HE did not sink very deeply into his book, however, and many were starting to wonder, sometimes publicly, whether they would ever see it. When he missed his January 1, 1971, deadline, Twentieth Century-Fox demanded the return of the down payment it had made on film rights, two hundred thousand dollars, and to his chagrin, Truman had to give it back. To the reporters who asked how much he had actually written, he said that he was two-thirds done, which was the same reply he had been giving for several years.
Even he began to talk as though he might never finish. “Of course I basically don’t really want to finish it,” he confessed at last. “It’s just that it’s become a way of life. It’s like suddenly taking some beautiful animal, say, or a child, some lovely child and you just took it out in the yard and shot it in the head. I mean, that’s what it means to me. The moment I give it up it’s just like I took it out in the yard and shot it in the head, because it will never be mine again.”
Whatever his reasons, he was in no hurry. During the months that followed his return from Switzerland, he seemed eager to do nearly anything rather than lock himself away and confront the problems inherent in any long and complicated novel. Drinking less than he had in the two preceding years—in that respect the bad vibrations had indeed receded—he jumped from project to project, job to job, taking on almost any assignment, it seemed, that would keep him away from Answered Prayers.
His first venture was into journalism. Peter Beard, Lee’s boyfriend—she finally had separated from Stas—and Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone magazine, persuaded him to cover what was expected to be one of the media spectaculars of 1972, the North American tour of the Rolling Stones. Beard was to take the pictures that would illustrate his article, and after it appeared in Wenner’s magazine, their collaboration was to become a book—The Muses Are Heard a generation later, with a hard-rock beat. He was in competition with any number of hungry young writers, all itching to become famous by using the journalistic techniques that he had pioneered. But only he and, for a time, the hip novelist Terry Southern, middle-aged men both, were allowed to travel in the Stones’ plane and to observe the private, as well as public, behavior of a group whose appeal rested largely on its reputation for appetitious depravity. He thus had an invitation to do what he did best: to become the fly on the wall that sees all.
With that sweeping charter, the “fantastic T. Capote,” as Southern labeled him, joined the Stones in late June, midway through their thirty-one-city, two-month tour. It was an easy mix: the Stones liked him, he liked them, and he was stimulated by their company, the like of which even a planet-wanderer like him had never encountered. After attending their last performance at Madison Square Garden on July 27, he went out to Sagaponack, where he sifted through his notes and started his story. Its title, “It Will Soon Be Here,” he borrowed from a nineteenth-century painting of Midwestern farmers rushing to save their bay from an oncoming storm. To his mind, that title had an ironic symbolism: in the twentieth century things had been so turned around that instead of rushing from the storm—the Stones and the chaos they represented—the young descendants of those God-fearing farmers were running toward it, desperate to be engulfed in the maelstrom.
His first deadline passed, and then his second, and although he read part of it to Beard, “It Will Soon Be Here” never reached its destination. He could write no more than a few pages. It may have been that he did not have the energy or power of concentration to devote himself to any significant piece of prose; or it may have been that, on examination, the idea bored him. The tour had been a new experience for him, he said, but in no way surprising; everything that had occurred, including the hysterical outbursts of the fans, had been coolly and efficiently manufactured by the Stones and their managers. “Since there was nothing to ‘find out,’” he explained, “I just couldn’t be bothered writing it.” Later, in a long interview with the magazine, he admitted that if he had been twenty-five years younger—and if he had not already written a history of a musical tour—he just might have been bothered. But why, he asked, “should I do a game that I’ve already done?”
It was a good question, but it did not stop him from engaging in other games he had already done: a film script, a television play, a documentary, and three crime shows for ABC. The first three he did with Robert MacBride, a free-lance writer he met in the summer of 1972 in a Rockefeller Center bookstore. Theirs was a bond of brothers rather than of lovers, according to MacBride, and Truman may have latched on to Bob MacBride because he could see in him traces of the Jack of earlier years. The physical resemblance was obvious. At forty-six, Bob too was thin and ascetic-looking, with rust-colored hair and pale, bleached skin. “He seemed sort of uncooked, like a blancmange that hadn’t been in the oven long enough” was the way Slim Keith described him.
There were also other, equally striking similarities. Bob too had grown up in Philadelphia, and he too was mostly self-educated, with an astonishingly diverse knowledge, ranging from computers and the navies of the Civil War to space and sculpture. Like Jack, he also spoke fluent French. Although the pliable Bob lacked Jack’s percussive temperament, he had the same unsettling habit of grabbing a conversation and turning it into a monologue. “When I see Jack is going off on one of his tantrums, I just tune out,” said Truman. “I don’t hear a thing, and then when he’s done, I tune back in. I do the same thing with Bob when he starts talking about space, stars and the universe. I don’t understand a word of it.”
