BUT Truman did not want to live without alcohol and drugs. Life with them was intolerable, but life without them was unthinkable. They had become his constant companions, his most dependable chums. Sometimes, late at night, he would take his pills and capsules out of his bag—the yellows and reds, the whites and blues, the browns and blacks—count them five or six times to reassure himself that they were all there, and fondle them, as a person of a different piety might caress the beads of his rosary. Merely touching them gave him comfort. “Isn’t it beautiful!” he exclaimed one day at lunch, holding up a newly acquired and especially powerful sedative—Lotusate it was poetically named—and turning it round and round, as if it were a sapphire in whose frozen heart he could see the light dancing. “It’s the only beautiful drug I’ve ever seen, a lovely lavender. Because my system isn’t used to it yet, it puts me to sleep immediately. I can sleep for five hours; then I wake up and take another one.”
Cocaine received a similar encomium—“so incredibly subtle,” he called it—and he publicly bragged about how much he consumed. Oblivious to the harsh penalties of the law, he partook of it with blissful indiscretion, interrupting a dinner at La Petite Marmite, for example, for a quick snort in the glass telephone booth near the entrance. Unperturbed, the headwaiter politely suggested that his dinner guest stand in front and block him from view. For a time there was a rumor that he had given up cocaine, and his suppliers, unhappy at the prospect of losing such a good customer, sent him envelopes containing free samples. But the rumors were false. Leafing through a magazine in the U.N. Plaza apartment, Joe Petrocik discovered three coke-filled packets that Truman had hidden between the pages, then inconveniently forgotten. “That’s just what I need!” screeched Truman, who instantly grabbed them and ran into the next room to inhale their contents.
Yet just as some part of his mind remained rational while the rest of it was conjuring up a roomful of assassins, so did some part of him stand coolly aside and declare that coke and pills were not what he needed, that in fact they might someday destroy him. A depressed glance around his apartment, littered with pills and the containers they had come in, one night caused him to issue another of his ominous predictions. “First there was Marilyn, then Monty,” he said. “I’m going to be the next one. You’re going to read about me on the front page of the Daily News one of these days. It’s a sure sign when you start seeing pills and pill bottles in corners.”
Before the summer of 1981 ended, his prophecy seemed close to fulfillment. On the morning of August 1 he suffered a convulsive seizure, something like an epileptic attack, in front of the Sagaponack General Store and was taken to Southampton Hospital in an ambulance, convinced that he was on the verge of dying. “I was dead for thirty seconds, alive for four hours, then dead for thirty-five seconds,” he said, repeating what he had been told by hospital attendants. “If I had been dead for two more seconds, I would have been dead for good. Little children are brought up to believe that death is awful. But this was quite, quite pleasant.”
After nearly a month in the hospital, he traveled into Manhattan, only to suffer a second attack in the hallway outside his apartment shortly after noon on September 15. “Truman Capote Rushed to Hospital,” blazoned the headline on the front page of that afternoon’s New York Post, which also displayed a picture of him strapped to a stretcher, unconscious, with his eyes closed and his mouth agape. His condition was not so grave as the photograph suggested, and after six days in New York Hospital he returned to Long Island, pointedly disregarding the admonitions of his doctors, who blamed the attacks on alcohol, by stopping off for a couple of drinks at a friend’s house on the way home. In the weeks that followed, he continued to drink as if nothing had happened, as if his weeks in the hospitals had been erased from his memory.
By so casually ignoring the dramatic—indeed, providential—warnings of his seizures, he all but announced what had long been evident: he had lost his will to survive. “Everything is difficult, painfully hard for him now,” said Jack. “All the energy he has goes into keeping up a front, into putting up scrims that make people think he’s all right.” Many days that autumn he could not do even that, lacking sufficient vigor to wash, shave and put on clean clothes. Sometimes he could not even make the effort to walk to the toilet, causing the back steps of his studio, which he often used instead, to stink of urine. “Go some place where they teach people to piss in a bowl!” was Jack’s sarcastic advice.
Seeing how helpless he was, well-meaning friends wanted to hire someone to look after him, a combination nurse and companion. His Long Island doctor, William Diefenbach, even volunteered to take a year’s leave from his practice to look after him—if only he would spend his time writing. Every possibility was considered, but Truman rejected them all, and Jack, who should have welcomed assistance, was predictably scornful. “What would Truman do with a male nurse?” he asked. “He’d probably teach the nurse to take heroin; or the nurse would introduce him to another drug.”
