the London stage, Constance Collier became an acting and voice coach in Hollywood, giving lessons to Marilyn Monroe, among many others.
223 Mrs. Crane was a rich, elderly philanthropist and a friend of Andrew Lyndon, who, for nine years, read to her nearly every afternoon from three to six o’clock. Lyndon often took his friends, including Capote, to her apartment for dinner. She allowed Capote to use her apartment for the backers’ reading of The Grass Harp.
224 The Grass Harp had opened in Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre on March 27; it closed on April 26.
225 The British imposed a six-month quarantine on animals coming into the country.
226 One of Arvin’s friends, Matthiessen had committed suicide in 1950.
227 Foy was doing jacket covers for classical music albums put out by Columbia Records.
228 Lerman and Foy went to Europe later that year and saw Capote, who had left Sicily, in Rome.
229 Theatrical producer Arnold Saint-Subber and his young companion, Robbie Campbell.
230 Kazin’s story “The Raven,” which was an unflattering portrait of a Lerman-like character, had just been published by Botteghe Oscure. For a full explanation, see the January 4, 1951, letter to Lerman.
231 He is being diplomatic. He of course knew that Kazin’s story was about Lerman, and in a letter to Andrew Lyndon on March 9, 1951, he had written that Kazin had “written a story about him that would take the skin off an elephant.”
232 Capote was writing his second play for Saint Subber, this time a musical based on his short story “House of Flowers.”
233 Arnold Weissberger was an entertainment lawyer based in New York. The Fontana Vecchia did not have a telephone, and Capote had to go to a telephone office in Taormina to receive calls.
234 Hauser was the preeminent diet guru of the fifties, extolling the benefits of such things as wheat germ and yogurt. His book Look Younger, Live Longer was a bestseller in 1950.
235 A 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf.
236 Robert Dunphy was Jack Dunphy’s younger brother.
237 Olga was Robert Dunphy’s wife.
238 Freddie Bartholomew was a child actor of the 1930s.
239 Look Down in Mercy (1951) was a novel by Walter Baxter that portrayed a homosexual relationship between a British officer and an enlisted man, set against the Japanese invasion of Burma in World War II.
240 Hemlock and After, Wilson’s first novel.
241 In July Capote had asked Beaton to show Dunphy’s book to Heyward.
242 The Tar Baby was Saint Subber’s companion, Robbie Campbell, a boyishly handsome black singer who had won some acclaim in Paris in the late forties singing “Nature Boy” at the Boeuf sur le Toit. “Jeune vagabond noir!” passersby would shout as he walked through the streets of the Left Bank.
243 Beaton had designed the sets for Noël Coward’s Quadrille, which starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne and which was soon to open in London.
244 Capote’s essay about Lola, “A Curious Gift,” appeared in Redbook, June 1965; it was retitled simply “Lola” in The Dogs Bark (1973).
245 Beaton designed the sets for Noël Coward’s Quadrille, starring the Lunts. The critics disliked it, but audiences gave it long runs in both London and New York.
246 Joe Capote had been fired from the Wall Street textile brokerage firm for which he had worked for many years after it was discovered that he had misappropriated a hundred thousand dollars. To escape jail he needed to repay the money, and he went into business in his native Cuba in hopes of raising the cash. He was unsuccessful, however, and the Capotes soon returned to New York, poorer than when they had left. Truman sent them much of the money he was soon to make writing screenplays.
247 Tiny, whose formal name was Marie, was Nina Capote’s younger sister, who sometimes stayed with her in New York.
248 Marguerite Young.
249 Titled Stazione Termini in Italian, the movie was David O. Selznick’s attempt to join Hollywood glamor with Italian realism. Shot in Rome and directed by Vittorio De Sica, it starred Selznick’s wife, Jennifer Jones, and Montgomery Clift. Capote was the last of several scriptwriters. Called Indiscretion of an American Wife for American audiences, the film was a flop—“lousy,” in Capote’s estimation.
250 A movie based on Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreamers,” one of the stories in Seven Gothic Tales.
251 Beaton was on his first American lecture tour, visiting several cities in the Midwest.
252 Also a dancer, Bob Fosse achieved even greater fame as an innovative choreographer. Even as Capote guessed, their marriage ended in divorce.
253 Me and Juliet.
254 In the Red Scare of the fifties, Chaplin, a British subject, was accused of being a Communist sympathizer. When he left the United States for the London premiere of his last American film, Limelight (1952), he learned that he would be barred from returning. Embittered, he moved with his family—his wife, Oona, was one of Capote’s oldest friends—to Switzerland.
