THREE
ALTHOUGH he was disappointed by his two failures in the theater, Truman seemed otherwise unfazed. He may have been finished as a playwright, but he was still in demand as a writer. Indeed, he had rarely appeared more self-assured, optimistic, and high-spirited than he did in the weeks and months that followed the closing of House of Flowers. He had made many new friends from show business and high society—the peacocks, Jack called them—and doors were being unlocked all around him. One by one and with breathless impatience, he was opening them all. His life seemed to be exploding, so swiftly was everything happening, and yet he had never been as firmly, as confidently in control.
Most of his new friends, like so many of his old ones, were women: his rapport with the opposite sex had now flowered into perfect communion. Discovering a marvelously apt entry from the journal of a nineteenth-century romantic, he quoted it in a Harper’s Bazaar article to express his own rhapsodic admiration of women, beautiful women: “Sat on the stone wall and observed a gathering of swans, an aloof armada, coast around the curves of the canal and merge with the twilight, their feathers floating away over the water like the trailing hems of snowy ball-gowns. I was reminded of beautiful women; I thought of Mlle. de V., and experienced a cold exquisite spasm, a chill, as though I had heard a poem spoken, fine music rendered. A beautiful woman, beautifully elegant, impresses us as art does, changes the weather of our spirit; and that, is that a frivolous matter? I think not.”
Truman thought not as well. No Casanova had ever admired lovely women more fervently or had been so fervently admired himself. He flattered them, consoled them, tried to guide their destinies. When they came to him with their problems, he could be depended on to ask the right questions and give the right answers. “That’s just fine,” he would say, or, “Oh, that’s not good for you, honey. You shouldn’t do that.” Pygmalion was his favorite role, and any woman who took his advice, whatever her age or position in life, he looked upon as his protégée, a work of art that needed only his word or hand to bring her to perfection. Women delighted him, and he pleasured them in every way but one—the physical act of love.
His ability to mold and influence them was a kind of sexual power, however, and probably not the least potent kind at that. A woman might go to bed with other men, but she listened to Truman. “He would tell me things, what to wear, for instance,” said Carol Marcus. “He was very smart about those things, and I don’t mean in that supercilious, chic, or homosexual way at all—he really knew what was right. He thought about it and got the sense of what a person wanted to be, or how she wanted to appear, and then he helped her to achieve it. It was his way of getting close to her. He was the best pal ever, someone who would coo at you and tell you that you were wonderful. What’s love? It’s a mirror saying you’re a perfect person.”
When all else failed, he employed the most irresistible of the seducer’s arts: he humbled himself and begged for love. “We were once in Copenhagen,” recalled Slim Keith, one of his new, glamorous friends, who was then married to the Broadway producer Iceland Hayward. “When we came back to the hotel one evening, he said, ‘Let’s talk.’ I told him that I was so tired that I was going to get into bed, and I did.
“‘I’m gonna tuck my Big Mama in, I love her so much,’ he said.
“‘Well, I love you too, Truman,’ I told him.
“‘No, you don’t,’ he said.
“‘Yes, I do,’ I replied.
“‘No. Nobody loves me. Do you have any idea what it is to be me? I’m a dwarf…’ And he listed all the things he thought were wrong with him. It was the most heartbreaking little monologue I’ve ever heard. He was testing me to see if I really cared.”
She did care, of course, and her company, and the company of attractive women like her, helped to brighten the weather of his spirit—and that, most certainly, was not a frivolous matter. He sought out and became the loving mirror to a whole new group of such remarkable women. He danced with Marilyn Monroe at El Morocco, he conspired with Elizabeth Taylor to save Montgomery Clift, he talked through long nights with Jacqueline Kennedy, and he became the trusted confidant of the most regal of his armada of swans, the grand and social ladies whose very names prompted floor-sweeping salaams from headwaiters on both sides of the Atlantic.
John Huston introduced him to Marilyn Monroe early in her career, and they formed a close, if brief, bond. “By the time you get this, Marilyn M. will have married Arthur Miller,” he reported to Cecil in June, 1956. “Saw them the other night, both looking suffused with a sexual glow; but can’t help feeling this little episode is called: ‘Death of a Playwright.’” He later picked her to play Holly Golightly in the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but Hollywood, which had different plans for his heroine, chose Audrey Hepburn instead. “Marilyn would have been absolutely marvelous in it,” he stubbornly maintained. “She wanted to play it too, to the extent that she worked up two whole scenes all by herself and did them for me. She was terrifically good, but Paramount double-crossed me in every conceivable way and cast Audrey. Audrey is an old friend and one of my favorite people, but she was just wrong for that part.”
