MIRIAM, that evil little girl, opened doors for him all over New York, and Truman, like many before, and many after, discovered that once one is inside the circle, the big city is a small town and that the most significant difference between Manhattan and Monroeville is that one is in the North, the other in the South. The recognition he had wanted so desperately the year before now came his way easily, casually, almost as a matter of course; what had looked like a climb up Everest in 1944 was, only twelve months later, a stroll through a garden of summer flowers. One person introduced him to another, and that person to someone else, who led him to another still. And so it went until—it all seemed to happen in an instant—he had met everyone he wanted or needed to know.
Admission to the circle was not just a matter of meeting the right people, of course. Many other talented writers were given the same opportunity, allowed to step inside, then booted out and lost to sight as if they had never existed. But Truman was not to be forgotten; nor, once he was inside that invisible boundary, was he to be dislodged. All the things that had shocked his colleagues at The New Yorker—his manner, his appearance, and his baby voice—guaranteed that he would be remembered; his seductive personality guaranteed that he would be accepted. When it came to charm, even Arch, who could talk a snake out of its rattles, had to stand aside for Truman.
One of those most intrigued by him was George Davis, who recognized something of himself, or the self he had been twenty years before, behind that smooth little-boy face. “George had pipit monstrosities in his head,” said Leo Lerman, who also worked as a writer, a kind of odd-job man, for the fashion magazines. “They were absolute perfection, George’s monstrosities. He took one look at Truman and recognized the monster that lurked in there to produce things that were really quite beautiful.”
For a time Davis’ relationship with Truman was almost that of a master and his apprentice. George liked to tease, banter, and instruct, and Truman was properly respectful, careful, like everyone else, not to cross him. “George had the nastiest tongue I’ve ever encountered,” said another young writer, Pearl Kazin, who discerned deep-rooted malice behind his slightly hooded eyes and exaggerated, stereotyped homosexual mannerisms. “He had that look of a rotten peach. You had the feeling that if you pressed your finger into his skin, the dent would stay.”
It was not a bad comparison, and there was something overripe about George, a satiety with the usual pleasures, perhaps with life itself, that led him to seek the decadent and the unwholesome. Like one of those misshapen sea creatures that diving bells photograph thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface, he was at home in the dark and shied away from the light, which is to say the ordinary, that satisfied most other people. He had a fascination with the low life; he frequented seedy dives and was attracted to tough sailors and hustlers, one of whom was to beat him so badly a few years later that he nearly died. His delight in the malformed drew him to sideshow freaks, and he made frequent visits to a colony of pinheads at Coney Island, stopping only when someone was rude enough to ask him what relationship he had to the family.
There was that side to him certainly, the dark and unpleasant side, but there was also another. Although his tongue could leave lasting scars, it could also be extremely funny. He had an epigrammatic turn of phrase that would have pleased Oscar Wilde, and his friend W. H. Auden called him the wittiest person he had ever known. George could sometimes be cruel, but he could also be as charitable as Santa Claus; many writers owed their careers, and more, to his generosity. To someone like Carson McCullers, who needed more than the usual amount of support and encouragement, he offered a plenitude of both. Typically, however, he broadcast his nasty deeds and kept his good ones hidden, as if he were afraid to be accused of something so common as sentimentality. “Knowing George was a career in itself,” said Phoebe Pierce, who worked for him at the end of the forties. “It was not that he was malicious. He was just incapable of saying anything good about anyone. Yet even while he was being bitchy, he could be doing something very nice. His mean facade concealed kindness and good judgment.”
Truman did not make a career of it, but, fascinated by George’s odd balance of brilliance and triviality, good and bad, he did make a hobby of knowing him. Just as George saw something of himself in Truman, Truman doubtless detected a hint of what he might become in George, the monster in middle age. Evil has its attraction, and George showed him subterranean vistas that he had not known existed. When the two of them were together, Truman even took on some of his teacher’s mannerisms, in the same way that a man with a mynah-bird ear unconsciously imitates the accent of the person he is with. Gossiping about mutual friends, for instance, he would become uncharacteristically mean-spirited, much as George was, and even slow his normal torrent of excited words to the trickle of a drawl, which is how George talked. “George brought out the worst in Truman,” said Pearl Kazin, “and I didn’t enjoy seeing them together.”
