If he had known how long In Cold Blood would take—and what it would take out of him—he would never had stopped in Kansas, Truman Capote later wrote. He would instead have driven straight through—“like a bat out of hell.” Midway through writing his biography, I sometimes said much the same. How much more serene my life would have been, I thought, had I said hello and good-bye to him in the same breath. When I began, I believed I would devote two years to Truman’s story, three at most; I actually spent more than thirteen. I envisioned a relatively short book; without notes and index, it is 547 pages. I thought writing Truman’s biography would be something of a lark, in short. It was, in fact, one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. And one of the most exhilarating.
One of my predictions did come true. Many of our interviews took place in some very pleasant spots, often over lunch or dinner at one or another of Truman’s favorite Manhattan restaurants. Sometimes lunch faded into cocktails, then into dinner. One winter day I arrived for lunch and did not leave—he begged me to stay—until the restaurant closed nearly twelve hours later. Every time I got up to go Truman would grab my arm, pleading with me not to leave.
By coincidence, Truman and I both had country houses, not more than five minutes apart, on eastern Long Island, and we were thus also able to talk under shady trees, on cool porches and in and out of swimming pools. It was while he was floating on a raft that Truman gave me a rundown, complete with verbal footnotes, of the real-life models for his characters in “La Cote Basque,” the story that made him a pariah to most of his rich and social friends.
“But Truman, they’re not going to like this,” I warned him, a conversation I repeat in my book.
“Nah, they’re too dumb,” he said. “They won’t know who they are.”
I was right about the reaction of his friends, though I was unprepared for the speed and the remarkable venom with which they turned on him. Some, in fact, had told me, just a week or so before the story appeared, how much they loved and admired him. But if I was right about their angry response, I was wrong about nearly everything else. For what I had not realized—what Truman himself did not know—was that, around the time I started work, he was beginning the long and dramatic decline that ended only with his death. And I became a part of that never-ending drama. As a writer, I had always kept myself in the background. Now I was pulled on stage to become one of the dramatis personae, a participant in the turbulent life of which I was writing. It was as if I were painting a portrait and suddenly saw myself peering out from the background—and wondering, to judge from the perplexed look on my face, how I had got myself into such a predicament.
In the early seventies, I had done a series of magazine profiles of famous writers and poets. I had written about Gore Vidal for The Atlantic and about Truman, Allen Ginsberg, P.G. Wodehouse, and Vladimir Nabokov for Esquire. It was a stellar list, but it was the Truman profile that caught the eye of the publisher, who asked me to expand it into a biography. I called Truman to see if he would cooperate, and, after a pause of no more than thirty seconds, he said yes, no strings attached. He promised never to ask to read what I had written, and he never did. What more could a biographer want?
Though we became close friends—it was impossible to know Truman and remain aloof—neither of us forgot our different and occasionally antagonistic roles. He was the subject who sometimes exaggerated. I was the prying biographer who wanted the facts. Our relationship, as a result, was not always smooth. He was annoyed when I seemed to doubt some of his stories, for example, and, as the months turned to years, he became exasperated that the writing was taking so long.
I was a “hammock biographer,” he told a friend. I turned this way in my hammock, he said, then that way. But I didn’t put much down on paper. How could I tell him that he had changed the story on me? That the Truman about whom I had begun writing—the ebullient Truman who was on top of the world—no longer existed? That a new, uncertain and, yes, even tragic Truman had taken his place? And that I could not bring down the curtain until, one way or another, the drama ended?
That ending, which surprised no one who knew him well, came on the morning of August 25, 1984, in Los Angeles, one of his least favorite cities. I finished my book a little more than three years later, and it was published in June 1988. Much has been written about Truman since then. I myself added to the list by editing a book of his letters. Too Brief a Treat I titled it, borrowing a phrase he used himself in describing the letters of his first editor, Robert Linscott. Truman has also been the subject of television documentaries and a successful Broadway play, Tru, in which I am an unseen character—Truman is supposed to be speaking into a tape recorder for my benefit.
There have also been two movies about his In Cold Blood years. One, Capote, is very good; the other, Infamous, is very bad. I confess a prejudice in favor of Capote, which was adapted from my biography. But most moviegoers, I believe, agreed with me, and the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including those for Best Picture, Best Director (Bennett Miller), Best Adapted Screenplay (Dan Futterman) and Best Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Hoffman went on to win an Oscar for a performance of uncanny sensitivity and accuracy. Watching him on screen, I frequently thought I was watching Truman himself. Yet despite all the attention Truman has received since my book was published—the articles, the television shows, the plays, and the movies—I can’t think anything of importance I would want to add or subtract.