255 Though others also admired Margaret Phillips’s acting, her career never took off.
256 The affair and subsequent marriage of Ingrid Bergman and the Italian film director Roberto Rossellini had scandalized much of America and torpedoed Bergman’s once-flourishing career in Hollywood.
257 Town Hall is on Manhattan’s West 43rd Street.
258 Capote was in Ravello, writing the script, together with the director John Huston, for Beat the Devil.
259 232 was Lyndon’s street address in New York, which he was supposed to vacate by February 27, 1953. Capote was suggesting that he find temporary refuge in the Capotes’ apartment, which they were also soon to vacate, at 1060 Park Avenue.
260 King Farouk of Egypt.
261 Capote’s aunt.
262 Almost a year to the day after it had closed on Broadway, The Grass Harp saw another production at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village.
263 Graham Greene’s first play, The Living Room, ran at London’s Wyndham’s Theatre.
264 Farrar, Straus & Young, which became Farrar, Straus & Giroux, was the house that published Dunphy’s novel Friends and Vague Lovers.
265 Aswell’s son Duncan had apparently taken a job at The New Yorker. Daise Terry was the magazine’s office manager. Famous for her terrible temper, she had nonetheless befriended Capote when he was one of the magazine’s office boys.
266 He was responding to Selznick’s letter of June 5, 1953. Ricki Huston was the wife of movie director John Huston, with whom Capote had collaborated on Beat the Devil.
267 Lili Harrison was also known as Lili Palmer, an actress with both beauty and talent.
268 He was trying to translate his short story into a full-fledged Broadway musical. He was writing the book, Harold Arlen was writing the music, and they were collaborating on the lyrics.
269 ‘B the D’ was Beat the Devil. Jack Clayton was the associate producer.
270 Binkie Beaumont was a theatrical producer, a major figure in the British theater.
271 Lerman’s birthday was May 23. He had given himself a party in the garden behind his Lexington Avenue apartment building, serving strawberries and cream to his guests.
272 Louis Kronenberger’s adaptation of Mademoiselle Colombe by Jean Anouilh, with Julie Harris in the title role, opened on Broadway on January 6, 1954.
273 The plays Capote saw in London were The Living Room by Graham Greene, Quadrille by Noël Coward, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw, Venice Preserved by Thomas Otway, and The Way of the World by William Congreve.
274 Capote might have been reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) or Margaret Lane’s The Brontë Story: A Reconsideration of Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1953), which contained the best of the original work plus significant updated material.
275 John Perry was a theater manager, as well as Beaumont’s companion.
276 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was Anita Loos’s comical novel about a lovable gold digger.
277 Jones’s character was English.
278 Arthur Jacobs was a publicist Selznick had hired to promote Indiscretion of an American Wife—and Jennifer Jones. Jacobs had written Capote to ask if he would be interested in writing a magazine profile of her.
279 John Van Druten’s comedy Bell, Book and Candle was later made into a movie. Selznick was not the producer, however.
280 Beaton had visited Capote in Portofino in August; the two had then gone to Venice together.
281 Lili Palmer (Harrison).
282 Margaret Case was an editor of Vogue and an influential figure in New York society.
283 Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright and wife of Henry Luce, the proprietor of the Luce magazine empire, was the American ambassador to Italy.
284 Lyndon was working at the Lenox Hill Book Shop.
285 Laurence Olivier was married to Vivien Leigh, who had various emotional problems.
286 Daisy Fellowes, the Hon. Mrs. Reginald Fellowes, was an heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune.
287 A customs document allowing a car to be driven across international borders.
288 Richard Hughes’s novel, first published in 1929.
289 Capote had turned twenty-nine on September 30.
290 Robert Lowry was a writer and poet who was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and given electric shock treatments.
291 Tea and Sympathy, Robert Anderson’s drama set in a New England boys’ school, had opened on Broadway on September 30, 1953.
292 André Roussin’s desert-island comedy The Little Hut opened in New York on October 7, 1953, but closed by the end of the month.
293 Arvin had persuaded Johnson, to whom he was attracted, to leave Ohio State University and teach Victorian literature at Smith.
294 Gielgud had been arrested on October 21, 1953, for trying to pick a man up in a Chelsea lavatory, an incident that instantly made the headlines.
295 Daniel Aaron was a colleague of Arvin’s in the English department at Smith; he and his wife, Janet, were among Arvin’s closest friends and supporters. Poet Alfred Young Fisher, another Smith colleague, spent three years at the University of Dijon with his first wife, gastronomic