One trick Truman learned from George is that the surest way to find out a secret is to tell one—your own, if no one else’s. It seems impolite, even churlish, to keep secrets yourself when the person across the table has just discarded the last veil and left himself naked; self-revelation, or, better still, self-mortification can be used as a kind of bait to forge a bond of instant intimacy. That was a ploy that George had turned into an art. Though he told scandalous stories about nearly everyone he knew, the most scandalous, most revealing, and sometimes most humiliating ones were always about himself. Nearly everyone, for example, had heard his favorite: when he was young, good-looking, and living in Paris, he was picked up by a handsome black man who invited him to a seedy hotel for an evening of sex. Only at the end did George hear a titter from the next room and realize that he had been an unwitting actor in a sex show—an audience in the adjoining room had watched the entire performance through a false mirror.
On the day he met Truman, he established just such a bond by spending most of a lunch giving an account of his sexual history. “He claimed that there wasn’t a single man he hadn’t been to bed with in his hometown in Michigan,” said Truman, “and he told me all about the affair he was then having with a French sea captain. George made up so many stories—but perhaps they were all true.” After that lunch, George occasionally invited him to parties in his shabby brownstone on East Eighty-sixth Street. Stuffed, basement to rafters, with Victoriana, the house could not have been called attractive. Yet there, seated on a hard and lumpy couch or standing beside a hideous statue, could be found some of the most interesting people alive, everyone from Auden and Jean Cocteau, to Dorothy Parker and Gypsy Rose Lee, who was, so they both said, George’s fiancée. “The people George knew were a legion,” said the poet Howard Moss. “You wouldn’t have been surprised if Shakespeare suddenly appeared out of another room.”
They were one of a kind, Truman and George, but although they saw each other frequently in the next several years, they were never comfortable friends. George made it plain that Truman was Rita Smith’s discovery, not his, and that he did not share her enthusiasm for his work. With uncharacteristic obtuseness—at the time he said it, Truman was only twenty-two—he even declared that Truman’s “slender talent” had already been completely realized. Beyond his habitual sarcasm, there was a hint of envy in his comments, as if Truman were gaining the acclaim George himself would have received had he not suffered from writer’s block. In fact, George had, or was to gain, more respect for Truman’s writing than he let on. A decade later, when he was living in Europe, he asked a friend to airmail only two articles from the United States; both were by Truman.
Truman’s feelings about George were equally ambivalent. He acknowledged his brilliance, but it was not in Truman’s nature to forgive his slights. If revenge were needed, however, he finally achieved his in 1976 when he used George, who by then had been dead for nearly twenty years, as the model for an extraordinarily unpleasant character, Turner Boatwright, in his stories “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud.”
A much closer friend was Leo Lerman, who, on the surface, was so much like George that George’s friends called him the “fake George Davis.” Truman met him in the fall of 1945 at Mary Louise’s, sat quietly through dinner, and then, hiding on the stairs as Lerman was leaving, jumped onto his shoulders. “It was spectacular in a truly Truman way,” said Lerman, “and it should have warned me about him for the rest of my life. It didn’t.” Despite that bruising introduction, they became warm friends. Since Leo lived only a block from the Capote apartment, they saw each other almost daily. When Leo was sick, Truman went over in the morning, lit his gas stove—Leo had a morbid fear of lighting fires—and made his coffee. In exchange, Leo offered Truman refuge from Nina, who was drinking even more than she had in Greenwich. “Nina sometimes became rather violent when she was drinking,” Leo said. “One time she threw an enormous quantity of Truman’s letters out the window onto Park Avenue. Another time he suddenly appeared in the middle of the night and said, ‘She’s breaking the china!’ When he just couldn’t stand it any longer, he would fly around the corner, climb up all my stairs, and sleep on my couch.”
