AFRAID that Truman’s hit men would get him, a panic-stricken John took flight, fleeing first to Las Vegas, where he bought another car, then to a beach community south of Los Angeles, and finally back to Santa Monica. Acting like a hunted man, he assumed an alias (Timothy O’Brian and Roger Sanderson Christie were among the names he used), kept his whereabouts secret, and had his mail delivered to a post-office box. They were all wise precautions. Prodded by Truman, Rick remained on the case and several times spotted him and gave chase, losing him in crowds or traffic each time.
But the explosion that had so thoroughly terrified John had had a marvelously soothing effect on Truman, who at last felt that he had given measure for measure. John now knew who was boss, and for the first time Truman was able to ignore his emotional plea, conveyed by a mutual friend, for still another reconciliation. “It’s as if a boil had been lanced,” Truman explained. “I feel very serene. I don’t have any of that hysterical anxiety anymore. Everything is going okay.” Then, his spirits restored, his hopes revived, he added: “I’m beginning my third act now. My first act ended with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My second act was In Cold Blood, which was a total switch for me. My third act will go on for the rest of my life.”
Indeed, it did seem, during the winter and spring of 1978, as if a curtain were going up on a new, happier phase of his life. John’s humiliation was the catalyst, but part of the credit for his resurrection must also go to the fortuitous reappearance of Bob MacBride, whom he had so callously dumped when he met John in 1973. Bob called him on some matter or other, they arranged a meeting, and Truman invited him on a vacation to Martinique. They got along better than ever, and from then on, wherever he went, Truman expected Bob to go as well. “Can’t you find somebody younger for Truman?” Andy Warhol finally asked a public relations consultant, Joseph Petrocik, who, together with his companion Myron Clement, became one of Truman’s closest friends during the seventies and eighties. “Truman is always getting himself involved with these old guys! They’re not very attractive, and they’re so dull!” But Bob’s steady, sober, unexciting company was exactly what Truman required, a safe port after four and a half years of rough and perilous waters.
Although his days were not quite as sunny as he pretended, things were brighter than they had been, and for the first time in years Truman was able to speak with convincing optimism about the future. Trying to rejuvenate his much-put-upon body, he returned to the gym to which Rick had introduced him in the early seventies. Renewing his surroundings, he redecorated his apartment, giving away—in effect banishing—the portrait painted of him when he was in his thirties by Jim Fosburgh. A new purchase, a Texas rattle-snake stuffed with Styrofoam, expressed the sentiments of the older and presumably tougher Truman. Rising to an attack position in the center of his coffee table, it seemed to say, “Don’t tread on me!” And like that angry rattler, he felt strong enough to strike at those who had snubbed him after “La Côte Basque,” delivering, for example, a public and much-publicized scolding to one minor society figure, Nan Kempner, who dared to advise him about Answered Prayers.
For all the others who had lined up against him, he plotted a subtler revenge: he would deny them invitations to the wonderful parties he was already busy planning. First would come a series of small and elegant lunches in his dining room overlooking the East River. “My little raspberry room will become the most exclusive club in New York,” he predicted. “If you get invited to Truman’s, you will be really and truly, totally, utterly in!” Then, when the outs were beginning to regret having crossed him, he would cause mass hara-kiri, as he had in 1966, by giving what he called his “get-even party,” a gathering grander than the Black and White Ball. March 21, 1979, the first day of spring, was to be the day of retribution. The place of honor was to be an indoor tennis court, which was to be decorated like a palace out of The Arabian Nights. The host himself was to be disguised in the humble robe of a poor peasant, revealing his true identity only by the huge emerald that would sparkle from his forehead, dazzling all those who approached his royal presence. “I will be the prince of all Araby,” he said, “and you will all kiss my hand when you come in.”
In the final years of the decade, that lovingly detailed but rather pathetic fantasy faded away, and most of his social energies were focused on a nondescript-looking former theater on West Fifty-fourth Street, inside which was what The New York Times called the “Oz of discos”—Studio 54. Discotheques had come and gone in New York since the sixties, but none was as popular as that palace of decadent pleasures, whose real progenitor was not its immediate predecessors, but the gaslit Moulin Rouge of the 1890s, the home of the cancan, Toulouse-Lautrec, and dozens of plump, pretty and available girls.
