TWO weeks before The Grass Harp closed, Truman went backstage to say goodbye to the cast. Hours later, he, Jack, and Kelly were aboard ship once more, on their way back to Europe. Stopping first in Paris, where they bought a tiny red Renault, they then drove to Italy and south again to Sicily. “Well, here we are back in Taormina,” Truman wrote Pearl Kazin, “and I’m delighted to be here, believe me.” Unfortunately, the Fontana Vecchia had been rented, but they became the only tenants of a newly completed hotel that was not otherwise scheduled to open until winter. “There are two long spooky hallways—more than twenty rooms, and, as far as I can make out, hundreds & hundreds of doors, all of which have to be locked and barred at night,” Jack told Mary Louise. “We want you to come—we have a room and bath—lots of them in fact—and we think of them as waiting mostly for you.” Truman, characteristically, painted a somewhat grander picture of that ghostly residence. “We could not get Fontana,” he reported to Donald Windham, “so have rented an entire hotel—22 rooms and six baths, all super moderne.”
Graziella came back to work, and they picked up life where they had left it the year before. The hotel, like the Fontana Vecchia, sat high on a hill above the town, but the car made it easier to travel to the beach; hiring a boat for the summer, they learned to swim underwater, with snorkels and masks. Joining Kelly as a dependent was Lola, a black bird—whether a crow or raven, no one could say—that liked to hide small objects, such as keys and fountain pens. “She adores Jack—but is a good deal less fond of me,” Truman told Jack’s sister Gloria. “I guess because I try to discipline her. Only how do you discipline a bird?” Renewing old friendships, he soon caught up on the latest news of the piazza. “It seems all so much the same,” he told Donald, “except there are more cafes, more tourists, and Carlo Panarello has opened a nightclub. The Panther no longer parades the beaches: he got involved in a great scandal by trying to blackmail one of Gayelord Hauser’s guests, and the police told him to stay out of Taormina.”
When he was asked in New York what he would do next, Truman had said that he planned to write short stories, a new novel, and more plays—just about everything, in short, but nothing in particular. “When one of them seizes me, I’ll do that one first,” he informed one questioner. In fact, though he may not have known it himself, he had been seized. The actors at the Martin Beck, who recognized all the symptoms, said that he had become completely stagestruck. Despite the failure of The Grass Harp, he wanted to write another play. Saint Subber, who had not given up on him, saw the makings of a musical in “House of Flowers,” his amusing, touching story about a Haitian bordello, and again approached him about an adaptation. This time Truman did not hesitate. He said yes.
Saint hoped to begin preliminary work on the production in the fall of 1952, but Truman, still panting from his months of exertion on The Grass Harp, was not yet willing to enter another round-the-clock writing marathon. Although he worked fairly hard, reaching the halfway point of his first draft in early September, he was in no rush to finish the rest; not willing to give up prose entirely, he found enough spare hours to write a short story and at least forty pages of a novel. By the time he returned home after Christmas, he told Linscott, he expected to have completed not only the play, but a hundred pages of the novel as well. He was overly optimistic. He found it too confusing to try to concentrate on two large projects at once, and the novel was soon put aside. “Sometimes I wish I did not have this urge to write for the theater,” he told Jack’s sister. “Life was so much simpler when I just wrote stories.”
And so much quieter too. Accustomed to the frantic pace of Broadway, “the mad Saint,” as Truman nicknamed him, expected a more single-minded dedication and dispatched telegrams inquiring about his progress. To Truman’s annoyance, he even threatened to come to Taormina so that they could talk in person. “Had a two-page cable from the Saint yesterday,” he complained to Cecil in July. “He is very anxious to come over here and seems to feel he needs a visa from me. Christ! But I just don’t want to see him until I have done enough work to feel less vulnerable.” Worse yet, from Truman’s point of view, was the likelihood that Saint would bring along his companion, Robbie Campbell, the young black who had attracted so much attention singing “Nature Boy” at Le Boeuf sur la Toit in 1948. “I rather fear he [Saint] will be headed this way toward the end of the month, and I strongly suggest you put up storm windows at 8 Pelham Place,” he advised Cecil in August. “For my own sake, I pray to God he doesn’t bring the Tar Baby with him. Because I will not, no never again, put up with the boredom of that.” He did not have to. Saint stayed home and Campbell did not show his handsome face.
