BORED and depressed in Palm Springs, in late March, 1974, Truman gathered Joey Faulk, John Knowles and Saint Subber and, leaving John O’Shea behind, drove over the Mexican border to a health spa—a fat farm—in Tecate. They expected to be pampered, to read, relax and sink into soothing whirlpool baths. Instead, on their very first night they were fed nothing but pureed vegetables and scheduled for early-morning exercise classes. They fled back over the border the next morning, Saint and Knowles not stopping until they had reached New York, Truman and Joey continuing up the coast to San Francisco.
There was no happy reunion when they returned to Palm Springs two weeks later, however, and the tension between Truman and John, which had been accumulating over the months, quickly erupted into angry words. When John said that he wanted to attend a track meet in San Diego, Truman assumed the role of tough boss. “You can’t take my car!” he declared. But when he and Joey went out to dinner that night, John did take his car, calling from San Diego to say that he was in Phoenix—on his way to New York. Truman knew him well enough to know that he was lying, and when John came through the door twenty-four hours later, he had prepared his own unpleasant surprise. “I have an airline ticket for you to New York,” he said coldly as he handed him an envelope with the ticket inside.
After John flew East, Truman stayed only long enough to sell his house, accepting, in his haste to be rid of it, an almost ludicrously low offer of sixty-three thousand dollars. Jack’s premonition had proved altogether accurate: the sunny hideaway in which Truman had planned to finish Answered Prayers had instead been the scene of some of the worst hours of his life. For him, Palm Springs had indeed been Thirst’s End, as Jack had called it, the place in which hope had died and despair had been born. Belatedly realizing what had befallen him in that seemingly peaceful spot, Truman must have felt some bitterness, as well as relief, as he packed up his belongings, said goodbye to Myrtle (who was to succumb to cancer two years later) and joined the exodus back to New York.
“For better or worse,” John said, “Truman and I are attached to each other by an invisible umbilical cord for the rest of his existence.” So it was to be, and Truman had no sooner landed at Kennedy Airport than they had reconciled. But the confrontation in Palm Springs was only the first of many, and even at its best, their relationship seemed to provide little real enjoyment to either one of them. After spending a weekend in May with them on Fire Island, Donald Windham concluded that John lacked any of the “mental traits” that would have interested the Truman he had known, that the only link between them seemed, in fact, to be pathological. “[Truman] watched Johnny with an obsessed nervousness, but without pleasure, like a man staring at a mirage,” wrote Donald. “The effort seemed to drain him.” Though Truman allowed John the appearance of power, in most major matters Truman did just what he wanted. “Please be nice to Johnny,” he told Alan Schwartz, carefully adding that if Alan should have any problems with John, he should call him privately: he would set things straight. It did not take long for John to catch on to what was going on behind his back and to realize that he was only a make-believe vice president. He was proud enough to resent it and combative enough to keep fighting for what he considered his rightful position.
John’s major complaint, however—and the cause of most of his arguments with Truman—was Truman’s refusal to break with Jack. It was a source of intense bitterness to him, as it had been to Rick, that he was expected to be constantly on call, whereas Truman, who acknowledged no similar obligation to him, could take off for New Orleans or Mexico with Lee, or bury himself for weeks on end with Jack in Sagaponack. In John’s not unnatural view, such an arrangement was distinctly inequitable, and time and again he demanded that Truman leave Jack. At one point Truman appeared ready to do so; but he eventually found a good excuse to change his mind, as he always did. “He couldn’t separate from Jack,” John reluctantly conceded. “They were too much the same person.”
Once he realized that, John could not even look at him without seeing the shadow of Jack in the background. “I could never have committed myself totally to Truman because I suspected his purported love,” John said. “I could not understand someone who could say, ‘I love you, but I have to go home to Jack.’ Or, ‘I love you, but I have to go to Mexico with Lee.’ Or, ‘I love you, but I’m going to be in California for six weeks, and, no, you can’t come.’ I always had the feeling that I was the tail on the dog, and that when he had used me—when it suited his fancy—he would walk away.”
