THE man who replaced Newton in Truman’s affections was Newton’s opposite in almost every way. His name was Jack Dunphy. He was thirty-four, vigorous and good-looking, five feet, nine inches tall, with receding red hair, a complexion as ruddy as an autumn apple, blue eyes, and the trim, athletic physique of the dancer he had been before going off to war in 1944—he had played one of the cowboys in Oklahoma! His ambition was to be a writer, however, and his only novel, John Fury, a spare, severely written tale of Philadelphia’s Irish poor, had been highly praised by the reviewers. Despite those accomplishments, many people in New York thought of him chiefly as the husband, then the ex-husband, of Joan McCracken, one of Broadway’s brightest young musical-comedy stars. Truman, typically, knew all about him even before they met. “I had a terrific crush on him without ever having seen him,” he confessed.
Jack happened to be at Leo’s when Truman telephoned one evening in the fall of 1948. Knowing Truman’s interest, Leo said, “Jack Dunphy’s here!” Within ten minutes Truman was walking in the door. “He was cute, adorable-looking,” said Jack. “He was wearing a cap, and his skin was fresh and clear. He was trying to be his mostest and bestest. We sat on the couch together and talked about trains. I had a mad desire to go somewhere.” A day or so after that, Truman invited him to a party he was planning to give at 1060 Park in mid-December. Jack accepted, but suggested that they also see each other before then. Truman gladly obliged. They had dinner in Truman’s new apartment on Second Avenue, and as if adhering to a prearranged schedule, they went to bed together. “I made the advances,” said Jack, “but of course Truman was leading me by the nose.”
And of course, he was. “I have a theory,” said Truman, “that if you want something badly enough, you’ll get it, whatever it is. You’ve got to really want it, and concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day, but if you do, you’ll get it. I have never found that to be untrue. When I finally met Jack, I thought to myself: ‘That’s exactly the kind of person I really, really like. Why is it that other people meet someone like that and I don’t? Why can’t I?’ So I decided that one way or another—and I didn’t know how—I was going to get him. I was absolutely dead-set and determined.”
The party at 1060 was key to his campaign. Though ostensibly it was a celebration of Andrew’s thirtieth birthday, its actual purpose almost certainly was to demonstrate to Jack how many famous people Truman knew. At that it succeeded. “Good Lord! Who wasn’t there?” exclaimed Andrew. “Auden, George Davis, even the Marquis of Milford-Haven, who had been the best man at the wedding of Elizabeth and Prince Philip the year before. It was so crowded that you couldn’t move. Beatrice Lillie had said she would sing—that was going to be her birthday present to me—but there was no room. When I met her, she was in Truman’s bedroom and just said, ‘Happy birthday!’” It is doubtful that Jack, who was unaccustomed to such gatherings, was favorably impressed; it is doubtful, in fact, that he was aware who all those famous people were. He buried himself in the kitchen, prompting Nina, who had never seen him before, to ask him if he were sick. Truman carefully escorted him into the dining room to show him off to a few close friends, as if he were afraid that too many curious stares would cause him to bolt for the door—which might well have happened. “Truman told me he wanted me to meet somebody,” said Mary Louise. “He went through the swinging door into the kitchen and came back leading Jack, who had been lurking in there and who seemed nervous. Jack said nothing except hello, then immediately retired into the kitchen again. He looked gorgeous, and Truman was so proud and excited that you could tell that this was the real thing.”
Jack was not so much shy as he was unsociable, and he had more than the usual dislike of milling throngs. “All parties are bad, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I don’t believe in social life for a reason: it doesn’t do anything for you.” He was not easily intimidated, and when Truman chose him, he chose someone whose will was as strong as his own, someone who had overcome equally formidable obstacles to become a writer.
The eldest of six children, Jack had grown up in St. Monica’s parish, a poor Irish neighborhood, in Philadelphia. Life there was perhaps even more inflexible and narrow than it had been in Monroeville; the residents of those drab little row houses regarded themselves as members of a clan and held in fine disdain anyone who wanted to leave for the wider world outside. They were particularly suspicious of a boy like Jack who enjoyed listening to the opera on the radio and preferred reading to baseball and football. His own relatives were shocked by his desire to write. “My God! You’d think I sold dirty pictures the way [they] acted,” he complained. Unlike Truman and Newton, he was not a sissy, however: he gave back better than he received. He was twelve or thirteen when a neighbor boy taunted him for reading a book on the front porch. “Come on down and play, Mary!” the boy yelled. “Hey, Mary!” Throwing his book aside, Jack leaped over the porch railing and attacked him, smashing his head again and again against the sidewalk. “He had a terrible temper,” said his sister Olive. “It was as if he were saying to the boy, ‘I don’t care if I kill you.’ The mothers came running out when they heard the boy screaming, and there was lots of talk. But Jack was never bothered again.”
