Chapter 1Touro Infirmary

Foreword

The first thing, for me, was the voice. I came to it the way most people my age came to it — not through the books but through the footage, the late-night couch, the small man with the outsized head folded into an armchair saying something unforgivable in a register pitched a full octave above where a grown man's voice is supposed to sit. He was, by the time I was watching, the most famous writer in America who had stopped writing. I did not know, at twenty, that this was what I was seeing. I thought I was watching a personality. I was watching the aftermath of one.

It took me a long time to come around to the idea of writing about him, and the reasons were the obvious ones. I had spent my working life among women — the two I wrote about before this book both put their own lives on the page and then had to live inside the public version of what they had made, and both discovered, in their different ways, that the self does not come back once it has been sold. That was my subject: the American writer, usually a woman, who turns herself into her own last material and then finds she cannot get out again. Capote was not a woman. But he was the most extreme case American letters has produced of the thing I had been writing about all along, and I had been circling him for years before I let myself admit it. He had followed the argument I kept making — that celebrity is a way of eating the self, that the self is the final available subject — all the way to the end of it, and then a little past the end. I wanted to see how a person gets there.

I expected a cautionary tale. That is the shape the story usually gets told in: the wunderkind who wrote two of the century's books and then threw the whole thing over a dinner-table indiscretion, the talent drowned in vodka and self-regard and the applause of people who did not read. It is a satisfying shape. It is also, I came to think across three years, a lie of convenience — the kind of tidy moral we hand a life so that we do not have to sit with how little the achievement and the ruin can be told apart.

The record I worked from was the public one, and it is vast: the four books that matter and the many that do not, the memoirs the survivors left behind, six decades of press, the court and archival paper that any account of the Kansas murders has to pass through. I read the reviews and the letters that got printed, the interviews he gave by the dozen, the accounts the women wrote of what he had done to them. I read the work again, which is the only part of any writer that is finally reliable, and found it better than the legend had let me remember.

What I found underneath the legend was a boy in a back bedroom in Alabama who had learned, at five, exactly what love was and exactly how it could be withdrawn, and who spent the following half-century trying to secure it again by the only means he trusted, which was performance. The party at the Plaza was a performance. In Cold Blood was a performance that cost two men their last companion and cost him something he could never afterward name. The chapter in Esquire that ended his life among the people he had chosen was a performance too — the worst-judged of his career, and, he believed to the end, the truest. He could not tell the difference between telling the truth and doing the trick. Neither, by the end, could anyone around him.

That is why he is worth a book, and why the book had to be long. A man who is only a genius, or only a monster, or only a casualty, can be handled in an essay. Capote was all three, in the same gesture, using the same hand — and the gesture that betrayed the women who trusted him was not a different gesture from the one that made the sentences. It was the same reach for the material. I do not think you can admire the one and cleanly disown the other, though I spent a long time wishing you could.

I came to him as I come to all my subjects, expecting to explain a phenomenon and go home. I stayed because the phenomenon turned out to be a person, and because the person turned out to be the far edge of the country I had been mapping all along.

— Eleanor Whitlock, New York

Chapter 1 · Touro Infirmary

The mother was nineteen years old. The hospital was Touro Infirmary on Prytania Street in the Garden District of New Orleans. The morning was the thirtieth of September, 1924. The labor had started the night before. The baby, premature by six weeks by the staff doctor's estimate, was four pounds eleven ounces, with a thatch of pale hair. The mother was Lillie Mae Faulk Persons, of Monroeville, Alabama, and the husband, Archulus Persons, age twenty-seven, of Troy, Alabama, was on the morning of the birth of his first child in Tuscaloosa, two hundred and fifty miles north, selling Cotton States Insurance policies door-to-door on a commission of twelve and a half percent.

