FOR the better part of two years Truman’s life was in a state of suspended animation. He could not finish his book until he had an ending, but neither could he put it aside and go on to something else. Although he was no longer consumed with putting words on paper, his work continued in dozens of nagging chores, not least of which was the composition of two letters a week, the maximum permitted, to Perry and Dick. “The writing of the book wasn’t as difficult as living with it all the time,” he said. “The whole damn thing, day by day by day by day. It was just excruciating, so anxiety-making, so wearing, so debilitating, and so… sad.”
His frustration was made worse by his knowledge that, lying in front of him, missing only thirty or forty pages, was the best-seller that would alter his life irrevocably, that would make him rich and bring him what he coveted above all else: recognition as one of the foremost writers in America—indeed, the world. At that point such a conviction was a matter of fact, not opinion; the success of In Cold Blood was as predictable as the future movements of the planets. All those who had read the first three-quarters—and there was a large number of such people—confessed to being mesmerized. Everybody in the publishing world knew about his new work, and so did many others, all across the country. It was mentioned frequently in syndicated columns; in 1962 Newsweek had even run a story, complete with a picture of the author, on “the overwhelmingly factual book he has been working on for more than two years.”
Such publicity could not have been purchased, particularly for a book that had yet to be completed. In Cold Blood had been touched by a magic wand. At both Random House and The New Yorker, where all copies were locked in Mr. Shawn’s office, there was the thrill of anticipation, the excitement that comes with the possession of a sure thing. But nothing—nothing at all—could happen until the courts had at last decided the fates of the two Clutter killers.
So Truman watched and waited and went on, as best he could, with the normal business of living. Following his return from the Midwest in 1963, he and Jack went out to Long Island, to the same beach house in Bridgehampton they had shared with Oliver Smith six years before. “The house is divine, and I am working on my endless task,” Truman wrote Cecil in July. “But I am very restless—waiting for final developments in Kansas. It’s all so maddening.” Two months later he added: “I am in a really appalling state of tension and anxiety. Perry and Dick have an appeal for a New Trial pending in Federal Court: if they should get it (a new trial) I will have a complete breakdown of some sort.” Although they were not granted a new trial, the appeals continued, and in November, still tense and anxious, Truman made yet another trip to Kansas.
He went first to California to visit Cecil, who was designing the sets and costumes for the movie version of My Fair Lady. They met in San Francisco, where Cecil was eager to introduce him to his new, thirty-year-old lover, who was everything that Cecil had ever desired. He was tall, blond and athletic; he had been a member of one of the American teams at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. An art historian who was studying and lecturing at Berkeley, he was also far better educated than Cecil himself; he had attended both Harvard and Princeton, where his roommate had been his lover and where belly-rubbing was so common that it was named “First Year Princeton.” By some miracle, this handsome all-American was as enthralled by Cecil as Cecil was by him. To Cecil’s gratification, Truman heartily endorsed their May-December romance, telling him that his athlete was “adorable, intelligent, appreciative, very fond of you, an important addition to your life.” Glowing in the reflected praise, Cecil added, “Felt very proud of my choice, who today seemed more delightfully gay & intelligent than ever.”
If Truman showed any of the tension he had referred to in his letters, it was not noticed by Cecil, who was caught up not only in his love affair, but also in a running feud with George Cukor, the director of My Fair Lady. During the following days in Los Angeles, Cecil was once again impressed by Truman’s ability to instantly take command. “He was completely at home on the [studio] lot here,” Cecil observed. “He was effusively received by the hypocrite Cukor & confided in by Rex [Harrison], who says that he likes working with Audrey [Hepburn], as she has such discipline, but she possesses no fire. Liz Taylor for all her slatterliness does possess this quality.”
After his California holiday, Truman dutifully went to Kansas, where he saw friends in Garden City and spent perhaps an hour and a half each with Perry and Dick in Lansing. “I had so much to say & discuss with you and so little time to say it in,” complained Perry a few days later. “It seemed as though we no sooner greeted each other, had a few brief words and here I was, back in my limbo again, feeling as though I was cheated of something and a little confused and disappointed.”
