Best-Kept Boy in the World (20 page)

On several occasions as the years passed, he
announced that the manuscript was complete and that Random House
would publish it within six months, but his editors never received
a page more than the three chapters published in
Esquire
.

There was evidence that he had written a lot more.
One day he was visiting John Knowles at his home in Nyack and had
brought with him what he said was the manuscript of
Answered
Prayers
. “He started to show it to me. There was a lot of it,
much more than has been published. Much more than has ever been
found. I said, ‘Oh, later,’ which was madness on my part because he
was making a great concession by showing me something of a work in
progress. He never offered to show it to me again. I’m absolutely
certain that he wrote a great deal more of that book.”
⁷⁹
His good friend Joanne Carson, former wife of Johnny Carson, had
read three long chapters, “The Nigger Queen Kosher Café,” “Yachts
and Things,” and “And Audrey Wilder Sang,” which have never been
found. Other friends had been with Capote at dinners when he
entertained them by reciting unpublished chapters from memory, just
as he had done when writing
In Cold Blood
.

Capote admitted that “I did stop working on
Answered Prayers
in September 1977,”
⁸⁰
explaining
that he had re-read not only the early chapters of his
novel-in-progress but also each book and story he had written, and
realized that all could be better. “Slowly, but with accelerating
alarm, I read every word I’d ever published, and decided that
never, not once in my writing life, had I completely exploded all
the energy and esthetic excitements that material contained. Even
when it was good, I could see that I was never working with more
than half, sometimes only a third, of the powers at my
command.”
⁸¹
That conclusion may have resulted in a
massive writer’s block that stopped any more work.

Capote called
Answered Prayers
“the
raison
d’etre
of my entire life.”
⁸²
What had gone wrong?
Had he set the bar too high? Was he over-thinking what he was
doing? Had his society friends’ stormy reactions so thrown him off
his game that his vision of the book was destroyed? Or did he
complete his manuscript, with the whereabouts of its remaining
chapters the mystery of twentieth century literature?

John Knowles remembered how Capote had been talking
with him for years about his work on the manuscript “in a way which
I’m sure was authentic. He said, ‘It’s absorbing everything, it’s
taking in everything.’ Then one day at McCarthy’s restaurant in
Southampton, Truman said to me, ‘I’ve been working, working,
working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your
work and you see that it just isn’t any good.’ I think he had come
to that point. Whether he was right or wrong about his own work, I
don’t know. I think he burned hundreds and hundreds of pages
because he thought they weren’t any good.”
⁸³

He was staying with Joanne Carson the day he died,
August 25, 1984, at the age of fifty-nine.

“Truman,” Joanne had asked him that day, “what
happened to
Answered Prayers
; it’s not finished yet?”

“Oh, yes it is,” she recalled him saying.

“How will anybody know where or how to find them
[the remaining chapters] if something happens to you?”

“Don’t worry, they will be found when they are ready
to be found.”

“But you know there are a lot of people who say you
never finished
Answered Prayers
. If something happens to you
and these aren’t found, people are not going to be convinced.”

Truman started talking about a safe deposit box.

“Where? What bank? What city?” Joanne asked.

“Well, they could be on Long Island, in Manhattan,
or they could be in Palm Springs, or maybe they’re in San
Francisco. Or maybe right here in Los Angeles. Texas, even New
Orleans.”

He gave the safe deposit key to Joanne Carson that
day, and later she gave it to Alan Schwartz, his lawyer and
executor. “We could never find the safe-deposit box,” Schwartz
reported. There was a key, and we tried to track it everywhere. We
couldn’t. So we’re left with that.”
⁸⁴

