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) (139 page)

Tennessee watched the scene of Coward being carried around in the sedan chair, and pronounced it all “so very campy.”

But when Losey demanded rewrites to the script, Tennessee knew he was in no condition to meet these requests. He was too heavily drugged and depressed. Without notifying Losey, Elizabeth, or Burton, he fled from Sardinia in ill health. Chartering a private plane at the nearest airport, he flew with Glavin to Rome. His intention involved an immediate return to New York for a “rejuve-nation” of his drug supply, and for “urgently necessary” additional “treatments” from Dr. Feelgood.

***

As anticipated by some, when
Boom!
opened across America, it played to largely empty seats in movie houses. Universal suffered a loss of $7.1 million.

Hoping to lure the masses, it had advertised
Boom!
as a picture where the public could see the Burtons “
do things you’ve never seen before!”

Burton biographer Michael Munn wrote: “
Boom!
proved that the public would no longer go and see Liz and Dick in just anything, and in effect, it brought to an end their reign as the supreme screen team of the 1960s.”

Critic Judith Crist wrote: “Elizabeth Taylor is 20 years too young and 30 acting ones away from the role. Richard Burton looks more like a bank clerk on a campy holiday, kimono and all, than a poet.”

In contrast,
The Village Voice
asserted, “Burton seems at first entrance utterly miscast as the morbid gigolo masquerading as the Angel of Death, but his final ‘Booming’ exit line caps what turns out to be the most brilliant performance of his career.”

The Hollywood Reporter
defined
Boom!
as “an ordeal in tedium.” Critic Fergus Cashin stated that,
“Boom!
is an extravagant failure, a project weighed down with opulence.”
Time
magazine charged that “
Boom!
displays the self-indulgent recklessness of a couple of rich amateurs hamming it up at a country club frolic, and with approximately the same results.”
Life
magazine assaulted the Burtons citing the “tired, slack quality of their work that is, by now, a form of insult.”

Burton himself had his own critique. “The film script was far too symbolic to attract a wide audience.”

He told Losey, “Instead of Miss Tits and myself, you should have given the roles to Bette Davis and Robert Redford.”

Tennessee delivered his own opinion of
Boom!
, one that would seriously alienate the Burtons
:
“Despite its miscasting, I feel that
Boom!
was an artistic success that eventually will be received with acclaim…It would have been received very differently if Hermione Baddeley, who did the first stage version on Broadway, performed on camera. If not Hermione, then perhaps Angela Lansbury or Sylvia Miles.”

Chapter Forty-Two

Even before he discovered
“a cold-blooded murder case” in a Kansas farmhouse, Truman Capote was thinking seriously about non-fiction. Speaking to the press, he said, “I like the feeling that something is happening beyond and about me, and I can do nothing about it. I like having the truth be the truth so I can’t change it.”

Of course, being the inventive artist he was, he could never stick to so rigid a formula without taking “poetic license,” as he did in his mega-bestseller,
In Cold Blood
.

“I couldn’t sit down any more to write fiction,” he said. “I felt there were chocolates in the next room, and I couldn’t resist them. The chocolates were true life events.”

“There were so many things I knew I could find out about,” he said. “Suddenly, the newspapers all came alive, and I realized that I was in terrible trouble as a fiction writer.”

One Monday morning, a hung-over Truman was reading
The New York Times
. On page 19, almost hidden, was a news story headlined:
WEALTHY FARMER; 3 OF FAMILY SLAIN
.

Holcomb, Kan. Nov 15 (1959)(UPI)—A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife, and two young children were found shot to death in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged. There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut
.

A devout Christian and self-made man, Herbert Clutter employed nearly two dozen farmhands, depending on the season. He had four children —three girls and a boy. His older daughters, Beverly and Eveanna, had gotten married and moved out. Two children remained—Kenyon, 15, and Nancy, 16. Clutter’s wife, Bonnie, was later described as a “basket case,” suffering from clinical depression and various physical ailments.

Truman appeared the next day before William Shawn, the non-fiction editor of
The New Yorker
, and sold him on the idea of his going to Kansas, not to solve the murders, but to write about their effect on the small, remote community where fear prevailed. “Perhaps the murders will never be solved, but remain a lingering mystery to be talked about for years to come,” Truman said.

Shawn liked the idea and gave Truman a green light on the project.

Truman’s knowledge of Kansas was non-existent. “I knew the Deep South and the people who inhabit it,” he told his friend, novelist Harper Lee, when he invited her to travel to Kansas with him. She would later make Truman jealous when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, which had not been published by the time she set out with him for the bleakness of Western Kansas.

Shortly before Christmas in 1959, Truman and Harper, childhood friends and neighbors from their long-ago days in Monroeville, Alabama, boarded a train to Kansas. He carried with him food supplies stuffed into a footlocker. “I understand they eat nothing but cholesterol on the hoof,” he said to Harper.

Their train pulled into Garden City, the seat of Finney County, just as dusk settled over the bleak little town.
[The massacre had occurred in the village of Holcomb, six miles west of Garden City.]
Truman recalled, “If I knew what was awaiting me, I would never have boarded the train. It is unwise for a man like myself to live outside New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles.”

In Garden City, in the foothills of the Great Plains, people were not initially impressed with Truman, viewing Harper and him as aliens just landed from the moon. Likewise, Truman was not impressed with the town. “The locals had never seen the likes of Truman with his high-pitched, squeaky voice, and his precise manners,” Harper said. “Whenever he spoke to someone on the phone, he was often mistaken for a woman.”

“When Harper and I arrived in Garden City, the natives were not dancing in the street to celebrate our arrival,” Truman said. “My initial impression was that Garden City was something you flew over en route to California.”

[Garden City, north of the Arkansas River, in the grain belt of Western Kansas, lay 65 miles from the Colorado state line. Some forty-six miles to the east was Dodge City, home of Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp, who buried many an outlaw on Boot Hill. Founded in 1878, Garden City, with its large zoo, blossomed during the land rush that began in 1885, as horses, wagons, teams of oxen, and buggies navigated their way through the town’s then-unpaved streets
.

Traditionally, famous visitors to Garden City stayed at the Windsor Hotel. Dating from 1887 it called itself “the Waldorf of the Prairies,” because of its luxury. Through its lobby had walked everyone from Lillian Russell to Buffalo Bill Cody. They had each been aboard the Santa Fe Railroad that passed through as part of its run between Chicago and Los Angeles
.

Truman and Harper stayed at the Warren Hotel.]

After only a day, Truman concluded that Garden City was filled with “Sunday go-to-meetin’ Christian zealots and right-wing Republicans of the neo-Nazi bent.”

He encountered a town gripped with fear, the locals raiding the local hardware store for locks and bolts for their doors. Porch lights were kept on at night. Someone in the sheriff’s department told Truman that if the killer were a local, and if he were still at large, Truman’s own life, because of his investigation, might be in jeopardy at the hands of some psychopaths. “I know I’m putting my life on the line,” he responded.