Best-Kept Boy in the World (17 page)

“DENNY HAD REAL MAGIC”

That photograph! That photograph of
twenty-four-year-old Truman Capote that appeared on the dust jacket
of his first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, published in
January of 1948, a few days after the publication of Gore Vidal’s
The City and the Pillar
; that photograph which Denny had
seen in
Life
magazine and cut out and kept next to his bed
under his opium pipe; that photograph that showed the young author
reclining on a Victorian sofa, looking ten years younger than his
actual age, drilling the camera with smoldering eyes, his right
hand touching himself suggestively; that photograph that Capote had
carefully staged, which became perhaps the most famous, infamous,
photograph ever to grace a book jacket and drew endless attention
to the novel and its ambitious author: that photograph had captured
the imagination of Denham Fouts.

Word of the new literary sensation already had
spread to London and Paris even before
Other Voices, Other
Rooms
was published anywhere in Europe. “Truman Capote is all
the rage here,” Peter Watson’s lover, Waldemar Hansen, wrote from
London on May 6, 1948 to a friend in the United States, noting he
had heard that Denny had sent the beguiling young author a blank
check with but one word written on it: “Come.” “So now,” Hansen
added, “Capote will be turning up in Paris soon.”
¹

Waldemar, who had met Truman in New York City, knew
his friend well. Capote set sail on the
Queen Elizabeth
on
May 14, joining the throng of Americans flocking to Europe after
the War. Waldemar met him in London and introduced him to the
luminaries he had come to know through Peter Watson. “Truman wasn’t
interested in seeing things like the Tower of London,” Waldemar
remembered; rather, he wanted to meet everyone who was anybody,
and, together, they made the rounds, visiting Cecil Beaton,
Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nöel Coward. In return, Truman
reveled in his role as confidante to Waldemar, advising him on how
to save his deteriorating relationship with Peter Watson. “If
you’re going to be a grand courtesan,” Truman instructed, “you’ve
got to play hard to get. Let’s beard the lion in his
den!”
²

The two set off for Paris where Peter, to distance
himself from Denny, was staying at the Pont Royal Hotel on the Rue
du Bac. Waldemar followed Truman’s advice and told Peter he hadn’t
come to Paris to see him, but rather to show his American friend
around the city. It worked. Truman orchestrated a reconciliation
between the two, and Waldemar credited Truman’s counsel with
restoring his relationship with Peter.

Waldemar had warned Truman about Denny, about how
much of a burden he could become. “Even when he was perfectly
well,” Christopher Isherwood’s friend—Bill Harris recalled from
their Santa Monica days, “Denny would often be propped up in bed,
like a little boy who’s sick and waiting for friends to come and
visit him. He wanted to be taken care of forever.”
³
Keep
your distance, Waldemar had cautioned his visitor, words that of
course made Truman all the more eager to make the pilgrimage to 44
Rue du Bac.

The two Southerners hit it off instantly. Both liked
to exaggerate their deep South accents (Capote said Denny talked
“as though his mouth were busy with a pound of Alabama corn
mush”),
⁴
both were a curious mixture of innocence and
experience, both were more than happy to have others dote on them.
Decades later Capote was asked in an interview what he would have
been if he hadn’t become a writer. An attorney, he answered, and
then added, “also, I wouldn’t have minded being kept, but no one
has ever wanted to keep me—not more than a week or so.”
⁵
Truman was fascinated to be with the world’s most famous kept man,
while Denny was fascinated to be with an author who had achieved
the exact sort of lionization he dreamed about when he had started
writing a novel while living with Christopher Isherwood. And that
photograph on the jacket of
Other Voices, Other Rooms
had
not been misleading. Isherwood described Truman as looking like “a
sort of cuddly little Koala bear.”
⁶
The author could
easily pass for a teenager—blue puppy dog eyes, silken blond bangs,
pouty-lipped, an instantly infectious smile and laugh, a natural
ebullience: at last Denny had found his own fantasy. As Gore Vidal
had remarked, Denny “was at his best with pubescent boys; but then
he was one himself, I should think, a southern Penrod who still
spoke with a North Florida accent.”
⁷
Truman looked the
part to perfection.