Ten years older than Truman, tall, with a bald head and a long beard that already gave him the look of a middle-aged rabbi, Leo had started out as an actor, turning to writing only after a car accident destroyed his looks. After that his life did indeed parallel Davis’ in many ways. He also did most of his work for the fashion magazines, he also loved to gossip, and he also stuffed his apartment with Victoriana. Finally, perhaps the most persuasive parallel of all, he also gave parties that attracted the celebrated.
The similarities were all on the surface, however; the differences, profound. Leo had very little of Davis’ talent, but he also had very little of his malice. Whereas George was surrounded by a halo of boredom, as if he thought life an overrated play that did not deserve its good reviews, Leo was a gusher of praise and enthusiasm, a magpie of a man who was fascinated, at least briefly, by nearly everything. His real gift was neither writing nor editing, but his ability to spot what was in vogue and whose star was rising—or setting. “He knew without a doubt the precise moment when the James ‘revival’ went into decline,” was the way Pearl Kazin described a fictional character many people assumed was modeled on Leo, “that Stendhal was old hat, Cocteau a bore, and Genet the newest freshest genius of them all. Never less than fully informed, he was always more than certain when what would happen, and where next.”
Much of that information Leo gathered at his Sunday-night parties, which were a New York institution throughout the forties. Taking a perverse pride in being able to attract people despite the lack of the usual amenities, he served nothing but the kind of cheese usually found in mousetraps and offered nothing to drink but jug wine, so bad, he liked to brag, that wise people refused to touch it. Still they came: playwrights, poets, and novelists, Broadway stars and movie stars, ballerinas and chorus boys—almost anyone, in fact, who could survive the alpine climb up four flights of stairs. One man, who was thought to live in a cave in Central Park, always came early, gobbled a mound of the mouse cheese, spilled some red wine down his throat, and hastily departed. Another regular, a woman whose identity was equally mysterious, always wore the same Chinese dress and coolie hat, giving birth to jokes that when she was not at Leo’s, she was pulling a rickshaw along Fifth Avenue.
At George’s parties, no one would have been surprised to see Shakespeare come staggering through the doorway; at Leo’s, no one would have noticed, so many people were jammed in so little space. The host himself, wearing a colorful costume, such as a red robe topped by a fez, often greeted his guests from his bed. But whether he was standing, sitting, or lying down, he would spread a happy glow over the festivities, and despite the confusion and the haphazard, thrown-together atmosphere, his parties were as carefully choreographed as a hit musical. He made sure that the people he wanted showed up, that those he did not want stayed away, and that everybody who came was happy to be present. “You knew exactly what you were going to get there,” said Mary Louise. “He was a wonderful host, genuinely welcoming and funny, and you could be certain that Sunday night at Leo’s would be very jolly.”
Shakespeare, said Truman’s friend Marguerite Young, must have known someone very much like Truman when he created Ariel and Puck. One moment he was an ethereal wisp of cloud and sky, Ariel in all but name; the next moment he was a mischievous earthbound sprite, Puck making merry in the concrete forest of Manhattan. And half one, half the other is what he was then and for many years to come. As Ariel, he was warm and sympathetic, generous with time and with money too, when he had it. As Puck, he enjoyed playing tricks and telling tales on his friends; more naughty than bad, he liked to stir up trouble and create the dramas that he loved to see swirling around him. “Little T can be absolutely adorable or such a pain in the neck that you want to take a swift kick at him” was how Mary Louise described him to a reporter at the time.
“We love him up here,” she added, however—the “here” being the offices of Harper’s Bazaar and its sister magazine, Junior Bazaar. “He is in and out all the time.” In fact, he spent so much time there with Mary Louise and Barbara Lawrence, who had left The New Yorker to become features editor of Junior Bazaar, that Carmel Snow assumed he was Barbara’s little brother and offered him a glass of milk the first time someone brought him to one of her cocktail parties. When Mary Louise told her that that innocent-looking boy was the author of those nightmare visions, “Miriam” and “A Tree of Night,” Mrs. Snow quickly put a martini into his hand instead.