A birthday party for Bianca Jagger had set the tone: riding a white horse, she had been led around the dance floor by a huge black man, who was naked except for a covering of gold glitter. After that, anything went, so long as it was done with a similarly outrageous mixture of style and fantasy. Among the regulars were Disco Sally, a grandmother who loved to dance; Rollerena, a transvestite who endlessly circled the floor on roller skates; and two young men who showed up in different costumes each night—as cowboys one night, baseball players the next, and so on. “Le freak, c’est chic,” said the words of a popular song, and in the late seventies and early eighties it was. When any sophisticated tourist returned home, whether home was Paris or Peoria, the first question put to him was: had he been to Studio 54?
“Rendez-vous du High-Life,” the advertisements for the Moulin Rouge had read. “Attractions Diverses.” And so, in the same words, might the ads have read for Studio 54, which glorified drugs—its symbol, emblazoned on a curtain behind the stage, was the man in the moon sniffing cocaine from a spoon—and which celebrated sex. The handsome young waiters, who wore nothing but silk basketball shorts, were frequently lured away by the customers, and almost every night at least a few people could be observed engaging in some form of sex in the marijuana-scented balcony.
“I’ve been to an awful lot of nightclubs, and this is the best I’ve ever seen,” said Truman, who was so smitten with the place that he dragged Bob MacBride there two or three nights a week. “This is the nightclub of the future. It’s very democratic. Boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, blacks and whites, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything else—all one big mix!” But Bob, who hated it, usually disappeared into the balcony, where, making a bed of his overcoat, he would fall asleep, blind and deaf to the frenzied cavorting around him. “When I was in the Navy, I used to sleep on the steel deck of a destroyer, with five-inch guns going off over my head,” he explained. “So I can sleep anywhere.” And there he would remain until Truman sent someone to fetch him.
Truman preferred the deejay’s booth above the dance floor, a crow’s nest from which he could see without being seen. “Isn’t it too bad that Proust didn’t have something like this?” he said. “Sometimes, when I’m sitting up [there], I think about all the dead people who would have loved 54. It’s a shame they’re not around—people like Ronald Firbank or Toulouse-Lautrec or Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde or Carl Van Vechten. Cole Porter would have loved it.” Occasionally, he also joined others among the elite in the sanctum sanctorum, a fence-enclosed area in the basement, adjoining the boiler. “It was almost as if we were in jail, but at that time it was the most desirable spot in New York,” recalled Bob Colacello, the editor of Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview. “Now it seems sick, but it all seemed so glamorous then. Truman enjoyed it, but I think he wished that he could have gone to lunch with Babe the next day and have told her about what had gone on.”
That was never to be, and as spring turned to summer, Babe’s long battle with cancer approached its conclusion. When she did go out, it was most often to visit her sister and brother-in-law, Minnie and Jim Fosburgh, who, by a grotesque coincidence, were also—both of them—victims of cancer.13 Babe had not forgiven Truman for “La Côte Basque,” in any event. Chance once brought them together on a sick call to the Fosburghs, and for sweet Minnie’s sake, they acted as if nothing had happened; but every so often Babe’s eyes would meet his and tell him how things stood between them. “When she and Bill left, I pretended I had to make a phone call in the next room,” said Truman. “I was afraid that if I went down in the elevator with them, I would break down and begin crying. I do that sort of thing. Babe never did.”
Yet Babe may not have been as implacable as she seemed; though he was never to know it, Truman may have achieved his goal of turning her against Bill after all. “My own feeling is that there was this weird undercurrent, which she couldn’t admit to, of gratitude and a kind of perverse loyalty to Truman,” said the art critic John Richardson, who saw her frequently in her last months. “She became very anti-Bill. She would always refer to him as Paley, seldom as Bill, and only in the most cruel terms. It may have been partly the outcome of the cancer—I believe that people who have it tend to take it out on the person closest to them—but I think it was also a consequence of ‘La Côte Basque.’ People used to talk about Bill as a philanderer, but his affairs weren’t the talk of the town until Truman’s story came out.”
Bill was later to lament that “you understand much more about the value of a marriage when you’ve lost it,” and only when she was dying did he seem to appreciate the remarkable character that lay beneath Babe’s beautiful facade; only when it was too late did he appear to see what Truman had seen from the first. As she turned away from him, he turned toward her, making it not just his goal, but his mission to save her life. “I was determined to be the most knowledgeable man in the world about cancer, and I think I was,” he said. Yet in the end, all his determination, his money and his power could do nothing but make her more comfortable than she might otherwise have been. “But it will take millions to take care of her at home,” her doctors told him when she said that she wanted to leave the hospital. “That’s all right,” he answered, “I’ve got millions”—and he brought her home to their apartment on Fifth Avenue.
