words, Truman also phoned Bill, who did take his call, blandly pretending that nothing untoward had taken place since they had last talked. “I have other ways of torturing the little shit,” he later told a friend. Truman asked if he had read his
Esquire
story, and Bill said, “I started, Truman, but I fell asleep. Then a terrible thing happened: the magazine was thrown away.” When Truman, with pathetic eagerness, offered to send him another copy, Bill politely declined. “Don’t bother, Truman. I’m preoccupied right now. My wife is very ill.” My wife! Not Barbara, not Babe, but my wife! As if Truman had hardly known her, had not spent some of the most enchanted hours of his life with her, had not been entrusted with secrets she confided to no one else, including her husband. To be dismissed as a stranger: that was torture indeed.

To Babe herself, Truman wrote two long letters. She did not reply, but in early 1976 chance brought them together in Quo Vadis, a then-fashionable restaurant on East Sixty-third Street—though ill, she was occasionally still able to go out. He introduced her to his luncheon companions, and like Bill, she was polite but distant, as if he were someone she knew only slightly. Eventually Jack, without prompting, also approached her, phoning her one Saturday afternoon at Kiluna Farm. Forgive him, Jack asked her. “Never! Never! Definitely not!” she declared.

“Babe, what Truman said in that piece is none of your business. Or his business either,” replied Jack, in that stern voice Truman himself had so often heard. “He is an artist, and you can’t control artists.”

“Oh, Jack…,” she began, and seemed about to say more; then, after a second’s hesitation, she concluded, “Let me talk it over with Bill.” Jack knew then that he had lost the argument. He did not make similar entreaties to Slim, which was probably just as well for both of them. “If I ever met Slim on the street, I’d kick her,” he promised. “I’d say, ‘Jesus Christ, Slim, as nice as that boy was to you!’ When Truman and I were living in Spain, Leland Hayward left her. She was in trouble, wandering around, and we took her in.”

As consumed with anger as they might have been toward a lover who had deceived them, Babe and Slim were not prepared to make peace. Nothing Truman did, whether it was to write eloquent letters or to send amusing telegrams, could change their minds. All the devices that had worked so well for him in the past were now of no avail. “Babe always spoke of Truman with total loathing, as this snake who had betrayed her,” said their mutual friend John Richardson. “Have you heard what Truman’s done now?” she would ask her friends, professing to be horrified by each new comment she saw quoted or each new escapade she heard about. When her sister Minnie’s husband, Jim Fosburgh, who had once painted Truman’s portrait, broke ranks to lunch with him, Babe called to upbraid him that very afternoon. How could he, her own brother-in-law, have been so disloyal? she demanded. Yet carefully hidden beneath her fury lay a great disappointment: like Truman, she too had lost perhaps her best friend. Harper Lee glimpsed that disappointment the few times they met in the ensuing months: seeing her, Babe was reminded of Truman and automatically burst into tears.

For her part, Slim could not stop herself from chewing endlessly on the wrong that had been done her. “If ever there was a woman who was beside herself, it was Slim,” said one friend. And it was literally true. When she discussed him, Slim became so agitated that she could not remain seated for more than a moment, moving restlessly from couch to chair, chair to couch. “After ‘La Côte Basque’ I looked on Truman as a friend who had died,” she said, “and we never spoke again. I took the cleaver and chopped him out of my life. And that was it.”

In public Truman regretted the loss of Babe, and Slim too, but claimed to be otherwise unaffected by the commotion he had created. Like Jack, he lectured rather loftily on his mission as an artist. “The artist is a dangerous person because he’s out of control,” he said. “He’s controlled only by his art.” Defiantly saying that he had done nothing that Proust had not done before him, he tried to wrap his work in the mantle of literature. “Oh, honey! It’s Proust! It’s beautiful!” he exclaimed to Diana Vreeland.

In a more practical vein, he noted what probably would have been evident all along, if he had not, in Slim’s rueful words, been “so wily, so clever and so bright” that even the most suspicious dropped their guard. “All a writer has for material is what he knows,” he said. “At least, that’s all I’ve got—what I know.” But sometimes in private, late at night and when he had been drinking, he would break into tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” he would cry. “I didn’t know the story would cause such a fuss.”