Capote (65 page)

At the same time, the sexual part of their relationship was becoming increasingly onerous to him. “Physically, Truman did nothing for me, and that’s why, sexually, we weren’t knocking the fireworks off. Plus, many nights he was drunk. It is very hard trying to be affectionate with someone if they’re drunk, excuse themselves to throw up, then come back. How could you kiss someone after that? You can’t. It was just hard, hard for me.” Making it harder still was the ragging he was taking from many of his old friends, who assumed that he was homosexual; even his estranged wife threw the word “fag” at him. “It hurt my feelings a lot, and I was thinking, ‘Jesus, do I look gay? Or am I gay?’” He had never imagined himself in such a predicament. “If a heterosexual who has sex with a man is called homosexual,” he plaintively inquired, “why isn’t a homosexual who has sex with a woman called heterosexual?”

As Rick was having such doubts, Truman was making matters worse by becoming both less generous and more possessive. He began to watch Rick’s expenditures, he kept track of where he spent his time, and he accused him of having a romance with a woman friend. What Rick had feared would happen was happening: he was required to ask every time he needed money, as if he were a sixteen-year-old begging Saturday-night-date money from his father. “I had no identity. There was no way that he was going to let you become your own person because you’d have felt you didn’t need him anymore.”

In the midst of his agonizing, Truman took Rick to California, where he planned to establish Joanne Carson in Hollywood society. He had met Joanne shortly after the publication of
In Cold Blood
, and had been drawn immediately to someone whose childhood had been as lonely as his. She had been born in California. After spending most of her first eleven years in a convent and moving from relative to relative during her teens, she had survived to become a stewardess for Pan American. Following a plot line too corny not to be true, she had met Howard Hughes on a Pacific flight and had been given a contract with his studio, R.K.O. Though she was pretty, with dark hair and a superb figure, she was not a star. Giving up her modest movie career, she had moved to Manhattan and in 1962 had married Johnny Carson, who was then the host of an afternoon TV game show,
Who Do You Trust?

His selection to be host of
The Tonight Show
had dramatically changed her life, as well as his. Suddenly she was the wife of one of the most popular and powerful entertainers in America, with servants, a limousine on call, and, by coincidence, a vast duplex at the U.N. Plaza, several times the size of Truman’s own apartment. Blinded by the spotlight unexpectedly aimed in her direction, she turned around to find Truman, who was always eager to direct the lives of rich and attractive women. “I was a little mouse,” she said. “I didn’t know anything. He went through my closets and told me what to wear and what not to wear. I grew up basking in the sunlight of his approval.”

Prey to anxiety and depression, she was probably more of a challenge than he had anticipated, however. Nor was she helped by Johnny, who had problems of his own, in Truman’s opinion. “Since he lived in my building, he used to call me all the time, and I knew him better than anyone outside of that small circle of people who work with him. People talk about how calm he is. Johnny Carson is consumed by rage! Under that calm surface there are tornadoes! He’s not a heavy drinker, but two glasses are enough to set him off. He can be very mean. There’s not an ounce of kindness in that man.

“But I know where it comes from. He hates his parents, particularly his mother. He comes from a very rigid, authoritarian family in Nebraska. He had to be home at a certain time, and if he was so much as fifteen minutes late, there would be terrible scenes. Once when he was drunk, he told me that his mother would throw herself on the floor and scream, ‘I bore you from these loins, and you do this to me! All that pain and this is what I get in return!’ I met his mother once, and she was an absolute bitch. Despite everything he’s done, she’s never really accepted him, and he constantly wants her approval. I think that that’s what keeps him going.”

Despite her unhappiness, Truman advised Joanne against a divorce, suggesting to her, as he had to Babe Paley, that she look upon her marriage as a lucrative career. When it broke up anyway, he persuaded her to return to her roots in California. A few months before her fortieth birthday, she bought a house on Sunset Boulevard overlooking the UCLA campus, started her own TV talk show, and waited for calls from the friends she had made with Johnny. None came. The people she had seen when she was married to Johnny ignored her the minute their separation was announced, and for two months she sat alone in her new house.