Through some particularly melancholy irony, Truman had become like that wraith of his youth, Denham Fouts, who during the last months of his life had rarely left his gloom-shrouded, opium-scented apartment on the Rue du Bac. Truman had been so disturbed and frightened by Denny’s withdrawal into the netherworld of drugs that he had soon fled his company. In fact, he had seen in Denny the ghost of things to come, and more than thirty years later, he had become what he had then feared, a semi-invalid who often could not manage the simplest tasks on his own and who relied on a dwindling circle of friends to take care of him. On his good days he could still charm, amuse and even write; on his bad days he was a burden that many found exceedingly heavy to bear.
The one who found the burden most onerous was Jack, who looked forward to his departure for Verbier each year as a convict might look forward to the day of his release from prison. As the drama of Truman’s decline entered its last act, Jack seemed to regard himself as a spectator, not as a leading character, and certainly not as the one who should have led the rescue efforts, however doomed they might have been. It never seemed to have occurred to him that thirty-three years of companionship carried a special obligation. What hitherto had been obscured by the choler and fury of his personality, the eruptions of anger and outrage, was now obvious: it was Truman who had dominated their relationship, Truman who had decided where they would travel and where they would live, and Truman who had been the one who had loved, Jack the one who had been loved. Jack’s affection for him had been real, but for the most part he had been remarkably passive and removed—cold and hyperborean, as he himself had observed. He had demanded only one thing and that was that he not be bothered.
Now, at the age of sixty-seven, Jack remained as self-absorbed as he had always been. He still did not want to be bothered, and he responded to the burden that Truman had become by escaping to Switzerland; or, even when he was home, by shifting responsibility onto other shoulders. In January, 1983, at one of the lowest of Truman’s many low points, Joe Petrocik thought of cabling Jack in Verbier and asking him to return to New York; then, imagining his response, Joe threw up his hands. “What would he say? ‘I’ll be there when the ski season is over.’”
It was Truman’s fate, and the most melancholy irony of all, that at the end of his life, as at the beginning, he was rejected by the one who was closest to him. Like Nina, Jack was ambivalent about him during his final years, expressing love and contempt almost in the same breath. And like Nina, Jack could be counted on only when it suited him, only when he was not otherwise engaged. “Truman’s beyond help,” he declared. “What am I supposed to do? I think I’m terrible for him. I’m always lecturing him. I’m not able to handle him any more than I can carry a handful of water from here [Sagaponack] to East Hampton. How can you live with a thing when you’re watching it burn down before your eyes? Truman’s dying. He’s a dying man. But I can’t die with him.”
Lonely and frightened by his seizures, Truman clung to Jack nevertheless, and at the end of 1981 he battled bitterly to prevent him from leaving for Switzerland. “He holds on to me like I’m a raft,” said Jack. Jack’s refusal to stay with him ushered in some of the worst weeks in their relationship. When pleas and persuasion failed, Truman used economic blackmail for the first time, threatening to sell the apartment in Verbier. When that did no good either, he angrily struck out, accusing Jack of having put the ailing Maggie to sleep—her hind legs had become paralyzed—simply so that he would be free to travel.
That charge wounded Jack most of all. “Oh, God!” he groaned. “How I fought for that little dog’s life! Truman’s vindictiveness is fantastic. He’s taken the whole fabric of our life together and ripped it up. The love of his life left him, and Truman thought he was going to come back to paradise with Jack. But he can’t. He’s changed. But maybe somebody will come along for him. After all, more than half the world still believes in the Messiah. I dread weekends and holidays with him now. For the first time in years I feel I can’t get out of bed, I’m so depressed. Everybody who lives with an alcoholic gets to hate him. We’re like soldiers after the battle. There’s nothing to say.”
There was more to say, of course, and Truman had said it not long before: “I can’t break the connection with Johnny, but somehow I always know that I will die living with Jack.” A thaw came with Jack’s return from Switzerland in the spring of 1982, and for a few weeks the clock seemed to have been turned back to a more congenial time. Truman sneaked peeks at Jack’s newest book—“I love it,” he reported, midway through—and interjected himself into one of the decade’s most celebrated court cases, the trial of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of his wife Sunny. Siding with the defense, which maintained that Sunny’s addiction to drugs and alcohol had caused the coma in which she lay, Truman stated that he had known her and that, contrary to prosecution claims, she was both an alcoholic and a drug abuser: she had even shown him how to give himself injections.
Playing the busybody was about all he was able to do, and even the few words he managed to produce, a story titled “One Christmas” and a column of reminiscences, had a tired quality, reflecting his own unshakable fatigue. For most of the year he was even too weary to give much thought to John, who sent him at least two provocative letters. The first, in April, 1982, asked for money, which Truman apparently gave him. The second, a few months later, revealed that John no longer hated him. His sponsor in AA had convinced him that he could not find peace unless he expunged such negative emotions from his soul, John said, and that was his reason for writing. “So. Consider yourself forgiven and unhated by me… If my, selfishly, doing this gives you any peace and happiness I am glad; and I hope that you will consider the efficacy of acting likewise towards whomever you hate. Let it seep away, Truman, it is poison.”