Perhaps to nurse John’s bruised ego, Truman took him to Europe again in the middle of July, almost a year to the day after they had met. They stayed with the Wyatts on the Riviera, and, with vivacious Lynn leading the way, attended one gala after another. Twice they lunched at the palace in Monaco, where John, who noticed such things, was surprised that amidst all the informal family photographs, he found not one of Princess Grace’s brother, Jack Kelly, whom he had once met at a track meet. “She was a prisoner, absolutely a prisoner,” he declared. He later shared his discovery with one of Grace’s friends, who agreed, but replied, as if surprised by his innocence: “But she had to make a life.”
It was a comment that would have puzzled him twelve months before, but now struck John with the force of revealed truth. If Truman required any more examples for his book, he need not have looked any further than his own lover, whose answered prayers had brought him nothing but unhappiness. John had broken out of his middle-class rut, just as he had promised Brian, but he had only exchanged one jail cell for another: he too was a pampered prisoner. He did not manage money for writers, movie producers and winners, nor did he have any prospect of doing so. Both he and his family were totally dependent on the whims and moods of just one writer, and that knowledge filled him with fear, as well as anger.
Truman and John thus continued to vex each other, each in his customary way. Truman’s was the subtle way; he made it clear that he was the one who wrote the checks. John’s was the direct way; he seemed to delight in cutting his provider down to size before friends like Kay Graham and Carol Matthau, who was so horrified that she threatened to kill him. “I have a gun in my purse,” she warned him, “and I’m a crack shot.” John Knowles was with them at a restaurant in Bridgehampton when John threw his drink in Truman’s face. “Oh, Johnny, stop that” was Truman’s mild reproof. “Sit down and be quiet.”
John did not even stop at demeaning Truman in the eyes of his father. Claiming that he was writing Truman’s biography, he telephoned Arch for information, taking the opportunity to furnish some of his own. “He didn’t try to hide,” recalled Arch. “He said he’d been intimate with Truman sexually and he told me all about it.” Although Truman’s sexual orientation was obvious to most of the world, some ultimate scruple had prevented Truman himself from suggesting it to his father. John had now done it for him.
Unable to stay in one place very long, Truman was on the move throughout the fall and winter of 1974, traveling, sometimes with John, sometimes with Lee, to New Orleans, California and Florida—then back to California, to Mexico and to Florida. Alighting with John in Key West at the end of February, 1975, he finally settled down for several weeks of concentrated writing at the Pier House hotel, rushing to finish a story he had promised Esquire two months before. Titled “Mojave,” it apparently had been in his mind, and perhaps partly on paper, for some time. Now, with the deadline fast approaching, he sat down to complete it.
By March 12 he was done. But perhaps not since he’d first walked into the offices of Mademoiselle had he been so uncertain about the quality of his writing, so eager to be reassured. Not only was he putting on exhibit his first fiction since “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” nearly eight years before, but he was also giving the world its first peek at Answered Prayers. A bleak tale of disappointed love, “Mojave” was supposed to be a fiction within a fiction, the work of the novel’s cynical narrator, P. B. Jones.
He was so nervous that he demanded an immediate reaction, and Don Erickson, Esquire’s top editor, obliged by flying down from New York to pick it up himself. When Erickson arrived, Truman ordered him to take a swim in the Pier House pool first, then read it in a deck chair, while he himself anxiously watched from the bar. Erickson’s face registered appropriate appreciation—under the circumstances, how could it have been otherwise?—and he soon took “Mojave” back to Manhattan.
“To John, with all my love and gratitude,” Truman had written on the manuscript, and for as long as he was writing, he and John enjoyed one of their good periods, ending each night with a tour of Key West’s many night spots. Wherever they went, much was made of Truman. One night, in a crowded bar on Duvall Street, a woman asked for his autograph, handing him a felt-tip pen and pulling down her panties to offer him a plump pink pad—her bare buttocks. Not to be outdone, an athletic bartender vaulted the counter and ran over to him, unzipping his pants and hauling out a considerably smaller piece of flesh for a similar inscription. “You won’t be able to autograph it,” John slyly observed, “but you might be able to initial it.” Truman did neither, but, appropriating John’s amusing put-down as his own, he repeated the story on several TV talk shows, to giggles and laughter each time.
