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) (153 page)

Tennessee cut short his trip and flew back to New York, ending his decades-long wandering on the Continent, specifically to his favorite country, Italy, and his favorite island, Sicily, home of Frank’s ancestors.

In Manhattan, he checked into his final hotel stop at the Élysée. He passed his first evening in the Monkey Bar, where on some long ago night, he’d entertained Joan Crawford. She had appeared in a dress with large flowery prints, looking as if she’d just emerged from the set of
Mildred Pierce
.

The hotel had long been a hangout for artists and writers, including such old friends as Marlon Brando and Ava Gardner. He occupied the suite once rented to Tallulah Bankhead, who told him that John Barrymore had fucked her in the bed in which he now slept.

John Uecker moved back in with him, although reportedly he found Tennessee locked in his own world.

On the night of February 24, 1983, he retired to his bedroom after ordering a bottle of Bordeaux from room service. On his nightstand was an array of pills, including his favorite, special lavender capsules, which Truman Capote had long ago endorsed for him.

It was a night of drug ingestion, including doses of cocaine, consumed with wine.

When a maid entered his room the next morning, she found him dead. An autopsy was performed, and the examiner announced that the cap to a plastic container of barbiturates had lodged in his throat, choking him to death. According to the report, he had used it as a spoon to swallow two capsules loaded with Seconal. Apparently, he’d accidentally swallowed the cap.

The suggestion was that he had been so heavily drugged that his gag reflex had been suppressed.

Later, forensic detectives claimed that Tennessee had died of a drug overdose, not from choking. The autopsy report was later amended, stating that Tennessee died of acute Seconal intolerance. A friend, Scott Kenan, charged that “someone in the coroner’s office invented the bottle cap scenario.”

Dakin Williams flew to New York to claim the body. Contrary to his famous brother’s wishes, Dakin arranged for the body to be shipped back to his native St. Louis, where Tennessee was interred in Calvary Cemetery, where his grave is visited today by tourists.

He had requested that he be buried at sea at approximately the same place where Hart Crane had committed suicide.

[On April 27, 1932, the American poet, Hart Crane, was sailing aboard the steamship
Orizaba
en route from Mexico to New York. He had been beaten after making sexual advances toward a male crew member. Just before noon, he jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. After his beating, he had been drinking heavily. He left no suicide note, but witnesses claim that his last words were, “Goodbye, everybody!” before throwing himself overboard. His body was never recovered from the shark-infested waters.]

In the wake of Tennessee’s death, various conspiracy theories have risen, some claiming that he was murdered, perhaps smothered to death under a pillow. Dakin himself was the first to promulgate such a charge, but no motive for murder was ever cited. Nor was any actual murderer ever fingered.

Hours after his death, Maria St. Just called Marlon Brando in Los Angeles. Brando told her, “By the time of Tennessee’s death, he had been so close to it so many times psychologically, emotionally, and physically, it was probably just a shave-and-a-haircut to him. I always felt that Tennessee and I were compatriots. He told the truth as best as he perceived it, and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him. We are all diminished by his death.”

After all his trials and tribulations, Tennessee, in a sense, wrote his own epitaph:

“I’ve had a wonderful and terrible life, and I wouldn’t cry for myself. Would you?”

“Happiness leaves such slender records. It is the dark days that are so voluminously documented.”

In September of 1980, Truman was in Los Angeles at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, concluding negotiations for the film adaptation of his
Handcarved Coffins
.

[
Handcarved Coffins was a well-written novella-length thriller about a series of bizarre murders that had taken place in Nebraska. It was subtitled “Nonfiction Account of an American Crime”. For $300,000, he’d sold the film rights to Lester Persky who had produced such cinematic hits as Taxi Driver.]

Truman’s traveling companion at the time was Rick Brown, a hillbilly from West Virginia whom Truman had met when he tended bar at a rough sailors’ joint on Manhattan’s West 45th Street near Broadway.

In Truman’s upscale hotel suite, in the aftermath of a particularly excessive binge, Brown returned after an adventure of his own and found Truman lying nude in bed, steeped in his own waste.

Cocaine, which Truman praised for its “subtlety,” remained his favorite drug. He carried his pills around in a purse from Tiffany’s. They came in a rainbow of colors, but he preferred the lavender hue of Lotusate, a powerful sedative.

To friends, he announced, “Death comes in threes—first Marilyn, then Monty. Next: Yours truly.”

His health continued to deteriorate at an alarming rate. In August of 1981, he suffered a convulsive seizure and was rushed to Southampton Hospital on Long Island.

Back in Manhattan, on September 15, he was rushed to yet another hospital, generating a headline on the front page of the
New York Post
. A photographer snapped a picture of him strapped to a stretcher. Out of the hospital after a week, he resumed his heavy drinking.

Truman accurately predicted, “I will never live to celebrate my sixtieth birthday. I even know the city in which I will die—Los Angeles, not New York. Los Angeles is where all the locusts go to die.”