In prior years such a condescending letter would have evoked screams of outrage from Truman. But John was now too great a challenge to his depleted strength. Even with all of his nagging, Jack was the one he wanted to be with, and as fall of 1982 merged into winter, Truman made the same old plea: forget Switzerland. And he received the same old answer: no. But in truth, Jack was no longer much company even when he was in New York. On Christmas Eve, a night when, according to all the songs and carols, loved ones gather by the tree, Jack marched off to the opera, to the blood and betrayal of Verdi’s Macbeth, leaving Truman to fend for himself. A few days later, as Jack packed for Verbier, Truman checked into Southampton Hospital, where, alone again, he saw in the new year, 1983.
Truman’s descent now accelerated at an alarming speed, and he was scarcely out of one hospital before entering another. An exact count of his stays is hard to come by; during the first few years of the eighties he was hospitalized in half a dozen states and Switzerland too. But the tally from Southampton Hospital, his favorite, gives an indication of the quickening pace of his decline: he registered there four times in 1981, seven times in 1982, and sixteen times in 1983. “It used to be that he would have a few good months between crises,” said Joe Petrocik. “Then it would be a few good weeks. Finally it was a few good days. Now it’s a few good hours.”
In the first two months of 1983 he ricocheted from hospital to hospital: from Southampton Hospital to New York Hospital, from a clinic in Switzerland to Larkin General Hospital in Miami—then back to Manhattan and Mount Sinai Hospital. “If he straightens out, he has many, many years left,” said Bertram Newman, his doctor at Mount Sinai. “But if he keeps going the way he is now, he might just as well put a gun to his mouth. It would save everyone a lot of trouble. I feel so impotent because I know that he knows that this can all stop.”
On March 1, 1983, the day he left Mount Sinai, Lester Persky and Alan Schwartz gave him an unwontedly stiff lecture at La Petite Marmite. Alan was moved to tears—“I recognized finally that he really was killing himself,” Alan said—but Truman was more irritated than touched. “I had an incredibly grim lunch with my lawyer and Lester Ever-Present Persky,” he said later that afternoon. “They told me I’d be dead in six months if I didn’t stop drinking. I wanted to say, ‘So what? It’s me, not you. Why do you care?’ They all act as if I’ve made no effort, but I’ve made a tremendous effort over the last five years. It’s almost as if they all have crossed eyes and can’t see.”
Like Jack—indeed, like Truman himself—his friends began to speak as if he had a fatal disease, as if his death were an impending event whose date had not yet been determined. Some of his friends were reluctant to open the door to him, worried lest he fall asleep on their couch or in their guest bedroom and never wake up. Foreseeing that he would not live long enough to enjoy his money, Alan and Arnold Bernstein, his accountant, took the practical step of persuading Random House to immediately release sums scheduled for payment in future years. “I wanted him to have it right away, even if it meant he had to pay a little more in taxes,” said Arnold.
And so the downward spiral continued, hastened by a series of small shocks, including a rejection slip from Vanity Fair for his column and a gratuitous assault by his aunt Tiny Rudisill, who, in March, 1983, published Truman Capote, a singularly silly account of his childhood. Although her portrait of him was unflattering, what disturbed him more was her malicious depiction of his mother—Tiny’s sister—as a slut whose “only enduring passion” was not for Arch, or Joe Capote, but for Teshu, a Creek Indian with a voluptuous mouth and a habit of speaking in romance-novel dialogue. “I have never seen so many misstatements of fact per sentence as in that book,” said Harper Lee, who was one of its chief characters. Mary Ida Carter, one of Tiny’s other sisters, was so disgusted that she dumped it in the privy behind her house—the “outdoor convenience,” as she called it—and pushed it out of sight with a long pole. Yet ludicrous as it was, Tiny’s book did have a modest sale and was, unfortunately, accepted by many as factual.17 It even reached the hands of Slim Keith, who, in her sleepless rage, sent Truman a brief but uncommonly venomous letter. “So amusing,” she said, “to read of your pathetic antecedents & childhood.”