He last saw Marilyn a few weeks before her death in 1962. “She had never looked better. She had lost a lot of weight for the picture [Something’s Got to Give] she was going to do with George Cukor, and there was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly anymore. If she had lived and kept her figure, I think she would still look terrific today. The Kennedys didn’t kill her, the way some people think. She committed suicide. But they did pay one of her best friends to keep quiet about their relationship with her. The friend knew where all the skeletons were, and after Marilyn died, they sent her on a year-long cruise around the world. For a whole year no one knew where she was.”
Elizabeth Taylor he enjoyed for her raucous sense of humor, for what he called her “hectic allure,” and for a lively intelligence that surprised him. “She’s a very unusual girl, really bright. She was always finding unknown novels by well-known writers, and she would give me rather interesting, curious books. She was the first person who ever gave me a P. G. Wodehouse book to read, for example. I’ve seen her with three or four husbands, and Mike Todd was the only one who really knew how to handle her. He loved her, but he also knew how to say, ‘Screw you!’ Not long after they were married, I visited them in Connecticut, where they had a house. It was a beautiful day in early summer, and they were lying on the grass together with about ten Golden Retriever puppies climbing all over them—Elizabeth loves animals. It was my idea of perfect love.
“For some reason Todd liked that dreary little Eddie Fisher, who was like his son or younger brother. When Todd was killed in the plane crash, Fisher and Elizabeth just naturally got together. She never really loved him. I happened to be staying at the Dorchester Hotel in London when she was waiting to make Cleopatra, and we used to make bad jokes about him. We called him the Bus Boy. He was so boring! But I felt sorry for him too. He was so much in love with her, and she was so rude to him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody as rude as she was to him.
“That was the time she got so desperately ill that she nearly died. She had a tracheotomy, and they put a cork in her throat to plug up the hole in her windpipe. I used to take her champagne, which she wasn’t supposed to have, and we hid it under her hospital bed. One night Fisher and I were leaving her room at the same time and he said, ‘I’m afraid we’re going to lose our girl.’ Little did he know! I asked him if he’d like to have dinner, and the next day she said to me, ‘You won’t believe it, darling, but the Bus Boy thought you were making a pass at him!’ At that moment she played a trick on me and pulled the cork out of her throat, spurting champagne all over the room. [“I thought Truman was going to pass out!” she gleefully recalled. “He turned green and sort of huddled into his sheepskin coat.”]
“I spent several days and evenings with her and Richard Burton. That’s when they used to sit up all night, drinking champagne. Theirs was an affair based entirely on tension. They would have terrific but at the same time sort of affectionate rows. They really riled each other up, and I always felt that they did it on purpose so that they could have a big makeup in bed. She was faithful to him, but he was never faithful to her. He flirted with everything and made dates with waitresses practically in front of her. She put up with an awful lot from him. He was terribly indiscreet. ‘Oh, I’m just getting too old for him,’ she would say. ‘We could be perfectly happy as long as I didn’t mind his running around with all these chicks. But I just can’t take it.’ He was obsessed with money. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with him in which at least half of it was not about money. That was the career he wanted—money, money, money. He married her because he wanted to be a movie star. She loved him, but he didn’t love her.”
Jacqueline Kennedy he also met in the mid-fifties, when she was the wife of a glamorous but still relatively unknown senator from Massachusetts. “I used to have dinner with her and Jack when they had this awful old apartment on Park Avenue, around Eighty-sixth Street. But mostly Jack was out-of-town, and she and I would have dinner or go to the theater by ourselves. We used to sit talking until four or five o’clock in the morning. She was sweet, eager, intelligent, not quite sure of herself and hurt—hurt because she knew that he was banging all these other broads. She never said that, but I knew about it rather vaguely. What I don’t understand is why everybody said the Kennedys were so sexy. I know a lot about cocks—I’ve seen an awful lot of them—and if you put all the Kennedys together, you wouldn’t have one good one. I used to see Jack when I was staying with Loel and Gloria Guinness in Palm Beach. I had a little guest cottage with its own private beach, and he would come down so he could swim in the nude. He had absolutely nuthin’! Bobby was the same way; I don’t know how he had all those children. As for Teddy—forget it.