Feeling at least partly responsible, Truman was determined to remedy that. He and Rick moved in with her in early September, and he set up lunches and dinners with his friends in Hollywood’s “Group A,” the entertainment industry’s social elite. Yet try as he might, pushing and shoving, pleading and wheedling, he could not nudge her into Hollywood’s inner circle. To his old friend Carol Marcus, who was now married to Walter Matthau, he confessed that she was not a natural candidate for membership.

“Honey, you’ve got to meet this girl,” he told Carol, as he invited her to lunch with them at the Bistro in Beverly Hills. “You’re going to absolutely hate her. She’s a bore and a pain in the ass, but I feel sorry for her and I like her. So, as a favor to me, please be nice.”

Carol was nice and, for his sake, asked Joanne to a party after he left. But Joanne’s first solo flight ended in a crash. When she arrived, she startled the other guests by announcing that she was sick and needed fresh orange juice. She then anxiously followed Carol, who, dropping her other duties as a hostess, rushed into the kitchen to squeeze oranges. They in turn were followed by Audrey Wilder, the wife of movie director Billy Wilder, who delivered what was to be Group A’s unyielding verdict on Joanne. “You know, you’re a pain in the ass,” she said. “If you’re really sick, you shouldn’t have come.” Barred from the inner circle, Joanne eventually made her own way in Los Angeles, achieving some success as a television interviewer.

Although he never admitted Joanne into his pantheon, Truman liked her and grew dependent on her almost idolatrous devotion. “You have to understand that I would walk through fire for Truman,” she said. She reserved a small room and bath next to her kitchen for him, and he often stayed in it when he was in California, enjoying her pool, which she heated to ninety-two degrees, and her patient mothering.

During his weeks in California Truman also talked with Paramount executives about their newest version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
—it had been filmed twice before—and he was commissioned to write the screenplay for a fee of one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. In its structure, which is an extended flashback, in its brevity, and, most of all, in its elegiac mood,
Gatsby
has much in common with
The Grass Harp
and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, and he approached the assignment with some excitement. “Fitzgerald has charm,” he said. “It’s a silly word, but it’s an exact word for me. I love
The Great Gatsby
and its sad, gay nostalgia.”

But capturing such elusive qualities in a film script proved a more formidable task than he had anticipated. “When I had the parts disassembled, I saw that there are so many things in that book that are so bad. It was like going into the kitchen and finding the garbage strewn all over. I must say that the same thing happened when I adapted
The Turn of the Screw
for
The Innocents.
It is incredible how James fudged that story.” (Ironically, Fitzgerald, who also labored for Hollywood, had similar complaints about adapting the work of other writers. “It’s all beautiful when you read it,” he said, “but when you write it down plain it’s like a week in the nuthouse.”)

In early December he and Rick flew to London so that he could discuss his first draft and make revisions with Jack Clayton, who had directed
The Innocents
and who, at Truman’s suggestion, had been chosen to direct
Gatsby
as well. He finished his scenario a few weeks later, in January, 1972, and, on the whole, was pleased with it, he told Alan Schwartz. But Paramount was not and rejected it, calling it “unacceptable.”

“Well, Truman, this is just like the book,” complained a studio executive.

“I was under the impression we were adapting the book,” Truman answered. Using the excuse that he had missed his deadline by more than a week, the studio refused to pay him the remainder of his fee, which amounted to a little more than one hundred and one thousand dollars. But Truman, who replied that he had been delayed by an attack of the flu, sued and got what was owed him.

It was in London that Rick, concluding that his dreams were not going to be realized, decided that he had had enough of Truman, who, when he was not working on
Gatsby
, spent most of his time in bed, drinking and watching television. One of the few times he left their suite at the Connaught Hotel was to take Rick to dinner at Lee Radziwill’s. But that visit only underlined for Rick his position as a hanger-on. “What a rude bitch!” he exclaimed. “She shook my hand, turned her back, and never looked at me again.”