Truman found that Denny “was more conversationalist
than sensualist; ...though he wanted us to share the same bed, his
interest in me was romantic but not sexual.”
⁸
Denny’s
libido had been damaged by his addiction, but he was content just
to have Truman worship him as he entranced Truman.

Truman spent hours lying with Denny on the massive
bed beneath Tchelitchev’s
Adonis
, gossiping and listening to
his stories. Like everyone else, Truman was smitten: “Denny
radiated a quality that was the exact opposite of what he was,
extraordinary health, youth, and unspoiled innocence. Whatever he
had done the night before, or the day before, or the week before,
he always looked as if he had just awakened on the freshest and
most beautiful morning in the world. To watch him walk into a room
was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking: he was the
single most charming-looking person I’ve ever
seen.”
⁹

Those first days of June, Truman stayed with Denny
in the “high-ceilinged dusk of those shuttered, meandering
rooms.”
¹⁰
Often in the afternoon, they would go to
Champs-Elysées movies, “and at some juncture [Denny] always, having
begun slightly to sweat, hurried to the men’s room and dosed
himself with drugs; in the evening he inhaled opium or sipped opium
tea, a concoction he brewed by boiling in water the crust of opium
that had accumulated inside his pipe. But he was not a nodder; I
never saw him drug-dazed or enfeebled.”
¹¹
The two became
friends. “Denny had real magic and I adored him. But I was
frightened of him and the drug scene. I was young, and I didn’t
plan to get involved in any of that. I wanted to get him off drugs,
and he also wanted to get out of the life he had been living all
those years. He loved the West and he had a fantasy about buying a
gasoline station in Arizona, the sort of place that has a sign
saying, ‘Last Chance for Gas for Fifty Miles.’ I was going to
write, and he was going to run it and be cured of all the things
that were wrong with him.”
¹²
This fantasy they spun
together was a variation of one of the plans Peter and Denny had
contemplated before the War, of moving to Arizona and growing
oranges.

Truman had enough influence over Denny to persuade
him to enter a Swiss drug rehabilitation clinic; as always,
whenever Denny found a new friend, his interest in living revived.
The two “said good-bye at the Gare de Lyon; he was somewhat high on
something and looked, with his fresh-colored face—the face of a
severe, avengeful angel—twenty years old. His rattling conversation
ranged from filling stations to the fact that he had once visited
Tibet. At last Denny said, “if it goes wrong, please do this:
destroy everything that’s mine. Burn all my clothes. My letters. I
wouldn’t want Peter having the pleasure.’”
¹³
They agreed
that when Denny’s treatment was complete, they would meet in Italy
to celebrate.

But Truman had no intention of meeting Denny there,
or anywhere. As with Christopher Isherwood, Gore Vidal, and all his
visitors, Denny had handed his opium pipe to Capote: “Denny offered
me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he
said: ‘Scared?’ Yes, but not of drugs; it was Denny’s derelict life
that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at
all.”
¹⁴
Capote had caught a glimpse of what his own
future might hold—Denny as the ghost of Christmas Future—and its
reality horrified him.

As usual, Denny’s commitment to change his habits
didn’t last long. By mid-June, Truman was writing to Waldemar: “Our
disturbing friend just called. The Switzerland deal seems to be
off. It makes me feel like a miserable heel, but what can I do now
but wash my hands of the whole affair?”
¹⁵
Just as
Waldemar had warned him, he came to see that “Denny was ...an
ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn’t free myself
that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I’d have to cart
Denny piggyback the rest of his life.”
¹⁶

Capote’s feelings of guilt over deserting Denny
surfaced decades later in his novel
Answered Prayers
; there
he recounts the heartbreaking story of Bob, a sixty-year-old blind
man staying at the Y.M.C.A. in Manhattan; ten years before, he had
married Helen, a waitress. Now, when he was in the hospital for an
operation on his leg, she comes to tell him she is leaving him,
taking their truck, taking their aluminum trailer home, and leaving
him with nothing but a suitcase with his clothes. When he gets out
of the hospital, he hitch-hikes from California to New York City.
Capote compared this story to his desertion of Denny in the clinic:
“A helpless man waiting in the dark by the side of an unknown road;
that’s how Denny Fouts must have felt, for I had been as heartless
to him as Helen had been to Bob.”
¹⁷

Truman left Paris and on July 4 arrived in Venice,
his repertoire now enhanced as he spoke of his “dear acquaintance”
Denny Fouts, the legend already growing so that Denny had “slept
with just everyone—Jean Marais, King Farouk, the Maharaja so-and-so
. . .”
¹⁸
Denny’s story kept percolating in his thoughts,
assuming a central role in his ideas about a book he had begun to
believe would be his magnum opus; but it would be years before his
new friend’s strange story would find its way into his fiction.