Truman associated Verbier with hard work and isolation, and in December, 1963, he let Jack go there by himself while he drove to Florida to stay with rich friends, the Gardner Cowleses in Miami Beach—Cowles owned Look magazine—and the Guinnesses in Palm Beach. He took Donald Windham with him to the Cowleses’, where he received a phone call telling him that Perry and Dick had won another appeal. Donald was witness to his depression and sudden nervousness, which manifested itself as a twitch in his cheek, a compulsive blink, and a darting, snakelike movement of his tongue. “I really have been feeling very low—almost bitter,” Truman confessed to the Deweys. “It’s all absolutely beyond belief. My God! Why don’t they just turn them loose and be done with it…. Well, there’s nothing to be done—except try to get through another year of this totally absurd and unnecessary torture.”
Jack lent his support from a distance. “Go on with your work, it’s a miracle of writing,” he said. “That’s what you must keep before you, day in, day out, waking and sleeping—your story.” But Truman’s restlessness sent his imagination off in a dozen different directions. He considered buying a house in Westchester, for example, not far from the Cerfs; but he quickly gave up the notion when Jack wrote back: “No, I want to be at least within bicycling-distance of water. Salt water!” He then said that he would like to spend the summer in Spain again. Jack sent a second veto, advising him to stay in America, close to his story. In the end, they again rented a house on Long Island, where Truman at last bought a piece of American real estate, a small house in Sagaponack, just east of Bridgehampton.
About a hundred yards from the ocean, the house had a high-ceilinged living room and a tiny bedroom downstairs; upstairs, reached by a spiral staircase, were two or three more rabbit-warren bedrooms. Jack hated the place immediately, believing, probably rightly, that they both would go mad in such a small space. He said nothing, but Truman undoubtedly read his face: not long after, he also bought the house next door. He would live in the first house, he said, and Jack would live in the second.
Thus they had found the ideal arrangement: they were within hailing distance, but they could not see each other through the trees and shrubs. Truman’s house was just right for him. He removed walls upstairs, giving his little house a more spacious feeling. Jack’s house was just right for him, an old-fashioned gingerbread cottage, with one large room downstairs and another one upstairs. He was so pleased, in fact, that, hat in hand—an unusual gesture for him—he asked Truman for title to his own house: he was forty-nine and, standing on his own ground at last, he yearned for the security of actual ownership. “I never asked Truman for anything,” he said. “I never asked him for favors. But I did ask him for my house, and he gave me the deeds for both of them in a butterfly box. He said that it was too much trouble to separate titles, so I could have them both in my name. I have never seen anybody else in my life do anything as generous as that.”
In October, 1964, Truman went back to Kansas, taking with him Sandy Campbell—Donald Windham’s lover—who was a fact checker at The New Yorker, assigned, at Truman’s request, to check the accuracy of In Cold Blood. They first flew to Denver, where Truman had arranged a party for some of his Garden City friends, most notably the Deweys, and Mary Louise Aswell, who had left Harper’s Bazaar in the fifties for a new life in New Mexico. The Deweys, Sandy noted in his diary, were almost like parents to Truman: he called Alvin Pappy, and Alvin had nicknamed him Coach. They then drove east to Garden City, where Sandy verified such things as dates and distances. Sandy said that he had worked with many New Yorker writers, including A. J. Liebling, Richard Rovere and Lillian Ross, but Truman was the most accurate. It was the opinion of Mary Louise that Truman most treasured, however, and he anxiously awaited her verdict on the first three-quarters of his book. He was profoundly pleased by her response. “That you really liked my book was so touching, and such a reward. I sort of dreaded your reading it—because I knew that if I was fooling myself, and had made a real mistake (about the artistic possibilities of reportage) you wouldn’t have been able to lie (successfully).”
Just before Christmas, Truman spoke, as he had before, at the Poetry Center of Manhattan’s Ninety-second Street Y.M.H.A. The program said he would read from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But some, suspecting that he would surprise them with In Cold Bloodinstead, arrived with more than the usual eagerness, like movie fans hoping for the sneak preview of a long-anticipated film. They were not disappointed. Newsweek, which sent a reporter, said that the effect he created was like that of “a fabulist of the old order, weaving a spell with voice and word, making one hear, see, feel, sense. What he shaped was a whole landscape and the fateful people in it.”
Perry’s and Dick’s numerous appeals not only caused him depression and anxiety. They presented him with an insoluble moral dilemma. He desperately wanted his book to be published. But publication almost certainly meant the painful deaths of two men who regarded him as their friend and benefactor, two men whom he had helped, counseled, and, in Perry’s case, tutored. “It wasn’t a question of my liking Dick and Perry,” he carefully explained to an interviewer. “That’s like saying, ‘Do you like yourself?’ What mattered was that I knew them, as well as I know myself.”