Bob was married, not happily, to his second wife when he met Truman, and he supported his six children as a commercial artist and as the author of corporate brochures. His labors with Truman promised greater reward, and during the next year, from the summer of 1972 to the summer of 1973, they worked together on their three projects, none of which was ever produced. Working with Bob much as he had with Wyatt on The Glass House, Truman sketched out his ideas over lunch or dinner; Bob then sat down by himself and filled in the details, which Truman revised at another lunch or dinner. For Truman at least, it was a pleasant and painless process, as little like work as work could be.
In the fall of 1972 they flew to New Orleans, where they examined locations for their murder mystery, Dead Loss. In the winter they put together Second Chance, a TV documentary about transsexuals. Finally, in mid-June, 1973, they drove to Canada, where, during two weeks in a Montreal hotel and a nearly empty, out-of-season ski lodge, they completed Uncle Sam’s Hard Luck Hotel, a TV play about a California halfway house. Their relationship was entirely amicable, and Bob was therefore puzzled and hurt when, not long after their return from Canada, he detected a distinctly gelid tone in Truman’s voice over the telephone. “It was obvious that he didn’t want to talk to me,” Bob said. Without explanation or apology, Truman was giving him the brush-off. His wife soon complained of Truman’s “perfidy,” and Bob, who had expected much more from their collaboration, agreed. In October he wrote in his diary: “Dreamed that Capote returned.” But that Truman did not do.
The explanation was simple: Truman was in love again. Not merely in love, as he had been with Danny, but enraptured and enthralled. His new lover’s name was John O’Shea, and although Truman thought that he was “one of the best-looking people I’ve ever seen in my life,” most other people described him as nondescript. He was five feet ten inches tall, and he had the build, neither fat nor thin, of the average man of forty-four. He had dark brown hair, pronounced eyebrows, and blue eyes that were magnified by thick glasses. In every way he looked like what he was, a low-level bank vice president.
“Charlie Middleclass,” John jokingly called himself, and search as he might, a sociologist could not have found a better representative of the typical American, circa 1973. He and his devoutly Catholic family lived in a split-level house in a middle-class development about forty-five minutes from Manhattan. Both his wife, Peg, and his son Brian, who was sixteen, were leaders in their parish; his daughter, Kathy, who was fifteen, was one of the top students in her class; and his two youngest, Kerry and Chris, twelve and nine, were training to be runners—in his spare time John was a track coach, and a very good one at that.
That was only half of the picture, of course, and John too bore the wounds of a terrible childhood. His parents had come to New York from Ireland, and when his father, who was a skilled carpenter, could not find work, his mother supported their family with her job at the telephone company. Disappointed with his life and longing to return to Ireland, his father became an alcoholic who regularly beat his wife and two sons. John grew up, and one day, after his mother had been thus roughed up, he threw his father out of their Bronx apartment. But that solved only half of his parental problem. His mother was perhaps even worse than his father. Her idea of an Irish lullaby was to hear him howl with pain. When he caught poison ivy, she poured ammonia on him in the shower. When she wanted to punish him, she made him sit in the bathtub and whipped him with an electric cord; naked wet flesh is easier to hurt than dry, she had learned.
Like his father, John grew up to become a profoundly disappointed man. After serving in the Navy, he spent a year at a college in upstate New York, then returned to the Bronx to take a job in a bank, marry Peg and start their family. At that point what appeared to be a modest success story took an unexpected turn. Although his banking career slowly advanced, he was dissatisfied; his real ambition, which he nurtured at night and on weekends, was to be a novelist. Nor was he happy with his marriage, and he saw prison walls wherever he looked. “He was just a classic Irish guy,” said his son Brian. “He got beaten growing up, he went into the Navy, he came back, and when he woke up, he had a house and a bunch of kids. He never had a life.”
Emulating his father again, John became an alcoholic, “an extraordinarily violent man,” in Brian’s words, who beat Peg and Brian both. But Brian grew up and became something of a martial-arts expert. One Sunday, when his father disrupted a family dinner—John threw vegetables at Peg—Brian angrily rose from his chair, and using a trick he had learned, he stuck a finger up each of John’s nostrils, sending him crashing to the floor, and, for a moment, knocking him unconscious. So did hostility and violence descend through three generations. Like his father, John had lost control even in his own house.
