HE was not exaggerating by much. When Truman and Nelle returned to Garden City for Dick and Perry’s trial in March, he was so esteemed that there was a competition for his company at parties and dinners. Indeed, as Dick Avedon, who had come along to take pictures, recalled, his conquest of Kansas had made him more than a little cocky. The farmer who had compared him to a banty rooster was not altogether wrong. Avedon was with him when he swaggered into the sheriff’s office one morning and went up to Roy Church, one of the K.B.I, agents waiting to testify. “You don’t look so tough to me!” he sneered.
Church replied by stamping over to the wall, pulling his arm back, and smashing his fist into it. “Oh, my God!” Avedon thought. “What can we do? This is it. Truman’s gone one step too far.” But he had not. Although it had taken him a while, he had learned how to handle those tough Kansans. Putting his hands over his head, he jumped from side to side and, assuming a thick Southern accent, cried: “Well, Ah’m beside mahself! Well, Ah’m beside mahself. Well, Ah’m beside mahself!” Joining in the laughter, Church relaxed his still-clenched fist. “It was one of the most brilliant, physically inventive and courageous things I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Avedon. “Truman would have survived in the jungles of Viet Nam. He won that duel in the same way he had won the town.”
The trial began Tuesday morning, March 22, with Judge Roland Tate presiding. There was never any doubt that the defendants were guilty. Besides their confessions, the prosecution had conclusive physical evidence, including their boots, whose heelprints matched those found at the Clutter house; the knife that had cut Herb Clutter’s throat; and the shotgun that had actually killed him and his family. The question was not guilt or innocence, but life or death, and on March 29, after deliberating for only forty minutes, the jury answered it. Both were guilty and should be executed. As they were led away, Perry snickered to Dick, “No chicken-hearted jurors, they!” No more so was Judge Tate, who pronounced sentence a few days later. Their execution was set for Friday, May 13, 1960, when they were to be hanged at the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing.
That was a scene Truman did not want to witness. Shortly after the trial ended, he and Nelle left for home. He realized that he could not write in New York, however, between lunches with Slim and weekends with the Paleys. “Gregariousness is the enemy of art,” he explained to a reporter, “so when I work, I have to forcibly remove myself from other people. I’m like a prizefighter in training: I have to sweep all the elements except work out of my life completely.” Two weeks after his return to New York, he and Jack sailed for Europe, where he planned to stay until his book was finished. He estimated that that would take about a year.
Landing in Le Havre in late April, they picked up a car and drove south to Spain, where they had rented a house in the fishing village of Palamós, on the Costa Brava between Barcelona and the French border. Although he had brought with him trunks full of notes, Truman continued his reporting by mail, bombarding his friends in Garden City with more questions and requests for updates on the news. Bulletins were not long in coming. The Kansas Supreme Court granted Perry and Dick a stay of execution while it reviewed their request for a new trial; but Perry, who did not have much hope, decided to beat the hangman by starving himself to death. “You can wait around for the rope, but not me,” he informed Dick, who occupied an adjoining cell. After neither eating nor drinking for six weeks, he began hallucinating, believing that he was in constant communication with the Lord. “It is really too awful,” Truman wrote Donald Cullivan. “They are only keeping him alive in order to hang him.”
Since that November day when he had learned about the Clutter killings, Truman had been moving so fast that he had not had time to sit back and take stock. In Palamós he did have time, and his thoughts were sobering. When he had begun most of his other projects, he had had a fairly good idea of how long they would take and what the result would be. Almost from the start, however, his murder story had taken its own independent and unpredictable course. Now it had veered again. No one could say how long the appeal process would last or what would happen to Perry. There was no end in sight.
As he sat there in his cliffside house, gazing out at the gentle waters of the Mediterranean, he also comprehended, probably for the first time, the full dimensions of what he was seeking to do. In Cold Blood, as he had titled his book, was not just the chronicle of a gruesome crime; it was a tale of a good and virtuous family being pursued and destroyed by forces beyond its knowledge or control. It was a theme that reverberated like Greek tragedy, a story that Aeschylus or Sophocles might have turned into a drama of destiny and fate.
That same fate, Truman was convinced, had sent him to Kansas and had given him an opportunity to write a work of singular power and grandeur. He had a sacred responsibility to his subject, to himself, and to the art he worshiped to create a book that was, as he told Cecil, unlike any other that had ever been written. If Answered Prayers would someday be his Remembrance of Things Past, then In Cold Blood would be his Madame Bovary. “[It] may take another year or more,” he declared to Newton. “I don’t care—it has to be perfect, for I am very excited about it, totally dedicated, and believe, if I am very patient, it could be a kind of masterpiece; God knows I have wonderful material, and lots of it—over 4,000 typed pages of notes. Sometimes, when I think how good it could be, I can hardly breathe. Well, the whole thing was the most interesting experience of my life, and indeed has changed my life, altered my point of view about almost everything—it is a Big Work, believe me, and if I fail I still will have succeeded.”