Many of those who have prominent roles in my biography have followed Truman to the grave. William Paley. Alvin and Marie Dewey. Loel and Gloria Guinness. C. Z. Guest. John Malcolm Brinnin. Andy Warhol. Joe Fox. Leo Lerman. Christopher Isherwood. Mary Louise Aswell. Richard Brooks. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Oona Chaplin. Carol Matthau. Pamela Harriman. John Huston. Slim Keith. Irving Lazar. Doris Lilly. Andrew Lyndon. Norman Mailer. Harold Arlen. Peg O’Shea. Saint Subber. Oliver Smith. And, most important of all, Jack Dunphy, who had been Truman’s companion, lover, supporter, and scold for more than thirty-five years.
In his final years Truman had been a source of constant anxiety to Jack, and, for Jack, Truman’s death was a kind of release. He moved from the apartment they had shared near the United Nations, with its battalion of uniformed doormen, into a walk-up in Greenwich Village. Obligated to no one but himself, he did just what he liked, and, perhaps for the first time, he had the means to do it. Truman’s will gave him a substantial annuity, and that, combined with the income from his own savings, allowed him to live very comfortably. Besides Switzerland, where he had long spent his winters, he now ventured to other locales as well. Every time I talked to him, it seemed, he had just returned from a trip: Dublin, Chicago, Boston, the West—I couldn’t keep track. Jack seemed happier than I had ever known him.
After Jack’s own death, other provisions of Truman’s will went into effect, with income from his estate going to scholarships for aspiring writers and to valuable prizes for outstanding literary critics. Truman’s decision to leave money to young writers came as no surprise to me: he always went out of his way to help others entering the field. But the generous prizes for literary critics, probably the largest such awards in the world, puzzled me. Never really accepted by the literary establishment, Truman shared my own dim view of most contemporary critics, and he said so many times, in pungent language I could scarcely imitate.
The puzzle was solved, at least partly, when I saw that Newton Arvin’s name was also attached to the awards. Several decades after their romance, Truman still revered the memory of Arvin, who, in his mind, was the ideal critic—a man of learning, judgment, and an understanding of the creative struggle. Unlike many critics who followed him, Arvin was also an excellent stylist, a master of clear yet elegant prose.
Besides paying tribute to Arvin’s virtues and the happy memory of their months together, Truman also had another motive, I suspect. At the time he made his will, Truman was probably angry at Jack—the two were often at odds in those last years. What better revenge could Truman have had than for Jack to know that Capote and Arvin, not Capote and Dunphy, would be so boldly—and so permanently—entwined?
Truman’s death was followed by a funeral in Los Angeles and by a crowded memorial in New York’s Shubert Theater. But his ashes, housed in a heavy bronze box, sat lonesomely and rather uncomfortably, I imagined, on a bookshelf in Jack’s apartment. After Jack died, they came to me, in my capacity as Jack’s executor, and I decided to find them a permanent and more suitable home. And what was more suitable, I thought, than Sagaponack, the place Truman and Jack loved more than any other?
Jack had left their Long Island property to The Nature Conservancy, an organization devoted to protecting nature and its beauty, and I suggested that it dedicate a preserve in their memory. So it was that on October 1, 1994, the only rainy Saturday in an otherwise golden autumn, forty or fifty of Jack’s and Truman’s friends gathered at a Conservancy sanctuary, Crooked Pond, a couple of miles from where they had lived. Surrounded by thick woods, Crooked Pond is a spot so still and private that it seems almost incongruous in the increasingly crowded Hamptons. Sometime around noon I opened the bronze box containing Truman’s ashes while Jack’s nephew opened a cardboard box holding Jack’s. We then sprinkled their ashes into the water, letting them fall and mingle together as if they were one.
The downpour put a quick end to the eulogies Jack’s brother, Bob, and I had prepared. It was just as well, for Truman and Jack had written words more appropriate than any we might have uttered. At the water’s edge the Conservancy had planted a memorial stone, engraved with quotations I had chosen. “The brain may take advice, but not the heart,” Truman had written in Other Voices, Other Rooms, “and love, having no geography, knows no boundaries.” Jack’s quotation was from Dear Genius, the memoir he wrote after Truman’s death. “I was grieving the way the earth seems to grieve for spring in the dead of winter, but I wasn’t afraid, because nothing, I told myself, can take our halcyon days away.”
After their deaths, many writers, even very good ones, even those who had made regular visits to the best-seller lists, enter the twilight realm of the barely remembered. Truman has done the opposite. Interest in him grows every year—thanks to the Internet, I receive messages from people from all parts of the world—and a whole new generation seems drawn to his writing and fascinated by his singular personality. “What was he really like?” I am often asked, a question I have tried to answer in my book. But to those who demand a quicker reply, I say only: the Truman Capote I knew was often in emotional pain, but when he was at his best, he transformed his own life, and the lives of those around him, into a high-speed adventure, an intoxicating journey into lands unknown.