NEW York, Truman had told a French reporter, is “the most stimulating of all the cities in the world. It’s like living inside an electric light bulb.” And incandescent it was in the weeks following his return. His absence had not dimmed people’s memories; it had made him more than ever an object of curiosity. His name was in gossip columns and cartoons—even a crossword puzzle—and no one seemed to tire of Truman tales. In an article on younger artists and writers, Flair magazine described, with some amusement, the stir he was creating two years after the publication of Other Voices. “The most richly embroidered legend, of course, is that of Mr. Truman Capote. It has been reported that on one of his trips across the Atlantic, Mr. Capote hired the bridal suite on the Queen Mary; that in Italy he was taken for the President’s son and, stepping into the role of goodwill ambassador, did a power of damage to the Communist party; that after traveling through Spain, he landed in North Africa partially accoutered as a bullfighter (and so on in this vein).”
Without a second’s hesitation, Truman picked up where he had left off in February. Two days after his triumph at the Y.M.H.A., he traveled to Northampton to see Newton. “Truman, the little monkey, arrives at the old time in the afternoon,” Newton wrote in his diary. “Poor child! There is something intolerably touching about him just now.” He returned in January and again in March and sneaked more furtive looks into that blabbermouth diary. “Many thoughts of Morton,” Newton had written at the end of one entry, and Truman felt jealousy stab him once again, like an old war wound. He asked Brinnin if he knew who Morton was—Brinnin did not—and the phrase became a familiar joke between them. The embers of his romance with Newton remained warm—on all three visits he and Newton had sex together—but except for those few hours, he was content to let the mysterious Morton occupy Newton’s bed as well as his thoughts.
Jack, not Newton, was now Truman’s concern, and Truman wanted to make permanent a relationship that, in Jack’s mind at least, had not been formally sealed. The only way to do it was to do it, and, uninvited, he moved into Jack’s tenement walk-up on East Seventy-sixth Street, a habitation so primitive that it did not have its own bathroom; the tub was in the kitchen, the toilet in the hall outside, shared with the neighbor next door. Overlooking those inconveniences, Truman carried his own furniture up several flights of stairs, and invited his friends, including Charlie and Oona Chaplin, to make that arduous journey as well. Manchester, the little Pekingese, was given to Jack’s family—Jack refused to walk a dog that looked like a powder puff—and gained a devoted protector in Jack’s father. Proudly pointing him out to taxi drivers when he came home from a night on the town, James Dunphy would say, “See that dog? It came all the way from Africa.” To take its place, Truman gave Jack a Kerry blue, a breed renowned for its pugnacity.
Leo was still holding open house on Sunday nights, and Truman showed up to see old friends and to try to make a new one: William Faulkner. Then as now, Faulkner’s giant talent loomed over other Southern writers, all of whom sometimes felt that they were merely scribbling in his margins. “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the [Southern] writer can and cannot permit himself to do,” said one of them, Flannery O’Connor. “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Although Truman had already met him—Faulkner also was a Random House author, as well as a good friend of Bennett Cerf and Bob Linscott—he was not long in joining the crowd that hovered around when Faulkner made a surprise visit to Leo’s.
Knowing how such attention alarmed Faulkner, Ruth Ford, who had brought him, quickly tugged at his sleeve. “We have to go home now,” she declared. “I wanna go! I wanna come along!” said Truman, jumping into a taxi with them. Faulkner was one of the few who did not succumb to his charms. “Truman never stopped talking and Faulkner never talked at all,” Ford recalled. “The more Truman talked, the more nervous Faulkner became—which speeded Truman up all the more.” Assuming, probably correctly, that Faulkner did not admire the work of Ernest Hemingway, Truman gleefully recounted the many failings of Hemingway’s newest novel, Across the River and into the Trees. Not above criticizing Hemingway himself, Faulkner did not grant such rights to Truman, and he finally broke his silence long enough to say: “Young man, I haven’t read this new one. And though it may not be the best thing Hemingway ever wrote, I know it will be carefully done and it will have quality.” Truman probably still felt the sting of that spanking when he wrote Bill Goyen several months later, following Faulkner’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm: “I am pleased that Faulkner got the Nobel Prize—but am far from pleased with his Collected Stories. With three exceptions they seem to me unwritten, unreadable, absolute frauds. Did you read that, when he arrived in Sweden, he listed his profession as farmer? I’m not so sure he was wrong.”