In the three chapters of Capote’s novel-in-progress
published in
Esquire
, what may have become two of his most
memorable characters are just beginning to emerge: P.B. and Kate
McCloud, a sophisticated young beauty who hires P.B. to be her
“masseuse.” An underlying theme running through the three chapters
is that life is such that everyone does what they have to do to get
along—from Denny Fouts to P.B., to the fourteen- and
fifteen-year-old male hustlers P.B. passed late one night as he
walked to the movies (“Mister! Ten dollars! Take me home! Fuck me
all night!”),
⁸⁵
to the Wall Streeter who becomes an
employee of Miss Self to make some extra money to put his sons
through Exeter. And doing what they have to do to make their lives
work, maybe everything will turn out alright: maybe the Wall
Streeter’s sons will get through Exeter and accepted at Harvard,
maybe the teenage hustlers will find their way, maybe the novel
P.B. is working on will be the masterpiece he hopes. But maybe not.
And that maybe not is what looms behind the three extant chapters.
To Capote, that maybe not is exemplified in Denham Fouts, and it is
therefore not surprising that he planned the last chapter of his
novel to be “The Nigger Queen Kosher Café.”

In his notes, Capote considered “The Nigger Queen
Kosher Café” the climax of the book. Here, perhaps, Denny Fouts who
had introduced the idea of this dead end depository in “Unspoiled
Monsters,” would have appeared again, and if so, it is likely that
Capote considered Denny a key character, his story a unifying
theme, a motif of the book, representing that end-of-the line world
of those who life has beaten, who never find their way, their place
in the world, who have lost hope and all their dreams.

Capote’s own life, hauntingly, had followed the
theme of his novel-in-progress, line and verse: his prayers had
been answered with the overwhelming success of
In Cold Blood
and when those hopes became reality, “more tears were shed.” His
life had death-spiraled in the very way that had frightened him so
during those blissful June days in Paris in 1948 when his own world
was so full of promise, when he had stayed with Denham Fouts and
seen him at the bottom—an addict about to be evicted from Peter
Watson’s apartment—sensing then just how easily such a bottom could
be his own, or anyone’s, lot.

“I’M SICK OF MORALIZATIONS”

Truman Capote was among the last who came to visit
Denny as the noose tightened around his life. Whether in reality or
in his mind, the gendarmes seemed to be closing in, both because of
his purchase of drugs and his penchant for handsome teenagers. It
would just be days before he was forcibly evicted from Peter’s
apartment.

Denny decided to move to Rome when he heard that
heroin could be obtained easily there and learned from Gore Vidal
that the police in Rome let the trade in rent boys flourish. He
asked Michael Wishart to join him. “With a shudder of the soul,”
Michael knew that he no longer could be a part of Denny’s life,
that what he would look back on decades later when he wrote his
memoirs as “the impurest happiness I have ever known”
¹
was over. Denny accused Michael of cowardice, and left for Rome
with Trotsky and Tony Watson-Gandy, the British RAF officer who
adored him. There was always someone.

Michael returned alone to England. He never again
would hear from Denny. Romantic passion triggers the same chemical
reactions associated with all addictions, and in Michael’s
dopamine-drenched brain “the thought of Denham was painful for a
long time”
²
as he suffered through the throes of
withdrawal.

The poet Charles Henri Ford, who for over two
decades was the lover of Pavel Tchelitchev, the artist who had
painted that huge Adonis nude that had hung above Denny’s bed in
Paris, wrote in his diary in September of 1948 that a friend had
told him that Denham at thirty-four “still looks so young, not over
28, no lines in his face, hasn’t got a gray hair.” Ford noted in
his diary that “it’s not doing the things one wants to do—even if
considered a ‘vice,’ like opium taking—that makes one age, but
doing the things one
doesn’t
want to do.”
³
Denny
continued on as he always had, trying not to do the things he
didn’t want to do. It was getting harder.