Wounded by such an unkind blow from a blood relation, in April Truman flew to Alabama and the comforting arms of Mary Ida, the only one left on his mother’s side of the family whom he liked and trusted. But he never reached Monroeville, and after an overdose, wound up in Montgomery’s Baptist Medical Center instead. “I put a knapsack on my shoulder and some old shoes and went to homeland, where decent people are,” he joked. “But on the way I had an accident.” Returning North, he suffered another sort of accident: on July 1 he was arrested for drunken driving in Bridgehampton and was forced to spend a night in the Southampton Town jail. “Capote Mixes Drinking and Driving Again,” said the headline in the New York Post.
A longer jail sentence seemed possible—there was a rumor that the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office planned to make an example of him—and Truman did not do his case much good by showing up for his hearing in dark glasses, a summer jacket and walking shorts. “People don’t come to court dressed like that,” angrily declared the judge, who, after allowing Truman to stew for several months, let him off with nothing more serious than a five-hundred-dollar fine and a three-year probation. “I’m not going to Sing Sing after all!” exclaimed Truman.
For much of 1983 he might just as well have been in Sing Sing, however, so little was he aware of where he was or what he was doing. He was so incoherent at a party for Liza Minnelli in December, for instance, that the other guests ignored him, surrounding him with a cordon sanitaire of politely averted eyes and blank smiles. Dismayed to see him sitting alone, the gossip columnist Liz Smith organized a relay team, people who agreed, as an act of charity, to stay with him in shifts of half an hour apiece. “It made me so sad,” said Liz, who could recall other nights, not so very long before, when they all would have formed a circle around him, eager to hear the latest witticism from the mouth of Truman Capote.
“He could rarely remember the earlier days,” Truman had written in his notes for Answered Prayers. “Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days [that] are so voluminously documented.” And so, once again, he had unwittingly predicted his own future. The triumphs of the past now seemed to echo from an immeasurable distance, while the dark days of the present stretched to the horizon and beyond. Many of those who had given him pleasure were dead: Bennett Cerf, Babe Paley, Cecil Beaton and Gloria Guinness; even Tennessee Williams, to whom, after a belated reconciliation, he had dedicated Music for Chameleons. Many others would no longer speak to him: Marella Agnelli, Lee Radziwill, Pamela Harriman and of course the vengeful Slim. The years, more destructive than a hurricane, had dispersed his armada of swans, and perhaps only he, who had admired them most, could recall how sublimely satisfying it had been to watch their serene progress through a room, and the smiles of awe and wonder they left in their wake.
Their passing might have been expected: beautiful women age, die and make way for other beautiful women. Before Babe there had been Mona Williams, and before Mona there had been Consuelo Vanderbilt—the list was long and illustrious. But sometime between the fifties, when Truman had scaled the heights of golden Olympus, and the eighties, the chain had been broken. There was a new generation of beautiful women, of course, but none who possessed the style of a Babe or a Gloria or the matchless Mona. The spirit those three represented had gone out of fashion, and a new kind of glamour, based solely on publicity, had taken its place. The rich had multiplied beyond all reckoning, but partly as a result, Olympus itself, that preserve of the stylish few, had disappeared. To those who came afterward it doubtless sounded more like a poetic invention—like Xanadu or Camelot or the lost city of Atlantis—than the land of sunshine and laughter Truman had known. As he talked about it on still summer afternoons, he might have been the lone survivor of some great catastrophe, the last one on earth who still remembered how things had been.
To his tired eyes, everything now looked stale. He had, as he often said, used up the world: there was no place that could provide him contentment, no place for him at all. Manhattan, which had excited him since he was a teenager, presented no delights, not even wicked ones like Studio 54, which had closed after two of its owners had been jailed for tax evasion. The one place he still loved, that flat stretch of Long Island between Southampton and East Hampton—it measured a mere eleven miles—had been disfigured by developers, and around his studio had risen costly houses of bizarre and almost uniformly hideous design. Forbidden to drive by the State of New York, he was unable to enjoy his stays there, in any event. No longer was he seen tooling through the countryside in Jack’s red Mustang, all but hidden behind the wheel as, drunk or sober, he terrified other motorists by his nearly total disregard of the rules of the road.
In the first six weeks of 1984, he had two bad falls, one of which resulted in a mild cerebral concussion, and after three more trips to Southampton Hospital, he flew to Los Angeles to be nursed by Joanne Carson. A week later, on February 27, her doctor sent him back to the hospital, to Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for treatment of a new and potentially fatal illness: phlebitis, a swelling of the veins that had painfully enlarged his left leg. He was well enough to return to Manhattan on March 11, but the phlebitis quickly flared up again and five days later he was in New York Hospital. Blood clots had formed in his lungs; until they were dissolved by a blood-thinning drug, he was in constant danger. Jack was concerned enough to come back early from Switzerland.