It was the first of many she was to share with him during the next few years, and she became yet another in the succession of middle-aged women who clasped him to their bosoms and caused heads to turn wherever they went with him. She was the famous editor, a perfectionist who was seen only in Balenciaga; he was the stripling writer, more than thirty-five years her junior, whose only distinction in dress was the long Bronzini scarf that fluttered after him like a ship’s pennant in a stiff breeze. A more curious and singular pair could scarcely be pictured; yet there they were, having lunch or drinks together and gossiping like ancient friends, and there he was, the sought-after extra man who added the spice to her dinner parties, entertaining her guests as much as he did her. “Carmel and Diana Vreeland were both fascinated by him and adored him,” said Mary Louise. “They both had an eye for the unusual and the extraordinarily gifted. I had nothing at all to do with those glamorous, beautifully dressed women in the fashion department—the literary department was the absolute stepchild of the Hearst organization—but one day Diana came up to me and said, ‘I like you because you’re a friend of Truman Capote’s!’”
With those empresses of fashion he was like an amusing godson, who appeared on command for a few hours of happy chatter but minded his manners, as godsons usually do. Real intimacy was reserved for several other women he met at that time, to whom he was more of a pal, a playmate, a younger brother. He had and was to have many male friends, heterosexual as well as homosexual, with whom he felt a bond of confidence. But he had a special rapport with women, an easygoing relationship that few men ever enjoy, whatever their sexual preference. Women liked being with him, he with them, and he often found his closest companions among members of the opposite sex. “It’s too bad I don’t like going to bed with women,” he lamented years later, with what sounded like genuine regret. “I could have had any woman in the world, from Garbo to Dietrich. Women always love me, and I love attractive and beautiful women, but as friends, not lovers. I can’t understand why anyone would want to go to bed with a woman. It’s boring, boring, boring!”
Two of those with whom he felt most relaxed were Barbara Lawrence and Mary Louise. Not only did he spend hours encamped in their offices, he also went to exercise classes with them, had dinner with them, and dared them, as he had the Jaeger sisters in Greenwich, to join him in some amusing devilment. “Oh, those were funny days!” said Mary Louise. “Truman was never embarrassed about speaking his mind, and we got thrown out of practically every Schrafft’s in New York because we laughed so much.” Even his silliness made them laugh. Once they invited him to a concert, only to be turned down when he found out they would be sitting in the balcony: he could not afford to be seen in such cheap seats, he informed them; it would ruin his image. “He was mighty airy in those days,” said Mary Louise, “and Barbara and I used to tease him an awful lot about his delusions of grandeur.”
Playing the part of the helpful older sister, as she had at The New Yorker, Barbara continued to read drafts of his stories; at her suggestion he had changed the ending of “Miriam,” dropping the last two paragraphs before submitting it to Mademoiselle. Mary Louise was more like a mother; not since Sook had he met a woman who was so warm and unstinting in her affection. One of those rare beings who receive universal devotion, she seemed to make good people want to be better and encouraged mediocre writers to put music into their prose. She was, in short, an ideal editor as well as companion. “She was perfect for Truman, someone Truman could go to and talk,” said his friend Andrew Lyndon. “She admired him as an artist and found him lovable too. And I don’t think many people up to that time had found Truman as lovable as she did.”
Inspired to assume the unaccustomed role of the good son, Truman was also a great comfort to Mary Louise, who bore more than the usual burdens of sadness. Not long before, troubled by some emotional disturbance, she had been persuaded by an incompetent therapist to enter a mental hospital; when she emerged, she made the devastating discovery that her ex-husband had gained custody of their two children. “She was in a very shaky state,” said Pearl Kazin. “Yet, young as he was, Truman was a great support and gave her the reassurance she needed. I was astounded by that. There was no one else I knew at that age, or any other age for that matter, who was able to be as intuitive, affectionate, and helpful to her as he was. His friendship mattered a very great deal to her.”
