Best-Kept Boy in the World (19 page)

The alcohol, the drugs, the temptations of celebrity
may have robbed him of the discipline he had mustered while writing
In Cold Blood
, but the real blow to his work-in-progress
came in 1975 when he made the decision, against his publisher’s
recommendation, to begin publishing a few chapters of his
novel-in-progress in
Esquire
.

The first chapter he selected for publication in the
December 1975 issue was to be a middle chapter of the novel. “La
Cote Basque” included not only characters clearly identifiable as
his society friends, but also some characters with the same names
as these friends, and featured a rich stew of scandalous tidbits
they had told him in confidence.

Capote had been quite sure his friends would view
Answered Prayers
as a work of art and not be troubled by
their appearances in it, and, in fact, be delighted to be a part of
a work by such a famous author. He was blind-sided by their instant
cries of outrage and betrayal. At once, they cut him from their
lives. He was expelled from Olympus. “I can’t understand why
everybody’s so upset,” he said. “What did they think they had
around them, a court jester? They had a writer.”
⁵⁴

Capote put on a brave front and when another
chapter, “Unspoiled Monsters,” was published in
Esquire
in
May 1976, he poked fun at the outcry, appearing on the magazine’s
cover dressed in black as an assassin fondling a stiletto. “Capote
Strikes Again” the cover read; “More from
Answered Prayers
:
The Most Talked About Book of the Year.”
⁵⁵

“Unspoiled Monsters,” the second chapter Capote
wrote for
Answered Prayers
, was intended to be the opening
chapter of the novel, a key to the entire book. It’s strange title
came from an eight year old’s rumination he had happened upon: “If
I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet, Earth,
and seek uranium, rubies, and gold. I’d look for Unspoiled
Monsters.”

The narrator of this section is P.B. Jones. Jones,
who has been described as a male Holly Golightly from
Breakfast
at Tiffany’s
, is also an alter ego of the author, perhaps his
imaginings of the course of his life had his early short stories
not been accepted for publication and his career as an author had
not fallen so neatly into place. Jones is in his mid-thirties and
has had the same sort of fantastical early years as Capote long ago
had invented for himself for his author’s write-up on the book
jacket of
Other Voices, Other Rooms
: “written speeches for a
third-rate politician, danced on a river boat, made a small fortune
painting flowers on glass, read scripts for a film company, studied
fortune telling with the celebrated Mrs. Acey Jones, worked on
The New Yorker
, and selected anecdotes for a digest
magazine. . .”
⁵⁶
As Capote explained: “P.B. isn’t me,
but on the other hand he isn’t not me. His background is totally
different from mine, but I can identify with it psychologically.
I’m not P.B., but I know him very well.”
⁵⁷

This chapter begins recounting how P.B. Jones was
abandoned as a baby in a St. Louis vaudeville theater, raised in a
Missouri orphanage by Catholic nuns, one of whom recognized and
encouraged his ability to write and convinced him he had a special
gift, ran away from the orphanage at the age of fifteen and was
picked up by a man in a white Cadillac convertible. P.B. calls
himself a “Hershey Bar whore—there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for a
nickel’s worth of chocolate.”
⁵⁸
The man who picked him
up is a masseur in a Miami Beach hotel and teaches P.B. his trade.
P.B. takes off for New York City, enrolls in a creative writing
class at Columbia, marries a girl he met in his class, decides she
is a moron and leaves her.

The fiction editor of a woman’s fashion magazine
comes to speak to the class at Columbia and P.B. can tell the man
is attracted to him. He brings to the editor several short stories
he has been writing, they have sex in the editor’s office, the
editor hesitantly offers to help P.B. get published and, after
twenty submissions, buys one of his stories for publication.
Through this editor, he meets a highly regarded author in her
fifties, a woman of androgynous beauty who has had four husbands.
P.B. and the author lives together, he becomes her protégé, and
soon he begins receiving grants and fellowships, (P.B. “had
drilled” her “till she geysered Guggenheims”),
⁵⁹
an
advance, her assistance in editing his stories, and her glowing
review of his published collection of stories titled
Answered
Prayers and Other Stories
, a title she selected: “ ... the
theme moving through your work, as nearly as I can locate it, is of
people achieving a desperate aim only to have it rebound upon
them—accentuating, and accelerating, their
desperation.”
⁶⁰
The book upon publication is ignored:
“My defeat, my cold hell.”
⁶¹

