Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (151 page)

To a reporter from
People
magazine, Truman said, “My book is like a gun—there’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and finally, the bullet headed for the heart. When that bullet is fired, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen before—
WHAM!”

For years, he’d surrounded himself with what remained of café society. He fancied himself a reincarnation of his controversial late Victorian predecessor, Oscar Wilde, moving through society of the 1960s and 70s, dazzling ornamental trophy wives who included Slim Keith, heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, Gloria Guinness, and most definitely, the reigning
doyenne
of them all, Barbara Cushing Paley. Nicknamed “Babe,” she was the spectacularly fashionable and deeply frustrated wife of William Paley, the head honcho at CBS.

The darkest secrets of Truman’s coterie of rich and stylish friends would be exposed with devastating detail within the gossipy pages of
Answered Prayers
.

He was especially harsh with Bill Paley’s in fidelities and cruel treatment of his wife. What wasn’t widely known is that Truman harbored another reason for wanting to embarrass Bill. Every since he swam nude with him in the Paley’s private pool in Jamaica, he’d harbored a crush on the CBS executive. When Bill brusquely refused Truman’s request to “let me suck you off,” Truman privately vowed revenge for the rejection.

Among Truman’s many friends were two sisters, Lee Radziwill and Jacqueline Kennedy. He’d aggressively tried to coach Lee as an actress, successfully negotiating to get her contracts as the female lead in an onstage production of
The Philadelphia Story
and in a TV drama.
[It involved a 1968 remake of the classic Otto Preminger film
, Laura (1944)
, which had starred Gene Tierney, JFK’s former mistress, in the role of the mysterious Laura. Truman, with Thomas Phipps, co-authored the screenplay.]

Both Jackie and Lee joined the parade of the bitchy, barely disguised caricatures that Truman exposed to the world in print, revealing their lies, infidelities, indiscretions, abortions—“and all their other abominations,” in his words.

In
Answered Prayers
, he gives Jackie the needle: “Very photogenic, but the effect is a little unrefined, exaggerated.” Jackie, he wrote, did not strike him as being a bona fide woman, but rather “an artful female impersonator impersonating Mrs. Kennedy.”

He wanted the world’s two most famous sisters to join the ranks of what he defined as, “my exclusive gaggle of widows, rich wives, divorcées, and international riffraff—C.Z. Guest, Peggy Guggenheim, and Nedda Logan among others, and, of course, my dear Babe. I’m sorry to hear that Babe is dying of cancer, however.”

When Gore heard of Truman’s most recent
imbroglio
, he said, “Capote might call them swans, but I call these women fruit flies buzzing around the biggest fruit in America. Privately, these
grandes dames
call him ‘Tiny Terror,’ but find him amusing. Their husbands tolerate the five foot, three-inch faggot. He is their lapdog.”

In November of 1975, a chapter of his projected novel, entitled “La Côte Basque 1965,” appeared in that month’s issue of
Esquire
. High society later compared it to the dropping of an atomic bomb. Many swans were at their hair-dresser when the magazine was handed to them. “Read this!” was the frequent command. In lieu of that, swans—along with their allies and detractors—were urged to rush to the nearest newsstand to read “what this devilish little freak has written.”

When Babe Paley read Truman’s thinly disguised description of her in
Answered Prayers
, she said, “It was the most shocking
exposé
since Judas sold out Jesus Christ.”

Perhaps as a face-saving device, Truman falsely claimed that, “I only hung out with the swans to learn their innermost, dirtiest secrets. Otherwise, these upper-crust dames with their interminable face-lifts bored me.”

The most extreme reaction came from Ann Woodward, the socialite suspected of having murdered her husband in 1955, falsely claiming that she had mistaken him for an intruder. After reading a chapter containing Truman’s revival of her sad story, she committed suicide.

[In 1985, another writer, Dominick Dunne, immortalized Woodward in his
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles
, a
roman à clef
based on the sensational 1955 incident. It was made into a television movie in 1987. Directed by John Erman, it starred Ann-Margret, Elizabeth Ashley, Stephen Collins, Genevieve Allenbury, and in one of her last dramatic performances, Claudette Colbert.]