Harmony expired when Truman grew tired of such late-night revels and John went carousing by himself, sometimes not stopping until the early hours of the morning. Truman was angry, but he did nothing until John brought a young woman back for a skinny-dip in the hotel pool, making so much noise that other guests came out to their balconies to see what was going on. Whether Truman heard about that noisy swim or whether he witnessed it himself from behind a palm tree, John never knew. But find out he did, and early the next morning, March 22, he called John Knowles, who was staying at the Palm-Aire health spa in Pompano Beach, nearly two hundred miles to the north. “Can I come up there?” he whispered into the telephone. “I’ve got to get out of here.” Packing as quietly as he could, he then sneaked out to his car, leaving John a note and a hundred dollars for the flight back to New York.
Truman had meekly accepted almost every humiliation John could contrive, and compared with John’s other misdeeds, a romp with a young woman in the Pier House pool seemed almost innocent. “I didn’t even get into her pants,” John regretfully recalled. But Truman saw nothing innocent in it. In preferring her company to his own, John had finally committed the unpardonable offense: he had, so Truman believed, betrayed and rejected him.
Vowing revenge, Truman made two important phone calls from Pompano Beach. One was to inform Alan Schwartz that the president of Bayouboys had just fired the vice president. “Accordingly,” Alan dutifully wrote John a few days later, “you are in no way to consider yourself an employee of Bayouboys Limited nor to hold yourself out as such to anyone.” John tartly replied that Truman demanded a twenty-four-hour-a-day attendant, not a business manager. “If Mr. Capote’s emotional dysfunction is such to require that he needs a male nurse, then he should have hired one” was his spirited retort.
Truman’s second call was to Peg O’Shea, telling her that John’s drinking had forced him to flee Key West. For their own safety, Truman advised her, she and her children should vacate their house before he came back. Terrified, Peg began packing. Her signal to leave came when John himself phoned from Florida, asking her to meet him at the airport. Trying not to convey the panic she was feeling, she suggested that he take a cab instead. Then, while he was still airborne, she and her children loaded their belongings into the car and, like refugees escaping an invading army, sought asylum in the home of a friend. A few hours later John entered a silent house.
She had left him before, only to forgive him after a few days; in her world a wife did not abandon her husband simply because he drank too much, or even because he was violent. “He was the father of my children, as well as my husband,” she explained. “If you’re brought up in my faith, you think you’re married for life. He was a very mean person, and I didn’t like him. But I loved him.” Apparently afraid that such love would prevail once more, Truman returned from Florida and drove out to her hideaway a few days later. He was determined to win, and it was time to call in the artillery.
Standing there in her friend’s living room, he told her everything: that he and her husband had been lovers, that their business arrangement had been little more than a front for their affair, that they had met in a bath, and that John had had other homosexual relations before Truman came along. By way of proof, he showed her an affectionate letter he had just received from John, who was eager to make up. As Peg recalled it, it said something like: “Dearest Truman, We’ve had our ups and downs. Sorry if I’ve hurt you. I want you to know I really do love you. All my love, Johnny.” She read it, and so stunned that her ears rang for hours afterward, she automatically handed it to her friend—an ex-nun, as John’s bad luck would have it. “That’s grounds for annulment!” declared the friend.
Still, Peg seemed to waver. Who, she asked herself, would take care of her and her family? Despite his drinking, John had always been a good breadwinner; once he found another position, he doubtless would be one again. She, by contrast, had no employment history; at the age of forty-five, she had dim prospects of finding a good job.
“You’ll be my personal secretary,” said Truman, who had come prepared with an answer for every question. “We’ll go on a lot of trips. You need a change. You need to relax.”
He thus gave her John’s old job, albeit without the title; when John moved out of their house, as he did shortly thereafter, she was even able to use the little office he had set up for his Bayouboys work. Truman had not only taken away John’s job; he had also robbed him of his wife, family and home. To John, who was living by himself in a rented room, it seemed as if Truman had planned it that way from the first. “He decided from the beginning that he would make a conquest and that to do that he would have to subvert my relationship with Peg. He had it down to a fine line: how to subvert a married Irish-Catholic life.” Truman had had his satisfaction.