Truman had what was probably his last encounter with the Dixie Limited in the mid-fifties, at the end of Faulkner’s romance with Jean Stein, who was a daughter of the Hollywood movie tycoon Jules Stein. “I didn’t know it, but Faulkner had a Lolita complex—he was a Humbert Humbert. Jean knew it instantaneously, and made herself look like fourteen. Faulkner fell madly in love with her, and he was going to divorce his wife so they could marry. But her parents said they would never speak to her again if she did, and she had to stop seeing him. She told him one day over lunch at the Algonquin. When I stopped in at Random House that evening—I had a key and used to go there sometimes—I heard this terrible sobbing from the little room they gave him. The room was dark, and he was lying on the couch, completely drunk; a bottle of bourbon was sitting on the floor. ‘It’s all over,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s finished. It’s ended.’ I sat down beside him and took his hand and said, ‘It’s just Truman.’ I stayed there for a couple of hours, until he fell asleep. He went back to his wife in Mississippi, and Jean married Bill vanden Heuvel. When Faulkner died a few years later, it was really of a broken heart.”
Although he was not able to give Linscott Summer Crossing, as he had pledged from Tangier, Truman did give him the makings of a book nonetheless: all the travel articles, nine in all, that he had written since “Notes on N.O.” in 1946. Now he busied himself bringing them together for September publication. As a result of working so long with the fashion magazines, where looks are paramount, he was more concerned than most other writers with the physical appearance of his books—such things as the color of dust jackets and the layouts inside. For this, his third book—Local Color he titled it—he made all the major decisions, doing everything but don a printer’s green eyeshade and set the type. “Maybe it seems strange that anyone should put such stress on the ‘physical’ appearance of a book,” he was later to write Linscott. “But there you are, I can’t help it.” Far from finding it strange, Linscott was enormously impressed. “You see, Bill, you would never do this,” he cheerfully told Goyen, prompted perhaps by a mischievous desire to feed Goyen’s obvious envy of Truman. “You would never have enough chutzpah to say what you really wanted with your book. Truman won’t listen to anybody but himself, and he knows exactly what he wants. And we do it.”
When it came to his own life, Truman did not always know exactly what he wanted, however: in Europe he had longed to be in New York; now, in New York, he longed to be back in Europe. The inside of a light bulb is an exciting place to live, he was discovering, but it is not a tranquil and productive place to work. Manhattan was expensive, moreover; being in the gossip columns nearly every day had not even secured him an apartment with a private toilet. To add to his depression, he contracted a case of viral pneumonia, which sent him to the hospital for several days. Sunny Sicily beckoned once again. In early April, 1950, he and Jack finally heeded its call and boarded a Norwegian freighter bound for Italy.
After three weeks at sea and a long train ride from Palermo, they at last reached their destination, Taormina, a picturesque hill town near Mount Etna that had provided a haven for foreigners since the time of Euclid. One side was dominated by an ancient Greek theater, the other by the ruins of a medieval castle; in between was the piazza, with its baroque church, fountain, and cooling oleander trees. Before World War II, German and English tourists had crowded its bars and cafés; in 1950, currency restrictions kept most of them at home, and besides the natives, there were only a few outsiders around to savor that postcard-pretty scene.
It was in that square that Donald Windham, who had arranged to meet them, heard Truman’s familiar shriek on the morning of May 3: Truman, Jack, and Kelly, their Kerry blue terrier, had finally come, days after they were expected. Donald had dinner with them that night, and the next day he helped them find a house. Hung on the side of a hill and approachable only by foot, over a rocky goat path, the Fontana Vecchia, as it was called, seemed to offer everything they wanted at an affordable price. Indeed, it all but carried a guarantee of good writing to come: D.H. Lawrence had lived and enjoyed two of his most creative years there in the twenties. “We have had luck, at least I hope it is luck, in finding a place to live,” Truman reported to Linscott. “It is the top two floors of a little villa about twenty minutes walk from Taormina, very isolated, but plenty of room and a wonderful view. It costs $50 a month, which is rather a lot, at least by Italian standards, but I like it tremendously.”
The top floor had two bedrooms and a bath; the living room, dining room, and kitchen were on the floor below; a partially detached tower contained a small room for guests; and the ground level was occupied by the owner. Plenty of space it had, but the Fontana Vecchia was far from luxurious. There was no phone or refrigerator; the two-burner stove always seemed to run out of fuel at dinnertime; hot water was dispensed by a wood-burning heater; and the only space heating came from fireplaces. Not much of a drawback in May, that was a considerable hardship during the winter, which was short but so cold that Truman sometimes wore gloves to write. A stone shack was what Cecil, who usually was entertained by grander hosts, was to call the house, and he was not altogether wrong. “With any one else [but Truman] the discomfort would have been unbearable,” he would complain. “As it was, the daily trek to buy provisions in town, and lugging the heavy packages back in the heat of the day, was quite an ordeal. My bedroom possessed no furniture except a pallet on which to sleep and it was best never to use the bathroom.”