Capote’s reputation always far exceeded his slim
output.
A Tree of Night
, a collection of eight short
stories, was published in January of 1949, followed by
Local
Color
in 1950, and
The Grass Harp
, a novel based on his
Alabama childhood, in 1951.
The Muses Are Heard
, an account
of his travels through the Soviet Union with the cast of
Porgy
and Bess
, appeared in 1956, and his short masterpiece,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, in 1958. It was during these years,
as he wrote these gem-like stories, that he was adopted by high
society as a sort of mascot. Woman of wealth and stature found him
amusing, witty, charming, the most delightful company; and where
they led, their powerful husbands followed. It wasn’t long before
Truman was on a first name basis with those who graced the highest
reaches of New York and international society—Babe Paley, Lee
Radziwill, Gloria Vanderbilt, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Gloria
Guinness, Marella Agnelli—a fixture at their dinners and parties, a
guest at their country homes and Caribbean retreats. As it turned
out, as he was singing for his supper, entertaining his society
friends, he was mining material for his magnum opus.

After completing his work on
Breakfast at
Tiffany’s
in 1957, Capote began to focus more on this work that
had always been in his thoughts, making notes and outlines and
preliminary sketches, drawing material from the stories he had
heard gossiping with his new friends. He already had the title,
Answered Prayers
, taken from a saying of St. Theresa that
“more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered
ones.”
¹⁹
On September 29, 1958, while staying at Paros
on Greece, Truman wrote to Bennett Cerf at Random House, reporting
that he was working on “a large novel, my magnum opus, a book about
which I must be very silent so as not to alarm my ‘sitters’ and
which I think will really arouse you when I outline it (only you
must never mention it to a soul). The novel is called
Answered
Prayers
; and if all goes well, I think it will answer
mine.”
²⁰
His mention of his “sitters” was a reference to
his society friends, an early recognition that they might be
offended by the subject of this book.

Answered Prayers
had always seemed the book
Capote was destined to write. Christopher Isherwood remembered the
first time he met Truman. It was May 1, 1947: Christopher was
having lunch with Bennett Cerf, also his editor at Random House.
Capote’s first novel,
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, was still
months from publication, but the editor that day taking Truman
around the offices assured Isherwood ‘that this young man could
only be compared to Proust.’ And then the marvelously gracious
little baby personage itself appeared; Truman sailed into the room
with his right hand extended, palm downward, as if he expected [me]
to kiss it. [I] didn’t, but within a few moments [I] was quite
ready to—having been almost instantaneously conquered by the campy
Capote charm. To hell with Proust; here was something infinitely
rarer and more amusing, a live Ronald Firbank
character!”
²¹
The two became friends, and always
Isherwood was urging Capote to write the book he was sure was in
him. “Somehow or other (and I’ve said this to him constantly), I
feel that he hasn’t yet quite written about the things that he’d be
best at writing about. I always say to him, ‘why don’t you be our
New York Proust? Why don’t you write about feuds and social
goings-on in Manhattan?’ because he knows this stuff inside out ...
I’m sure that he could do wonderful things on the largest scale
showing the whole nature of society today.”
²²
Norman
Mailer, too, who had called Capote “the most perfect writer of my
generation,”
²³
was convinced of it: “I would suspect,”
Mailer commented in 1959, “he hesitates between the attractions of
Society, which enjoys and so repays him for his unique gifts, and
the novel he could write of the gossip column’s real life, a major
work, but it would banish him forever from his favorite world.
Since I have nothing to lose, I hope Truman fries a few of the
fancier fish.”
²⁴
Capote was sure of it himself: “I am
not Proust. I am not as intelligent or as educated as he was. I am
not as sensitive in various ways. But my eye is every bit as good
as his. Every bit! I see everything! I don’t miss nothin’! If
Proust were an American living now in New York, this is what he
would be doing.”
²⁵