She died on July 6, 1978, having planned her own funeral, as she had planned everything else. Truman was not among those notified. “She always said to me, ‘There’s only one person in the world who could hurt me, really hurt me, and that’s you,’” he recalled. “‘Bill can’t hurt me. Betsey’—that was the sister she was slightly frightened of—‘can’t really hurt me. But you could really hurt me. You could do something. I don’t know what it would be. But I know that you’re the one person in the world that could ever really, really hurt me.’ And apparently I did hurt her, bizarre and ridiculous as it seems. But because I loved her, she was able to hurt me too—out of loyalty to a man who was so disloyal to her. The tragedy is that we never made up before she died. And I never even went to her funeral… I never even went to her funeral.”
Her death, combined with a long and unflattering profile of him in The New York Times Magazine, was enough to destroy the serenity he had boasted of at the start of the year. Ten days after her funeral he once again mortified himself in public, rambling incoherently on one of New York’s morning TV talk shows. “What’s going to happen unless you lick this problem of drugs and alcohol?” the host, Stanley Siegel, finally inquired. “What is going to happen to Truman? I’m sure you’ve thought about it.” Truman certainly had, and to that question, at least, his reply was chillingly clear: “The obvious answer is that eventually I’ll kill myself.”
In New York, and much of the rest of the country as well, his appearance made headlines. “Drunk & Doped, Capote Visits TV Talk Show,” reported that afternoon’s New York Post, which followed up the next day with a savage cartoon: it depicted him as a sleepy-eyed bum, surrounded by hypodermic needles, piles of empty liquor bottles, and a book titled Breakfast at the Bowery. Television critics debated whether Siegel should have let him go on the air in his dismal condition. But no one disputed that the show had been riveting. “A talented man of considerable literary stature was making a fool of himself in front of 250,000 viewers,” wrote Newsday’s John Cashman. “But, strangely enough, it was drama.”
Truman himself could remember nothing of what had happened, and he was dismayed to hear about it when he returned to his apartment. “I can’t even talk, I’m so upset,” he said. “Ohhh, I feel so awful!” Trying to forget, he spent most of the night at a gay disco in SoHo with Liza Minnelli and Steve Rubell, one of the owners of Studio 54. The next day, July 19, he was in such bad shape that Bob MacBride checked him into a hospital. Afraid that he might return to his apartment and try to kill himself, Bob then went back and removed the gun Al Dewey had given him when he was researching In Cold Blood; dropping it into a paper bag, Bob carried it to Alan Schwartz’ office. Informed that Truman was deeply depressed and suicidal, Jack, who was in Sagaponack, asked a friend to sit with him—he did not want to be alone. “I’m just shaking,” he said. “I guess I wanted someone to do my job for me, and I had great hopes that MacBride would take care of him. I thought MacBride was a staff Truman could lean on. Instead, he’s a wet towel.”
In this instance, however, Jack was the wet towel, Bob the staff on whom Truman could lean. “I saw what that man is about under stress,” said Joe Petrocik, admiringly. While Jack nursed his own anxieties on Long Island, Bob took charge in Manhattan, searching for a solution to what seemed to be a desperate situation. Finally, with the help of Winston Guest, C.Z.’s husband and also an alcoholic, he prevailed on Truman to enter Hazelden, an addiction-rehabilitation clinic fifty miles north of Minneapolis. When Truman seemed to waver—if Smithers had been Devil’s Island, he moaned, then Hazelden was Alcatraz—Bob and Winston bundled him into Winston’s car, virtually abducting him, Bob confessed, and drove him to the Guest estate on Long Island. Afraid that he still might back out, a few days later Winston and C.Z. drove him to the airport and flew with him to Minnesota.
To his surprise, Truman almost enjoyed his month at Hazelden, which was surrounded by woods and water and which, unlike Smithers, gave him a private room and freedom to wander around. “It’s highly disciplined—they don’t fool around—but it’s not unpleasant at all,” he admitted. “I’ve got my nerves back together and I’ve got a good attitude. Getting better is all in the attitude, actually. My head wasn’t in a place to really work things out at Smithers; there were too many things hanging over me. Now I feel as if a hurricane had gone out to sea and that I’m on a kind of fresh beach.” But the Hazelden treatment worked no better than the Smithers treatment. By the end of September, just a few weeks after his discharge, he was drinking so heavily again that Rick Brown, who accompanied him on a speaking tour of Western colleges, had a hard time keeping him on schedule.
