Capote (8 page)

What did crush him was to be ignored. Even to receive second billing in something as unimportant as a school play was hurtful to his ego, and he was keenly disappointed, Flanagan recalled, when he was assigned a bit part in an historical epic,
If I Were King.
While the rest of the cast swept across the stage in colorful costumes, he and Flanagan, who played executioners, were little more than props. It was obviously not a large enough role for a fourteen-year-old show-off, and Truman was determined to make it bigger. If he could not play François Villon, the man who saved France, he could at least be the most loquacious hangman in the history of the theater, and on opening night he used the script merely as a starting point for his own soliloquy on hanging: “Not every day of a hanging is like this. Do you remember four years ago when we hanged…” It was as if one of the spear carriers in
Hamlet
had pushed the lead aside to recite “To be or not to be,” and even before the curtain was down, the furious drama teacher was chasing him across the stage—a scene that was doubtless more interesting, and certainly more amusing, than any that had preceded it. “At the end of the play Villon is almost hanged,” said Flanagan, “and I thought to myself: ‘If Truman really wants to star, next time he’ll hang the son-of-a-bitch for real.’”

Such a display of ego did not make him popular, but Truman’s real problem at Greenwich was not his fellow students; it was the school administration, which did not view kindly his poor attendance record, his refusal to work at anything that bored him, and his loud and adamant boycott of gym classes. “His attendance was very irregular, and he demonstrated his creativity with his excuses for his tardiness and absentee record,” recalled Andrew Bella, the school principal. “His downfall was Physical Education. He was the despair of the coaches, and I remember one of his numerous visits to my office. Standing at the tall office counter, he spread his elbows like wings, his chin barely above the top, and announced defiantly: ‘I will not take gym.’ Our explanation that gym was required by state laws and that a doctor’s excuse was necessary to get him out of it was of no avail. He thought it was not necessary for him.”

Bad marks and failures—he flunked algebra, French, and Spanish—did not deter him from concentrating, doggedly and single-mindedly, on the only thing that mattered to him: his writing. Given his fierce determination, he doubtless would have persisted despite every discouragement, but every young writer, however confident, needs encouragement, someone older to assure him that his scribblings are not just adolescent doodles. Truman was no exception, and he had the extreme good fortune to come under the wing of an English teacher, Catherine Wood, who not only shared his faith in himself, but believed that it was her duty, her mission and sacred obligation, to help bring his talents to blossom.

He came to her attention as aggressively as he could manage. She was taking her students on a tour of the school library and had just picked out a book by Sigrid Undset to give to one of the girls. “Suddenly,” she said, “this little fellow, who was not in my group, turned around from where he was sitting and interrupted me. ‘Must be wonderful to read her in the original,’ he said. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of anything else!’ I replied, although of course I didn’t know a word of Norwegian. From that time on I saw Truman, and when he came into my class the next year, in the eleventh grade, I saw him all the time.”

A tall, gray-haired spinster who shared a house with another English teacher off the Post Road, Miss Wood invited him often to dinner, read his stories, catered to him in class, and encouraged her colleagues to do the same. “I made out a schedule for him,” she said, “and tried to make the other teachers understand him, so that they would not expect a great deal from him. Some people objected to my doing that, and the principal, who did not appreciate him, wouldn’t make any exception for him. So I told him: ‘I know that the time will come when you would like to say that Truman Capote graduated from Greenwich High School!’” Even Nina could not escape the empassioned advocacy of this resolute woman with the long, sheeplike face. “His mother couldn’t understand this boy who liked such different things,” she said. “I remember sitting in my little dining room and saying to her that it was hard for me to tell his own mother this, but that in years to come the other, regular boys, who do the usual things in the usual way, would still be doing those things while Truman would be famous.”

Truman himself was convinced of it, and the hours he spent practicing his craft at last started to show results. At Trinity the best evidence of his ability had been his persistence; with a few exceptions, like his stream-of-consciousness description of rolling down a hill, his writing itself had not been unusual. At Greenwich his talent began to bud, if not flower, and it was soon displayed in the pages of the school literary magazine, which published several pieces of prose that were, considering his age, remarkably good.