The view from the huge windows and broad terraces was as wonderful as Truman said, however, a more than adequate reward for the hike up that steep and stony path: down below, a valley of olive and almond trees, the blue Ionian Sea beyond, and, in the distance, the miragelike outline of the Italian mainland. “It is very like living in an airplane, or a ship trembling on the peak of a tidal wave,” said Truman. “There is a momentous feeling each time one looks from the windows, steps onto the terrace, a feeling of being suspended, like the white reeling doves, between the mountains and above the sea.”
A girl in her late teens, Graziella, was paid seven dollars a month to clean and cook lunch, usually minestrone, and the new tenants happily returned to the productive schedule of Ischia and Tangier: work in the morning, lunch and a swim, and often more work in the afternoon. Toward evening, Truman walked into Taormina to buy meat for dinner. The undernourished brats who lived in caves on the outskirts of town invariably screamed at him as he walked by. He learned just enough Italian to reply that he planned to boil them alive if they did not shut up, and the exchange of insults became as much a part of his daily routine as the stops at the post office for mail, the tabacchi for newspapers and magazines, and the Americana Bar for a martini.
The new arrivals were quickly introduced to the peculiar Sicilian mentality. Graziella often came to work with loud bruises and once even a split lip, results of beatings by her brother, who objected to her going out by herself. When Truman expressed shock at his brutality, she politely told him to mind his own business. “He is good-looking and has many friends,” she said. “Only to me is he brute.” In late summer there was a werewolf scare. Someone claimed to have been attacked by a human on all fours. “You don’t believe in werewolves, do you?” Truman asked the boy who delivered ice. “Oh, yes,” the boy gravely replied. “There used to be many werewolves in Taormina. Now there are only two or three.” In the fall Etna erupted, an awesome sight, and Truman joined the crowds who packed baskets with food and wine and picnicked as close as they dared to its fiery rivers. Only one group of revelers was hurt, beaten up by peasants whose homes had been swallowed by the lava and who were furious to see their neighbors making holiday out of their tragedy.
A martini was not all Truman wanted at the Americana Bar: it was a meeting place and the center of gossip for Taormina’s small foreign colony. Andre Gide, who was then in the last year of his long life, was in town when Truman and Jack arrived, for instance, basking in the sun and finding pleasure in the company of the compliant boys he paid to visit his hotel room. Eugene O’Neill showed up later (“a nervous little man at loose ends and lonely; but rather likable” was how Truman described the great playwright to a friend), and so did Jean Cocteau, Christian Dior, Emlyn Williams, Orson Welles, Gayelord Hauser, and an M.G.M. film crew that was shooting a B movie, The Light Touch, with Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli. At Truman’s request, Richard Brooks, the director, placed him in a street scene. “I can just imagine Tennessee’s face when he sees this!” Truman rejoiced. But his acting career was soon derailed. Screening the rough cut in Hollywood, the producer spotted his face and demanded its removal. “Isn’t that Truman Capote?” he asked Brooks. “You can’t use him! Cut him out!”
For months the patrons of the Americana were captivated by the continuing soap opera of Bobby Pratt-Barlow, a moneyed Englishman and a decades-long resident of Taormina who sometimes stopped by to see Truman and Jack on his way to his own house in the hills. “He liked beautiful boys, and he turned them into very good and accomplished servants,” said Truman. “When he was ready for a new one, the hill families around Taormina would vie for him to consider their sons for adoption. Then a rich Texan came to town, bought a big house, put in a swimming pool, and drove around in a large car. At the time Bobby had a boy of thirteen, Beppe, who was the greatest love of all the boys he had ever had. The Texan spied him and stole him away—the kid was just undone by the swimming pool and the car. After that, it was open warfare in that town! People were outraged that the boy had gone off and left Bobby, and they tried all kinds of voodoo to kill off the American. But none of it worked. The boy stayed with him and was eventually married in his house.”
But the only soap operas that really interested Truman were those involving his friends and enemies in New York. He wrote letters, he pointedly informed one laggard correspondent, only so that he could receive them, and the visit to the post office was the most exciting part of his day. “Such a newsy letter,” he purred to Pearl Kazin after receiving one of her fact-filled dispatches. “You are the only person who writes the kind of letter I really enjoy.” The Cerfs, on the other hand, received a reprimand for not writing more often. “Many’s the night I’ve trudged down to the post office, then trudged back empty handed,” he wailed, “thinking, a fine lot they are, whirling from one gay event to another, never giving a thought to poor Truman: far off there on a windswept hill with nothing but the sound of the sea to cheer him up. Oh chilluns, it do get mighty powerful lonesome here.”