In mid-September, Truman and Jack stuffed their belongings into the little Renault. With the pugnacious Kelly barking out the window at goats and donkeys and the regal Lola perched commandingly on one or the other’s shoulder, they said farewell for the last time to Taormina, whose appeal had depended, more than they had thought, on the charms of the Fontana Vecchia. Leisurely driving north, they picnicked in the Calabrian mountains, sunbathed on the remote beaches of Cape Palinuro, and slept on the ground amid the surf-soothed ruins of majestic Paestum before settling in Rome, in a three-room penthouse on the Via Margutta.
“We decided to spend the winter here in Rome and have found, I must say, a beautiful apartment, a dream really,” Truman wrote Cecil. “We have a first-rate cook! Everything is so different from Taormina—I guess this is the first time in my life I’ve ever lived the way I really want to—such a pity that I can’t afford it.” Mary Louise, who was still at Harper’s Bazaar, heard much the same tale of joy mingled with woe. “[Our apartment] is very sunny and charming, and I would be a very happy boy if it weren’t so outrageously expensive, and I am next-door to penniless. If you hear of anyone who wants an article about Rome (or horticulture, hair styles, Famous People I Have Known) send them my way.” Though he had been in Rome only a few days, already he had managed to snub or be snubbed by several of their mutual friends. In a wickedly amusing, but probably accurate aside, he added: “Heaven knows there are enough old acquaintances about—I am going to buy a heavy veil to wear in the streets. Sister (the famous Carson McCullers, you remember her?) and Mr. Sister are frequently to be observed staggering along the Via Veneto, where they are now established members of the movie crowd (she is writing a movie for David Selznick); but of course Sister and Mr. Sister are too exalted, and usually too drunk, to recognize my poor presence. The Cow (the not so famous Marguerite Young) is still here, but quite easy to avoid if you go nowhere near the lobby of the Inghilterra, where she broods all day with a cup of coffee.”
Actually, Truman had been offered Carson’s movie job first—or so he informed Cecil in November—but had deliberated so long that Selznick gave up on him. “Now I’m just a little sorry,” he confessed, “if only because it would have put an end to my financial straits, which grow increasingly serious. But it would have been dishonest of me to have accepted, for I did not feel at all sympathetic to the story they outlined, and besides I must, must get on with my own work.” Writers, particularly those with empty bank accounts, should not be bound by such rash promises of artistic purity, however, especially when large sums are offered for little toil. Before the month was over, he had temporarily abandoned his own work and assumed the job from which Carson had just been fired. Again transformed into a frantic scribbler, he was in a constant huddle with the illustrious Selznick, the producer of King Kong, Rebecca, and the greatest of all Hollywood spectaculars, Gone with the Wind. “Capote will be rich someday,” Jack jokingly told Mary Louise, “so we must all stay friends with him.”
The movie was titled Stazione Termini, and it was the result of an unnatural collaboration between Selznick, who wanted his wife, Jennifer Jones, to star in a prestigious European production, and Vittorio De Sica, one of the leaders of Italy’s postwar film renaissance. Jones was to play an American housewife on a visit to Rome, Montgomery Clift was to play her Italian lover, and the story of their adultery was to be told with De Sica’s characteristic simplicity inside Rome’s new railway station—hence the title. But the picture was doomed from the start. As shooting began, it became clear that Selznick had only imagined he wanted the unvarnished quality of Italian neorealism. What he really wanted was the kind of Hollywood polish for which he was famous. He compulsively supervised every detail, as was his habit, and tried several writers besides Carson in his search for what he considered a workable script.
