Capote (39 page)

Whatever Truman thought of him, Arch was his father, his nearest blood relation now that his mother was dead. After those initial harsh words, he relented, took Arch to dinner at the Colony, and—like father, like son—bragged about his conquest of Europe, which must have sounded, by the time the dessert cart was wheeled around, only slightly less impressive than the D-Day invasion. Arch believed every word. Like all inventive liars, he appreciated the tales of other inventive liars. “He told me that he had been going out with Princess Margaret and that he had had dinner with Queen Elizabeth,” Arch recalled. “I looked at him and said, ‘You mean to tell me that if I were to go to London today and check in at the Dorchester Hotel, you could call Princess Margaret on the telephone?’ And he looked at me like he thought I was crazy! ‘Hell, I’ll get her from here,’ he said. ‘Do you want to talk to her?’ And he meant it, too!” Truman had in fact been introduced to Princess Margaret, but of course they had not gone out, and the dinner with the Queen had taken place entirely in his imagination.

In the weeks following Nina’s death, Joe walked around in a drunken daze. Trying to revive his spirits, Truman took him to parties and nightclubs, and for several weeks they were rarely seen apart. His efforts were in vain. Undone by all the calamities that had befallen him, Joe acted more and more erratically, running up big bills on Truman’s charge accounts, forging checks in his name, and gambling away the proceeds. “Truman is having a bad time with Joe—who
implies
he’s in bad trouble,” Jack told Gloria. “I think he spends all his money as soon as he gets it, like a boy. Takes some dame to Atlantic City (Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, no less), hires cars, etc. During the week he’s desperate enough to murder, I think.”

The district attorney at last concluded his investigation into Joe’s activities at Taylor, Pinkham, and on December 21 he was indicted on several counts of forgery and grand larceny. On January 5, 1955, a year and a day after Nina’s death, he pleaded guilty, and on March 30 he entered Sing Sing Prison, from which he was released on May 14, 1956.

Truman visited him several times and gave him money while he was there, and still more money after his release. Joe was his father, in his eyes, and he did his duty as a son, and perhaps a bit more. In the late sixties, however, Truman complained about pesky phone calls from Joe’s latest wife, who suffered from paranoid delusions that she was being persecuted by the Mafia and the F.B.I. Joe reacted angrily, and they did not speak again. Joe managed without him, living in near-poverty until his death, at the age of eighty-two, in 1982. “You sometimes have to perform a little lobotomy and cut people out of your mind or they will drag you down,” Truman said by way of explanation. “I cut my father out long ago. He never did anything for me and he was not my responsibility. I finally cut Joe out too. I gave him a lot of money and saw him through two marriages after my mother died. But after a year-and-a-half of this current crazy wife, I said, ‘Enough!’ There have been a lot of people who have tried to take me—and a few have—but I got to the point where if they were found in the East River, with a note tied around their necks saying, ‘Truman Capote did this to me,’ I could say, ‘They were not my responsibility.’”

N
OT
long after Nina’s funeral, Truman turned once again to
House of Flowers
, which now seemed well on its way to Broadway. Harold Arlen, the composer of such popular classics as “Stormy Weather” and “Over the Rainbow,” had been hired in November to write the music and collaborate on the lyrics—Truman confessed to knowing nothing about how a song is put together. They began work immediately, exchanging ideas by mail and transatlantic telephone, and by the time Truman returned to New York, they had finished the title song. There was a setback in February, when Arlen was hospitalized with bleeding ulcers. But even before the intravenous tube had been taken out of his arm, he invited Truman up to his room, where he used a spoon to tap out rhythms on a dinner tray. Only when they started singing the chorus together did the nurses call a halt.

Although they were separated by almost twenty years, the two collaborators formed an affectionate bond. Every day when he visited Arlen in the hospital, Truman automatically went through the letters and telegrams that had accumulated on the dresser since the day before. That was a closer collaboration than Arlen had contemplated, and he took to hiding them under books and drawers. It did no good. Not at all embarrassed, Truman searched them out. “Dads, where are they?” he would demand. Once Arlen put a message of his own in the middle of the pile: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, you little bastard?” The little bastard did not seem to be. Dressed in sneakers and jeans, he was soon making himself equally at home in Arlen’s Park Avenue living room, curling up on the couch next to the piano while Arlen tested his newest tunes. “We used to work three hours every day,” said Arlen. “He used a little pad and I used a large one. I thought he was a fine versifier, but he needed direction as far as songs go. It’s a special art.”