Even Pearl’s news was stale by the time it reached Taormina, and frustrated by the lack of fresh gossip, Truman resurrected old gossip and used it in a new way, in a parlor game, his own version of Monopoly, which he played with almost anyone who made it up the goat path. “It’s SO educational,” he bragged to the Cerfs, “and you can slander people right and left, all in the interest of le sport. It’s called IDC, which stands for International Daisy Chain. You make a chain of names, each one connected by the fact that he or she has had an affair with the person previously mentioned; the point is to go as far and as incongruously as possible. For example: this one is from Peggy Guggenheim to King Farouk. Peggy Guggenheim to Lawrence Vail to Jeanne Connolly to Cyril Connolly to Dorothy Walworth to King Farouk. See how it works? Peggy Guggenheim had an affair with L. Vail who had an affair with J. Connolly etc. Here is another, and much more difficult, not to say raffine, example: from Henry James to Ida Lupino. As follows: Henry James to Hugh Walpole to Harold Nicolson to the Hon. David Herbert to John C. Wilson to Noel Coward to Louis Hayward to Ida Lupino. Perhaps it all sounds rather dreary on paper; but I can assure you that, with a few drinks inside you and some suitable folk to play with, you’ll be amazed.” Later he added: “P.S. forgot to include my most favorite IDC: Cab Calloway to Hitler. Cab Calloway to Marquesa Casamaury to Carol Reed to Vanity Mitford to Hitler. Get Moss and Kitty [Hart] to play this game; I bet they’d be wonderful at it. If you get any good IDC’s, please send them along.”
Seeing his friends was even better than corresponding with them, and he began issuing invitations almost as soon as he had unpacked. “It is terribly quiet and pretty and cheap and we want awfully for you to come here. Why don’t you, Bill?” he pleaded with Bill Goyen. A like request was directed to Cecil, who, to Truman’s consternation, was considering vacationing in France instead of Italy. “But why are you going to Brittany?” he asked. “Absolutely you must take a holiday here.” A similar courtship was carried on with Pearl Kazin. “Pearl Lamb,” he wrote in June. “La vie Taormina est la vie en Rose—except, of course, that there is no Pearl.” And later: “Honey, why are you going to the south of France? Why not Italy! So much warmer, nicer, cheaper. Or here, Sicily. At least, before settling anything, come down and visit with us.”
Goyen ignored his pleas, but Cecil and Pearl succumbed, Cecil staying two weeks in August, Pearl for a full three months during the fall and winter. “Truman was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, generous to a fault,” she said. “I was running out of money, and he said, ‘I’ll support you.’ And he meant every word of it.” Scarcely had she put down her bags, however, when Peggy Guggenheim, the millionaire art collector, descended on them from her palazzo in Venice. “With that incredible generosity of Truman’s, he had simply thrown out the suggestion that she come down to Sicily,” recalled Pearl. “I moved out of the tower and slept in the living room, but she still found it absolutely impermissible that there should be another woman around. She insisted that we all had to accompany her on her ‘giro’—it’s what the Sicilians called an automobile trip—around the island. So off we went for five or six days.
“It was a ghastly trip in some ways. Peggy was flirting with Jack, which didn’t interest him at all, and, failing that, with the driver of the car, whom she was also trying to cheat on the number of kilometers that she was supposed to pay him for. He was about thirty-five and Peggy herself was fifty-two. I remember her age because Truman sneaked a look at her passport, ran to me, and said, ‘Guess how old she is!’ At that point fifty-two seemed awfully old to both of us. The journey ended with a violent outburst on Jack’s part in the lobby of the hotel in Palermo. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he gave her a dressing-down the likes of which I don’t think she had ever had in her life. He was also angry at Truman because he didn’t appreciate at all the carte blanche invitations Truman was always giving people. We made the return trip to Taormina in rather stony silence.”
One invitation Jack could not object to was that extended to Truman’s mother. Touring Europe for the first time since the war, she and Joe showed up at the beginning of September. Although Truman did not know it, Nina had a reason for making a detour to Sicily, and before leaving New York she had told Phoebe Pierce what it was. “She telephoned me and asked me if I could have lunch with her,” said Phoebe. “She was completely sober and less ‘Southern belley’ than I had ever seen her. She said that she had always hated me, but that she was sorry she had been unkind to me. ‘I was wrong and I know you loved Truman,’ she told me, ‘and I don’t know why I hated you.’ Somehow she made me feel worse after she had apologized than before: that was the ambiguity of Nina. Then she said to me, ‘I’m going over to Europe to see Truman. I want to put things right. I don’t think I have behaved very well.’”