What was hidden between those lines was the fear that fate might have entrusted him with too big a task. Imagining how good In Cold Blood could be made him realize at the same time how high he had to reach—how much higher, in fact, than he had ever reached before. No one valued his rich gifts more than he did himself: there was no other American of his generation, he felt, who had such a clear ear for the music and rhythm of the English language, no one else who wrote with such style and grace. But the truth of the matter was that until now, he had exercised that style only in small spaces. Other Voices, a short novel by any measure, was his longest piece of writing.
His Kansas book, on the other hand, would be not only long, but complicated; he would have to weave together a bewildering collection of characters, facts, legal explanations and psychological studies. It demanded skills he had never demonstrated and was not certain—could not be certain—he possessed. He was like a composer of string quartets who was nervously wondering if he was capable of a symphony. He was trying to scale Parnassus itself, and he could not help but approach the job ahead with awe and dread.
He plunged quickly ahead, nonetheless. In June he flew to London, where he talked with a psychiatrist who helped him unravel the psychology of his two murderers. He did not linger, returning almost immediately to his pencils and pads in Palamos. By October he was nearly a quarter done. “Whether it is worth doing remains to be seen!” he fretfully told Mary Louise Aswell. “I think it is going to be ‘good’—but it will have to be more than that to justify ALL I HAVE GONE THROUGH.”
To Donald Windham he expressed the worry that he might be writing too much for The New Yorker to digest. “Never thought that I, of all writers, would ever have a length problem,” he said, “but actually it is very tightly written, and really can’t be cut (I’ve tried). Well, if I can’t come to terms with Shawn (and I can see that they might hesitate to devote 4 full issues to this enterprise—especially since it is not ‘pleasant’ reading, and not very ‘entertaining,’ as the word is used) my only regret will be that I have spent over $8,000 on research, which I will not be able to recover. But I shall go right on with the book, regardless. I suppose it sounds pretentious, but I feel a great obligation to write it, even though the material leaves me increasingly limp and numb and, well, horrified—I have such awful dreams every night. I don’t know now how I could ever have felt so callous and ‘objective’ as I did in the beginning.”
Those fierce prairie winds had followed him across the Atlantic, and they howled in his ears through the soft Spanish nights. “Alas, I am rather too much involved emotionally with the material,” he confessed to Newton. “God, I wish it were over.”
There were, of course, a few pleasures on that Mediterranean shore, and in June he and Jack changed addresses, moving down the beach to a grander house, staffed by a cook, two maids, and a gardener. “I’ll think 3 times before taking on such a responsibility again,” he grumbled to Donald Windham. From time to time a boat dropped anchor offshore, and fancy friends like Noël Coward and Loel and Gloria Guinness paid their respects. “Every once in a while friends of Truman’s come in on a yacht,” wrote a surprisingly genial Jack, “and so I’m forced to meet people I would not ordinarily even see. I really don’t mind any more, though, about that sort of thing. Most of the time if I’m asked I go. It’s the least I can do. I suppose I used to take it all seriously. I know now that these people are like hummingbirds, feeding here and there off flowers they really don’t take in at all. All they ask is that you behave. Then—as far as I’m concerned anyway—it’s out of sight, out of mind.”
With Truman Jack was not always so mellow. After a visit in May, Cecil, who was always fascinated by their paradoxical relationship, described it in his diary: “It was sometimes embarrassing to hear Jack lambasting T. for his duchesses & his interest in rich people & his being considered a genius by the Mrs. Paleys. Jack lashes out with Irish articulation & American violence. Sometimes it must hurt T. very much. But it teaches him also. He learns when not to argue, when to let Jack have his own way. He knows when Jack is right, & accepts the healthy criticism, but if Jack is unfair then he will fight bitterly & courageously.
“It is interesting that these two should have found one another, that they should recognize the fact that each gives the other an essential that would be otherwise lacking in their lives. This was a true glimpse of both of them, & it was very touching to see, despite the banter & tough onslaughts from Jack, how when anything serious occurred they were together closely knit as one unit. Jack had received a letter of despair from his sister Gloria. She was in hospital suffering from hepatitis (jaundice) & after 2 days her sister had had Gloria’s pet, a Pekinese, & another dog destroyed. T. was so upset that he trembled: ‘We must send Gloria a ticket to come out & stay with us & we must have Gloria to live with us always.’”
