Best-Kept Boy in the World (18 page)

Capote never would forget the day he put on hold the
Proustian masterpiece he and Isherwood and Mailer knew was his. It
was a Monday, November 16, 1959, and there, deep inside the
New
York Times
, page thirty-nine, was a headline “WEALTHY FARMER, 3
of Family Slain” and a one column story that caught his attention,
a bare bones account of a murder in Holcomb, Kansas the day before:
“A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were
found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by
shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and
gagged.”
²⁶

He read it and read it again, and again. At the
time, he had been toying with the notion that “journalism,
reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the
‘nonfiction novel’ as I thought of it.”
²⁷
It wasn’t that
this crime itself was of special interest to him. Rather, the
crime, this story, could provide the framework for his literary
experiment, “a book that would read exactly like a novel except
that every word of it would be absolutely true.”
²⁸
He
thought about it. “Everything would seem freshly minted. The
people, their accents and attitude, the landscape, its contours,
the weather. All this, it seemed to me, could only sharpen my eye
and quicken my ear.” The more he thought about it, the more it felt
right. “Well, why not
this
crime? The Clutter case. Why not
pack up and go to Kansas and see what happens?”
²⁹

By mid-December, he was on his way, accompanied by
his childhood friend from Alabama, Nelle Harper Lee, who had just
completed her novel
To Kill a Mockingbird
and, awaiting
publication date, was ready for adventure.

When the elfin Capote with the voice of a fourth
grader arrived deep in the heart of middle America, dressed in a
large sheepskin coat, a pillbox hat, a long scarf wrapped around
his neck with the ends dragging down to his moccasins, the citizens
of Holcomb were stunned. It was Nelle Harper Lee who saved the day.
“Nelle walked into the kitchen,” one resident of the town
remembered, “and five minutes later I felt I had known her for a
long time.”
³⁰
By the time the two left Kansas in the
middle of January 1960, they were treated as celebrities. Within
the month, Capote had signed a book contract with Random House and
by April had started writing the book he would call
In Cold
Blood
.

He estimated that it would take about a year to
complete and went to Verbier, Switzerland where he bought a small
condominium to avoid all the distractions of the social life he
loved in New York City. “Gregariousness is the enemy of art, so
when I work, I have to forcibly remove myself from other people.
I’m like a prizefighter in training: I have to sweep all the
elements except work out of my life completely.”
³¹
On
June 27, 1960, he would write to Bennett Cerf: “I’m all right.
Living quietly; see literally no one; and am totally concentrated
on
IN COLD BLOOD
. My enthusiasm is as high as ever. No,
higher. It is going to be a masterpiece.”
³²

But it wasn’t long before this first burst of
enthusiasm began to wane and strains began to appear. He called
Verbier a “very pretty, very remote, very healthy, extremely
snowbound, and unalterably boring village.”
³³
By
September, he was writing to a friend “what an appalling and
terrible story it is. This is the last time I am ever going to
write ‘a reportage.’”
³⁴
He found that being alone for so
long a period was “rather frightening. Something about it was
unsettling,”
³⁵
and working with that subject matter “led
to a definite darkness and terrific apprehension. I’ve never been
so nervous and so agitated. I never slept more than three hours a
night.”
³⁶
He would admit that “this sort of sustained
creative work keeps one in a constant state of tension, and when
one adds to it all these other uncertainties and anxieties, the
strain is just too much. I’ll tell you something: every morning of
my life I throw up because of the tensions created by the writing
of this book. But it’s worth it; because it’s the best work I’ve
done.”
³⁷