Such was his situation when he met Truman, probably in the first week of July, 1973. He had come into Manhattan to be interviewed for a job he had been all but guaranteed; but to his surprise and chagrin, he did not receive it. When two tranquilizers failed to relieve the resulting tension and anger, he decided, as he sometimes did when he was anxious, to pay a call at a gay bathhouse near the Plaza Hotel: he looked upon the sex he had there as a form of masturbation; he did not consider himself homosexual. “An older guy was doing a number on me,” he recalled, “and I looked to my right, and there was Truman. I felt compelled to talk to him, thinking he’d be sympathetic to my plight. I wanted to unravel my whole tortured existence, to tell him how I had been impressed into working for a bank when I was really a writer. He would tell me how to write.”
In a private room Truman had rented upstairs, John did spill out his woes, and Truman was, or pretended to be, sympathetic. Once again Truman was swimming in the treacherous currents of nostalgia, reaching out for the absolutely average. But there was more to John’s appeal than his ordinary condition. Like Danny, he unwittingly pressed a button in Truman’s memory. Just as Danny had reminded him of a military-school classmate, so did John remind him of a Monroeville boy, a boy whose personality had stamped itself so indelibly on Truman’s memory that he had made him the title character in his story “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Only later did Truman recognize how accurate and prophetic that association was: that boy was the school bully who had made his days miserable and filled his nights with foreboding. Odd Henderson he had called him, “the meanest human creature in my experience.”
He did not find John mean on that afternoon in the baths, however. Telephone numbers were exchanged, and they met again, and again after that. By the end of July their affair was on and, in John’s words, “flying like a kite.” Each saw in the other what he most desired. For Truman, John was the satisfaction of a passion; he was in the grip of an obsession that was sexual, as well as psychological. He never had enjoyed the lurid, promiscuous sex life he sometimes claimed, and like many men his age who feel that the best is behind them, he keenly regretted his omissions. Ever since he had met Danny, he had been trying, albeit with only limited success, to make up for lost time. Now, as he was approaching fifty, Truman had found someone who was all he desired in a lover, who was both exciting in bed—“on a list of my all-time favorites, Johnny was the best, Jack was second and Danny was third”—and a never-ending challenge.
What John saw in Truman was opportunity. Truman did not appeal to him physically; he may even have repelled him. A few years before, recalled Brian, his father had angrily switched channels when Truman walked onto The Tonight Show—“damned fag!” John had muttered. But like Danny and Rick, John believed that that damned fag could make his dreams come true. Scrambling to find a device that would enable him to turn Truman’s infatuation to his own advantage, he hit at last upon what seemed to be, in his words, “a wonderful solution.” Truman did not know how to manage money; he did. What Truman needed, he concluded, was someone who could take that burden off his shoulders, who could be his factotum, agent and business manager.
Truman agreed, as he probably would have agreed to any proposal that would tie them together, and papers were drawn up. Conveniently enough, Truman already had a paper corporation called Bayouboys, Ltd.—Alan Schwartz had established it as a tax shelter—that could give John a fancy title and a salary. Quitting his bank job, John was appointed executive vice president at an annual salary of fourteen thousand four hundred dollars. He was starting a whole new career; soon, he believed, he would be managing not only Truman’s affairs, but those of Truman’s rich friends as well. “I’m breaking out!” he told Brian. “I’m getting out of here, out of this middle-class bullshit! I’m going to manage money for writers, movie producers and winners.”
His family, who had not believed that he even knew Truman until they heard his baby voice on the telephone, were informed that John’s new duties required extensive travel, and in early August the president and executive vice president of Bayouboys were on their way to Los Angeles, and then, on September 3, to Europe. Flying first to Athens, they later were lifted by Aristotle Onassis’ helicopter to the island of Spetsai, where Slim Keith was vacationing, along with such other fashionables as Mary Martin and Stavros Niarchos. Renting a house, they remained there for three weeks, sunning and sailing. “They were lazy days and everything was wonderful,” said John.
After a trip to Istanbul, which they hated and quickly departed, they rode the Orient Express to Venice, where they commuted between the Gritti Palace Hotel and Harry’s Bar, with a few stops at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo in between. After three weeks, they traveled on to Switzerland, staying in Verbier and making several visits to Charlie and Oona Chaplin in nearby Vevey. Touched by Charlie’s husbandly devotion—“so sweet, so endearing,” John thought—John began feeling guilty about his own wife and family. He still carried with him the expression on Peg’s face as she had said goodbye at Kennedy Airport: it said to him that she did not believe for a second that he was merely Truman’s business manager, that she knew exactly what was going on between them. “It must have been a terrible ordeal for her to tell her friends that her husband had flown off with the world’s number one queer,” he said.