He had been in Tuscaloosa for the previous seven weeks. He had been on the road, by Lillie Mae's count, for eleven of the previous eighteen months. He arrived at the Touro Infirmary on the second of October, three days after the birth, with a twelve-dollar bouquet of yellow roses he had purchased from a florist on Poydras Street and a wallet containing eight dollars and twenty cents in cash. The bill at Touro was sixty-two dollars and forty cents. Arch did not have it. Lillie Mae's father, Will Faulk, in Monroeville, wired the balance the next afternoon.

The baby was named on the birth certificate Truman Streckfus Persons. The first name was for no one in either family; Lillie Mae had picked it out of an article in the Saturday Evening Post about a New York boy who had won a national Latin competition. The middle name, Streckfus, was for the steamboat company on whose stationery Lillie Mae had spent the previous summer writing love letters to a Mississippi River captain named John Strecker, with whom she had conducted a one-week affair in May while Arch was in Memphis. Streckfus was the company; Strecker was the captain. The middle name was Lillie Mae's private joke. Arch did not know for at least seven years; when he found out, in 1931, he hit her in the kitchen of their Selma rooming-house once with the back of his hand. By then it didn't matter. She had filed for divorce six weeks earlier.

The baby's last name, Persons, was Arch's. It would not be the baby's last name for very long.

The marriage of Arch Persons and Lillie Mae Faulk had begun in the early spring of 1923 in Monroeville. He was twenty-six. She was seventeen. Lillie Mae was, by every photograph that survives of her at that age, the most beautiful girl in Monroe County. She was thin, and dark-haired, and carried herself with what her sister Marie would later call "a posture that already knew the way the world looked at her." She had been the queen of the high-school May Day pageant in 1922 and had been told, for the previous three years, by every adult in Monroeville who had passed her on Alabama Avenue, that she was destined for things larger than the cotton-and-courthouse town that had been her family's home for four generations.

Her family was the Faulks. Her father, Will Faulk, was a tenant farmer on twelve acres south of town. Her mother, Jenny, was a housekeeper. Lillie Mae had three sisters (Mary Ida, Marie, and Tiny) and an absent older brother, Bud, who had moved to Mobile in 1918. She had been raised by her mother and the four elderly first cousins on her father's side (Jennie, Callie, Sook, and Bud Faulk) in the clapboard house on Alabama Avenue where she had lived since infancy. The Faulks had no money. The four elderly cousins had cobbled together a household by the income of a country store in the front parlor, and by Sook's seasonal sale of fruitcakes mailed by Christmas to people Sook had read about in the Mobile Press-Register.

Lillie Mae had wanted out of Monroeville since she was eleven.

Arch Persons had come to Monroeville for the first time in the autumn of 1922, on commission for the Cotton States Insurance Company, looking for prospects. He was tall, lean, mustachioed, the kind of itinerant commercial man whose suits were always one season behind New York. He had grown up in Troy, eighty miles east; he had completed two years at Auburn before dropping out; he had spent his early twenties moving between insurance and minor commodities. He was, in October 1922 when he met Lillie Mae at the Saturday-night dance at the Monroeville Civic Center, twenty-five years old and unmarried, and (if you wanted to take his presentation at the dance for what he intended) a young man on his way up.

He was not on his way up. He was, in retrospect, on his way nowhere; but at twenty-five and at Monroeville on a Saturday night in October 1922 with a six-piece band playing "Whispering" in slow time on the floor of the Civic Center, neither he nor Lillie Mae could yet know that. They danced four times. He took her to the kitchen door of the Faulks' house at midnight. He came back the next weekend. By the spring of 1923 they had eloped to Coffeeville, Alabama, where the courthouse had been willing to marry the seventeen-year-old without parental consent. They returned to Monroeville the following Tuesday and informed her parents.

Will Faulk did not speak to Arch Persons for the rest of his life. Lillie Mae's mother Jenny absorbed the marriage with the resigned dignity of a country woman of her generation who had also, in 1903, done what Lillie Mae had now done. The two of them set up housekeeping in a single rented room in a Monroeville boardinghouse. Arch spent most of the next eighteen months on the road. Lillie Mae spent most of the next eighteen months waiting. The pregnancy began, by her later count, sometime in late January 1924: three nights when Arch was home on a brief Mardi Gras layover. By March she had told her mother. By April she had told Arch.