Jack liked to ski, Truman enjoyed cold weather, and at the end of October they traded the seashore for the mountains, driving to Verbier, a Swiss ski resort where Loel Guinness’ son Patrick had found them a small apartment. It was cold, dark and raining when they arrived, and their car became mired in the mud. So inauspicious was their first night that Jack was afraid to wake up the next morning, dreading that they might be stuck in a place they despised. But when they woke up, the sun was shining, the thin air tasted delicious, and the apartment was just what they had hoped it would be. “It is rather like living on the side of a moss-green bowl whose rim, zigzagging sharply up and down, is covered with snow,” Jack wrote Gloria. “I asked, where do you ski? and was told—everywhere.”
The apartment had already been rented for the Christmas holidays, unfortunately, and they spent three weeks in Munich, where, almost without warning, their bulldog Bunky died. Freud, who learned to enjoy canine companionship late in life, declared that an owner’s feeling for his dog is the same as a parent’s for his children, with one difference—“there is no ambivalence, no element of hostility.” Truman and Jack felt that way about Bunky, who had been with them since the making of Beat the Devil. “Last week we found out Bunky had leukemia, and yesterday he died in my arms,” Truman told Donald Windham. “I know you know how much I loved him; he was like my child. I have wept till I can weep no more.”
Back in Verbier, Truman put aside In Cold Blood for a few weeks to write a movie adaptation of another dark tale, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The story was one of Truman’s favorites: a psychological thriller about an English governess who believes she is battling two ghosts for the souls of her young charges. When the director, Jack Clayton, who had worked with him on Beat the Devil, begged him to do a rewrite of the script, he could not refuse. “He did it in the most unbelievable speed,” recalled Clayton, “most of it in eight weeks, with a little bit of touching up afterward.”
Titled The Innocents, the picture, which starred Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave, contained his best film script, Truman thought, better even than that of Beat the Devil. “I thought it would be a snap because I loved The Turn of the Screw so much,” he said. “But when I got into it, I saw how artful James had been. He did everything by allusion and indirection. I made only one mistake. At the very end, when the governess sees the ghost of Miss Jessel sitting at her desk, I had a tear fall on to the desktop. Up until then it wasn’t clear whether the ghosts were real or in the governess’ mind. But the tear was real, and that spoiled everything.” Few of the critics agreed. “A beautifully turned film,” said the New York Herald Tribune reviewer, “one of the most artful hauntings to come along on film in a long time.”
After the cold and drizzle of a London winter, Verbier looked more appealing than ever. “Oh how glorious it seems here,” he exclaimed when he returned in February, 1961. “Such sun, skies, silence, air. I really do like it.” He liked it so much, in fact, that he used part of the money he had earned from The Innocents to buy a two-room condominium. After moving from one rented place to another, he and Jack enjoyed the feeling of permanency. “Today I stood in back of the little church with the men folk—farmers,” Jack wrote his sister. “It was a comfort. The strangest people go to church, rich and poor, dumb and bright. The priest was a big man with a long grey beard. I have to walk a mile or so to the church, which has a rooster on its steeple. I like that.”
The pattern of their lives changed hardly at all during the next two years: spring and summer in Palamós; fall and winter in Verbier. Truman worked on In Cold Blood; Jack persisted with his plays. Kelly, the Kerry blue terrier that had been with them since 1950, also died, causing more pain. Although he had vowed that he would never go through the agony of love and loss again, in July, 1961, Truman bought another bulldog. In London for last-minute chores on The Innocents, he heard a familiar-sounding bark in Harrods. “Is there a pet shop here?” he asked, and was taken down a corridor to a room that held a macaw, a parrot, an owl, a fox terrier, and, as he told Cecil, “the most adorable, cuddly little bulldog pup you’ve ever seen.” Marching over to the saleswoman, he said, “I’ve bought that bulldog.”
“No, that’s a special order,” she replied. “That dog’s not for sale. We can order you another.”
“No,” said Truman. “That dog is mine. I wish to buy that dog. Here’s my checkbook.”
“You can’t buy that dog,” she insisted. “Besides, he costs fifty-five pounds!”
“My dear woman. I’ve come all the way from Spain and have been directed straight to that dog. It is my destiny to have that dog.” After an appeal to higher authority, destiny prevailed. When he returned to Palamós, the puppy—Charlie, he was called—was with him. “Charlie J. Fatburger is (as Diana V. [Vreeland] would scream), deevine,” he wrote Cecil that fall.
In January, 1962, Truman returned to the United States to interview Perry’s sister, whose testimony was crucial to an understanding of her brother’s character, and to visit Perry and Dick on Death Row—“an extraordinary and terrible experience,” he told Cecil. While he was in New York, Babe Paley gave him a large welcome-home party. But the sight of a hundred famous faces turned in his direction, which would have thrilled him not long before, now left him almost numb. Back in Verbier, he described his feelings to Cecil: “Somehow they, it, the whole thing seemed quite unreal, remote. The only thing that seemed real was Kansas, and the people there—I suppose because of my work. Actually, it is rather upsetting—the degree to which I am obsessed by the book. I scarcely think of anything else. The odd part is, I hate to work on it: I mean, actually write. I just want to think about it. Or rather—I don’t want to; but I can’t stop myself. Sometimes I go into sort of trance-like states that last four or five hours. I figure I have another 18 months to go. By which time I should be good and nuts.”
