87 The Old Howard, a famous theater in Boston’s Scollay Square; formerly a grand opera house but by this time a tawdry burlesque establishment.
88 Friends of Arvin, F. O. Matthiessen and Harry Levin were esteemed professors of literature at Harvard.
89 Sconset is a familiar name for Siasconset.
90 Other Voices, Other Rooms.
91 Marian Ives was his literary agent.
92 Christopher Isherwood and his companion, Bill Caskey, arrived on July 13.
93 Mina Curtiss—Capote misspelled both her first and last name—was at that time editing a book of Proust’s letters.
94 The “Cousinage” was a humorous reference to the friends who gathered around Lerman.
95 Photographer George Hoyningen-Huene.
96 Porter was in Hollywood to write screenplays.
97 Photographer Florence Homolka, wife of actor Oscar Homolka. Her mother, Agnes Meyer, was a friend and translator of Thomas Mann.
98 Lion Feuchtwanger, German-Jewish historical novelist whose The Oppermanns (1933) was the first anti-Nazi novel written by a German writer in exile. He fled Europe in 1940 and spent the rest of his life in the United States.
99 Franz Werfel, Czech-born Austrian-Jewish playwright and novelist whose works included The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) and The Song of Bernadette (1941). Werfel fled Europe in 1940 and settled in Southern California, where he died in 1945.
100 Poet and art collector.
101 He was referring to the devastating blizzard of March 1888, not 1883. The blizzard of December 1947 set a record that was not to be surpassed for nearly half a century, until a similar snowstorm in January 1996.
102 Saroyan’s play Don’t Go Away Mad was produced in 1949.
103 Other Voices, Other Rooms, whose publication date was January 19, 1948.
104 Richard Hunter and Leo Lerman had amicably ended their partnership of over a decade, and Hunter had taken up with Howard Rothschild, a fellow artist. Though he had a modest income from his family, Rothschild was not a member of the famous banking family.
105 Capote often addressed Lerman as “Myrt” and signed himself “Marge” since both were fans of an old radio serial, Myrt and Marge (1931–1942), about a struggling chorus girl (Myrt) and her daughter (Marge) who were in competition for the same vaudeville parts and the same men. “It was really marvelous,” Capote said. “It was one of the all-time strange, peculiar, surrealist things. I had never met anybody who had ever heard of this program until one day I was talking to Leo Lerman about it. ‘Myrt and Marge? It was one of my favorite programs!’ he said. After that we used to make up old Myrt and Marge things. It made us both feel good.”
106 Highsmith was accepted at Yaddo, where she worked on her first novel, Strangers on a Train, which was published in 1950. Capote’s high opinion of her work never wavered.
107 Lord David Cecil, author and Oxford University professor.
108 Trilling was a professor of literature at Columbia.
109 Newton Arvin.
110 Published as “Master Misery” in Horizon, January 1949, and in Harper’s Magazine, February 1949.
111 “Children on Their Birthdays.”
112 Poet Lloyd Frankenberg and his wife, artist Loren MacIver.
113 Harold Halma, Lyndon’s companion, was the photographer who took the famous photograph of Capote lying seductively on a chaise longue that was used on the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms.
114 Tennessee Williams’s lover was Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez.
115 A young actor, Campbell was the companion of Capote’s friend Donald Windham.
116 Unfortunately, l’affaire Gide has been lost to history.
117 Wendy Hiller, British screen actress who starred in I Know Where I’m Going (1945).
118 Donald Windham, American novelist and short-story writer, perhaps best known for his collaboration with Tennessee Williams on the 1945 play You Touched Me!, an adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s story.
119 A European sleeping car.
120 The Glass Menagerie.
121 Capote did get passage, and he and Williams returned to America together.
122 Windham was writing his first novel, The Dog Star.
123 Probably either “Master Misery” or “Children on Their Birthdays.”
124 Audrey Wood was a literary agent.
125 Capote won first prize in the annual O. Henry Awards for his story “Shut a Final Door,” which had been published in The Atlantic Monthly, August 1947.