His entire future awaited their walk to the Big Swing, and his comments to his friends, which indicated his real feelings, ran like a grim counterpoint to the consoling comments he was making to Perry and Dick. Perry was of course unhappy when the Supreme Court refused in January, 1965, to hear their latest appeal. But where he saw a black cloud, Truman saw a ray of sunshine. “As you may have heard,” he told Mary Louise, “the Supreme Court denied the appeals (this for the third damn time), so maybe something will soon happen one way or another. I’ve been disappointed so many times I hardly dare hope. But keep your fingers crossed.” To Cecil he added: “I’m finishing the last pages of my book—I must be rid of it regardless of what happens. I hardly give a fuck anymore what happens. My sanity is at stake—and that is no mere idle phrase. Oh the hell with it. I shouldn’t write such gloomy crap—even to someone as close to me as you.”
In Verbier, waiting out events, he decided not to go back to America for the execution in February, working out an arrangement by which Sandy Campbell would cable him, word for word, the story in the Kansas City Star. “Hope this doesn’t sound insane,” he wrote Sandy, “but the way I’ve constructed things, I will be able to complete the entire ms. within hours after receiving [the] cable. Keep everything crossed.” At the last moment the hangings were postponed once again. Desperate for information, he made a transatlantic call to one of the defense lawyers, who infuriated him by suggesting that Perry and Dick might not only escape the noose, but actually gain their freedom. “And I thought: yes, and I hope you’re the first one they bump off, you sonofabitch,” he told the Deweys, who shared his frustration. “But what I actually said was: ‘Is that really your idea of justice?—that after killing four people, they ought to be let out on the streets?’”
The lawyer’s optimism was unfounded, and the hangings were rescheduled for the early hours of April 14. This time Truman could not stay away—Perry and Dick had asked him to be with them—and he returned to America. Accompanied by Joseph Fox, who had replaced Bob Linscott as his editor at Random House, Truman arrived in Kansas City a day or two early. “He was incredibly tense and unable to really talk to anybody for more than two or three minutes at a time,” recalled Fox. “Tears rolled down his cheeks at the thought of what was going to happen. Alvin came to call, along with a couple of the other K.B.I, agents, and Truman would pace around our suite at the Muehlebach Hotel. At night we went to the movies or strip shows and transvestite shows—Kansas City is one of the six or seven biggest transvestite centers in the country.”
For some reason, Perry and Dick thought that Truman might help them obtain another stay of execution, and they tried desperately to reach him. Perry telephoned the hotel two or three times, and an assistant warden, acting on their behalf, tried seven or eight times more. But another delay was the last thing Truman wanted. Rather than say no, he let Fox answer the phone and make his excuses. Finally Perry telegraphed the Muehlebach. “AM ANTICIPATION AND WAITING YOUR VISIT. HAVE BELONGINGS FOR YOU. PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE BY RETURN WIRE WHEN YOU EXPECT TO BE HERE.” Truman cabled back: “DEAR PERRY, UNABLE TO VISIT YOU TODAY, BECAUSE NOT PERMITTED. ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND. TRUMAN.”
Perry was aware, of course, that he was lying—that he would have been permitted to visit. At 11:45 that night, one hour and fifteen minutes before the noose was put around his neck, he sat down and wrote a joint letter to him and Nelle. “Sorry that Truman was unable to make it here at the prison for a brief word or two prior to [the] neck-tie party. Whatever his reason for not showing up, I want you to know that I cannot condemn you for it & understand. Not much time left but want you both to know that I’ve been sincerely grateful for your friend[ship] through the years and everything else. I’m not very good at these things—I want you both to know that I have become very affectionate toward you. But harness time. Adios Amigos. Best of everything, Your friend always, Perry.”
In a heavy rain, Truman and Joe drove to the prison, and Truman was able to say a few last words to each of them. Dick was hanged first. “I just want to say I hold no hard feelings,” he said. “You people are sending me to a better world than this ever was.” Less than half an hour later he was dead. Just after 1 A.M. Perry was brought into the warehouse where the gallows had been set up. “I think it’s a helluva thing to take a life in this manner,” he said. “I don’t believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute, something…” He stopped, and in a lower voice, added: “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.” The rope was placed around his neck, a black mask was put over his eyes, and at 1:19 A.M. he too was pronounced dead.
Crying, Truman later called Jack to describe the terrible scene he had witnessed. Jack was unsympathetic. “They’re dead, Truman,” he said. “You’re alive.”