From Rome, Denny wrote increasingly desperate
letters to Peter Watson, alternatively asking for money and
accusing him of causing all his problems. Peter was facing his own
problems. His income from the trust funds had fallen sharply, taxes
in England had risen, and his investments in France had been wiped
out by the War. As Waldemar Hansen wrote about Peter to a friend on
September 11, 1948: “And now, he’s reduced to watching the lira in
Italy, eating in cautious style, etc. He can’t buy any more
paintings because he hasn’t got the money abroad, and England won’t
import. He loathes London and has to live there most of the time.
He hasn’t got a car, nor a house, nor an apartment in Paris. He
watches the area of his life get smaller and smaller and
smaller.”
⁴

Peter was well aware how his life had changed: “I
seem to have suffered the death of feeling myself,” he had written
to a friend a few months before:

I just can’t react any more. It all seems so futile
anyway, as we are under the sentence of death, I feel. If only the
world contained some hope. Intelligence, freedom are monstrous
luxuries which this world can no longer afford. If only I could
take things for granted like any stupid person can ... Like you, I
am only interested in life it if reaches a certain standard, and
now that standard has gone forever and there is no pleasure left
which is not ersatz ... How terrible it is to grow old. One loses
so many tastes one had and seems to get no new ones at all. Wisdom
doesn’t settle anything—it only removes one from old friends and
prevents one from making any new ones. Then it is so humiliating to
have all one’s old beliefs and enthusiasms turned inside out. The
only thing is to be young as it makes egotism
elegant.
⁵

Peter once remarked to a friend that “I cannot bear
to see self-destruction in friends or in anyone else, and I react
violently against it.”
⁶
Watching from afar as Denny’s
life careened out of control made him miserable.

Peter knew that Denny was “diabolical in pinning the
blame on to others,”
⁷
but nevertheless was tormented by
his letters, and on November 30 wrote to Waldemar: “Denham wrote me
a reproachful self-pitying letter from Rome saying that I had done
nothing to help him! My God, I have been paying for all his
self-indulgent auto-destruction, besides his doctors and nursing
homes ... I can’t understand what people
want
of me or
expect me to do. Denham and what happened to him is the perfect
example of someone evading every issue through someone else, and
when he does have to stand on his own legs, they just aren’t there.
So he is forced to use everyone else as a prop to his own
weakness.”
⁸

Johnny Goodwin, a wealthy American author who Denny
had befriended in California, visited him in Rome in November. “He
and Denny are like brothers,” Christopher Isherwood commented, “in
many ways, Johnny is simply Denny with money.” Denny, though, was
wary of his friend’s visit: “You can sit here as long as you don’t
start moralizing,” Denny told him. “I’m sick of
moralizations.”
⁹
Like everyone else, Johnny tried
reasoning. As he wrote to Christopher:

... I told him very brutally why he had lost all his
friends (as he constantly complained of), it was that he was not
himself any more. He asked in his strange, rational and yet hazy
way just in what way was he different. It was hard to tell him for
I meant really saying that he was not at all rational, that his
habits of lying abed and living a kind of Poe existence made it
difficult to share anything of the world with him. But he seemed to
see finally what I meant and for a week until I left, though his
habits didn’t change, he wanted to live, which was something he
hadn’t cared one way or another about for a long time. He was
seriously considering going to England or America to a psychiatrist
which I was all for, even though I admitted to him and he agreed
that they were only a very last resort.
¹⁰

According to Denny’s cousin, Denny was planning to
return to the United States, home to Jacksonville to write. He sent
ahead to his mother a large mailing envelope stuffed with
manuscript pages—perhaps a draft of his memoirs. His mother read
them, realized her son was gay, and burned every
page.
¹¹

Bernard Perlin, a young artist who had met Denny in
Rome, visited Denny early in December, Denny in bed, corpse-like,
the sheet drawn to his chin, a cigarette between his lips, his
lover, Tony, removing the cigarette and tapping it each time before
it burned him. This was to be his final visitor. Ever a night
fiend, Denny injected the drugs he kept in a cigar box in his room
and, as always, instantly came to life, went out for the evening,
and vaporized into the mists.
¹²

On Christmas Day, December 25, 1948, Glenway Wescott
sat in Stone-Blossom, his farm in Hampton, New Jersey, and in his
perfect script, wrote to his friend, Christopher Isherwood, in
Santa Monica, California:

Dear Christopher,