126 It was, indeed, an amusing story. One night Capote and Andrew Lyndon decided to visit Tennessee Williams unannounced. Hearing no answer to their knock, Capote suggested they wait for him inside, and he had Lyndon push him through the transom. This feat of athleticism attracted the attention of three passing guardians of the law—two plainclothesmen and a police-woman—who entered the house after them and kept them in custody until Williams, accompanied by Gore Vidal, finally returned. “They broke into your house—do you want to press charges?” Williams was asked. Enjoying himself immensely, Williams appeared undecided. “Listen, Tennessee,” said Capote, “don’t you do anything of the sort!” Williams didn’t, and the housebreakers were released.
127 Williams’s play Summer and Smoke was to close January 1, 1949. Brando was the star of A Streetcar Named Desire, another Williams play then on Broadway.
128 Campbell also had a part in Streetcar.
1949–1959
The Years of Adventure: Off to See the World
FOR TEN YEARS, FROM 1949 TO 1959, Truman Capote lived outside the United States, returning only for relatively brief periods. A few months after they met, at the end of February 1949, he and Jack Dunphy sailed for Europe on the Queen Mary. They traveled through France, where Dunphy had fought during World War II, to Italy, where they spent several weeks on the island of Ischia, near Naples. From Ischia they went to Tangier for another prolonged stay. Returning to New York at the end of the year, they sailed for Europe again in April 1950, ending up in Taormina, an ancient resort town in Sicily, where they rented the same house D. H. Lawrence had occupied twenty-five years earlier.
After Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote had begun a second novel, a social comedy set in New York that he titled Summer Crossing. Finally concluding that it was, in his words, “thin, clever, unfelt,” he chose a subject closer to his heart, his Alabama boyhood. That book, The Grass Harp, whose characters he borrowed from the elderly cousins who had raised him in Monroeville, was published in 1951. At the urging of Arnold Saint-Subber, a producer with a record of hits, Capote then adapted it for Broadway. The Grass Harp was not one of Saint Subber’s successes, however, and Capote and Dunphy returned to Italy, where Capote was soon recruited to help salvage two ailing screenplays—one for Vittorio De Sica’s Stazione Termini (it was called Indiscretion of an American Wife in the United States), the other for John Huston’s Beat the Devil. The first film, which starred Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift, even Capote disliked. But he retained an affection for Beat the Devil, for which he bears much more responsibility—the screenplay was almost entirely his. Featuring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, and Robert Morley, the movie is, indeed, a small comic gem, as delightfully offbeat and surprising today as it was in 1953.
At the beginning of 1954 Capote was forced to make a hurried trip home. Beset by financial troubles—Joe Capote had been fired from his job on Wall Street and faced criminal charges for misappropriating funds—his mother, Nina, had swallowed a bottle of Seconals and had fallen into a coma. She died on January 4, before Capote could reach her bedside and just a few weeks shy of her forty-ninth birthday. Though their differences had been profound, her only child, who had been the principal support for her and Joe Capote for many months, was nonetheless deeply affected. “She didn’t have to do it,” he told Andrew Lyndon. “She didn’t have to die. I’ve got money.”
Not long after his mother’s funeral Capote resumed work on another play Saint Subber had convinced him to write: a musical adaptation of his short story “House of Flowers.” Set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the musical version centered around the rivalry of the city’s two reigning madams and the innocent young lovers who were caught in between. Capote wrote the book, Harold Arlen composed the music, and they collaborated on the lyrics. Once again, Saint Subber provided a first-class production, but once again Capote’s play was doomed to a relatively short run, 165 performances. Within hours after it closed in May 1955, Capote and Dunphy returned to Europe.
For several years Capote had been intrigued by the possibilities of nonfiction. He had written many short factual articles, mostly about the places he had visited, but at the end of 1955 he had an opportunity to do something longer. Breaking through the ice of the Cold War, an all-black troupe was going to the Soviet Union to present George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Capote went along, and the result was The Muses Are Heard, a short book one reviewer aptly described as “wicked, witty and utterly devastating.”
Toward the end of the decade Capote finally wrote a social comedy set in New York. He called it Breakfast at Tiffany’s, modeling his scatty central character, Holly Golightly, on half a dozen of the charming young beauties he had squired around Manhattan during and after World War II. The list started with Phoebe Pierce, his old Greenwich chum, but it also included Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Marcus, Doris Lilly, Anky Larrabee, and Oona O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill’s daughter. “The most perfect writer of my generation” was how Norman Mailer described Capote after reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “He writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which will become a