Truman now courted Peg as ardently as he had courted John two years before—or Rick and Danny in earlier years. Taking command of her life, he hired a housekeeper to look after her children and in May he flew her to California, where he dazzled her with expensive restaurants and movie-star parties. Carol Matthau, Jack Lemmon and Jennifer Jones (who was now married to the financier Norton Simon) invited them to cocktails or dinners, and Robert Anderson flew them to his New Mexico ranch for the weekend, ferrying them by helicopter from the roof of his headquarters in downtown Los Angeles to a private jet at the airport. Peg was as impressed as Truman had hoped she would be. “Gee, Barbara, how big is your ranch?” she asked Anderson’s wife when she saw how far it stretched over the New Mexican landscape. “You don’t ever ask!” laughed Barbara.
One long trip with Truman, no matter how glamorous, was enough for her, however, and when it ended three weeks later, she told him so. “It was fun while it lasted,” she explained, “but I felt that I was having myself a good time at the expense of the children. All of a sudden they didn’t have a father, and now they had a traveling mother. So I stopped.” Thenceforth she did her secretarial work from home.
But a secretary, or a business manager, was not what Truman needed. John’s angry comments to Alan had not been far off the mark: Truman wanted a full-time companion, if not a nurse. Peg would not provide such company. Her much-chastened husband would, and by the beginning of July, John was prepared to give in. Try as he might, John had still not been able to land another job in a bank, and he was reduced to selling life insurance during the day and working for a collection agency at night. With extreme reluctance—“I fought like a son-of-a-bitch not to get involved with him again”—he called Truman and asked for help in obtaining work in Manhattan.
Grabbing the bait, Truman asked him to join him at a weekend party on Long Island. John accepted, they talked some more then, and he was invited out again to spend the night in Sagaponack. Finally Truman popped the question John was waiting to hear. As a kind of lark, Truman said, he had accepted a part in a Neil Simon mystery-comedy that was to begin filming in the fall. Would John go with him to California? Could they start over? John said yes, and Truman rented him an apartment in the nearby town of Noyac for the month of August, warning his friends not to mention his presence to Jack. So they resumed, as if nothing, including the destruction of John’s marriage, had interrupted them. Truman had his revenge and John too.
During the time they had been apart, John had remained sober. But when Truman drank, John drank—and vice versa—and within days they were boozing and fighting again. One typical scene took place at the Mount Kisco estate of Truman’s friends Bill and Judy Green. Obviously fishing for an invitation, Truman called Judy one Saturday afternoon.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m sitting by the pool with Frank and Ava,” she injudiciously replied, referring to her houseguests, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.
“If that’s true, I’m coming right up.”
“Oh, no, please don’t! I’m having a dinner party.”
“All right,” he said grudgingly. “I’ll come after dinner.”
He and John arrived at 6 or 6:30, before she had even gone upstairs to bathe and dress for the evening. Truman was wearing a Sonny & Cher sweat shirt, khaki pants and sneakers; John was wearing a cotton tweed sports coat and looked, to Judy’s sophisticated eyes, like the manager of a grocery store in the Midwest. By 9, when dinner was served, they were both drunk and disrupting a gathering that included several tycoons and the Governor of New York. John accidentally dropped his cigarette, which burned a large hole in an expensive Portuguese rug, and began insulting Sinatra, accusing him of having ties to the Mafia. “Frank took it very well,” said Truman, “but I couldn’t stand it. I had to get out of there. I went to the car, and Frank said he would drive us to a motel. But John got into the driver’s seat and wouldn’t move. So the two of us roared off down those narrow paths, hitting fences and trees. Finally I grabbed the wheel and we wound up in a ditch. I jumped out and ran into a field. John called for me, then drove away.”
Returning to the house, John said that he had lost his passenger. “That’s impossible!” bellowed Ava Gardner. “You can’t let somebody jump out of a car! We’ve got to find him.” And she and Judy took another car and went searching for Truman. “Truman!” they shouted across those otherwise peaceful hills and dales. “Truman, where are you?” There was no answer. Giving up at last, they returned for nightcaps in the Greens’ pool house. They were still sitting there at 3 A.M. when they heard a tap on the door. Turning, they saw a face pressed against the glass: Truman, looking much refreshed from his long walk in the warm summer air, had come back on his own. “By that time he was completely sober,” said Judy, “and I think he was terribly embarrassed by everything that had happened.”