“At Bozeman, Montana, he was so drunk that they had to drag him out of the plane,” said Rick. “I hired a car to drive to the next stop—I didn’t want him drinking on an airplane—but after a while he said, ‘Rick, you’ll have to stop so that I can get a drink.’ Finally I pulled into a cowboy hangout. He went up to the bar and asked for a vodka and orange juice. When the bartender said they didn’t carry hard liquor—they only had beer and wine—Truman pounded his fist on the bar and yelled: ‘Beer and wine! I thought this was a tough place! And you call yourselves men!’ I was afraid that those cowboys would kill him. But they just looked at him. I don’t think they had ever seen anything like him before. When we got to Denver, he was so bored that on our first day he took me to five porno flicks, straight and gay both. We saw so many that I finally recognized a girl I knew.”
Returning to Long Island in October, Truman once again was paralyzed by anxiety. “I’m followed by fear and terror, which hits my chest and then goes up to my throat,” he said. “I think a lot—not just a little, but a lot—about killing myself. I’m obsessed with the idea of dying, and I wake up hoping that I will die. But what scares me is the fear that I might injure but not kill myself, that I might do terrible things to my brain with Tuinal, yet not die.” Jack believed that he also saw death’s approaching shadow. “You’re looking at a dying man, you know” were his gloomy words to a friend. “I watch him when he’s sleeping, and he looks tired, very, very tired. It’s as if he is at a long party and wants to say goodbye—but he can’t.”
During the summer crisis Jack had also said: “Truman has surprised me before, and he may surprise others too. The tree may seem to have no more leaves on it, but who can say? There may be another spring.” And so, miraculously, there was. At the beginning of 1979, in an almost exact reprise of the year before, Truman tried to break the destructive patterns of the recent past, to give himself a fresh start—indeed, a fresh face before the world. Within the space of a few months, he had a face lift, hair transplants and major work done on his teeth. “Why, Truman,” exclaimed Andy Warhol, “it’s a new same old you!”
This time his efforts seemed to succeed. Though he continued to pop pills and snort cocaine, a drug to which his friends at Studio 54 had introduced him, he was nonetheless able to stop the heavy drinking and reassert control over his life. “My recovery wasn’t spontaneous,” he said. “It was hard work. I had to go through hell to get there. It was all a question of being ready. I was ready—I always knew I would be—and things that had been impossible for me suddenly became very easy.” One of those easy things was writing, and 1979 became perhaps the most productive year of his career. Nearly every day he descended fifteen floors to a maid’s studio apartment he had rented in the U.N. Plaza, and there, safe from importuning visitors and the telephone, he scribbled in his notebooks and on his yellow pads. “I’ve never worked in such a concentrated way as I’m working right now,” he said. “I write all the time, and I’m oblivious to everything else. I don’t like to talk about it because it destroys the concentration, but bits of it will begin appearing very soon.”
He had always been happiest writing short pieces, fiction and nonfiction alike, and some of the bits that followed were among the best works he was ever to produce: the years of self-abuse had not dulled his musician’s ear for the rhythms and intonations of the English language. Most of the pieces were later collected in Music for Chameleons. They included the title story, which he published in The New Yorker; “Dazzle,” a confessional story about his childhood yearning to be a girl, which he sold to Esquire; and ten pieces he wrote for Interview. Among the latter were a profile of Marilyn Monroe (“A Beautiful Child”), an anecdote about his chance encounters with a Soviet spy (“Mr. Jones”), an account of a day with an itinerant cleaning woman (“A Day’s Work”), and Handcarved Coffins, which was a superbly executed novella-length thriller—his last major work.
The idea for Handcarved Coffins had come from Al Dewey, who several years before had told him about a series of bizarre murders in Nebraska—in one instance the inventive killer had used rattlesnakes to dispatch his victims. Truman followed the case by telephone and he may also have conducted interviews. But this “Nonfiction Account of an American Crime,” as he subtitled it, was, nonetheless, mostly fictional. His homespun detective was not a real person, but a composite of several lawmen he had known—not the least of whom was Al Dewey—and Truman did not, as he indicated in the manuscript, play Dr. Watson to the detective’s Sherlock Holmes.
Handcarved Coffins, like his other contributions to Interview, resembled a movie script, with long stretches of dialogue occasionally interrupted by passages of descriptive prose. In his hands such a structure was remarkably pliable and plastic, and he was so happy with the results—“there’s not an ounce of fat on these stories,” he boasted—that once again he claimed to have discovered a new art form: one that combined the techniques of film, fiction and nonfiction. It was such a radical advance, he said, that it made traditional storytelling obsolete. “It’s a distillation of all I know about writing: short-story writing, screenwriting, journalism—everything. There is no future in the novel, so far as I can see. I’m trying to show where writing is going to be. I may not get there, but I will point the way.”
