WHEN I was young, wrote Swift, I felt that I could leap over the moon. So Truman must have felt as that new year, 1947, began. His most serious problems with his mother were behind him, he and Newton had arrived at a tolerable understanding, and his fame as a writer, like Jack’s wonderful beanstalk, seemed to grow by itself, ascending heavenward from a very small seed, a handful of short stories and only the promise of a novel. Yet that tiny output, coupled with curiosity about Truman himself, was enough to excite intense interest in publishing offices all over Manhattan and to raise a few murmurs of enthusiasm even in Hollywood. On the bare chance that there might be a movie in those unseen pages, Twentieth Century–Fox paid $1,500 for an option on Other Voices and the second novel that would presumably follow.
“After the war everybody was waiting for the next Hemingway-Fitzgerald generation to appear,” said Gore Vidal, in partial explanation. “That’s why so much attention was devoted to novelists and poets, and that’s why a new novel by one of us was considered an interesting event.” Reporting on the postwar American scene for the British magazine Horizon, Cyril Connolly, the English critic, exaggerated only slightly when he described the hubbub in New York literary circles: “The hunt for young authors who, while maintaining a prestige value… may yet somehow win the coveted jackpot is feverish and incessant. Last year’s authors are pushed aside and this year’s—the novelist Jean Stafford, her poet husband Robert Lowell or the dark horse, Truman Capote—are invariably mentioned. They may be quite unread, but their names, like a new issue on the market, are constantly on the lips of those in the know. ‘Get Capote’—at this minute the words are resounding on many a sixtieth floor.”
Life, which could bestow instant celebrity with a flick of a camera shutter, much as television talk shows do today, selected its own group of up-and-coming writers. Except for Truman, all had at least one novel between hard covers; but it was that small dark horse, the pony of the herd, whose picture, blown up to nearly a full page, the editors chose to lead their article. And it was “esoteric, New Orleans–born Truman Capote,” as he was described in the caption, whom most readers doubtless remembered. The day the issue appeared, Bennett Cerf received a call from his friend and competitor Richard Simon, the Simon of Simon and Schuster. “How the hell do you get a full-page picture of an author in Life magazine before his first book even comes out?” Simon demanded. “Do you think I’m going to tell you? Does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” answered Cerf. “Come on. How did you wangle that?” Simon insisted. “Dick, I have no intention of telling you” was Cerf’s stubborn reply. “He hung up in a huff,” Cerf later wrote, “and I hung up too, and cried, ‘For God’s sake, get me a copy of Life.’ That was the first I knew about the whole affair! Truman had managed to promote that full-page picture for himself, and how he did it, I don’t know to this day.”
In fact, he had not promoted it, and the reason for such prominent display was too obvious for Simon, Cerf, or perhaps even Truman himself to guess. Life’s editors had focused on him for the same reason they had printed two pictures of him in a spread they had done on Yaddo the year before: he looked unusual, which is to say, newsworthy. Giving the appearance of a jaded and world-weary child as he sat pouting amid Leo Lerman’s Victorian bric-a-brac, he was the only one in the group who would make a reader stop before turning the page. Most of the other young novelists, a selection that included Thomas Heggen, Jean Stafford, Calder Willingham, and Vidal, could just as easily have illustrated a story about young advertising executives—or junior editors at Life itself. Like a movie star, or a very clever child, Truman instinctively knew how to seduce the camera, when to stand and when to sit, when to smile and when to frown, and the editors of Life, like many other editors in years to come, could scarcely avoid giving him the spotlight he craved.
It is impossible to conceive of so much excitement being aroused today by such a young writer with such a slim output. The New York that resounded with his name in those years just after the war has now vanished, and a new city, different in spirit as well as body, has taken its place. That Manhattan was the unchallenged center of the planet, “the supreme metropolis of the present,” as Connolly told his English readers; it was what London had once been and what Rome had been so long before that. The great capitals of Europe lay prostrate and impoverished from the battles that had raged around them; European intellectuals, who had sought refuge in seedy but congenial West Side caravansaries, lingered on; and the cities of the Sunbelt—there was no such word then—basked in sleepy obscurity, unaware that soon they would seek to become rival centers themselves. Political decisions were made in Washington, but most of the other decisions that counted in the United States—those involving the disposition of money and fame and the recognition of literary and artistic achievement—were made on that rocky island, that diamond iceberg between the rivers. No wonder successful New Yorkers felt proud, and perhaps a little smug, about being who they were and where they were: they had all climbed to the top of what Disraeli had called the “greasy pole.” And no wonder that Truman, who had arrived at that dizzying height before he was old enough to vote, found the view so exhilarating.