That is as far as his patroness can take him “ ...
for P.B. had already encountered the future. His name was Denham
Fouts ... ” Here Capote introduces Denny into the novel. “Denny,
long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me,
a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World.”
⁶²

Capote recounts the saga of Denham Fouts, many of
the details of his story adhering precisely to history, others
introducing elements that may have been his elaborations, or
Denny’s, or may indeed have been part of the real story as told to
him by Denny during their June days and nights together in Paris on
that massive bed in Peter Watson’s apartment.

As Capote tells the story in this chapter, Denny is
working in a bakery owned by his father in a Florida “cracker town”
when a cosmetics tycoon who has made a fortune on a “celebrated
suntan lotion” spots him and takes him to Miami, and from there to
Paris, and on to all the celebrated spots of Europe. On Capri,
Denny “caught the eye of and absconded with a
seventy-year-old-great-grandfather, who was also a director of
Dutch Petroleum.”
⁶³
Prince Paul of Greece appears next
and together “they visited a tattooist in Vienna and had themselves
identically marked—a small blue insignia above the
heart.”
⁶⁴
According to Capote’s account, “women
experimented with Denny: the Honorable Daisy Fellowes, the American
Singer Sewing Machine heiress, lugged him around the Aegean aboard
her crisp little yacht, the
Sister Anne
.”
⁶⁵

In P.B.’s narrative, Denny in 1938 meets Peter
Watson “his final and permanent patron” who he describes as “not
just another rich queen, but—in a stooped, intellectual
bitter-lipped style—one of the most personable men in
England.”
⁶⁶

Capote captures well the essence of his
friend—”Denny was suited to only one role, The Beloved, for that
was all he had ever been,”
⁶⁷
and an insight into Denny’s
character: “One had to have experienced Denny’s stranglehold, a
pressure that brought the victim teasingly close to an ultimate
slumber, to appreciate its allure.”
⁶⁸
Capote believed
that “Watson was in love with Denny’s cruelty ...The Beloved even
used his drug addiction to sado-romantic advantage, for Watson,
while forced to supply money that supported a habit he deplored,
was convinced that only his love and attention could rescue The
Beloved from a heroin grave. When The Beloved truly desired a turn
of the screw, he had merely turn to his medicine
chest.”
⁶⁹

A tantalizing passage of the chapter describes just
how P.B.—Capote—makes his way to Paris. P.B.’s first book had been
published when he received a letter that read:

Dear Mr. Jones, Your stories are brilliant. So is
Cecil Beaton’s portrait. Please join me here as my guest. Enclosed
is a first-class passage aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
, sailing
New York-Le Havre April 24. If you require a reference, ask Beaton:
he is an old acquaintance. Sincerely, Denham
Fouts.
⁷⁰

P.B. realizes that it is not his book that Denham
finds so captivating, but rather the photograph on the jacket of
the book. “The photograph conveyed a notion of me altogether
incorrect—a crystal lad, guileless, unsoiled, dewy, and sparkling
as an April raindrop. Ho ho ho.”
⁷¹

P.B. arrives in Paris to find Denny “living in
Watson’s Paris apartment on a day-to-day squatter’s-rights basis,
and existing on scattered handouts from loyal friends and old,
semi-blackmailed suitors.”
⁷²
To P.B., Denny appears
“paler than his favorite ivory opium pipe,” though “he still looked
vulnerably young, as though youth were a chemical solution in which
Fouts was permanently incarcerated.”
⁷³

In an opium-induced reverie, Denny speaks to P.B. of
the hopelessness he feels, the hopelessness that is at the heart of
Capote’s
Answered Prayers
, an existence that lay just on the
far side of the “lives of quiet desperation” Thoreau attributed to
most men:

Tell me, boy, have you ever heard of Father
Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café? Sound familiar? You betcher
balls. Even if you never heard of it and maybe think it’s some
after hours Harlem dump, even so, you know it by
some
name,
and of course you know what it is and where it is. Once I spent a
year meditating in a California monastery. Under the supervision of
His Holiness, the Right Reverend Mr. Gerald Heard. Looking for this
... Meaningful thing. This ... God Thing. I
did try
. No man
was ever more naked. Early to bed and early to rise, and prayer,
prayer, no hooch, no smokes, I never even jacked off. And all that
ever came of that putrid torture was ... Father Flanagan’s Nigger
Queen Kosher Café.