As Truman neared the end, his longtime companion, Jack Dunphy, virtually deserted him. “He’s dying right before my eyes. I don’t plan to die with him. Even if I wanted to visit him, it would be in a hospital room. I get ill just going into a hospital.”

His own doctor, Bertram Newman, told Dunphy, “Your friend is putting a gun to his mouth. I don’t know when he’s going to pull the trigger.”

To all his critics, to all those who wanted to help him, Truman said, “It’s my life, to live as I wish—or to die as I wish.”

On July 1, 1983, he was arrested on a DWI in Bridgehampton on Long Island. He spent a night in the Southampton Town Jail, where he made the outrageous claim, “The inmates lined up to rape me. The same thing happened to Valentino when he was arrested.”

The judge fined him $500 and sentenced him to a three-year probation.

In December of 1983. at a party for Liza Minnelli, he was virtually ignored. In the old days, he would have been surrounded by voyeurs who savored and thrilled to each outrageous tale after another.

He mourned the loss of “my armada of swans.” Many of them, including Babe Paley, had died of cancer.

“Cecil Beaton is gone, even Tennessee,” Truman said. “Tenn forgave me. Regrettably, Gore Vidal is still taking up space on this earth.”

“My God, they’ve even closed Studio 54, where Andy Warhol and I spent so many wicked nights.”

“I stayed up to watch 1984 come in, knowing it would be my last year on this dreadful cesspool called Earth. It began badly with two falls, both of which caused concussions, each rendering me almost incoherent for days.”

He had begun to hallucinate—in fact, medical scans revealed that his brain mass had perceptibly shrunk.

During his final days, Truman flew to Los Angeles to stay with his most steadfast and loyal friend, Joanne Carson, former wife of Johnny Carson. She and the TV talk show host had lived in elegant apartments at the United Nations Plaza, where Truman maintained a residence. Unlike his artful swans of yesterday, Joanne was more like a “lovely, lonely little wren,” in Truman’s words.

Before winging his way west, Truman had been rushed to Southampton Hospital. Doctors there had found him near death and put him in an oxygen tent.

Jack Dunphy was constantly nagging him to give up “booze and pills.” When Truman got to Los Angeles, he told Joanne, “The time has come to say my farewell to Jack Dunphy.”

In the twilight of his life, even though late at night he envisioned scene after scene spinning through his head,
Answered Prayers
was abandoned, albeit privately, without fanfare in the press or to any of his few remaining friends.

The morning of August 25, 1984, dawned bright and sunny over Los Angeles, City of Unfulfilled Dreams, with apartment after apartment inhabited by wannabee stars hoping to become a celebrity like Truman or, even better, like Marilyn Monroe or Paul Newman.

Joanne went to check on Truman, but he told her he wanted to rest some more, since he wasn’t feeling well.

He begged her to stay with him. Until around noon, he talked incessantly, going over all the traumas of his life, some of them dating back to his childhood in Alabama.

Then he lay back on the pillow. Having told Joanne “the story of my life,” he fell into a deep sleep.

His final words to her were, “Let me go, dear one.”

He didn’t want her to call paramedics, but she did. When they arrived, they pronounced him dead at 12:21pm.

Outside, the impossible traffic of Los Angeles moved on, but at a snail’s pace.

Had he lived until late September of that year, Truman would have been sixty years old. The body of the dead author was cremated.

Over the coming years, Truman’s ashes were stolen twice but recovered. Eventually, they were mixed with those of Jack Dunphy, who remained living until 1992. Their collective ashes were scattered to the winds at Crooked Pond, near his beloved home at Sagaponack on Long Island. The site is commemorated with a plaque affixed to a rock near the spot where their ashes, as they were tossed into the pond, were blown away by a terrific wind that descended unexpectedly from the north.

George Plimpton, editor of
The Paris Review
, wrote a kind of epitaph to Truman:

“He had the opportunity to observe first hand the crumbling-away, the loss ofmorale and sense of consequence, the desperate and defiant secret lives, the hyperactive despair and ruinous lack of self-discipline of the monied class of our time: of being highly observant and intelligent witnesses to the decline of the West itself, spies in the house of Trimalchio.”

“I’m having one final drink of whiskey in the departure lounge of life. The plane to oblivion is about to fly away, destination unknown.”

At the beginning of 1962, Howard Austen, Gore Vidal’s longtime companion, checked into Memorial Hospital (now known as Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital) in Manhattan. A large growth had formed in his throat and was thought to be cancer of the thyroid.

Ironically, during his first visit to see his friend after his operation, Gore ran into Tennessee Williams in the hospital’s corridor. The playwright was also visiting his longtime lover, Frank Merlo, who had lung cancer. Gore later claimed that Tennessee had proclaimed, “The bells will soon be tolling for me as well as for Frankie.”