Written when he was sixteen, the best of the lot is “Lucy,” a beautifully painted portrait of Lucy Brown, the black maid who brought him north from Monroeville in 1932: her thrill at coming north, her eventual homesickness, and finally, her return South. “New York was just vast loneliness,” Truman wrote. “The Hudson River kept whispering ‘Alabama River,’ yes, Alabama River, with its red, muddy water flowing high to the bank and with all its swampy little tributaries.” The other pieces are equally proficient in terms of style, but are marred by contrived plotting and an obvious and self-conscious literary tone. Yet all his Greenwich works are highly polished, products of a surprisingly sure and confident hand. More important than technical competence, which many diligent students can acquire, they show a genuine and unmistakable gift for the creation of real and vital characters, which is, after all, the primary duty of any writer of fiction.

I
F
many of his contemporaries in Greenwich disliked Truman, those he wanted to be his friends, those he went after, he usually got. Few could resist the unrelenting onslaught of his affection. “He had a great, and immense, capacity for friendship,” said Phoebe Pierce, one of the first to succumb. Others soon followed, and before long he was the leader of a sprightly and spirited Millbrook band, a group of a dozen or so that included, most prominently, the pretty little Jaeger sisters, Marion and Lucia, handsome Ted Walworth, wild Joan Ackerman, and Phoebe herself, whose ambition to be a poet was as strong as Truman’s was to be a writer. Bright and lively, with the shining smiles, radiant confidence, and all-American good looks of models in a toothpaste ad, they were normality itself in that pre-war world of the jitterbug and the jalopy. Yet invariably, when they could not think what to do, they turned to the distinctly abnormal newcomer from New York. “Truman brought happiness into our lives,” said Marion Jaeger. “He said, ‘Let’s do it! Don’t be afraid!’ He created the fun, and if we got bored, he would come up with an idea of how we could get un-bored.”

After school they would often rendezvous at his house, and his bedroom became a hangout where they could smoke Joe’s long, dark Cuban cigarettes; drink liquor, mostly sweet fruit brandies they had filched from their parents; and dance to jazz records. On weekends they would move their boisterous convention to the cavernous old Pickwick Theater on the Boston Post Road. Emboldened by the omnipresent sweet brandy, which they would sneak in in paper bags, they would laugh when they were expected to cry, pretend to cry when they were supposed to laugh, and vie with one another in embellishing Hollywood’s love scenes with a more amusing dialogue of their own invention. Eventually the actors themselves could not be heard above their din, and the weary ushers yet again would chase them out into the evening twilight. “We were out to shock and we did,” said Phoebe. “We were just awful. We couldn’t buy an ice cream cone without causing a riot. We were rude and intolerant, and we had perfected to the point of magnificence what the British army calls ‘dumb insolence.’ We did things partly to please ourselves and partly to set everybody else on edge. We were creative troublemakers.”

Friday or Saturday night, they might drive to nightclubs in nearby towns, like the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle or Aladdin’s Cave in Stamford, to dance to the music of the big bands. Truman, who was almost always short of cash, would depend on the dutiful Jaeger sisters to help pay his share of the bill; but there was one memorable occasion on which he made up for past omissions. All that day he walked the halls of Greenwich High, asking everyone he met for a penny to buy a stamp, and when they set out for Aladdin’s Cave that night, his pants were sagging from the weight. “I’ve got a surprise,” he explained mysteriously. Later, when the two sisters automatically reached for their purses, he stopped them. “This is my treat,” he announced proudly. Emptying his bulging pockets, he covered the table with a coppery mound, hundreds of his hard-earned pennies. To the sputtering waiter he said: “Just because of your rudeness we don’t care to come here again. We don’t like the people who come here, anyway.”

It was a privileged and, to all appearances, a carefree, idyllic life Truman and his company enjoyed in those months before Pearl Harbor. Spring and summer they would swim and play tennis at the country club. Winter they would skate on the upper lake, and Mrs. Jaeger would greet them with steaming mugs of hot cocoa when they returned, cold but exhilarated, to shore. Autumn they would attend a never-ending round of parties.