His letters confirm that assessment. For the next several years, whenever Mary Louise was feeling low, he was there to raise her up. “As an editor it seems to me as though you quite persistently refuse to acknowledge your role as one of the two or three people serious artists, particularly the young, can look to with any hope of commercial recognition,” he wrote when she was considering leaving Harper’s Bazaar. “That is a responsibility, Marylou, a role I do not know that I could forgive you for quitting… if ever, in some strange moment, you did. Isn’t it true you choose and publish and encourage the best short fiction in this country? And that is no accident, darling. It all, I suppose, depends on what one considers important; if you think art important, as you do and I do, then you are one of the most important people in the world.
“All human life has its seasons, and no one’s personal chaos can be permanent: winter, after all, does not last forever, does it? There is summer, too, and spring, and though sometimes when branches stay dark and the earth cracks with ice, one thinks they will never come, that spring, that summer, but they do, and always.”
If Barbara was the dutiful but sometimes boring older sister, Doris Lilly was her glamorous, fun-loving twin. Tall and pretty, with long legs and streaked blond hair, she belonged to a species that was soon to become extinct: the good-time party girl whose only goal, openly and honestly stated, was to make a rich catch. It was a pursuit for which she was admirably equipped. A onetime starlet, whose movie career can only be called fleeting—she had one line in one picture, The Story of Dr. Wassell—she was bouncy and buoyant, not subject to moods or given to silences of more than thirty seconds. She reminded some of her literary friends of Rosie Driffield, the embodiment of the life force in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale.
When Truman met her, not long after she had arrived from California, she had not yet found either a millionaire or a job, and she had time to take long walks with him, have dinner with him in her East Seventy-eighth Street walk-up—ordering in, of course—and talk to him for hours on the phone. Once she failed to pay her rent, and her landlord turned off the heat and lights. “Who thought about those things?” she later explained. “I was so busy going out every night. I mentioned the problem to some man I was seeing, but instead of sending a check, he sent two dozen candles. Finally it was so cold that Truman and I took the shelves out of the kitchen closet and burned them in the fireplace.” Scatterbrained in most matters, Doris was capable of perfect concentration when she was trying to please a man, and even a sourhead like Evelyn Waugh, who was then at the apex of his fame, temporarily put aside his ingrained dislike of Americans to pay court. “Do you know anything about a writer named Waugh?” she asked Andrew Lyndon. “Do you mean Evelyn Waugh?” he replied. “No, dear,” she said patiently. “This is a man.”
Her madcap sense of fun and adventure appealed to Truman as much as it did to most other men, and she was to be one of the models for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She helped to provide him with a character, and he returned the favor, suggesting both the subject and the title for her first book. “Write about what you know,” he told her. “You know about millionaires, so write about them, and call it How to Meet a Millionaire. After all, every girl in the world wants to know how to do it. I’ll help you write it.” And he did.
“The first time I saw her—a tall slender wand of a girl, slightly stooped and with a fascinating face that was simultaneously merry and melancholy—I remember thinking how beautiful her eyes were: the color of good clear coffee, or of a dark ale held to the firelight to warm. Her voice had the same quality, the same gentle heat, like a blissful summer afternoon that is slow but not sleepy.” So Truman described Carson McCullers, who was the most extraordinary of all the women who came into his life in that year of first success. Rita Smith thought that he should meet her famous older sister, and sometime in the spring or summer of 1945, not long after Rita herself had met him, she invited him to Nyack, where the two sisters and their widowed mother shared a large old house overlooking the Hudson.
Rita had judged them perfectly, and Carson and Truman took to each other immediately, as well they should have: they were alike in everything but sex and body, and when they looked closely at each other, they saw someone very familiar. When her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940, Carson too had been a Wunderkind, the darling of the fashion magazines. George Davis doted on her, and they would sit for hours, studying his photo collection of freaks, like fond parents browsing through the family album.