Columnist Liz Smith wrote, “Never have you heard such gnashing of teeth, such cries of revenge, such shouts of betrayal, and screams of outrage.”

The swans and the other ladies exposed vowed never to speak to Truman again, and refused his phone calls. To them, he was no longer a friend. Their various descriptions of him included phrases like: “a dirty little toad,” or “a hideous fag.” Some preferred to define him as “a rattlesnake,” or “the monster.”

Truman was stunned at his sudden fall from grace. “Who in the fuck did these empty-headed fools think they were talking to?” he asked the few friends who remained with him. “I’m a writer. All of them knew that. A good writer draws upon his own experiences. The swans have floated away from me, but I predict they’ll come back because I’m the only person in their empty lives who can amuse them. Everybody else, especially their lovers and husbands, are so fucking boring.”

Retreating from the glare of Manhattan, Truman fled to a safer haven in Bridgehampton on Long Island. Instead of swans, he frequently socialized with the resident literary set, including James Jones, John Knowles, and Kurt Vonnegut, who didn’t give a damn if Truman had exposed café society or not. Truman was seen with members of both the
literati
and with “rough trade”
[hustlers]
at such watering holes as Bobby Van’s or Mortimers.

“
La Côte Basque 1965”
was followed by two more libelous serializations in Esquire—“Unspoiled Monsters” (May, 1975); and “Kate McCloud” (December, 1976).

The titles of other potential chapters, perhaps never written, or if written, probably destroyed by Truman himself, had been pre-publicized with titles that included “A Severe Insult to the Brain,”
[Truman’s appellation for Los Angeles]
; “Yachts and Things,” and “And Audry Wilder Sang.” His most provocative title was “Father Flanagan’s All Night Nigger Queen’s Kosher Café.”
[Only the titles, but not their corresponding texts, were discovered in the wake of his death.]

Ironically, the original contract for
Answered Prayers
had been signed way back in January of 1966 for an advance of only $25,000. But after endless delays and missed deadlines over the years, Random House, in a reckless moment, had upped the ante in the early 1980s to a $1 million advance for a three-book contract that included
Answered Prayers
.

Sam Kashner wrote in the December, 2012 issue of
Vanity Fair
: “Truman Capote had unwittingly turned that gun he’d talked about on himself. Exposing the secrets of Manhattan’s rich and powerful was nothing short of social suicide. Trying to write
Answered Prayers
, and its eventual fallout, destroyed him.”

When the chapters of
Answered Prayers
were compiled and released at last in book form by New American Library in 1978, readers discovered an unfinished novel that contained only those chapters previously published in
Esquire
. During his final years, Truman had maintained the pretense that he was writing it, but he was too mired in alcohol and drugs to continue. Many critics compared him to Dylan Thomas, who in the 1950s was said to have drunk himself to death, mostly at the White Horse Tavern in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

Upon publication,
The Chicago Tribune
referred to it as “The most talked about novel in publishing history.” Less effusively,
Time
magazine claimed, “The author of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
is now lunching in Sodom, where the specialties include lightly fictionalized stories of lust, greed, envy, and homicide.”

James M. Fox, Truman’s editor at Random House, pondered various theories about the book’s missing chapters. “The first and most obvious,” he reportedly said, “was that they were never completed. Another theory was that they were stashed somewhere in a box, perhaps seized by an ex-lover for malice or profit. There was even a theory that they were placed in a bank somewhere—that is, a bank unknown. There’s even a theory that he put them in a locker at the Greyhound Bus Depot in Los Angeles.”

Fox also speculated that Truman did write the final chapters, but destroyed them in the early 1980s because they did not live up to his Proustian dream.

By 1984, the year Truman died, he’d been in and out of dry-out centers, though nothing at rehab seemed to work for him. His remaining friends thought he’d given up not only on
Answered Prayers
, but on life itself.

“Abandoned by his society friends, Truman was worn out,” Joanne Carson said. “Really heartbroken.”

“You’ve got to lie a little to tell the truth.”

—Truman Capote

Chapter Forty-Seven