“I liked Jack, and I liked many things about Bobby. But I wouldn’t have wanted him to be President. He was too vindictive. Teddy is crazy. He’s a menace. He’s a wild Irish drunk who goes into terrible rages. I’d want anybody to be President before him.”
Truman visited the Kennedy White House on several occasions. Andrew was present when he received his first invitation, a telephone call from Jackie asking him to what she promised would be the best party she had given since Jack was inaugurated. “Madame Queen Kennedy was talking, telling him about the evening and the music they would hear,” recalled Andrew, “and suddenly Truman interrupted, ‘But, Jackie! Isn’t that an opera?’ He was just wailing! She had told him that one of the selections would be from The Magic Flute. But she quickly assured him that it wouldn’t go on too long and that after everyone else had left, they would go up to the private apartment.”
Jack Kennedy found Truman almost as entertaining as his wife did, occasionally calling him himself. He liked to show off the detective powers of the White House operators, who were famous for their ability to find anyone anywhere; without giving them his unlisted number, he would put them to the test by asking them to ring Truman. They almost always located him, once tracking him down in Palm Springs, where he was visiting a friend who also had an unlisted number.
When their newborn son Patrick Kennedy died, Truman sent the bereaved parents flowers and a seven-line letter of condolence. “I keep thinking what power a great writer has,” Jackie responded. “All the things you write move people. It is a selfish thought—but if all you have written all your life was just training to write those seven lines which were only seen by me—and Jack—I am glad you became a writer.” On the first anniversary of the assassination he gave her a porcelain rose. Obviously touched, she wrote, “Dear Truman, thank you for thinking of me always—in times that are difficult for me with such beautiful things.” He wrote her another letter after the murder of Bobby Kennedy in June, 1968, and she replied: “All the times of insouciance so long ago, when we all first knew each other—and now these numb, numb letters we write—”
They remained friends a year or two more, until he made the mistake of bragging about their intimacy. They were so close, he said, that she invited him into her bedroom while she was dressing to go out for the evening. That indiscretion was repeated to her, and it was enough to cause her to drop him, as she had many other people in her life. When they saw each other afterward, as they inevitably did, they spoke as if nothing untoward had occurred. But they were no longer friends.
“There is some Myth for every man,” said Yeats, “which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all that he did and thought.” Truman’s myth can be expressed not by words but by an image: the young Nina sweeping into the fusty old house on Alabama Avenue, dazzling him with her sleek silk dresses, making him dizzy with her fragrance, then, after a day or two, driving away again, leaving him choking in a cloud of red dust, lonelier and more forlorn than if she had never come at all. To his child’s eyes, she was the embodiment of sophistication, and it did not matter that by the standards of Park Avenue or Lake Shore Drive she was still a country girl, that her clothes were not really smart, or that her perfume was common and inexpensive. She was a symbol of style, and his memories of her visits helped to shape his entire life.
“Style is what you are,” he was to conclude. It was not just a glittering, shiny surface; it was a Platonic ideal, a way of looking at the world and a manner of living, and all of the extraordinary women and most of the men he admired had it to one degree or another. Money could not buy it, but real style, the grand style he prized most, was nonetheless impossible unless it was watered daily from a deep well at a prominent bank. “When I was young,” he confessed, “I wanted to be rich, terribly, terribly rich. My mother, after divorcing my father, married a rich man, but they were upper-middle-class rich, and that’s worse than being poor. There’s no taste in middle-class rich. You must be either very rich or very poor. There’s absolutely no taste in between. I was sent to some good schools, but I hated the rich boys. They had no taste. I’ve always known rich people, but I was so aware of not being rich myself.”
In fact, he was obsessed not so much by money as he was by many of those who have it. He was not interested, except in rare cases, in the Old Line rich, the ancestor-worshiping blue-bloods of Boston or Philadelphia. And he was of course bored by the vulgar rich, shopping-center magnates from Ohio and oil barons from Texas or Oklahoma. It was the other rich who fascinated him, New Yorkers mostly, but Europeans too, people of power and achievement who knew, as he himself did, the difference between what was stylish and what was merely expensive.
He looked upon those special few—the stylish rich—the way the Greeks looked upon their gods, with mingled awe and envy. He believed that money not only enlarged their lives; it also excused them from the ordinary rules of behavior—or, indeed, any rules at all. “He explained to me that when you are a very, very rich girl, you don’t marry the same way a real girl marries,” said Carol Marcus. “You marry the way another person travels in a foreign country. You stay there until you tire of it. Then you go elsewhere.”