His latest scriptwriter he did not fire—“David absolutely adored him,” said Jones—and Truman worked at furious speed, sometimes running into one room of the station to write the lines the actors were waiting to recite in another. In the end his contribution was small, and he could neither claim credit nor receive blame for the picture that rolled across American screens a year later. Both credit and blame belonged to the producer. When he returned home, Selznick added a saccharine love song by Patti Page and cut what De Sica had shot by nearly a third, to an extraordinarily short sixty-three minutes. Even at that abbreviated length, Indiscretion of an American Wife, as he retitled it, was a flop. “Lousy” was Truman’s one-word judgment, and both the public and the critics concurred. “Indiscretion is, for the gifted men who made it, an indiscretion indeed,” said one reviewer, reflecting an apparently universal opinion.
Truman had known one of the picture’s two stars, Montgomery Clift, in New York, but only in Rome, in the hermetically sealed world of a film set, did they become close. “Monty was really gifted,” said Truman. “He was serious about only one thing, and that was acting. He was an exception to my theory that a movie star has to be ignorant to be good. You have to be smart to be on the stage, but a film actor is just a conduit for the writer, the director, and everybody else who puts something into a picture. He has to react to what they do. If he’s too smart, he resists them and then he’s no good. Brando never really made it as a movie star—he always resisted. Garbo, on the other hand, never had a thought in her head and she was fabulous! She was the perfect instrument for the writer and director. Monty was smart and good, but that was because he was also very shrewd: he knew just what he was doing. I once asked him why he wanted to act in movies, why he didn’t do something more interesting. He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s my life! This is what I know how to do.’ He was an artist, with all of an artist’s sensibilities and flaws.
“But the last eight years of his life were a terrible mess, and when he was high on something, he was absolutely impossible. There is one incident that stands out most in my friendship with him. It happened sometime in the fifties, a few days before Christmas. He phoned me in the morning and invited me to lunch. ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘because I haven’t done any Christmas shopping.’ He said, ‘Listen, I haven’t bought anything either. If you take me shopping with you, I’ll buy you lunch.’ So I met him at his house and we walked to the Colony. He seemed perfectly normal and full of good humor, and we were laughing and having a fine time. No one could have been more charming. Everybody on the street kept stopping and turning—they recognized him, me or both of us. It was a cold, blue day, and the whole thing had a kind of jolly, jingling quality about it.
“When we finished eating, we went shopping at an Italian store that specialized in beautiful, expensive sweaters. At lunch he had had just one drink—one drink! But he must have shot up or taken pills in the men’s room, because suddenly he went utterly, completely to pieces, just like an insane person. He pointed to the counter, where all the sweaters were stacked, and counted, ‘One, two, three, four, five… sixteen. How much are all of those?’ The salesman told him, and Monty picked up all of the sweaters in one huge bundle—there were so many they were falling out of his arms—and somehow got the door open. It had begun to rain by this time—in fact it was pouring—but he walked out and threw them all in the gutter. When he came back, the salesman just asked, ‘And to what address do I send the bill, Mr. Clift?’ I’ve never seen anyone so cool in my life as that salesman. Monty wouldn’t speak to him, but I gave his address and made him sign the bill.
“‘Monty, you’ve got to go home,’ I said when we went outside. ‘I’m not going anywhere!’ he replied, and we began to have a struggle in the street. I shoved him into the back seat of a taxi, but he got out, walked around the back and got into the front seat, where he tried to grab the wheel away from the driver, who told us to get out or he would call the police. ‘Oh, please God, do anything except that!’ I said. ‘This man is very ill. Take us to this address, and I’ll give you a big tip. Please!’ So he did, through all the Christmas traffic, while I was holding on to Monty, who was screaming and shouting. It was a nightmare. When we got to his house, his colored houseman managed to get him inside and called his doctor, who gave him an injection. After that experience, something went snap in our relationship. I still liked him very much, but I was always wary of him. It just got to the point where one dreaded to see him, no matter how much one liked him.