The work, the tension, the concerns of whether
putting so much time into one book would pay off, the trips back to
Kansas for more research, and back to the isolation and loneliness
of secluding himself to write dragged on. In August of 1961 he had
estimated he had at least another year’s work on the book; “with
great industry, and nothing but solid luck, I might be able to
finish in a year this September.”
³⁸
But six months
later, on February 25, 1962, he would write to Cecil Beaton, who
had been a friend since Waldemar Hansen introduced them in London
in 1948: “I figure I have another 18 months to go, by which time I
should be good and nuts.”
³⁹
It was not until three years
later that he would write to Beaton that “I’m finishing the last
pages of my book—I must be rid of it regardless of what happens. I
hardly give a fuck anymore what happens. My sanity is at stake—and
that is no mere idle phrase. Oh the hell with it.”
⁴⁰
Six
months after that he again wrote to him, “Finished the final pages
of my book three days ago. Bless Jesus. But incredible to suddenly
be free (comparatively) of all those years and years of tension and
aging. At the moment, only feel bereft. But grateful. Never
again!”
⁴¹

In Cold Blood
did indeed answer the author’s
prayers, and in spades. Even before the book was complete, even
before it was excerpted in
The New Yorker
, he was being
offered substantial sums for the movie rights—$250,000 from
Twentieth Century-Fox, $300,000 from Frank Sinatra, eventually
landing through his agent a million dollar contract, later selling
the paperback rights for $500,000, and the foreign and book club
publication rights for another million dollars—all before
publication. When at last the book was published in January of
1966, it rode the bestseller lists for months, earning him millions
more. Even more important to him, he had become the most recognized
living American author.

And for a while, he basked in the glory.

All summer he sat by the pool of a Bridgehampton
friend, writing in a school composition notebook, not sketching the
outline of his next book,
Answered Prayers
, but rather
preparing a list of names, adding to it and deleting from it,
joking with whoever learned what he was doing: “well, maybe you’ll
be invited and maybe you won’t,”
⁴²
refining his list to
the select five hundred who would receive invitations to what he
already was calling “the party of the century.”

It would be held in the ballroom of Manhattan’s
Plaza Hotel on a Monday night, November 28, 1966: a Black and White
Ball. The dress code was set forth very specifically on the
handwritten invitations sent out in October:

Gentlemen: Black Tie; Black Mask

Ladies: Black or White Dress;

White Mask; Fan

He chose as the guest of honor Katherine Graham,
owner of the
Washington Post
, but there was no doubt that
this party was his, his reward for his years of toil on
In Cold
Blood
, a celebration of its overwhelming success, and certainly
the fulfillment of a fantasy. “Don’t you think Truman sat there in
Monroeville, Alabama, when he was about ten” his friend, John
Knowles, author of
A Separate Peace
, mused, “deeply rejected
and out of it, strange little outcast, even in his own house, and
said that someday he would hire the most beautiful ballroom in New
York City and he would have the most elegant and famous people in
the world there?”
⁴³

The invitation list represented a startling
intersection of the social, political, and literary worlds: Frank
Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Babe and William Paley, Gloria Guinness,
Marella Agnelli, Cecil Beaton, Lillian Hellman, Mr. and Mrs. Henry
Ford, Harper Lee, Tallulah Bankhead, Norman Mailer, William F.
Buckley, Jr., Lee Radziwell, Christopher Isherwood, Capote’s
friends from Kansas who were the cast of
In Cold Blood
,
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Candice Bergen, the doorman from the
U.N. Plaza apartments where he lived, Leonard Bernstein, Noël
Coward, Walter Cronkite, David Merrick, Sammy Davis and Tennessee
Williams, among others. “It was one of those rare occasions,” John
Kenneth Galbraith remembered, “when you knew by sight or by fame or
infamy everybody there.”
⁴⁴

But after a while, after the distraction of the
party, he felt completely drained by the effort
In Cold
Blood
had consumed. “I certainly wouldn’t do it again. If I
knew or had known when I started it what was going to be involved,
I never would have started it, regardless of what the result would
have been.”
⁴⁵
He said later that if he had realized what
lay ahead of him as he and Harper Lee drove toward Kansas “I would
have driven straight on. Like a bat out of hell.”
⁴⁶