Thus, when Marella Agnelli asked them to prolong their trip and cruise the Greek islands on her yacht, a luxurious excursion John could scarcely have dreamed of when he was sitting behind his desk at the bank, he did not hesitate to say no. “I’ve just ordered Truman to turn down Marella Agnelli’s offer,” he proudly wrote Peg. “He agreed but thinks it’s a first for them.” To Truman he spoke more directly: “Fuck the Greek islands! I’m going to New York!” In late October they flew home. The honeymoon was over.
John may have had second thoughts about their relationship, but Truman had not: he was besotted, and to keep his new companion from returning to banking, he more than doubled his salary, to thirty thousand dollars a year. If John had wanted to, he would have been hard pressed to refuse such generosity. Whatever doubts he had were put aside, and he invited Truman home for dinner: it was time he met the family.
Despite John’s guilty conjecture, Peg did not suspect that he was Truman’s lover. It was inconceivable to her that her husband could have an affair with another man. Far from being angry or jealous, she was delighted by their family’s good fortune. “Truman had doubled the salary he was making at the bank,” she said. “I thought he had found a marvelous job. Wouldn’t anybody?” Nor, as John had also dourly imagined, had she been humiliated when he flew off with the world’s most famous admitted homosexual. Their neighbors were apparently as innocent and trusting as she was. As best anyone in the family could tell, there had been no sly winks around the barbecues that summer, no whispers over backyard fences.
When John told her that his new boss was coming, her only reaction therefore was nervousness. “What should I serve him?” she anxiously inquired. “Lamb chops,” replied John, and out she went to buy fourteen lamb chops, an expensive cut unfamiliar to the budget-minded O’Shea household. “I told the kids that instead of saying, ‘What’s that?’ they should say. ‘Oh, no, not lamb again!’ Knowing that Truman was Southern, I also had a friend bring some black-eyed peas from a black area of the Bronx. But I didn’t know how to cook them, and I left them on the stove all day. When it came time to serve them, they were mush. If my husband’s job had depended on that dinner—as I thought it did—we would have been lost. Little did I know that Truman would become my best friend. I liked him immediately.” Returning a few days after Christmas, Truman gave each of the O’Shea children a hundred-dollar bill, fresh from his cash drawer.
Settling into his job, John actually did begin to manage Truman’s career—probably to Truman’s surprise, most certainly to his consternation. John’s first major act was the negotiation of a lucrative contract, a minimum of ten thousand dollars a week plus expenses, for Truman to write about another murder case—this one involving sex and torture—for The Washington Post and its syndicate. The accused was one of two teenage boys who had allegedly helped a Houston electrician sexually abuse, torture and then kill other teenagers before he himself turned around and shot the electrician.
Interest in the case was not so much in the murders—the electrician had killed at least twenty-seven—but in the circumstances that had allowed them to go unnoticed. How could so many boys have vanished so quietly, without arousing the curiosity of the community, the police, or the newspapers? That, at least, was the question Truman planned to ask. “I see the trial as a jumping-off point,” he told an interviewer, “to really tell about this whole extraordinary culture—in Texas and the Southwest, all the way to California—of aimless wandering, this mobile, uprooted life: the seven-mile-long trailer parks, the motorcycles, the campers, the people who have no addresses or even last names.”
Despite his public enthusiasm, it was not an assignment he cherished. He only accepted it because John had pushed him, and John might not have pushed him if he had been at all familiar with his writing habits. Truman had rarely written on deadline, much less a daily deadline, as the Post expected, and the prospect of dictating into a telephone every night, like any other reporter on a fast-breaking story, must have filled him with terror. In any event, the ambitious piece he had outlined could not have been written in small doses; it would have required an effort on the scale of In Cold Blood. The project was doomed, and Truman must have known it.
Nonetheless, he and John set out by car for Houston in the first week of January, 1974. Stopping overnight in Washington, they stayed with Kay Graham, who was no more impressed by John than she had been by Danny. “A horrible man! Horrible!” she said. They then proceeded to Monroeville, where Truman’s relatives gathered at his aunt Mary Ida Carter’s house for the old-fashioned kind of Southern dinner Sook used to make. “I’ve never enjoyed so much food in my life,” said John. In Houston they stayed with Truman’s friends Lynn and Oscar Wyatt, who were rich even by Texas standards, and explored the lower-middle-class neighborhood where the electrician had slain his victims.
