Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (141 page)

As time went by, Smith and Truman sometimes engaged in what was called “a lovers’ quarrel.” Smith would get angry at him, at one time accusing him of paying undue attention to Hickock. He’d call Truman either “Miss Piss Pot” or “Little Bastard.”

Smith supplied him with details of how the murders were committed. “Clutter was tied up on the cold basement floor. I lifted him up and placed him on a mattress so he’d be more comfortable when I slit his throat. I thought he was a nice gentleman.”

At one point, Smith said he didn’t want to make Truman jealous, so he would not provide complete details about his relationship with Hickock. He did admit to having made nude drawings of Hickock, and Truman noticed that Hickock called Smith “honey.”

Smith admitted that when he’d served in the Merchant Marines, many of his fellow servicemen had invited him to “roll over” at night.

He also shared his dreams with Truman. “I want to bill myself as Perry O’Parsons and sing and play my guitar in a cabaret.”

Truman was surprised that Hickock had an amazing memory. He supplied so many minute details that it greatly helped Truman to enrich
In Cold Blood
.

Hickock later said, “If I had known Truman was a cocksucker in the beginning, I would have availed myself of his talent during our long interviews.”

After extensive prison chats with both men, Truman boarded the train back to New York, having accumulated hundreds of pages of notes. As he told Harper Lee, “I think I have all of my book now, except for the final chapter—and that centers around the fate of both Dick and Perry. Of course, I already know their fate…I just need for the hangman to come for them.”

In time, Truman became Smith and Hickock’s only link to the free world. He recalled sitting for hours talking with them in their twilight existence, illuminated only by the eerie glow from a low-watt amber-colored lightbulb.

Truman was less intimate with Hickock, but yet was his only friend. When not visiting them in prison, Truman exchanged endless letters with both of them, and sent them magazines and books.

Denied exercise by the prison guards, both men began to age prematurely. They developed excruciating physical pain, especially Smith in his legs. Not that it mattered at this desperate point in his life, but Hickock became obsessed with his increasing baldness. “I’m ugly enough already without a bald head. When I get out of here, how am I going to attract any hot pussy with a bald head?”

During their final years, both Smith and Hickock began to feel that Truman, with all his powerful connections, would get them out of jail based on appeals to higher courts. In front of them, Truman had played up his long-standing friendship with John F. Kennedy.

“My god,” Hickock said to Smith, “Truman is a good buddy of the President of the United States. If all else fails, Kennedy will pardon us. He has that right.”

Of course, when they heard of Kennedy’s assassination, they were bitterly disappointed.

Hickock wrote Truman of the “long, cold days and the desperate nights waiting to be hanged. I doubt if hell will have me. I’m feeling lower than whale manure.”

On the fourth anniversary of his incarceration, Hickock wrote, “It feels more like forty years instead of four.”

Before Kennedy’s death, Smith had held out the hope that he would be freed and could come and live in New York with Truman “as your husband. You can introduce me to all your movie star friends like Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn.”

As early as 1962, in a letter to Bennett Cerf at Random House, Truman made it clear that he already knew that appeals of the killers’ death sentences would hopelessly work their way through the State and Federal courts, with perhaps a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. “It’s no use, and both you and I know that, but I don’t dare tell Dick and Perry that. They have too much hope.”

The progression of events went as Truman had predicted. The last decision came down on January 18, 1965, when the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the appeal. “It is now certain that Dick and Perry will face the hangman,” Truman wrote to Cerf from Verbier, Switzerland. “I’m very sad about it.”

When he heard the news, Smith wrote to Truman, inviting him to “our necktie party.”

To write
In Cold Blood
, Truman and his lover, Jack Dunphy, had escaped to their little condo in Verbier in the Swiss Alps. “Every page I write is painful,” Truman confessed in letters to friends. “The material leaves me increasingly limp and numb—horrified, really.”

Eventually, he perceived that Hickock had become relatively stoic about his upcoming death, handling it with relative resignation. In contrast, Smith began a hunger strike, eventually losing forty pounds. He’d told Truman, “Dick can wait for the rope, but I’m going to beat it.”

The court had scheduled Smith and Hickock for the hangman’s noose on April 14, 1965. They both wanted Truman to travel to Kansas for their final hours.

Truman’s own life had come to something akin to an impasse. Months after months had dragged by, and he knew he couldn’t write or publish the final chapter of
In Cold Blood
until both men had been hanged. In a final letter to Truman, Smith had written: “The date has been set for Dick and me to drop through the trap door.”

Truman poured out his frustrations in a letter to Cecil Beaton. “I’m finishing the last pages of my book—I must be rid of it, regardless of what happens. I hardly give a fuck anymore
what
happens. My sanity is at stake—and that is no mere idle phrase. Oh, the hell with it. I shouldn’t write such gloomy crap—even to someone as close to me as you.”

Truman arrived in Kansas, but waited until the final hour to say farewell to Smith and Hickock. He spent two days vomiting and convulsing in a hotel before visiting them. “And yet,” he said, “for the entire time I was throwing up and crying and carrying on, in another part of my mind, I was sitting and quite coolly writing the story.”

He later admitted that he had great difficulty writing his “nonfiction novel’s” final seven pages. He developed hand paralysis. “I finally used a typewriter—very awkward, as I had always written in longhand.”

Hickock and Smith had been escorted under guard to a warehouse within the prison compound. Truman recalled his final moment with them as “the most devastating of my life.”