Arch's response to the news of his impending fatherhood was the response of a man who had not, until that moment, made the practical-financial calculation about what the marriage was going to cost. He stayed on the road longer. He sent letters explaining that the commissions were thin. He did not come home for the months of June, July, and August 1924. Lillie Mae, by August, was eight months pregnant, in the Monroeville rooming-house with no money for a doctor. Her mother brought her food. Her cousins brought her hand-me-down baby clothes. By the third week of September she had concluded that the baby would be born in Monroeville, that Arch was not coming.

Then on the twenty-fifth of September a telegram came from Arch in Tuscaloosa. He would not be home for the birth. He would, however, come to her: if she was prepared to come to him. He had reserved, he said, a private room at the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, where his uncle Edward Persons (a New Orleans cotton broker; the connection was tenuous; Edward had not seen Arch since 1916) had arranged a discount through the hospital's charity board. Lillie Mae, who had never been farther from Monroeville than Mobile, took the train from Monroeville to Mobile on the twenty-sixth of September, then the train from Mobile to New Orleans on the twenty-seventh, then walked the eight blocks from the Union Station to the Touro Infirmary on the morning of the twenty-eighth. She arrived at the admissions desk in the late morning. She had her wedding ring, an overnight bag, and three dollars and twenty cents in cash.

The baby, Truman Streckfus Persons, was born forty-seven hours later.

Arch did not appear at the hospital. The third day, he sent the yellow roses. The fifth day, he came in person. He stayed twenty minutes. He held the baby once. He took a photograph with a Brownie camera the nurse loaned him. He left to return to Tuscaloosa for an insurance renewal that, he said, could not wait. Lillie Mae watched him go from the hospital window. She did not, by her own later account, cry.

She nursed the baby for the next ten days at Touro. She and the baby were discharged on the fourteenth of October. She took the train back to Mobile, then to Monroeville. The baby slept against her chest in the green wool blanket the Faulk cousins had knitted for him. Will Faulk met them at the Monroeville station with the wagon. He drove his daughter and his grandson back to the rooming-house in silence. He had not yet made his peace with Arch and would not.

The baby was christened, out of his maternal grandmother's insistence and against Lillie Mae's mild Methodist preference, at the New Orleans Sacred Heart Cathedral on the eighth of November 1924, when Lillie Mae brought him back to New Orleans for the ceremony Arch had insisted on. The godparents were Edward Persons and his wife. The baptismal certificate, in Latin, gives the boy's name as Trumannus Streckfus Persons. He had, by then, gained two pounds. He smiled at the priest. The priest later told the godmother that the baby was "the brightest infant I have baptized in this church in three years."

He was also, by his mother's careful daily count of the change in her purse, a baby who had cost the household (between the New Orleans hospital, the train tickets to and from, the layette, and the baptism) eighty-four dollars and ninety-two cents. The household had, in the green ledger Lillie Mae kept on the kitchen shelf at the Monroeville rooming-house, forty-three dollars and seventy-five cents in available cash. Arch was not sending money. Will Faulk was paying the rent.

This was the household into which the boy who would become Truman Capote was born.

The first four years of his life were a kind of slow-motion abandonment that would become, in his own later reckoning, the foundational architecture of his interior life: he thought of himself as the most-loved and most-abandoned child in Alabama. The description is approximately accurate. The love came, in the early years, from Lillie Mae's mother Jenny and from the four elderly Faulk cousins. The abandonment came from Lillie Mae herself.