“In the sixties—it must have been 1964—he was living with a guy who just ripped him off, stole him blind. By that time he was so far gone on drugs and liquor that he didn’t know what he was doing, and he was a virtual prisoner in his own house. So I went over there and told him what was happening and that he had to leave. I told him I would do everything, take him away and find him a place to live. He said that it didn’t matter because he would be dead in six months anyway. I called up Elizabeth Taylor, who had been in love with him, and she said that she would take care of him in the Regency Hotel, where she was staying. So I went back to his house, packed his bag, and took him to the Regency. He remained there three days and then went home. ‘I can’t stay in a hotel,’ he told me. ‘I have to be at home.’ He died about two years later.”
A few weeks after Truman finished work on the Selznick film, Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, the director of some of Bogart’s best movies, including The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, were sitting in George’s American Bar in Rome, drinking double martinis and gloomily discussing their problems. They had come to Italy to make a picture from a novel titled Beat the Devil, a mystery in an offbeat key, somewhat like the famous Falcon. They had hired a cast that boasted, besides Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, and Gina Lollobrigida, the gorgeous new Italian star. They had found a picturesque location, the village of Ravello, perched high on the Amalfi coast south of Naples, and they had procured financing, much of which Bogart had put up himself. What they did not have was a script: they both disliked the one prepared by two professional screenwriters. “Couldn’t read it,” said Bogart. “Neither could I,” admitted Huston. “Stinker, isn’t it?”
Hearing of their dilemma, Selznick said that he knew of just the writer for them—and as luck would have it, the man he had in mind was already in Rome. “I do urge you to consider calling in Capote, even if it is only for two or three weeks,” he wrote Huston. “His is, in my opinion, one of the freshest and most original and most exciting writing talents of our time—and what he would say through these characters, and how he would have them say it, would be so completely different from anything that has been heard from a motion-picture theater’s sound box as to also give you something completely fresh—or so at least I think. Moreover, I know you very well, and I know of very few writers other than Capote whose work is of the sort that I know would appeal to you. He can also be quite fast, but only if he is whipped every day. In this case, he can turn out at least one solid scene a day, and more if necessary, and certainly more in collaboration with you. Also, he is easy to work with, needing only to be stepped on good-naturedly, like the wonderful but bad little boy he is, when he starts to whine.”
Out of desperation, probably, more than desire, Huston and Bogart accepted Selznick’s advice, and on a chilly day in early February, 1953, wearing an overcoat that fell almost to his ankles and trailing a long lavender scarf, that wonderful, bad little boy arrived in Ravello. “Nobody was prepared for the entrance of this incredible figure,” said John Barry Ryan, a rich young New Yorker who was working as one of Huston’s assistants. In a letter to his wife, Lauren Bacall, Bogart described his own reaction to that incredible figure: “At first you can’t believe him, he’s so odd, and then you want to carry him around with you always.”
Truman did write at least one solid scene a day—without being whipped or stepped on—but he was never able to keep more than a day or two ahead of filming. Usually he wrote much of the night, testing out lines and ideas on Huston (who was listed as coauthor but almost certainly had little to do with the screenplay itself). Then, just before lunchtime, he sauntered over to the scene of the shooting with the following day’s script tucked under his arm. “He wrote it page by page and read it aloud to us all, page by page, every morning,” said Robert Morley. “He never seemed to manage to write very much on any one day, but then as we didn’t film very much either it didn’t matter.”