The El still rumbled along a dingy Third Avenue, coal dust had turned the limestone and brick of Park Avenue to a sooty gray, and summers, in that era before universal air conditioning, meant hot and sleepless nights listening to the sound of a whirring fan. But it was also a time, as John Cheever observed long after, “when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartet from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” For those who dwelt along those streets and avenues, there was a feeling of romance and wonder about their city that is now hard to reconstruct, even in imagination. Green-and-yellow double-decker buses, so elegant and imposing that they were called Queen Marys, after the Cunard steamer, cruised serenely down Fifth Avenue; incoming ocean liners preened themselves as they passed the Statue of Liberty; and a regal red carpet was rolled out at Grand Central Terminal each night when the Twentieth Century Limited arrived from the West with its pampered freight of Hollywood stars. The skyline itself was romantic: the first flat-roofed glass skyscraper had yet to be erected, and Manhattan was still an island of grand and ebullient architectural fantasies—minarets, ziggurats, domes, pyramids, and spires. Banks resembled cathedrals, office buildings masqueraded as palaces, and spike-topped towers unabashedly vied for a place in the clouds.
Except for a few seamy areas, people walked wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted: street crime was rare. Hustling for news, eight major papers made everything that happened in the five boroughs, no matter how trivial, sound grave and consequential, while a battalion of gossip columnists, like nosy telephone operators in a small town, made the city seem smaller than it was with their breathless chatter about the famous, and those who would like to be famous. Broadway was a never-ending feast; theatergoers, sated with the variety before them, probably expected every year to be as bountiful as 1947, which not only saw the openings of A Streetcar Named Desire, Brigadoon, and Finian’s Rainbow, but enjoyed also the continuing runs of Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, Harvey, and Born Yesterday.
To Connolly, and many others, so much exuberance and vitality painted “an unforgettable picture of what a city ought to be: that is, continuously insolent and alive, a place where one can buy a book or meet a friend at any hour of the day or night, where every language is spoken and xenophobia almost unknown, where every purse and appetite is catered for, where every street with every quarter and the people who inhabit them are fulfilling their function, not slipping back into apathy, indifference, decay. If Paris is the setting for a romance, New York is the perfect city in which to get over one, to get over anything. Here the lost douceur de vivre is forgotten and the intoxication of living takes its place.”
The darling of the gods, as Howard had called Truman, was becoming the darling of half of Manhattan as well. The members of New York’s smart set were as fascinated as nearly everyone else by “this extraordinary boy,” as Phyllis Cerf called him. In a scene that was repeated, with only slight variations, many times during that period, she described how easily, how seemingly effortlessly, he captivated one of her celebrity-crowded gatherings. “We were having a black-tie dinner party, and since I was short of men, I told Bennett to invite some of his Random House authors. He did, and as the guests were arriving, the butler suddenly came up to me. ‘Are you expecting a child?’ he asked. I said no, I wasn’t. Bennett said, ‘That’s Truman Capote!’ and rushed to greet him. Truman then came up the stairs, looking very thin, very waifish, very childlike, with his blondish hair and bangs, and walked into the room rather blindly—he wasn’t wearing his glasses. The first guest to arrive had been Edna Ferber. She had come when our son, Chris, who was then six or seven years old, came down in his pajamas to say good night. I introduced him to Miss Ferber and sent him off to bed. But throughout the evening she pointed Truman out to people and whispered: ‘Really! Things couldn’t have been so bad that Phyllis had to bring her own child to the table in a dinner jacket! When I arrived, that young man was in his pajamas.’”
The combination of that little-boy facade with an acute adult intelligence only made him more intriguing to the Cerfs’ high-octane guests. The women in their jewels and gowns instantly surrounded him after dinner—“really instantly,” insisted Phyllis—and listened intently as he told his well-polished stories about fortune-tellers and bragged about his hitherto undisclosed ability to foresee the future. “They were absolutely enchanted by him,” said Phyllis, “and from then on people of that group began inviting him to parties themselves.”