Like Arch, he regarded the rich as heaven’s anointed, the only truly liberated people on earth. “The freedom to pursue an esthetic quality in life is an extra dimension,” he explained, “like being able to fly where others walk. It’s marvelous to appreciate paintings, but why not have them? Why not create a whole esthetic ambiente? Be your own living work of art?” Although he never had the cash to buy his own wings—or very many expensive paintings, for that matter—he was resolved that at the very least, he would be granted a guest membership in the celestial society of those who did.
His friend Oliver Smith likened him, not altogether whimsically, to a cat that once lived in Smith’s Brooklyn Heights garden. “He was just an alley cat that wandered around the neighborhood eating whenever he could. He was thin—very, very thin—and he would stand on the porch looking wistfully into the kitchen. He was determined to get into the house, but I didn’t want him. I had four other cats, which was a big enough feline population. Well, we eventually fed him on the porch, but still didn’t allow him in. Finally he got himself into the kitchen, and of course now he just rules the house. He’s huge! He can’t get enough to eat. Truman’s craving for a luxurious environment was something like that cat’s.”
In all the world there was no more brilliant an assemblage than the regal women Truman now called by their first names. What drew him to these elegant swans was not just their beauty, riches and style—he disliked many women who had all three. What captured his imagination, what made his favorites shine so brightly in his eyes, was a quality that was essentially literary: they all had stories to tell. Few of them had been born to wealth or position; they had not always glided on serene and silvery waters; they had struggled, schemed and fought to be where they were. They had created themselves, as he himself had done. Each was an artist, he said, “whose sole creation was her perishable self.”
He installed perhaps a dozen—no more—in his pantheon of class and beauty. There was Gloria Guinness, for example, a Mexican by birth, who after years of poverty and privation had emerged triumphant as the wife of Loel Guinness, a member of one of Britain’s great banking families. There was Barbara Paley, in Truman’s eyes superb and unsurpassable. Like her two sisters, she had been groomed to marry wealth and had achieved her goal by becoming the wife of the founder of CBS. There was C. Z. Guest, who, rebelling against the Boston society in which she was born, had worked as a showgirl and had posed nude for Diego Rivera—the picture he painted hung for a time above the bar of Mexico City’s Reforma hotel. Then, her rebellion over, she married Winston Guest, the beneficiary of ancient trust funds, and settled down to a life of parties and horses.
There was Slim Hayward (later Slim Keith), who had listened to his heartbreaking little monologue in Copenhagen. Slim was born Nancy Gross in Salinas, California. Her slimness—hence her nickname—and distinctly American beauty had so impressed Carmel Snow that during the mid-forties, Mrs. Snow had featured her in almost every issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Howard Hawks, her first husband, had used her as the model for his screen heroines, including Lauren Bacall, and Leland Hayward was so taken with her wit and high spirits that he had divorced Margaret Sullavan to become her second husband. There was Pamela Churchill, Winston’s ex-daughter-in-law, whose magnetic charms eventually lured Hayward away from Slim herself; and there was Marella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat king Gianni Agnelli and “the European swan numero uno,” in Truman’s words.
If their stories had a novelistic quality, so did his own, and the role he reenacted is familiar to readers of classical French fiction: that of the young outsider who, with nothing more than charm and the force of his personality, conquers the most elite society of the great metropolis. It was what Julien Sorel had done in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, what Lucien Chardon had done in Balzac’s Lost Illusions, and what Proust’s narrator, Marcel, had done in Remembrance of Things Past. And it is what Truman did in his own life. To his mind there could have been no better match between affection, his almost worshipful adoration of the lovely swans in whose aloof armada he now paddled, and profession: he was aware that every one of them could become a memorable character in a great work of fiction.
It was then, most probably, in that period of excited conquest in the mid- and late fifties, that he conceived of himself as the American Proust, a writer who would someday do for the modern American rich what Proust, laboring through the night in his cork-lined room, had done for the French aristocracy of the belle époque. In a way, he said, he regarded Proust as his mentor. Proust had not influenced his writing style—Flaubert would always be the master there—but he had set a personal example. “I always felt,” Truman confessed, “he was a kind of secret friend.”
Fortunately for him, his adored swans enjoyed his company as much as he enjoyed theirs. Their love of gossip was as consuming as his own, and as long as they believed themselves exempt, which they naively did, they laughed when he skewered the others in their group, and they were diverted by his considerable talent for stirring up discord—the other side of his Pygmalion complex.