There were only two interruptions in that tight schedule. One occurred when Truman had to return to Rome. “Truman had to go back to his raven,” the production manager informed Morley. “The bird simply refused to talk to him on the telephone and may be quite ill. On the other hand, as Truman says, he may be just sulking.” In fact, the bird—Lola, of course—had flown off the terrace of the Via Margutta apartment and was never seen again. The other interruption was more serious. One morning Truman awoke with a swollen jaw, the result of a dangerously abscessed wisdom tooth, and he had to be rushed to a hospital in Naples. “I swear his face was twice its size,” said Huston. “But that night something like ten or twelve pages of script came back that he had written in the hospital! He was a bulldog.”
Something completely fresh Selznick had promised, and something completely fresh Truman delivered. Before anyone else knew what was happening, the offbeat mystery that Bogart and Huston had thought they were making disappeared, and a mystery-comedy of Truman’s own devising took its place: a plot of wild skids and hairpin turns, unpredictable characters, and nutty dialogue reminiscent of the screwball comedies of the thirties. Morley is the leader of a quartet of inept cutthroats who are on their way to Africa to steal title to uranium deposits. Bogart is their reluctant confederate, Lollobrigida is his Italian wife, and Jones, playing a character who seems particularly dear to her creator, is a liar of Rabelaisian ingenuity, someone who, in Bogart’s words, “uses her imagination rather than her memory.” All are stuck in Ravello, waiting for repairs on the freighter that is to take them across the Mediterranean.
“When I started, only John and I knew what the story was, and I have a suspicion that John wasn’t too clear about it,” Truman said. But it is doubtful that Truman was entirely clear either: though he may have known where he was going, he did not know how he was going to get there. The plot veered this way, then that, and characters grew larger or smaller, or changed their personality, a practice that dismayed a methodical actress like Jones. “I always wanted to know where my character was going, whether she was going to drop dead or jump in the ocean or be knocked over the head. The beginning, the middle and the end was the way I was structured, so it sometimes threw me a little bit not to know from day to day what she was going to do or not do.”
Playwriting had not come naturally to Truman. Screenwriting did, giving him the same opportunity as prose to paint visual images without the restrictions of a proscenium stage. He did not have to be taught how to write for the screen: he knew how. Greenwich’s Pickwick Theater had been his classroom, several hundred Hollywood movies had been his teachers, and hours of drinking sweet brandy and making up new dialogue with Phoebe Pierce had been his homework. Now, writing a screenplay for real, he packed it with everything he found funny, from Lollobrigida’s comic malapropisms to his favorite cinema clichés, which, as one critic was to observe, he put within the faintest of mocking quotation marks. “It was perfectly obvious,” said John Barry Ryan, “that he was making a movie for his own amusement. I always meant to sit down with him and ask: ‘Truman, were you doing what we all thought you were doing? Was it really all a game to you?’”
By some mysterious alchemy, the mood of a movie set is often reflected on the theater screen. One of the reasons Beat the Devil is such a lark to see is that, as Huston recalled, “it was a hell of a lark doing it.” For ten weeks Ravello was one giant house party. Huston was the indulgent and genial host; Jones and Bogart were the guests of honor; and Truman, of course, was the entertainer, the Puck. “Things happened that could only have happened on a John Huston set in winter in an Italian town where there was no heat, no electricity, and nothing to eat or drink except what was shipped in,” said Ryan. “Every night there was a great poker game, with Huston, Bogart and David Selznick. Jennifer was being pursued by a tall Italian lesbian, who was in turn being pursued by a short, dumpy Italian lesbian. David was trying to fight everyone off, and Truman was encouraging the whole thing, the marvelous turmoil that he loved to create.”
Bogart nicknamed him “Caposy” and liked to tease him until one day Truman showed he could dish it out as well as take it. “We were all in the lobby of the Hotel Palumbo,” he remembered, “and Bogie was arm-wrestling with the crew. He kept winning over and over. I was just watching, and he called over, ‘How would you like to take me on?’ I said okay. We used to arm-wrestle all the time in school. We put our arms together, and I immediately pushed his arm down. I’ve never seen a look of such complete sorrow on anyone’s face. ‘Would you mind doing that again?’ he asked. ‘Yes, for fifty dollars,’ I said. He put the fifty dollars on the table, and we did it a second time. Bang went his arm again.