No one invited him more often than the Cerfs, and he was often a guest at that brownstone on East Sixty-second Street or at the Columns, their estate in Mount Kisco. Phyllis adored him, and Bennett may well have recognized a kindred spirit behind those deceptively innocent blue eyes: like a teddy bear, which exists only to be hugged. Bennett too was desperate for the spotlight, which he finally received a few years later as one of the panelists on the popular television quiz show What’s My Line? “Everybody always said, ‘Oh, Bennett Cerf, he’s kind of a joke. He just wants to be on television and make those dreary puns,’” said Truman. “And there was that side of him, to be sure. But he was also an extremely sensitive and sound person—you could really talk to him. His advice was always excellent; he had very, very good taste; and he knew the difference between good and bad. People thought he didn’t, but he knew the difference better than anyone else.”
Along with Bob Linscott, Bennett advised Truman, sometimes becoming so fatherly in his attentions that Truman liked to embarrass him with affectionate embraces and cries of “Big Daddy.” Bennett later admitted, “I do things for Truman that I wouldn’t do for any other writer. I love him.” For fear of hurting Truman’s feelings, Bennett would deputize his wife to issue his scoldings. Intelligent and sympathetic but also extremely tough and even pugnacious—Bennett himself called her “the General”—she would usually convey his advice over lunch. Truman did not always follow it, but since it was delivered by Phyllis, he accepted it in good humor. “I loved her,” he said. “Very few people did. But she was a really feisty, good-hearted, loyal person who would do anything for you if she really liked you—and anything against you if she didn’t. If she didn’t like you, it was best to get a passport and leave the country.”
Rarely has a young novelist, particularly an unpublished young novelist, been as praised and petted by a publisher as Truman was by Random House. In those more luxurious days, the company maintained its office in one of those commercial buildings masquerading as palaces, a mock Italian palazzo on Madison Avenue. No other publisher in New York could boast such an impressive suite of offices, and Truman seemed to believe that if he did not own it, he had, at the minimum, a long-term lease. William Goyen, a novelist who was signed by Linscott after Truman, had a similar impression: “He was considered a kind of naughty but very talented little kid at Random House, like somebody from an Our Gang comedy. ‘Look out,’ everybody seemed to say, ‘or the little devil will trip you up on a banana peel!’ I have a vivid memory of coming in those great doors one time and finding him sitting on a bench by the reception desk, a baseball cap on his head and his feet not touching the floor. It was as if he were saying: ‘This is my place. It’s a wonderful place, and I’m going to take you all through it and introduce you to everybody.’ And he did take me to people, give me hints about what to do, and make me feel more at home there.”
It was his place, that magnificent Renaissance building, the first home Truman had felt himself welcome in since Jennie’s house on Alabama Avenue. The Cerfs had all but adopted him, and true to his word, Linscott took special care of him, wrapping him in a blanket of satiny solicitude. As he had done with Carson McCullers and a few others, Linscott, who was a widower, gave him a key to his apartment on East Sixty-third Street so that he could have a quiet place to work during the day; he told Truman to bring Newton along for weekends at Linscott’s farm, which was only twenty miles from Northampton; and he constantly lauded him to everyone within hailing distance. “Bob believed Truman led a madly glamorous life,” said Linscott’s assistant, Naomi Bliven, “that he knew everybody there was to know and that he could give him tips to all the best places. My husband and I often had dinner with Bob, and we always went to restaurants that Truman had suggested. We finally wound up going only to the Plaza Hotel because Truman had recommended their chicken hash.”
Many writers eventually felt let down by Linscott, whose enthusiasm, which was so invigorating when he was happy with a manuscript, could turn to gelid disdain when he was disappointed. During the twelve years they worked together—Linscott retired in 1957—he was never seriously disappointed by Truman, however. From Truman’s standpoint, he was an ideal editor, one who was perceptive enough to occasionally make helpful suggestions but shrewd enough to realize that his real job was not to pencil copy but to hold hands. “As an artist, a craftsman, [Truman] is completely sure of himself,” Linscott told an interviewer in 1948. “As a human being, he has a great need to be loved and to be reassured of that love. Like other sensitive people he finds the world hostile and frightening. Truman has all the stigmata of genius. I am convinced that genius must have stigmata. It must be wounded.”