In fact, he had discovered nothing but a renewed sense of self-confidence, and when Music for Chameleons was published in 1980, some reviewers said as much, dismissing his claim even while praising his achievement. It was not a glorious future he was pointing to, contended the British novelist John Fowles, but a glorious past, namely, the spare, tightly controlled stories of Flaubert and Maupassant. “I take it Music for Chameleons is a foretaste of what we can expect when Answered Prayers is finally rewritten and published, and I now look forward to it immensely,” wrote Fowles in Saturday Review. “So also, I suspect, somewhere under a café awning on Parnassus, do Mr. Capote’s three masters: Flaubert, Maupassant, and Marcel Proust (who must all have had a dry time of it recently). If I’m not quite sure yet that he will one day join them there, I think he begins, behind the froth and the brouhaha, the name-dropping and the backstabbing, the wicked penchant for recording how real people spoke and behaved, to make a serious bid for their company. And of one thing I am certain: Contemporary literature would be much, much duller and poorer without him.”
Froth and brouhaha were as necessary to Truman as his art, however, and it was only to be expected that after several months of hard and steady work he began looking for some mischievous diversion. He found it, all too easily, in a collision with a once-treasured friend, Lee Radziwill.
Gore’s libel suit against him (the result of the Playgirl interview in which he had alleged that Gore had been kicked out of the Kennedy White House) had been dragging on for more than three years, and there was no end in sight. From the outset Truman had expected Lee to come to his rescue and say that she had been the source for his story. But now, in the spring of 1979, he was startled to learn that without giving him so much as a hint, Lee—his love, his Galatea!—had done just the opposite. She had become a witness for the prosecution. “I do not recall ever discussing with Truman Capote the incident or the evening which I understand is the subject of this lawsuit,” she had told Gore’s lawyer.
Stunned, Truman indulged himself in another of his retaliation fantasies. Convinced that if the facts were ever made public, Gore would be so embarrassed that he would immediately raise the white flag of surrender, he secretly gave his copies of their depositions to New York magazine, which in early June obediently printed long excerpts.
“It’s all I can do to contain myself,” Truman said, so excited that his words tumbled over one another into a long and almost manic monologue. “Until the magazine was actually on the press I could hardly breathe, but right now it is rolling down the chutes along with Gore’s career. All along I knew that if people read these depositions, they would know that he was like Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. Now they are about to explode and destroy his career. I will have the greatest single revenge in literary history. Nothing equals it. For the rest of his life he’ll wake up in the morning and be happy for ten minutes—and then he’ll remember what happened on that day in June. The humiliation for him! I love it! I love it! I love it! When he dies, they’ll write on his tombstone, ‘Here Lies Gore Vidal: He Messed Around with T.C.’”
Why had Lee turned against him? he wondered. Why had she testified in behalf of Gore, whom she disliked? “Why she betrayed me is one of the world’s great mysteries, like those statues on Easter Island,” he said. When his own call to her was not returned, he nagged Liz Smith into calling her and requesting an explanation. Liz did as she was bidden, and she gave him Lee’s answer. “I’m tired of Truman riding on my coattails to fame,” Lee had told her. “And Liz, what difference does it make? They’re just a couple of fags.”
If lightning had struck him, Truman could not have been more shocked. Through sleepless nights he had brooded, asking himself what he had done to offend her, but that was the one reply, probably the only reply, he had not imagined. Just a fag! He who had sacrificed months of his own work to help her become an actress; he who had foolishly gushed over her in countless articles and interviews. “I saved that girl’s life, for Christ’s sake,” he asserted. But now, when he needed her, she ignored him: he was just a fag and therefore someone who, when he was no longer useful, could be discarded like a paper napkin.14 No one could offer a credible explanation for her conduct—others were as puzzled as Truman was—but a friend of Babe’s, still angry about “La Côte Basque,” thought that quite unwittingly, Lee had nevertheless served the cause of justice. “Truman did everything for Lee and got nothing,” the friend said bitterly. “Babe did everything for him and got nothing.”