Nina herself organized one such party, a scavenger hunt, setting the example, with her usual flair in such matters, for many happy evenings to follow. “It was the Halloween of 1939,” said Howard Weber, Truman’s friend from Trinity days, who was visiting that weekend. “There was a full moon and it was a clear, crystal night, with a smell of burning leaves in the air. You had to draw a name out of a hat, and when I drew mine, Truman’s mother said, ‘Ah, you’ve got the cream of the crop!’ She was right—the name I had drawn was Phoebe’s—and off we went, shuffling through the un-raked leaves to people’s doors, asking them to loan us statues of the Venus de Milo or whatever else was on our list. When we had found what we needed, we rushed back to the Capotes’, where everybody danced, including the parents. The boys all wore coats and ties, and the girls looked sensational in their sweaters and skirts, saddle shoes, and camel’s-hair coats. We had a great time. Truman had some wonderful friends, and I was so envious I could hardly see straight to watch them having as much fun as they were.”

They were all good friends, but Truman’s closest companion in those Greenwich years, the partner of his secret thoughts, was the girl Nina had exclaimed so over, the witty and amusing Phoebe. Truman met her at a party shortly after he arrived from New York, and once they started to talk, they found it hard to stop. “For the first time in my life I thought I could really speak to someone and share what I was feeling,” said Phoebe, “and that person was Truman. We cared tremendously, deeply and passionately, about writing and poetry. We loved
The New Yorker
, we loved Oscar Wilde, we loved Saki.” They talked about everything in the weeks that followed, but no matter how far they let their imaginations wander, they always ended up on their fondest, most enduring dream: to move to Manhattan and become part of the smart literary life they were certain awaited them there. “Our dream was to get out of Greenwich and to go to New York,” she said. “Manhattan was Oz to us, a place where we could let loose and enjoy ourselves.”

Tall and attractive, with huge brown eyes and lustrous dark hair, Phoebe was a unique combination of several usually irreconcilable qualities. She was sophisticated far beyond her years, and as much as a girl in her early teens can be glamorous, she was glamorous, with a sure knowledge of how to dress and act and a never-failing ability to enliven any conversation. Even in her early teens she had the figure of a young woman; while the other girls went to parties in dresses that carefully covered the fact that they did not yet have much bosom to cover, she wore gowns that revealed that she most decidedly did. “My parents gave me a party,” said Marion Jaeger, recalling one such time, “and my father, who was very German and very strict, said, ‘Your mother will choose your dress.’ She did and it was pink, with lace up to my neck. Then Phoebe came in in a strapless gown and took over the whole party. I was never so disappointed in my entire life. Truman pulled me into a corner and said, ‘You look like a little old maid!’”

They were not yet old enough to move there, but in their mid-teens, Truman and Phoebe would sometimes visit Oz on a Saturday night. Not telling anyone else what they were up to, they would spend weeks collecting their money and putting their clothes together; by the time they were ready, the forty-five-minute train ride into Manhattan had taken on the colors of a daring, illicit adventure. They would first stop at a couple of the jazz joints that lined West Fifty-second Street, where they would listen to Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, or Lionel Hampton; then, as midnight approached, they would walk a block or so east and fast-talk their way into those glittering seats of Café Society, El Morocco and the Stork Club. Truman had been to both places with Joe and Nina, but even his bravado wilted under the stares of headwaiters the first time he went alone with Phoebe. She looked as if she were going to a high school prom and wore white gloves and a white, full-length silk gown covered with sparklers. He looked like her little brother and was terrified that despite all their efforts, they had not scraped together enough money to pay the bill. “Don’t order anything expensive!” he whispered as they sat down on one of El Morocco’s zebra-striped banquettes.

They were not thrown out, however, and after that first nervous night they breezed through the door, those two brassy teenagers, as if they were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “We were such a wild-looking pair that the maître d’s never knew what to say to us,” said Phoebe, who thereafter left her gloves in their drawer and exchanged her sparkler-covered white gown for the black cocktail dresses the other women were wearing. “They always thought that Truman was too young to drink. But since I looked older, they would take a bet on us. We really got in because we were interesting to watch. We were both wonderful dancers—there was never anyone on the floor who could dance those Latin rhythms the way Truman could—and when we got onto the floor, we were forgiven everything else. We were an unusual couple, and we must have been figures of fun. So we danced for our supper.”