In Taormina she did behave well—though it was too late, of course, to put things right. She was on the wagon, drinking nothing but endless cups of coffee, as she had for many months, and she treated Jack, whom she detested, with elaborate courtesy. Jack was equally polite to her, though he disliked her with at least equal intensity. “She was nothing but a hillbilly from the South, a pushy climber who only wanted to be in the New York Social Register,” he declared. “She hated the fact that she had a talented kid, and she hated Truman all the time, I’m sure. And he hated her. That poor little boy! He came from the mines.” If Nina and Jack had remained together much longer, there might have been an explosion—they were both primed bombs with short fuses—and Truman and Joe must have been relieved when after three or four days, the two of them went their separate ways: Jack to visit a friend near Naples, and Nina, along with Truman and Joe, to take in the beauties of Venice.
Local Color was published while Truman was there, and before heading home to America, Nina and Joe gave him a party in the roof garden of the Danieli, which was then, as now, one of the best hotels in the city. A few weeks later, the reviews, which were mostly favorable, reached him in Sicily. “At least the great chest-pounding he-men spit less venom than usual,” he wrote Linscott. “God forbid they should ever take me to their hearts; when that time comes, I’d best retire.” At the end of the month he also celebrated another birthday: he was now too old ever to be called a kid. “Dear God, I am 26,” he lamented, probably only half in jest, to Mary Louise. “I wanted always to be 25.”
Another visitor to Taormina was Robert Horan, whom Truman used to see at Capricorn, the Menotti-Barber house in Mount Kisco. Horan’s relationship with the two composers was rapidly disintegrating, and Thomas Schippers, a strikingly handsome nineteen-year-old who was to become the golden boy of American composers, was taking his place in Gian-Carlo’s affections. Devastated by the downward turn in his life, Horan was, in his own words, “drunk most of the time, in a kind of fog, just falling apart.” Finally, in December, he did fall apart. He became seriously ill and sardonically—such was his mood—told the hotel doctor that he had tried to commit suicide. The doctor, along with Truman and most others, believed him. For several days, Truman was nurse, companion and fixer, using all his power of persuasion to summon other doctors, who did not want to become involved in an attempted suicide, and to keep away the police, who did. Unable to work, under attack from Jack, who wanted him to stay away from “that son-of-a-bitch black Irishman,” as he called Horan, Truman desperately wired Gian-Carlo, who was in Milan, to come and get his young friend. When Gian-Carlo said that he could not take time from rehearsals at La Scala, Truman packed Horan aboard a train and delivered him to the maestro in person.
“The rest of the story is just too sad and sordid,” Truman reported to Bill Goyen several days later. “When we finally got to the hotel in Milan, G-C wasn’t there. He was at a rehearsal. I could have killed him. But Bob, for his part, was dramatizing the situation as much as possible. When G-C at last turned up, Bob was incredibly insolent to him—made him out to be a monster of ambition and stupidity. And there was G-C jumping around pretending it was all a joke. Then came the really sickening denouement. G-C came to my room, his face white as cold cream. All in a burst he said: Bob was ruining his life, that he’d spent $2,000 a month since he’d come to Europe and B’s extravagance was taking all his money—but that none of this mattered so long as he did not have to go to bed with him, that for the last few years B forced him to make love and afterwards he, G-C, had to go and throw up. He also said that he was terribly in love with somebody else—some young American boy—and he was terrified of B’s finding out.” Disgusted with both of them, Truman returned to Sicily the next morning. “Have been going through a terrible experience,” he told Linscott. “As a result am quite, quite exhausted.”
Shortly into the New Year, 1951, Jack’s father died. Jack decided that it would be too expensive and too complicated to return home for the funeral, but he paid his own kind of homage. His father was such a clean man, he told Truman and Pearl, that the greatest tribute he could pay his memory was to take a bath—it was not bath night. He lit a fire under the water heater, and when he had dried off, Truman and Pearl used the rest of the precious hot water to take their own baths. “Little things keep coming at me, remindful and barbed,” Jack wrote his sister Gloria. Chief among them was his regret that his father, with whom he had maintained a kind of truce in recent years, had not seen him write a best-seller, as his father had said he wanted him to do.