The Swans of Fifth Avenue(12)

“You are a dear dragon lady. The dearest! And I mean it in the most admirable way. I happen to love dragon ladies. They are fiercely protective of those they love.”

“Truman, you could charm the rattle off a snake,” Diana Vreeland pronounced. “I’m going to lunch at Le Pavillon. Will you join me?”

“No, my dearest dragon lady, I’m going to work now. On that story. Another time. And do not gossip without me, do you hear? Don’t go to any dives or pick up any sailors. No naughtiness without me, Mrs. Vreeland!”

Diana laughed, her great, echoing “ha ha,” every guffaw as articulated as every syllable she spoke. Truman turned to go, hands in pockets, golden head bent in thought. So lost in contemplation was he, he didn’t even notice that, indeed, hovering outside of Mrs. Vreeland’s office were hordes of emaciated mannequins clad in the latest fashions, nervously awaiting their reckoning.

He got into a cab and told the driver, “Brooklyn Heights.” And the cab carried him across the bridge, up up up and then down down down, away from Neverland, from Mother Goose, from Oz.

It pulled up in front of a canary-yellow townhouse on a quiet, tree-lined street. Truman paid the fare and walked down into a basement apartment.

And then he went to work.





CHAPTER 5


…..

TRUMAN AT WORK





So many wanted to catch him at it! Watch as genius burned! Not his fellow authors, of course; they were far too blasé and jaded to care. But his swans, in particular, all longed to see Truman Capote write. They went out of their way to offer him help—for if they weren’t patrons of the arts, then who were they?

They weren’t patrons of the arts.

But Gloria offered him his own beach villa at her place in Palm Beach. Slim provided him with hampers of food from 21 so he would be properly nourished. Pamela offered to sit at his feet, literally, a muse. Marella invited him to work on her yacht, bobbing up and down in the Mediterranean.

Truman refused. As much as he loved and appreciated their lives, their comforts, their wealth and bounty, when it came to his work, he displayed a monastic discipline none of his new friends could have suspected. Work was work; play was play. And never the twain shall meet.

Except—

Well, perhaps there was a time ahead when they could; he wondered. There were marvelous stories here, ripe for the picking. And if Truman wasn’t a storyteller, then who was he?

Truman was a storyteller.

But for now, the story he was telling was not theirs, although he already knew they would all want to lay claim to it when it was done. But this particular story was entirely of his own invention; he resented the implication by so many that he could write only from his own life. Other Voices, Other Rooms—why, that wasn’t autobiographical at all! It was a story. Made up in his own mind. The story of a young boy without a family, without a home, seduced into darkness, born into light—but the darkness beckoning, always beckoning.

No, his first novel wasn’t autobiographical at all.

And this new story; he had an idea for a title. He’d heard a sailor on leave, during the war, tell another sailor that he’d take him to breakfast at the most expensive place in town. Where did he want to go?

“Well,” the na?ve sailor had replied, “I always heard that Tiffany’s was the most expensive place in New York.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was a great title, that much Truman knew. Beyond that—

Truman gathered up a notebook. A simple composition book with lined paper. He sharpened his pencils, settled in on a velvet sofa beneath a window, and propped up the notebook on his knees.

His forehead furrowed, he read what he had written the day before, the words in his tiny, squared-off handwriting, meticulous, spare.

“Listen, Fred, you’ve got to cross your heart and kiss your elbow—”

And Truman was lost in the words. Awash in sentence structure, agonizing over punctuation. Studying the picture on the page; rearranging paragraph breaks so that there was just enough white space. Going back and forth, in his mind, between the words approximation and facsimile until finally choosing approximation.

Perhaps contortionists can kiss their elbow; she had to accept an approximation.

Truman worked through the entire afternoon, then stopped. Some internal alarm inside him, as nascent as the primordial switch that turns winter to spring, simply said, “Enough. Enough for today. One more word and you will question everything you’ve written so far.” And he put the notebook and pencil away on his desk, scratched himself in those patient places that required scratching, having been ignored all day, and went into the kitchen, where Jack was flinging pots and pans about, preparing dinner. Gruffly. Which was how Jack approached life.

Gruffly.

“Good day’s work?” Jack grumbled, viciously grinding pepper over a flank steak.

“Hmm-mmm.” Truman reached for the cocktail shaker with one hand, the vodka with another. “I’ll read you some tonight, if you want.”

“Sure.”

“And you?”

“It’s rubbish. It always is.”

“It’s not. And you just want me to tell you that, so stop fishing. By the way, the Paleys invited us both to Kiluna this weekend.”

“I don’t want to go.”