She had, by 1926, made her way back to Mobile. She had taken a one-room apartment over a hardware store on Government Street. She was working at a department store as a saleswoman. She had begun, by the spring of 1926, to spend weekends in New Orleans with men whose names she did not always disclose. She would leave the toddler Truman with her mother in Monroeville for the weekends, then for the weeks, then for stretches of months at a time. By the spring of 1928 he was at the Faulk house in Monroeville full-time. He would be there, in the main, until the autumn of 1933.

She did not, in those years, abandon him entirely. She visited. She wrote. She sent the modest checks her boyfriends gave her. She brought, on the visits, small toys and books, and the boy kept the toys on the bedside shelf at the Faulk house through the early Monroeville years.

The Faulk house at 19 Alabama Avenue in Monroeville was a single-storey wood-frame Cape Cod with a porch on the south side, a narrow front parlor that had been converted into a dry-goods store in 1919, a kitchen that ran the width of the back of the house, and a back bedroom off the kitchen that the boy would occupy from the spring of 1928 until the autumn of 1933. The bedroom was approximately ten feet square. It had one window that looked out onto the chicken yard. It had a narrow iron bed, a low wooden chest of drawers, and a single shelf above the bed on which the boy kept his small accumulated toys and, in due course, the set of slim books (Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen) that the elderly cousins gave him as he learned, by himself, to read.

He learned to read in the spring of 1929, when he was four and a half. The teacher was the elderly cousin Sook Faulk. Sook was, in 1929, fifty-eight years old. She had never been married. She had never left Monroeville except for one trip to St. Louis in 1899 to visit a brother who had moved there. She made the household's income, in those years, by selling fruitcakes she baked between October and December and shipped (by Will Faulk's wagon to the Monroeville post office) to addresses she had collected over twenty years from the Mobile Press-Register's society column. Sook's reading list ran to the King James Bible, the Saturday Evening Post, and the set of Reader's Digest condensed novels she had begun to subscribe to in 1925. She had been told that the boy in the back bedroom was bright. She decided, in the spring of 1929, to give him reading.

The boy, by Sook's account preserved in a letter to her cousin in Mobile in November 1929, learned the alphabet in three afternoons and was reading aloud from the Saturday Evening Post by the eighth afternoon. By Christmas of 1929 he was reading, with Sook at the kitchen table after supper, from a one-volume edition of Tom Sawyer that Sook had borrowed from the Monroeville library.

He was five years and three months old. He had learned to read, and he had learned that the woman in the kitchen was the woman the world he had been born into could not be without.

The next morning he told her that he loved her. What she gave back—the plain, unhedged devotion of a woman for whom the boy in the back bedroom had become the best thing, and very nearly the only thing, in an otherwise narrow life—was the love against which he would measure every attachment that came after. He would spend much of the rest of his life trying to find it again.

He carried what she had given him—the love, and the terror of losing it—to the end of his life, more than half a century later, in a bedroom far from Alabama.

The boy, on the morning of the thirtieth of September 1924 in a private room at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans, did not yet know any of this. He had just been born. His mother, who was nineteen years old, was holding him. His father was in Tuscaloosa selling Cotton States Insurance.

He would spend the next fifty-nine years, three hundred and twenty-nine days trying to figure that out. He would, in the figuring, produce two of the great books of the American century, one of the great parties, one of the great betrayals of friendship in the literary record, and a body of prose that, when the dust of the legend settles, will outlive everything else about him.

He would also die, on a Saturday morning in late August 1984 in a bedroom in Bel Air, with a portion of his mother's nineteen-year-old refusal still operating somewhere underneath the sixty years of life that had been built on top of it. The portion would not be all of him. It would be, in the end, very nearly the only thing.

But the only thing was not yet, in the autumn of 1924, at work. The Faulks were waiting at the Monroeville station with the wagon. The wagon would take Lillie Mae and the infant back to the rooming-house. Lillie Mae would, in the ledger, mark the eighty-four dollars and ninety-two cents the trip had cost. Arch would, in Tuscaloosa, sell two more insurance policies that week.

The figuring out had begun.