“‘I don’t get it. How did you do that?’ he asked. ‘It’s just a trick,’ I said, and as we stood up, he caught me in a bear hug. He meant it affectionately, but there was also a certain kind of frustration–malice in the way he did it. ‘Cut that out, Bogie!’ I said. But he kept on squeezing me. ‘Cut that out!’ I said and hooked my foot behind his leg and pushed. Boom! He fell down and fractured his elbow, which was a big disaster, because it meant two or three days lost in shooting. But I think that that incident, more than anything else, is what made us very good friends. After that he knew better than to fool around with me. I really liked Bogie. He was one of my all-time favorite people.”
Hearing of the amusements in Ravello, other movie folk, such as Orson Welles and Ingrid Bergman, stopped in to say hello. But the visitor who occasioned the most affectionate talk had nothing to do with show business. She was Truman’s old friend the regal Carmel Snow, who came for a weekend and had such a good time that she stayed for a week. Mrs. Snow being Mrs. Snow, she did not watch silently. The women’s dresses were unacceptable, she proclaimed, and summoned from Paris her new discovery, Hubert de Givenchy, to redesign them. That done, she left, waving a white-gloved hand as she marched through the lobby of the Palumbo.
“Why, honey, what’s wrong? Ain’t we chic enough for you?” Bogart inquired.
“My dear man, compared to you my life is lived in a salt mine,” she said as she got into her car. “No, it’s just that now I must straighten my face and stop having fun.”
“Well, remember, I like you, honey,” he said, leaning in the back window. “You’re a very ballsy-type type.”
Mrs. Snow, who had been given the Legion of Honor by the President of France, regarded him coolly for a moment. Then, perhaps deciding that she had just received an accolade that was almost as good, she replied: “Am I? Well, so are you. Bye-bye, tough boy.”
“Bye-bye, tough gal.” And off she went.
In April, the company moved to England to shoot interiors in the Shepperton Studios. This time, Jack, who had never visited the Ravello set, came along, enjoying three or four weeks at Claridge’s, all expenses paid by the production. As a demonstration of the company’s affection, Jack Clayton, the associate producer, gave Truman a puppy, an English bulldog. To repay so much hospitality, Truman gave a dinner party. “[It] ended with John Huston and Humphrey Bogart fistfighting,” Jack wrote his sister Gloria. “But it appears they always act that way. All concerned in the movie were nice to Truman. But I suppose he’s nice to work with, if only because he’s sane and they aren’t.”
Huston may well have wondered if the order of that equation should not have been reversed. As he sat down to edit the movie he and Truman had made, it must have looked odder and odder. Instead of giving it the standard praises, he warned the critics not to expect very much from it. “This is such a slight, tiny picture in this age of great ones,” he said. “You can’t get more trivial.”
In fact, many of the critics loved it. The New Yorker thought it was “hugely entertaining,” and Time called it a “screwball classic.” The public, however, agreed with Huston, and it never made a profit. “Personally if you don’t see this picture you are not missing much,” said a theater owner in Michigan, who bought a newspaper ad to apologize to his patrons for showing it. Even those dearest to Truman disliked it. Jack did not understand it, and Newton walked out after half an hour. One Hollywood wit declared that no matter where you came in, you seemed to have come in in the middle.
Yet the film has survived in revival houses and probably will continue to entertain for a long time to come. Writing in 1975, Charles Champlin, the critic of the Los Angeles Times, offered the appreciation of an aficionado. “However antic and loopy the circumstances of its making may be, Beat the Devil holds up as a fast and disciplined comedy, with a richness of invention which even now, after fifteen or twenty viewings, I find astonishing.” Huston may have been more prophetic than he knew when he told Jones, who had won an Oscar for The Song of Bernadette, “Honey, this is the picture for which you will be remembered.”