His father, James Dunphy, was a newspaper Linotype operator. He fled to Baltimore when Jack was born; Jack’s mother, Kate, who may not yet have had the advantage of a marriage license, tracked him down, shaming him into returning to Philadelphia by thrusting their infant child into his arms. He grudgingly did his duty, but he never forgave either mother or child. “I think Dad really did hate me,” Jack said. “We were terrible enemies, blood enemies. The only time we were together was when he impregnated my ma. Truman was ambivalent about his father. I knew where I stood with mine. He read books himself—he always had something in front of his face—but he threw mine into the backyard.” When they had words, which they frequently did, his father would end the argument by saying, “Please don’t talk so high and mighty. Remember, you shit in your pants coming back on the train from Baltimore.” Although Jack was his father’s main target, the other children—two boys and three girls—did not entirely escape his ill temper. When his favorite son, Carl, was killed on the beaches of Anzio during World War II, James Dunphy turned to his son Bob and snarled, “Why wasn’t it you who died instead of him?”
A swell, a spiffy dresser who had a haircut and manicure every week, he demanded much and gave little. “Now make me laugh!” he would command the radio when he sat down to listen to his favorite shows. He considered himself several steps above his wife, who could barely read, who drank her tea from the saucer in which she cooled it, and who was pregnant so often that he sarcastically nicknamed her Olan, after a Chinese peasant woman in Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth. Kate did have the patience of a Chinese peasant. Though he would often stay away for weeks at a time with one woman or another, she never murmured a word of complaint. “Here comes Father!” she would gaily yell when she finally saw him walking home to Gladstone Street.
Perhaps because he was her firstborn, perhaps because his father hated him so, she worshiped Jack. When he was little, he stood behind her at night and brushed her long hair; after the other children had gone to bed, the two of them often shared a bowl of ice cream, a special treat in a poor household; his was the only name she called on her deathbed. “All the little good in me, what kindness and courtesy there is, I count from her,” he wrote. “The nay-saying part of me is from him; the Protestant part.” As is often the case with fathers and sons, Jack became more like his hated parent than he probably knew. He almost always said exactly what he thought, without regard for the laws of tact and convention, and it was impossible to predict his sudden outbursts of anger, which arrived without warning, like tornadoes roaring across the prairie on a cloudless summer day. “You never know what Jack’s reaction will be to anything,” Truman was to observe. “You can say, ‘I think Horn & Hardart’s baked beans are better than Schrafft’s,’ and you will suddenly be in a fantastic quarrel with him.”
“Poverty is much more than a way of life,” Jack later wrote. “It goes much farther than skin-deep. It’s no tattoo that fades with time. Nor a brand that can be put out of mind except when faced. Poverty, if you’ve known it, is you.” So it was and so it remained for him. Quitting high school to earn his living in factories, he looked with gluttonous envy at the young men attending the University of Pennsylvania. Fired again and again—“I couldn’t stand an office or a set routine”—he began attending a school for professional dancers; he had an Irish love for dance and movement and had spent many hours practicing steps next to the coal bin in the basement. To his surprise, he discovered that he could survive by shuffling his feet. “I didn’t really have any talent,” he admitted, “but I was good enough to do the job.”
He married his classmate Joan McCracken, and they moved to New York, only to be temporarily separated when he landed a place in George Balanchine’s company, which toured South America for eight months. He had always wanted to be a writer, and it was on that trip that he began John Fury. “I wouldn’t have started it if I hadn’t been so lonely. When I wrote, I wasn’t lonely anymore. I cut myself off from the rest of the company. Everybody else would go out at night and screw. I would go up to my room, work, jerk off and go to sleep.”
