The Swans of Fifth Avenue(45)
Truman clapped his hands delightedly and reared his head back, roaring with laughter.
“Oh, Carol, you are divine!”
He was still laughing as Carol traipsed out of the restaurant. But he also still had a problem. Until he saw Pamela Churchill enter the room and spot him seated alone at his table. She broke into her fake smile, her British teeth perfectly capped, courtesy of one lover or another. Truman couldn’t help but appreciate her porcelain British complexion, but that dress! Satin in the daytime? God, the woman really was just a common tart dressed up in sheep’s clothing—he couldn’t believe that anyone would be serious about marrying her. She’d been kept by every important man alive—Gianni Agnelli, Averell Harriman, a Rothschild or two. Even Paley had paid for her, during the war, or so the rumor went—when he wasn’t sharing her with Ed Murrow. And now, Leland Hayward—
She saw him, waved regally, and started his way.
“Pamela! Darling! You look divine!”
“Oh, Truman, you love,” Pamela murmured in her posh British accent. She exuded her famous charm; she fluttered her eyelids at him like a baby lamb, blushed like a schoolgirl, made him feel as if he were the only man in the world for her.
Truman appreciated the effort; he had to admire the woman for putting on the full act for him, knowing quite well he’d never take her to bed. Or buy her a piece of jewelry.
“I was just going, sweetheart of mine, but do have a wonderful lunch, won’t you?”
“I’m meeting Leland,” she purred. “He simply can’t allow me out of his sight for a minute! The poor man was absolutely neglected by Slim, who is a darling girl, but a trifle flighty.”
“He’s a wise man,” Truman replied, wagging his finger at her naughtily. Pamela giggled, and he paid his check, kissed her on the cheek, and left.
It was raining, a chill fall afternoon, the kind that made even Fifth Avenue look sordid and cheap, the sidewalks slick and carpeted with matted, moldy newspapers and trash. People were in a hurry to be anywhere but outside, so he found himself bumped by passing shoulders, poked at with umbrellas. But he walked slowly, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed, glasses blurry, streaked with rain. And by the time he got to the Waldorf, his mind was made up; he removed his coat, shook his head like a spaniel, dried his glasses, and took the elevator up to a top floor. Then he knocked on a door.
“Truman!”
“Big Mama! You poor darling!”
Slim Hawks Hayward looked awful. Simply awful. She had lost weight—living up to her nickname for the first time in years—but it made her look haggard, and not sleek and feline, as she’d been in her youth. Her hair was quite unkempt: stringy, and not freshly colored, so that you could see the darker roots coming in. She wasn’t wearing sunglasses, as she did most everywhere these days, and so he could see that her eyes were puffy and bloodshot.
“Now, Big Mama, you haven’t been crying, have you? Over that son of a bitch? For shame!”
“No, I haven’t. Not since breakfast, anyway. And by the way, come in.”
“Dearest, I just had to tell you. I saw Pamela at lunch. I cut her dead, of course. Out of loyalty to my Big Mama! I just cut that thing dead. Dead as a doornail.”
“Were that the literal truth.” Slim, clad in an oversized man’s shirt with the initials LH embroidered on the pocket, and dungarees that hung on her, walked over to the sofa and picked up a cigarette that was burning in an ashtray.
“Oh, Slim!” Truman’s eyes filled with tears, to behold what she was reduced to. Living in a suite at the Waldorf, wearing her soon-to-be ex-husband’s clothing. It might as well have been a hair shirt.
Slim was always the most vibrant of the swans. She had such a sense of humor, such a genuine love of life. She’d traveled with him back to the Soviet Union a couple years ago, when he was thinking of writing a follow-up article to The Muses Are Heard. She’d managed to rustle up Cary Grant to come along, too. Cary Grant! Slim Hayward! Truman Capote! A merry band of travelers!
Except that Cary Grant proved to be too preoccupied with people recognizing that he was Cary Grant. If ever someone didn’t stop and do a double take at that famous puss, he’d do something to his face that somehow made the cleft in his chin even deeper, and say something very loudly in that distinctive cockney voice of his. It got so that Slim and Truman couldn’t suppress their giggles at the absurdity of it, and Cary Grant had decided to sulk the rest of the trip, until he got off the train abruptly in Finland and went back to Hollywood.
But Slim was absolutely without vanity. She didn’t care if Truman saw her first thing in the morning or last thing in the evening; she didn’t fix her makeup constantly. She wrapped herself in a fur coat and sunglasses and faced the world head-on, and she never stopped telling him stories.
And Truman, like most storytellers, enjoyed listening, almost as much as he enjoyed doing the telling.
Slim told him of the time Hemingway’s wife—the latest one, whom nobody liked—tried to drown her in a swimming pool after Papa was too openly flirtatious. She told him about her one-night stand with Frank Sinatra—“He sang when he came. Honest to God. I thought I’d die laughing but I didn’t dare. He has that Sicilian male thing going on. I had to tell him he was the best I’d ever had.” She told him about the tryouts of South Pacific, which her husband Leland had produced; how so many people told them all, very seriously, not to take it to Broadway because it was “too damn good and nobody would ever understand it.”