Peter Brook had been Truman’s first choice to direct
The Grass Harp
, and Truman was convinced that if Brook had only agreed, his play would have been a success. Like many others, he still considered Brook the reigning genius of the stage, and he was determined to do whatever was necessary to induce him to direct
House of Flowers.
By June, Arlen was well enough to fly, and together they flew to London, where they outlined the story and sang their songs for that brash young man, who thereupon consented to take on his first Broadway musical.

Truman’s original story came out of a trip he took to Haiti in the winter of 1948. In the absence of other nightlife, he spent many of his evenings sitting on the porches of the whorehouses along the Bizonton Road, buying beer for the girls, who told him the local gossip while they fanned themselves and waited for customers. From those nights emerged one of his finest short stories, “House of Flowers,” the tale of Ottilie, a pretty young prostitute from the hills, who forsakes the bright lights and sophisticated men of Port-au-Prince for true love with a country boy, handsome young Royal. Plagued by Royal’s evil grandmother, a famous caster of spells, Ottilie proves she is not so innocent as she seems and turns the spells back on the old woman, who is so shocked and chagrined that she obligingly drops dead, leaving the lovers to live happily ever after.

That story was the one Truman had dramatized in Portofino. But a play is not completed until opening night, and when he sat down with Saint, Arlen, and finally Brook, it became apparent that what Truman thought was a finished script was only a first draft. “Brook is a very creative force and he’s wonderful at cutting,” he told an interviewer a few months later. “And there was plenty of cutting to be done. I don’t usually tend to overwrite, but in this case I had written a full-length play plus a full-length musical. If we’d kept all of my original script, we’d have been in the theater from eight o’clock until two in the morning.” As the weeks progressed, his plot was revised, his characters were changed, and his script was altered almost beyond recognition.

The romance between the young lovers took second place to a plot line that was not even hinted at in the original story, a rivalry between the madams of two competing brothels. The evil grandmother disappeared altogether, and Ottilie was transformed from a prostitute into a sweet virgin—who just happened to make her home in a whorehouse. Even the house of flowers changed location. In Truman’s story it had been Royal’s house in the hills, which was covered by wisteria; on Broadway it was to be Madame Fleur’s bordello, where Ottilie lived and where each of the girls was named after a flower: Tulip, Gladiola, Pansy, Violet.

Truman once again had demanded a topflight production, and he got one. Pearl Bailey took on the part of Madame Fleur; Juanita Hall, who had played Bloody Mary in
South Pacific
, became Madame Tango, her rival in sin; and Diahann Carroll played Ottilie. The world’s greatest choreographer, George Balanchine, was in charge of a cast of dancers that included Alvin Ailey and Geoffrey Holder. Unpaid, but not unseen, was Arlen’s lady friend Marlene Dietrich, who bought coffee and pastries, helped with costumes—even rubbed Pearl Bailey’s tired feet. On the first day of rehearsals Truman showed up with real blooms for his house of flowers: red roses, which he solemnly distributed to the women in the cast and crew. “Here’s a little rose for you, Pearl, honey,” he said, “and one for you, Juanita, darling….”

Rarely has a show wasted as much talent as did
House of Flowers.
For two days, for example, Balanchine’s dancers watched with respectful awe as the master carefully, lovingly devised what he thought was a new step. “When he was through, it was a mambo!” said Holder, remembering his disappointment. “All he had to do was say ‘mambo’ at the beginning, and we would have jumped!” Confessing that he had accepted the assignment only because he needed the money, Balanchine realized that he was in the wrong place and gracefully withdrew.

Although he was only twenty-nine when he was hired, Brook understood Shakespeare as well as anyone alive. But a Broadway musical, particularly a black musical, was beyond his comprehension. “Tell me, how do you handle them?” was one of his early questions to Lucia Victor, the stage manager.

“Who do you mean by ‘them’?” she asked.

“The blacks,” he answered. “I just don’t know how to handle them.”