Whatever abilities he lacked as a dancer and entertainer Joan possessed in abundance. They both landed small roles in Oklahoma! His remained small; hers expanded—indeed, exploded. “When she came to the audition, she was very poor, wearing a coat trimmed with rabbit fur,” recalled Agnes de Mille, whose innovative choreography turned that musical into a Broadway landmark. “I insisted that she be hired and created for her the part of the girl who falls down, which became a great gag. She was a memorable comedienne and an exquisite technician; she had short, dumpy legs, but she used them brilliantly. She was beautiful, with a dear little, heart-shaped face, and when she came on stage and smiled, the audience melted. You could have sopped them up with a piece of bread. She was irresistible. Her personality was that of a star.”
Jack, by contrast, avoided the spotlight. When De Mille thought up something that would have focused attention on him too, he turned her down. “I’m not interested,” he said. “Give it to one of the other boys.” His ambition, he made clear, lay elsewhere. When he went into the Army the following year, Joan dominated his thoughts; as with many other soldiers, all he thought about was going home to his wife. “I was like a sunflower,” he said, “and Joan was like the sun. I didn’t have any sex at all. I didn’t even masturbate.” She was not so chaste, and when Jack returned from Europe in 1946, he immediately sensed that she was devoured by guilt. Guessing what had occurred, he tried to reassure her. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. They were on their second honeymoon in the Caribbean when she received the telegram that ended their marriage: the French composer she had had an affair with had been injured in a plane crash, and he had asked for her to come to his bedside. Forced to confess, she flew back to New York. “I would have forgiven her,” Jack said. “She was like an island I had waited all my life for. But she was blackmailed in a way, made to feel guilty, by this little Jew fairy who fell out of a plane. When she left, it tore me to pieces, and a part of me died.” To his family, who loved her, he said only, “She ran off with a Jew.”
As devastated by the breakup as he was, Joan was unable to handle either her success or her life. She married Bob Fosse, who also became famous as a dancer and director, but she divorced a second time. She accepted the wrong roles—heavy dramatic parts—and her career foundered. “Hollywood was screaming for her, and she could have become a big star,” said De Mille. “But she got lost in being arty.” Although she appeared to want Jack back, he shied away. “I still liked her,” he said, “but I would never have gone to bed with her again. She destroyed herself. She was hurrying toward the abyss.” They remained fond friends anyway, and when she died in 1961 of a heart ailment, she left him three thousand dollars. “I looked at her face in the coffin,” said De Mille, “and it was still beautiful, still seemed to give out light. I thought of some lines of John Webster: ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.’”
“I would never have become homosexual if Joan had stayed with me,” Jack said, and it is probably so. He had had homoerotic fantasies before, and he had moved in a dance and theatrical circle that was largely populated by homosexuals, but his sexual experience, starting in his mid-teens with a high school teacher, had been entirely with women. He was not a man who could react in a moderate or measured way, and when Joan cheated on him, he turned against the entire female sex. “Women were very distasteful to me, and I decided I wanted to go to bed with men. I had had dreamy crushes on men before, but I had never thought of doing anything about them. I knew the jars of honey were there, but I didn’t know they could be opened.”
Remembering the advances made to him by an Army buddy, he took a bus to Florida, where the man was living, to see if the offer was still open. It was not; his friend was now thinking civilian thoughts of marriage and children. Jack was undaunted. The jars of honey were waiting for him in New York, as they had always been, and although he fumbled and sweated, he soon learned how to open them. “When I did turn to men, it was very difficult,” he explained. “I really had to work at it. Men’s legs were hard.” He was still working at it—he had been to bed with only two men—when Truman came through Leo’s door and showed him how easy it all was.
“I’ve spent all my life looking for the perfect boy,” Jack confessed long after, and Truman’s youth and effervescence appealed to him as they did to so many others. But Jack was not in love with Truman, as Truman was with him—and Truman knew it. Truman had spent his life learning how to please, however, and now those years of training got him what he desired. Quickly picking up on what Jack wanted, he offered him a free trip to Europe. “I love to travel,” said Jack, “and when he said, ‘Let’s go to Europe!’ that was it.” They waited until Truman’s collection of eight short stories, A Tree of Night, was published at the beginning of 1949. Then, on February 26, 1949, three months after they had met at Leo’s, they sailed for France on the Queen Mary. “I finally got him!” exulted Truman. “Completely, totally, and utterly.”