Quiet bored him; he delighted in turbulence. When none existed, he would stir it up, then stand back and watch the results. “It was almost an intellectual solitaire that he played,” said Slim. “He would invent something out of whole cloth, an absolute fabrication, and say, ‘Did you know that X is having a walk-out with Y?’ I would say, ‘Oh, Truman, for God’s sake! That’s ridiculous!’ Then I began to think about it more and wondered: is it that ridiculous? And something usually did come of his invention. Whether he willed it into being or not, I don’t know. But he could cause a lot of trouble.”
Over the years his tales, true and false, helped to wreck more than a few friendships and marriages, including, as it was to turn out, her own. “I can break up anybody in New York I want to,” he bragged to Slim. Some of his old friends, who formerly had found his imitation of Puck endearing, now detected a spitefulness in his gossipy accounts. One of them was Newton, who, after a two-year separation, lunched with him at the Plaza in the spring of 1954. Truman’s mood seemed to have soured in the interval, concluded Newton, who was so upset by their meeting that he cancelled the rest of his stay in Manhattan and fled immediately to the safety of Northampton. That night he once again confided his thoughts about Truman to his diary. “A painful time,” he wrote, “so filled as it was with gossip, malice, and so much unkindliness.”
When he was not busy telling stories about other people, Truman was telling them about himself. He told his new friends about his childhood, about saintly Sook and his eccentric Faulk cousins, even about his sex life. “A friend of mine once went to a dinner at which the host and hostess had just spent a weekend with Truman,” said Glenway Wescott. “They were sophisticated people, but they were still talking about it with their jaws down to their chests. They said that they had never had such an experience. They had asked something about how his homosexuality started, and he sat down and told them about his first orgasm, his first childhood experience, his first older friend, and so on. I thought it was irresistibly funny. What he had discovered was that ladies in society want to know about everything.”
He had also discovered that, surfeited as they were with all the pleasures that money can buy, ladies in society—and gentlemen too—were desperate for amusement. And who could provide better amusement, who had had more practice at it, than Truman? “He was a constant joy to be around in those days,” recalled Eleanor Lambert, a close friend of Gloria Guinness. “Everything was fun about him. He was like a precocious child, so cute and funny; he was able to bring people’s childhoods back to them. He and Gloria laughed all the time. The three of us once visited the Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, which was supposed to be the nadir of taste. Behind the bar was a giant glass wall. It was the wall of the pool, and while you were sitting at the bar, you could see what the swimmers were doing underwater. They would swim by, and though they didn’t know it, we could see that they were urinating in the water! It was absolutely awful, and I wanted to leave. But Truman and Gloria thought it was hilarious. I couldn’t drag them away.”
Where the wives led, the husbands followed. Even those who had not read his books realized that there was more than a jester behind Truman’s observant blue eyes. “He was such a mercurial, many-colored, many-sided person, like a big mirrored ball with light hitting it at different angles,” said Slim. “But inside that ball was a really extraordinary mind; he was one of the three or four brightest people I’ve ever known in my life. His head excited me immensely! Going to lunch with him in a good restaurant was the most fun there was! But the most rewarding thing of all was to sit alone with him after dinner and just let him go. He was an adored friend.”
It was a small world the stylish rich inhabited in those days. Slim was married to Leland Hayward, for instance, in the garden of the Paley estate on Long Island; the Paleys and the Guinnesses were best friends; and just about everyone had visited one Greek ruin or another on either the Guinness or the Agnelli yacht. Knowing and playing host to Truman became the fashionable thing to do. “Once he got into that part of society, he moved very fast,” said Oliver Smith. “The wealthy find objects that amuse them: that’s history.”
He was a frequent visitor to their houses, he had a private stateroom on their yachts, and he was a privileged passenger in their private planes. He had a reserved seat by the fire, and he was there listening when the brandy was poured after dinner, when voices were lowered, hearts were opened, and secrets were passed. Spread out before him were enough plots for a hundred novels: the case histories of showgirls who became great ladies, of kept boys who inherited ducal mansions in the shadow of Notre Dame, of hushed-up society murders, and of all kinds of couplings within the sumptuous smoothness of Porthault sheets. He saw, he heard, and in the back of his mind he recorded everything. Nothing escaped him.
Yet of all the extraordinary tales that were whispered in his ear, none was more remarkable than that of the absurdly small, baby-voiced writer from Monroeville, Alabama, who, all by himself, had climbed to the very peak of golden Olympus.