After two summers in Spain, he and Jack planned to spend the summer of 1962 in Corsica. Within hours they realized their mistake. The other tourists were loud and pushy, and Jack watched with disgust as one group noisily drove off on a boar hunt. “Of course they all arrived back at the hotel the next morning not speaking to one another,” he gleefully recounted, “and without so much as a Boar Turd amongst the lot of them.” Describing their stay as a nightmare, Truman added that the Corsicans “combine the worst characteristics of both the wops and the frogs—ugh.” Back to Palamós they scurried, to the best house yet, with a private beach, a large garden, and a cottage by the sea. Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill, came in the middle of July; she was followed by the Paleys. When the Paleys left, Gloria Vanderbilt arrived, accompanied, Truman informed Cecil, “by a lady-in-waiting in the form of Tammy Grimes—who wears mink eyebrows and a leather bikini.”
In the process of changing husbands again, Gloria had warned her future Number Four, a sometime editor and writer named Wyatt Cooper, to be discreet in the letters he addressed to Palamós. Truman, she said, was certain to open and read them before she did. What she apparently did not explain to Wyatt was that she did not want Truman to know of their affair while she was telling him about another romance entirely. “Well, Gloria has come and gone and we had a ‘real nice’ visit,” Truman wrote Marie and Alvin Dewey, adding, with the excitement of a reporter in possession of a hot scoop: “There is a new man in her life. It’s supposed to be a great secret, but I will tell you because I just must tell somebody, it’s so fantastic: Nelson Rockefeller. Heaven knows what will come of it—it would certainly be a strange thing if they got married.” Nothing did come of it, and Gloria married Cooper, with whom she had two sons.
Truman and Cooper later became good friends, and in 1972 they collaborated on a television prison drama, The Glass House. Truman’s friendship with Gloria, on the other hand, which had been tenuous from adolescence, progressively deteriorated. “She was a nasty little girl,” he said. “She lied about her mother during her custody trial, and she was terrible to her until shortly before she died. She had a father complex. Her first husband, Pat DiCicco, was a rough-and-ready type who used to really beat her. She finally got rid of him and married Leopold Stokowski, who was more like a grandfather, or a great-grandfather, than a father. I introduced her to Sidney Lumet, and she only married him because she thought he would make her a movie star. But the only part she ever got was as a nurse in some television thing. When she found out he wasn’t going to make her a star, she dumped him quick.
“Why she married Wyatt is a mystery. He certainly wasn’t like anybody’s father, although he did tell me that when they had sex together, she would scream, over and over, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!’ He grew to hate her, and he was terrified that she would leave him and take their two boys, to whom he was devoted. He was always calling me, asking me what he should do. I think that that anxiety contributed to his death. In fact, I had lunch with him just before he died [in 1978]. He seemed fine, but he kept talking about those boys. ‘If only I can live another ten years,’ he said, ‘everything will be all right. But Gloria just isn’t responsible enough to raise them.’”
In early October, Truman and Jack were back in Verbier, where, Truman said, he was “bedded down with my book—on which am now heading into fourth year. Maybe one day it will all seem worth it: I wonder though.” In November he interrupted his work long enough for a lunch with royalty in London. The lunch, in honor of the Queen Mother, was given by Cecil, who boasted to his diary that it was “another milestone—the biggest yet perhaps—in my social rise.” Besides Truman, just three others had received invitations to his house on Pelham Place: Frederick Ashton, principal choreographer of the Royal Ballet; June Osborn, a comely widow whom Cecil once had hoped to marry; and that poet with the medieval manner, Edith Sitwell, who profusely apologized for not being able to rise from her wheelchair to curtsy to the royal guest. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Ma’am, I’m so ashamed that I can’t get up to greet you,” she said.
The conversation was lively and energetic. For his part, Truman told the Queen Mother the latest gossip about the Whitney family—Jock Whitney, Babe Paley’s brother-in-law, had recently retired as ambassador to Britain—and he talked about the book he was writing. By dessert “restraint was far away,” said Cecil. “T was yelping with laughter & gave a great whoop of joy when the summer pudding appeared.” Truman had made yet another conquest. After Cecil had escorted the guest of honor to her car, she pulled down the window to say “she thought Mr. Capote quite wonderful, so intelligent, so wise, so funny.”
“Yes, he’s a genius, Ma’am,” Cecil gravely replied.