Nor did he. He gave no direction, for instance, to Pearl Bailey, who had spent most of her career in nightclubs and who knew that she needed help in this, her first starring role on Broadway. “What am I doing wrong? What is Madame Fleur like?” she kept begging. Brook’s answer was always the same: “What you’re doing is just perfect. Just be yourself.” She made a final appeal to him two days before they finished rehearsals and left for Philadelphia, where they began their out-of-town tryout November 24, 1954. “Peter, I’m desperate, and you haven’t helped me,” she said. “Tell me what I’m doing wrong. If you don’t, I’m not going to make a fool of myself. I’m going to play the only thing I know how to play—and that’s Pearl Bailey. And then your show will be down the drain.”

Brook may have realized what she meant after one of the first performances before an audience. Calling the cast together afterward, he did not waste time trying to charm or cajole. “Before I left London, somebody told me that all you blacks were a lazy, shiftless lot and that it was going to be a lot of trouble working with you,” he said. “If you don’t all snap to it, get it together and start giving it your best, I think you should just all be sent back to the islands, or wherever you came from!” A near-mutiny erupted, and not long after that Simon Legree–like speech, Bailey marched out of the theater, pulling her dignity around her like a great fur coat. “When Pearl walked out, Peter became insanely angry,” said one production assistant. “He took it out on the girls in the chorus and kept them working for seven hours straight. It was that action that led to the Equity rule that there must be an hour-and-a-half break after five hours of rehearsal.”

Pearl demanded—and “not gently,” as Arlen phrased it—that Brook not only leave the theater, but leave Philadelphia as well. She was granted her first wish; stage carpenters were ordered to bar the door to him. She could not evict him from the entire city, however, and he watched performances, suggesting changes to Truman, Arlen, or Herb Ross, the young choreographer who replaced Balanchine. “Peter’s ego was such that he was sure that he knew how to do everything a little bit better than everybody else,” said D. D. Ryan, one of the production’s assistants. “He thought he could draw a little better than Oliver Messel, the set designer; he thought he was a better musician than Harold; and he thought he could certainly fix and edit the flaws in Truman’s script. Truman let him do it, until all that was left was an incomplete puzzle that could never be put back together again.”

Part of Truman’s own ego was a naive but indestructible belief that whoever represented him was the best at what he did, whether he was a doctor, dentist, lawyer, or stage director. He had insisted on Brook, and mountains of evidence could not persuade him that he had been wrong. If an editor had tampered with his prose, he would have smacked his hand. He had no similar confidence in his ability as a playwright, and when Brook, the expert, demanded changes, he meekly acquiesced. While they were in Philadelphia, he scarcely ever left his hotel room, writing most of the night, as he had during the filming of
Beat the Devil
, in order that his new version would be ready for rehearsal the next morning. When he did emerge, said Holder, he was white as paper. A strong producer, a Jed Harris or an Irene Selznick, might have put reins on Brook, mollified Bailey, and protected the playwright. But Saint was not a strong producer, and Brook did what he wanted.

Most of those who saw
House of Flowers
in Philadelphia liked it. But instead of getting better, as shows are supposed to do during their out-of-town trials, it got worse: each change weakened it. “The first act was very good,” said Arlen, “but we didn’t have a second act. We could never make it stronger, no matter how hard we tried.” On December 30, opening night in New York, Arlen and Dietrich sat in the audience. Walter Winchell was four rows in front of them, and at the end of the first act he turned around and indicated his approval. “I hope he doesn’t come back for the second act,” Arlen whispered to Dietrich. Winchell did, and so did the other critics, who, with a few exceptions, praised Arlen’s music and Messel’s sets and panned Truman’s script. “Mr. Capote has run out of inspiration too soon,” said Walter Kerr in the
Herald Tribune.
The reviewer for
Variety
wrote perhaps the most fitting epitaph: “It’s one of those shows in which everything seems to have gone wrong.”

The morning after the opening, Truman, dressed in his habitual sneakers and jeans, showed up at the theater to spread some much-needed cheer. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he complained. “They all got good reviews and I got bad ones, and I’m trying to console everybody.” He never understood what had gone wrong and, then and thereafter, blamed poor Pearl, who, as good as her word, had played Madame Fleur as if she were a nightclub performer. “I begged Saint to fire her,” he said. “If he had, that show would have been one of the most memorable things anybody ever saw on Broadway. But she single-handedly wrecked it with her paranoia, egomania, and insane behavior.”