But Truman’s Houston Diary, as his account was to have been titled, ended the instant the young defendant was led into the courtroom. “I’ve seen this before,” said Truman, referring to a similar entrance by Perry and Dick fourteen years earlier, and he marched out, with John at his heels.10 Packing their bags, they drove on to Palm Springs. Truman’s Random House editor, Joe Fox, was assigned the task of breaking the bad news to the editors of The Washington Post. Truman, he cabled, was hospitalized at an undisclosed location in the West and would not be reporting on the Houston murders.
Joe Fox was telling the truth. On his arrival in California, Truman entered the Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Desert, suffering from what the hospital characterized as a respiratory ailment. How sick he was, or whether he was sick at all, is a matter of disagreement. According to John, he was using illness as an excuse to wriggle out of his contract with the Post. But Truman wrote Jack, who was in Verbier, that he was very sick, that in fact he had pneumonia. “Most people talk themselves up, Truman talks himself down,” Jack told his sister Gloria. “So you never know with him. Much of his trouble has to do with drinking too much. (Says I!) When will it end! He only communicates to me in crises. When it’s bad. Otherwise he says nothing.”
Though Truman, looking for sympathy, may have exaggerated his illness to Jack, he probably was debilitated by the binge he had been on ever since he had met John, and he may well have had some form of pneumonia. Dispirited he indisputably was. Needing more support than John could give him, he summoned other companions to Palm Springs. His cousin Joe Faulk came from San Diego, and from New York came Saint Subber and John Knowles, a fellow writer and friend from Long Island.
Most of Truman’s friends had regarded Danny and Rick as inappropriate but inoffensive. With a few exceptions, John aroused far stronger and far more negative emotions. “When he was cold sober, he was all right, rather mannerly,” said Knowles. “But the moment he got a drink in his hand, he thought he could just let it all hang out. He was crude-mouthed beyond belief—‘this fucking place, fucking town, fucking restaurant’—and it was unbelievably wearing to have to listen to that barracks talk. He would lurch into Robert and Natalie [Wood] Wagner’s house, put his feet up on a table, and start spewing his obscenities. To me, he was a phony in every sense of the word, a fake tough guy with nothing tough about him. ‘You’re a marshmallow trying to act like a crowbar,’ I thought to myself. ‘Who do you think you’re kidding?’” Kay Graham probably spoke for the majority when she threw up her hands at the mere mention of his name.
Even Truman’s amiable cousin Joey Faulk thought that John went out of his way to irritate and embarrass Truman, starting arguments, stalking out of restaurants and slipping away late at night to a popular hangout. “He was always playing some kind of game with Truman and doing mean little things to get him upset,” said Joey. “Apparently he was also under the impression that he never paid for anything when he was around Truman. I went out to dinner alone with him once, and he just kept ordering drinks, and then dinner, and never offered to pay. I was living on just the G.I. bill, but I paid for everything.”
Yet what most alarmed Truman’s friends, then and in the months to come, was John’s apparent attempt to become his Svengali. John went so far, according to Knowles, as to have the telephone moved into his Palm Springs bedroom, ostensibly so that he could screen Truman’s incoming calls. He seemed to regard himself not only as Truman’s business manager, but also as his keeper, and he became furious if Truman refused, as he often did, to accept his instructions. Mixed in with his frustration and anger was an undisguised rage, verging on contempt, toward a man who seemed so incompetent in so many ways, yet who was, in the end, the master of John’s own destiny. “I’ve never seen a situation,” John wrote Alan Schwartz, “where there was such ignorance of basic personal business; lack of common sense; and childish impulsiveness as a compulsion. I feel like a trust officer dealing with the senile and the infantile.”
To make sure that he held the strings—that all of Truman’s business mail and phone calls went through him—he ordered Bayouboys stationery, listing his address and phone number rather than Truman’s, and he wrote a form letter which he sent out, over Truman’s signature, to various of Truman’s friends and associates: “As many of you are aware, communications with me are often difficult, sometimes impossible, to establish or maintain because of the vast amount of travel I enjoy. To facilitate communications I have asked my associate, John O’Shea, to function as my business manager, agent, secretary and advisor. Mr. O’Shea is completely and constantly attuned to my interest in, and availability for, new projects; and knows the current status of present undertakings. He can and will speak with authority in the functional areas described above. Please communicate with us through the phone and address on this letterhead only for prompt response.”
When Kay Graham saw the copy that was sent to The Washington Post, she exclaimed to her secretary: “Liz, how ghastly!” So said, in those words or words like them, many of Truman’s friends.