For several weeks after he got out, Truman followed his doctor’s orders, which forbade alcohol. “They were sitting around at Alcoholics Anonymous in heaven and asked what they could do to make me stop drinking,” he said. “This disease was it.” But as soon as the phlebitis had been brought under control, he ran to the bottle. When Jack threw out his vodka, he turned to the alcoholic’s last resort, NyQuil, a cold medicine that is twenty-five percent alcohol. A new doctor, George McCormack, Jr., gave him the usual lecture: “I think it’s criminal what you’re doing to the talent you’ve got.” Instead of pouting, as he usually did, Truman listened and in June agreed to try a rehabilitation clinic near Philadelphia, Chit Chat Carom Hospital. “I’ll do as you suggested, provided you take me,” he informed McCormack. The prospect filled him with dread, nonetheless, and as the day for checking in—Saturday, June 23—approached, he became more and more anxious, drinking measurably more each day. “I think I’ve made a mistake to say I’ll go there,” he fretted. “The minute I get out I’ll go back to my old ways. I know me. I’m just the person I am and I’m not going to be any different. I’m always going to drink. Undoubtedly it will kill me in the end.”
Equally dubious about his prognosis, Jack was not only unsympathetic to the Chit Chat venture, but almost gratuitously mean—there is no other word to describe his behavior—to Truman. He would not help him pack for the trip, and on Truman’s last night in Sagaponack Jack locked himself in his darkened house, not allowing Truman to stay with him, to visit him, or even to speak to him, except for a shouted exchange through his bedroom window. “For thirty-five years he’s had to pay nothing,” said Truman, so hurt and angry that his voice quavered as he talked. “And now he says, ‘I’m not going to let you into the house.’ I haven’t done anything to him to make him act that way. He’s a monster! A monster!”
Jack did drive him into Manhattan, and Truman was dutifully waiting in the lobby of the U.N. Plaza when Dr. McCormack picked him up Saturday morning for the journey to Pennsylvania. He began shaking so badly, however, that halfway there, McCormack had to stop at a liquor store to buy him a pint of vodka, afraid that without it, he might go into convulsions. By the time they reached the clinic, Truman was so drunk that he needed aid to get out of the car and undress for bed. “This is not my tasse de thé,” he mournfully observed when McCormack said goodbye. Nor was it. A few days later McCormack received a call from Chit Chat’s director, who reported that Truman was preparing to flee. “Not only is he leaving, but he’s induced two other people to go with him!” said the director.
Back into his life for a brief moment came John, who had visited him in the hospital in Los Angeles, their first face-to-face meeting in more than two and a half years. John had suffered a heart attack the summer before, and in contrast to Jack, he seemed sympathetic to Truman’s emotional and physical ailments, as if his own flirtation with death had purged him of his old anger and resentment. They talked on the phone after the hospital visit and made plans for a later reunion in Florida, where John was working as a salesman in a furniture store. “Truman is just exactly the way he was four years ago—all fucked up,” said John. “He doesn’t want to get sober, but I want him to come here so that I can have a last crack at him. I just want to set him down and say, ‘Truman, what can I do to get you out of this?’”
John was not to have that last crack. On August 2 Truman was taken by ambulance to Southampton Hospital, suffering from his worst overdose yet. The pupils of his eyes were fixed and dilated, and he needed a machine to help him breathe, the first time such assistance had been necessary. “I think he came pretty close to death this time,” said Dr. Diefenbach. “It’s just in the lap of the gods whether you can sleep such a thing off without your breathing stopping.” On his occasional trips into Manhattan, Truman was prey again to hallucinations. One night he saw ghosts, Joe Capote’s among them, and was so scared that he banged on the doors of his neighbors, begging to be let in. Afraid to stay by himself in New York and unhappy in Sagaponack, he made plans to spend a few weeks in California with Joanne, even though it meant missing Jack’s seventieth birthday. “I’d like to get away from Jack and his harassments,” he said. “Every other sentence he’s nagging me.” The tension between them continued until the day he left, and when he arrived in Los Angeles, he told Joanne, “It’s all over with Jack. Fini.”
But that was a word that might have been applied to everything Truman had known and loved, including his writing. It was all over and done with—fini. Not long before, a friend had asked how Answered Prayers was progressing. “Let’s not talk about that,” he petulantly replied. Then, his expression softening into a look of both puzzlement and sadness, he added: “I dream about it and my dream is as real as stubbing your toe. All the characters I’ve lived with are in it, so brilliant, so real. Part of my brain says, ‘The book’s so beautiful, so well constructed—there’s never been such a beautiful book.’ Then a second part of my brain says, ‘Nobody can write that well.’”