Lee’s “fag” remark changed hurt to rage, and Truman mapped out an attack on the “principessa,” as he now derisively labeled her, slowly rolling that flavorful Italian word around in his mouth before spitting it out like a bad piece of candy. “If the lovely, divine and sensitive Princess Radziwill has such a low opinion of homosexuals, then why did she have me for a confidant for the last twenty years?” he demanded.
Throughout the first weekend in June he hatched his revenge, and on Monday, June 4, his plan ready, he arranged to appear on Stanley Siegel’s TV show the following morning. If Lee thought he was just a fag, he said, he would do what fags are supposed to do: he would tell all, all of the stories she had told him over the course of those many years, all of her secrets, all of her love affairs, all of her feelings of resentment toward her sister Jackie. “When I finish with her tomorrow, the average rider of the New York subway system will see what a little cunt she is,” he proclaimed. “She and her beloved sister had better have ambulances waiting and rooms reserved at Payne Whitney, because they’ll be there for a long time. Believe me, you will never have seen anything like this.”
Until late Monday night he rehearsed what he called his “crazy queen” act, so that when he went before the cameras, he would be, as he phrased it, “as calm as a bombe glacée.” Then, early Tuesday morning, The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn met him in his apartment and rode with him to the television studio so that she could report the historic event. “A cassette of this show is going to be one of the great comic classics of all time,” he assured her.
And in truth, the first half of his performance, which he gave in a thick Southern accent, did have a certain lunatic brilliance. “I’ll tell you something about fags, especially Southern fags,” he said. “We is mean. A Southern fag is meaner than the meanest rattler you ever met… I know that Lee wouldn’t want me to be tellin’ none of this. But you know us Southern fags—we just can’t keep our mouths shut.” Opening his own mouth very wide, he began revealing the secrets he claimed Lee had confided to him: how envious she was of Jackie (“The princess kind of had it in mind that she was going to marry Mr. Onassis herself”), how she had once tried to steal William F. Buckley, Jr., away from his wife, and how deeply she had been wounded by the breakup of her romance with Peter Beard (“He met this chick with a little less mileage on her”). He was just hitting his stride when Siegel, who was becoming increasingly nervous at the direction his monologue was taking, interrupted, destroying the mood he had so carefully created and causing his speech to sputter to a depressing conclusion.
Brought suddenly down to earth, he invited Quinn back to his apartment and repeated for her, without the histrionics, the rest of his diatribe, which she duly reported in her newspaper: how Jackie had supposedly told Lee that Lee owed everything to her, for example, and how Lee had had a crush on both Jack Kennedy and Rudolf Nureyev—although she had been taken slightly aback when she saw pictures of nude men in Nureyev’s guest room. But most of all he confessed how hurt he was, and how keenly he felt the loss of one of his greatest friends. “Love is blind,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve been in love before with people who were just ghastly. I was in love with her like I would have been in love with anybody.” Why had she betrayed him? He believed he had belatedly deduced the answer: she was afraid of Gore, but she had thought that poor drunken Truman was going to die and that she could therefore disregard his feelings. “Unfortunately for Princess Radziwill,” he said, “this fag happens to be alive and well and in New York City.”
Having spoken so unwisely before, Lee now remained silent. Gore, always combative, did not. “This is pathology,” he said. “Real nut-house stuff.” If he had been devastated by publication of the depositions, Gore did not let on. Nor did he drop his suit, pursuing his complaint for four more years. It was finally settled out of court in the fall of 1983, when Truman wrote a letter of apology. “Dear Gore: I apologize for any distress, inconvenience or expense which may have been caused you as a result of the interview with me published in the September 1975 issue of Playgirl. As you know, I was not present at the event about which I am quoted in that interview, and I understand from your representatives that what I am reported as saying does not accurately set forth what occurred. I can assure you that the article was not an accurate transcription of what I said, especially with regard to any remarks which might cast aspersions upon your character or behavior, and that I will avoid discussing the subject in the future. Best, Truman Capote.”
His furies exorcised, Truman retreated to Long Island after the Quinn interview, and he returned to work, apparently unfazed by his week of melodramas. A little more than a week after the Siegel show, in fact, he was able to finish one of the best short pieces he was ever to write, his profile of Marilyn Monroe. So his days continued, productively and reasonably happily, during the months that followed, and he ended 1979—and the most troubled decade of his life—on a hopeful note of optimism. “Music for Chameleonswill be just as good as Answered Prayers,” he said. “It has in it everything I know about writing. It’s the best I can do, and I want everyone to see that it’s the work of a great writer. When it comes out next year, my friends are going to be very proud. I think we’re going to win. In fact I know we’re going to win.”