Denny had told Capote all about his stay in
California with Christopher Isherwood, of his experiences with
Gerald Heard, the Swami, and Vedanta.

There it is: right where they throw you off at the
end of the line. Just beyond the garbage dump ... Now knock. Knock
knock. Father Flanagan’s voice: “Who sent ya?” Christ, for Christ’s
sake, ya dumb mick. Inside ... it’s ... very ... relaxing. Because
there’s not a winner in the crowd ... So you can really unpin your
hair, Cinderella. And admit that what we have here is the drop-off.
What a relief! Just to throw in the cards, order a Coke, and take a
spin around the floor with an old friend ... The Nigger Queen
Kosher Café! The cool, green, restful as the grave, rock bottom!
That’s why I drug: mere dry meditation isn’t enough to get me
there, keep me there, hidden and happy with Father Flanagan and his
Outcast of Thousands, him and all the other yids, nigs, spiks,
fags, dykes, dope fiends, and commies. Happy to be down there where
you belong: Yassah, massuh! Except—the price is too high. I’m
killing myself.
⁷⁴

Denny finds a new friend in P.B., and, as always
with a new friendship comes a renewed interest in life. “I wouldn’t
object to living,” he tells P.B., “provided you lived with me,
Jonesy,” then spinning his fantasy of together buying a filling
station in Arizona or Nevada: “It would be real quiet, and you
could write stories. Basically, I’m pretty healthy. I’m a good
cook, too.”
⁷⁵

Just as Capote did with Fouts, P.B. convinces Denny
to go to a Swiss clinic, with the promise to meet in Positano or
Ravello once his treatment is complete, though “ ...I had no
intention of doing so, or of seeing Denny again if it could be
avoided.”
⁷⁶

With Denny in the rehabilitation clinic, P.B.
returns to New York City, trying again to write, now working on a
novel he titled
Answered Prayers
, just like the title of his
collection of short stories that had sold but three hundred copies.
He is at rock bottom, penniless, feeling his dream of a writing
career drifting from him. At the Central Park Zoo, he meets an old
friend, “the descendant of our twenty-eighth President,” who,
seeing that P.B. is down and out, tells him how he and a Yale
friend of his who is a stock broker and trying to put his two sons
through Exeter are making extra money by hustling, hired out by the
hour by a Miss Self who runs a service from an office on
Forty-second Street. P.B. signs up as an employee, and his first
customer that afternoon is Mr. Wallace, an “acclaimed American
playwright” (Tennessee Williams) staying at the Plaza Hotel with
his English bulldog.

Some weeks later, P.B. receives a note from Denny to
call him. When P.B. reaches him, Denny tells him that he is ready
to leave the clinic, and suggests that they meet in Rome where a
friend has lent him an apartment. P.B. agrees, but he has no
intention of meeting, “for how could I say I never meant to see him
again because he scared me? It wasn’t the drugs and chaos but the
funereal halo of waste and failure seemed somehow to threaten my
own impending triumph.”
⁷⁷
For P.B. was at work now on
another novel—
Sleepless Millions
—which he felt sure would be
recognized as a masterpiece, all the while supporting himself by
working for Miss Self. After a session with yet another customer,
he “began to remember Denny Fouts and to wish I could dash
downstairs and find a bus, the Magic Mushroom Express, a chartered
torpedo that would rocket me to the end of the line, zoom me all
the way to the halcyon discotheque: Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen
Kosher Café.”
⁷⁸

Capote’s opening chapter, “Unspoiled Monster,” set a
dark tone for what promised to be a disturbing novel. A third
chapter from his work in progress, “Kate McCloud,” was published in
Esquire
in December of 1976. And that was it. There would be
no more chapters published. Ever. Nothing more would ever be seen
of
Answered Prayers
.