Precocious success was only one of the things she and Truman had in common, however. She had also grown up in the South. She was also thought to be odd-looking—too tall and skinny, in her case, rather than too short—and to have quirky mannerisms. Although she was married to Reeves McCullers, she was primarily attracted to members of her own sex. Even their writing was similar in substance, though not in style, dwelling on loneliness and the perverse nature of love. Small wonder, then, that Truman instantly became devoted to her. “I was very, very fond of Carson,” he said. “She was a devil, but I respected her.” Small wonder, too, that, as her cousin Jordan Massee reported, “she was enchanted with him and regarded him as her own private little protégé.”
He became a regular visitor to Nyack, and learned what it meant to be her friend, what it meant to be barraged by her questions, enveloped by her concern, manacled by her demands. She was a toucher, a hugger, a kisser, and her friends were overwhelmed by her embrace even on the telephone. Still in her twenties when Truman met her, she had already suffered several serious illnesses, and like many people who are chronically sick, she felt that she had an almost imperial right to the time and attention of those around her. Many, like Truman, were caught in her spell and granted her that privilege; others stayed well away. “An hour with a dentist without Novocain was like a minute with Carson McCullers” was Gore Vidal’s acid memory.
Her house in Nyack looked out on the Hudson, but those fast-flowing Yankee waters might just as well have belonged to some languid stream in Georgia, with alligators lazily sunning themselves in the shallows, so deep-fried Southern was the atmosphere inside the door. For Phoebe visiting there with Truman was a journey into bayou country. “Carson’s family was wildly Southern,” she said, “and when they were all together—her brother had come up from the South with his wife when I was there—it was quite a scene. Carson had taken to her bed, but the rest of us sat in the living room and listened to Brother-Man play the piano. I have never heard anything so execrable in my life. ‘Play it again, Brother-Man!’ everybody would cry, and he would. This had been going on for some time, and I asked to use the bathroom, thinking I could go upstairs. Not at all! Carson’s mother pointed to the one at the side of the living room. The house was being remodeled, and the bathroom was complete, commode and all, except for the one thing—it had no walls. ‘Close your eyes now, everybody, so Phoebe can use the bathroom,’ she said, and they all closed their eyes while I went into the bathroom without walls. But it was all right: Brother-Man kept on playing the piano.”
As strange as that household seemed to her, it was as normal as grits and butter beans to Truman, a nostalgic reminder of summer evenings on Jennie’s front porch. More than one of his friends remarked that when they were together, he became more Southern than Carson, who had spent more of her life in the South and had a greater claim to the acreage. His Southern accent, which he had long since dropped, awoke from its slumber, and his whole manner changed, in perceptible, if undefinable, ways. “Somehow Northerners have the vague idea that Southerners are just like them, except for their funny way of talking,” said Phoebe. “I know I thought that. Seeing Truman with Carson, however, I realized that there is a whole shared experience in being Southern, and that he and Carson had that together.”
She demanded a great deal from her friends, but Carson gave as much as she received, and she helped no other young writer as enthusiastically as she did Truman. Together with Rita, she found him an agent, Marion Ives, and she wrote a warm letter of recommendation to Robert Linscott, a senior editor with Random House. A tall, tweedy New Englander who had begun his publishing career as an office boy in 1904, Linscott was as impressed by “Miriam” as most other people, and on October 22, 1945, he signed Truman to a contract for Other Voices, Other Rooms, with a small advance, twelve hundred dollars, to be doled out in installments of a hundred dollars a month beginning December 1. “Now you’re going to be a writer and an artist,” Linscott told him. “We’re going to support you, take care of you. You’re like a racehorse.” Linscott’s boss, Bennett Cerf, described what happened next: “Well, that was a day when Truman arrived at Random House! He had bangs, and nobody could believe it when this young prodigy waltzed in. He looked about eighteen. He was bright and happy and absolutely self-assured. Everybody knew that somebody important had arrived upon the scene—particularly Truman!”