“I first saw them in the holding room, where they were served their last meal—which needless to say, they didn’t eat. They were strapped into these leather harnesses. I had to hold up cigarettes for them to smoke. They were trembling violently, not from fear but from being terribly nervous.”

“Perry handed me a 100-page farewell letter. Dick kept talking right up to the end about his mother—he felt very sad about her—and some old girlfriends. Up to the end, he kept making jokes. Both of them had an extraordinary phosphorescence, so that they were practically glowing in the dark.”

“Dick was the first to be summoned to his death,” Truman said. “I looked into his desperate eyes, knowing that there was nothing I could do. In a soft voice, he said, ‘I’m being sent to a better world than this ever was.’ He kissed me goodbye before he was taken away by two guards. The kiss lingered on my lips. It was the kiss of death.”

The farewell to Smith was especially painful for Truman.

Before his own departure, Smith said, “Maybe I had something to contribute, something.” Then his voice wandered off. “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did, even inappropriate. But I do apologize.”

“He kissed me, a long, lingering kiss,” Truman said. Then he said his final two words, but his eyes said so much more.”

“Adios, amigo.”

And then he was gone,” Truman said. “I cried for two and a half days afterward. I couldn’t stop. It was convulsive.”

It was Jack Dunphy who led Truman off Death Row. “Stop crying!” he shouted at Truman. “They’re dead! You’re alive!”

James M. Fox, Truman’s editor at Random House, recalled, “I sat next to Truman on the plane ride back to new York. He held my hand and cried all the way. I remembered thinking how odd it must have seemed to passengers sitting nearby—those two grown men apparently holding hands and one of them sobbing. It was a long trip.”

—Truman Capote

In April of 1965, Truman wrote to Cecil Beaton in Brooklyn. “Perry and Dick were executed. I was there because they wanted me to be. It was a terrible experience. Something I will never really get over.”

In Cold Blood
was first published in an unusual four-part serial in
The New Yorker
beginning on September 25, 1965. Random House released it in book form in January of 1966.

Most of the reviews were favorable, Conrad Knickerbocker defining it as a masterpiece in
The New York Times Book Review
. “It is agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy.”

Writing in the
New York Herald Tribune
, Maurice Dolbier claimed: “Capote has recorded this American tragedy in such depth and detail that one might imagine he had been given access to the book of the Recording Angel.”

The celebrated social commentator and critic, Rebecca West, called Truman “an ant of genius who has crawled over the Kansas landscape in pursuit of his story.”

Stanley Kauffman attacked the book in
The New Republic:
“It is ridiculous in judgment and debasing of all of us to call this book literature. Are we so bankrupt, so avid for novelty, that merely because he is a famous writer who produced an amplified magazine crime-feature, the result is automatically elevated to serious literature, just as Andy Warhol, by painting a soup-carton, has allegedly elevated it to art?”

Around the same time, Truman had defined Kauffman as a blood enemy after
The New York Times
published an article he had written entitled, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.”

Truman bristled at Kauffmann’s analysis, interpreting it as an attack on homosexuals by questioning the ability of a gay playwright to create authentic heterosexual characters. In the ensuing decades, the article has occasionally been singled out as an illustration of the intolerance prevalent at the time. Kauffman was soon after replaced at
The New York Times
by the far more tolerant Walter Kerr.

A media blitz followed the publication of
In Cold Blood
. Truman appeared frequently on television, giving interviews, and he was featured on the covers of such magazines as
Newsweek
.

Naturally, there was a stampede to acquire the movie rights, which were being handled by the well-known agent, Irving (Swifty) Lazar.

At “21” in New York, Otto Preminger got into a fight with Lazar. The temperamental director accused the agent of reneging on a commitment to sell him the movie rights as a starring vehicle for Frank Sinatra, who had expressed an interest in playing Perry Smith.

The argument turned violent, and Lazar smashed a water glass against Preminger’s bald head, seriously injuring him. Newspapers dubbed it “
L’Affaire 21,”
after Preminger was rushed to the hospital, where he received more than fifty stitches.

In Cold Blood
made Truman more famous than he ever was, and it also brought him riches. But to many of his friends, it was the beginning of the end of him, and he began to descend into despair, soaked in booze and devoured by drugs.

“No one will ever know what
In Cold Blood
took out of me,” he announced. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it
did
kill me. I just can’t forget it, particularly the hangings at the end.
HORRIBLE!”

Truman claimed that
In Cold Blood
was “100 percent true,” and that was 100 percent wrong. There are many distortions, exaggerations, and inaccurate quotes. An investigative article in
Esquire
outlined the various exaggerations or distortions, and they were anthologized in Irving Malin’s
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook
(1968).

True crime writer Jack Olsen commented on fabrications that sleuths had discovered. “I recognized it as a work of art, but I know fakery when I see it,” Olsen said. “Capote completely fabricated quotes and whole scenes. The book made something like six million dollars in 1960s money, and nobody wanted to discuss anything wrong with a moneymaker like that in the publishing business.”

When Truman read Olsen’s criticisms in
Esquire
, he claimed. “Jack Olsen is just jealous.” Harper & Row had assigned Olsen the Clutter case as core material for a book, until it was discovered that Truman and Harper Lee had already been investigating it for six months.

Other critics immediately charged that Truman had changed the facts to suit the story, adding scenes that had never occurred, and re-creating dialogue that was not authentic.