A bitterness crept into his thoughts as he began to
feel that others had imitated his groundbreaking idea of the
nonfiction novel, including Norman Mailer’s
The Armies of the
Night
, Woodward and Bernstein’s
All the President’s Men
:
“They got all the prizes and I got nothing. And I felt I deserved
them. The decisions not to give them to me were truly, totally
unjust. So at that point I said ‘Fuck you! All of you! If you are
so unjust and don’t know when something is unique and original and
great, then fuck you! I don’t care about you anymore, or want to
have anything to do with you. If you can’t appreciate something
really extraordinary like
In Cold Blood
and the
five-and-a-half years I put into it, and all of the artistry and
the style and the skill, then fuck you’!”
⁴⁷

Capote could sense himself how he had changed. “No
one will ever know what
In Cold Blood
took out of me. It
scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed
me. I think, in a way, it
did
kill me. Before I began it, I
was a stable person, comparatively speaking. Afterward, something
happened to me.”
⁴⁸
John Knowles, too, felt something
fundamental had happened to his friend and also traced the roots of
Capote’s depression to
In Cold Blood
: “It was such an
overwhelming success in every way, critically, financially. I think
he lost a grip on himself after that. He had been tremendously
disciplined up to that time. One of the most disciplined writers
I’ve ever met. But he couldn’t sustain it after that. A lot of his
motivation was lost. That’s when he began to
unravel.”
⁴⁹

Even while writing his non-fiction novel, Capote had
been thinking about
Answered Prayers,
which he had begun in
1958. On August 22, 1964, he had written to Bennett Cerf: “
In
Cold Blood
” is nearly completed; I’m taking a few weeks away
from it to write an outline of the novel I intend to write this
winter. I will let you read the outline.”
⁵⁰
But with the
final push to complete
In Cold Blood
, and then the frenzy
surrounding its publication, it was not until January 5, 1966 that
he signed a contract with Random House for this next book and
received on signing, an advance against future royalties of
$25,000. This contract, which he felt confident enough to negotiate
himself, called for a manuscript delivery date of January 1,
1968—two years to write a relatively short novel that had to be no
more than a guaranteed minimum of two hundred and fifty pages.

Neither the manuscript nor any sentence of it was
delivered on January 1, 1968, and in May of 1969 the contract was
re-worked as a three book contract with the delivery date of
Answered Prayers
moved ahead to January 1973, and the
advance increased based on the success of
In Cold Blood
. In
1967, Twentieth Century-Fox had bought, for $350,000, the movie
rights to
Answered Prayers
, a huge sum for a book whose
first sentence Capote has not yet shown to anyone. When the
manuscript of the book had not been delivered by the contractual
deadline, Capote had to pay back to Fox $200,000, the first
installment payment he had received for the movie rights. The
pressure to produce was tightening on him. “ ...I have a novel,” he
had written to a friend, “something on a large and serious scale,
that pursues me like a crazy wind.”
⁵¹
Early in 1973 the
delivery date was pushed to January 1974, and six months later
changed to September 1977. Then in 1980, fourteen years after the
original contract was signed, the completion date was changed
again, now to March 1, 1981, and the advance raised to $1,000,000
on delivery of the manuscript.

What had happened?

Always a slow writer, his output became glacial as
he enjoyed the life of a celebrity and as he began to drink more
heavily and to abuse prescription drugs, admitting also that he was
using cocaine every day at a cost of about $60,000 a
year.
⁵²

As the years slipped by with nothing to show, he
began justifying his time saying that he had spent four years, from
1968 through 1972, “reading and selecting, rewriting and indexing
my own letters, other people’s letters, my diaries and journals
(which contained detailed accounts of hundreds of scenes and
conversations) for the years 1943 through 1965”
⁵³
for
use in
Answered Prayers
. In 1972, he finally began writing,
working on the last chapter of the book first, then the first
chapter “Unspoiled Monsters,” then the fifth which he called “A
Severe Insult to the Brain,” and then the seventh, “La Cȏte
Basque.”