Rick wanted to go home, and just as Danny had done the year before, he made a plane reservation. Reenacting that by-now-familiar scene, Truman abruptly changed his own plans so that he could join him, and on December 14, a week after they had left New York, they flew back. Unchastened, Truman continued to gulp down vodka over the Atlantic, causing Rick at last to turn to him. “Truman, I just don’t think it’s going to work. Here, I want you to have your keys back because I’m not going to honor our bargain anymore.” With those words, he made a symbolic exit, handing him the keys to the U.N. Plaza apartment as he departed for the lavatory.

Rick soon repented. He had become accustomed to the good life. “You get addicted,” he explained. “It’s murder. It’s habit-forming, like heroin.” But when he called to make up, Truman’s phone did not answer; without saying anything, he had flown off again, to Palm Springs and then to Switzerland. In a panic because his rent was coming due, Rick finally tracked him down in Verbier and dispatched a telegram: “
GET IN TOUCH WITH ME
.” Truman cabled back: “
I SUGGEST YOU GET A JOB
.” Then, in a more mellow mood, Truman wrote a long letter, saying, in essence, that although he cared about him, their relationship had no future. He asked Saint Subber to give him sixteen hundred dollars, money enough to carry him for several months.

Rick returned to the Club 45 to tend bar again, and then, a year later, in 1973, moved to Los Angeles and found a job in a similar establishment, the Pussy Cat Café on Santa Monica Boulevard. Although they kept in close touch, Rick was convinced that his life would have been better if he had turned the other way when he first saw Truman walking along Forty-fifth Street. “Just as quick as the door opened, it closed again,” he said. “And, my God, what a disappointment it was! He promised me the world and gave me a pot of beans.”

Truman had been fond of Rick, but he had not been in love, and the end of their affair did not send him into a spin, as the breakup with Danny had done. “I’m sinking back into my book,” he wrote Alan Schwartz from Verbier, “and every day I feel more removed from the bad vibrations, that incredible syndrome of juvenile nonsense that started some two years ago.” It seemed, for a while anyway, that his encounters with Danny and Rick had stopped his roving eye. “It is totally necessary to develop loneliness if you are going to be a writer, if you are really going to give yourself up to it,” he later proclaimed to an interviewer. “You can’t get around it—you’ve got to be alone.”

H
E
did not sink very deeply into his book, however, and many were starting to wonder, sometimes publicly, whether they would ever see it. When he missed his January 1, 1971, deadline, Twentieth Century-Fox demanded the return of the down payment it had made on film rights, two hundred thousand dollars, and to his chagrin, Truman had to give it back. To the reporters who asked how much he had actually written, he said that he was two-thirds done, which was the same reply he had been giving for several years.

Even he began to talk as though he might never finish. “Of course I basically don’t really want to finish it,” he confessed at last. “It’s just that it’s become a way of life. It’s like suddenly taking some beautiful animal, say, or a child, some lovely child and you just took it out in the yard and shot it in the head. I mean, that’s what it means to me. The moment I give it up it’s just like I took it out in the yard and shot it in the head, because it will never be mine again.”

Whatever his reasons, he was in no hurry. During the months that followed his return from Switzerland, he seemed eager to do nearly anything rather than lock himself away and confront the problems inherent in any long and complicated novel. Drinking less than he had in the two preceding years—in that respect the bad vibrations had indeed receded—he jumped from project to project, job to job, taking on almost any assignment, it seemed, that would keep him away from
Answered Prayers.

His first venture was into journalism. Peter Beard, Lee’s boyfriend—she finally had separated from Stas—and Jann Wenner, the editor of
Rolling Stone
magazine, persuaded him to cover what was expected to be one of the media spectaculars of 1972, the North American tour of the Rolling Stones. Beard was to take the pictures that would illustrate his article, and after it appeared in Wenner’s magazine, their collaboration was to become a book—
The Muses Are Heard
a generation later, with a hard-rock beat. He was in competition with any number of hungry young writers, all itching to become famous by using the journalistic techniques that he had pioneered. But only he and, for a time, the hip novelist Terry Southern, middle-aged men both, were allowed to travel in the Stones’ plane and to observe the private, as well as public, behavior of a group whose appeal rested largely on its reputation for appetitious depravity. He thus had an invitation to do what he did best: to become the fly on the wall that sees all.