It was an ambush. I knew Truman Capote loathed me, because an important part of my job as an editorial assistant at Random House was being the gatekeeper to Joe Fox, his editor there. The year was 1978. I sat at a massive steel desk in the long hall lined by the editors’ offices, facing the door to Fox’s office, which had a fine view of the East River.
I answered the phone, which involved deflecting unwanted calls by speaking the name of the person who was calling loudly enough for Fox to hear. Following his shaking head or vigorous nodding, I’d then transfer the call or take a message. When it came to Capote, my boilerplate response was that Fox was in a meeting and would call him back later.
“Don’t lie!” he’d say. “In a meeting with who?” I always told him the same thing: Random House editor in chief Jason Epstein. Epstein was probably the only person who scared Capote, since the writer was in hock to Random House for the $750,000 advance on a three-book deal that included the overdue novel Answered Prayers. He’d already missed the deadline several times.
One day, the curl of cigarette smoke rising from behind the towering pile of yellowing newspapers at one corner of his desk told me that Fox had returned from lunch before I had. That massive mound of newsprint was intended to hide him from the sight of anyone walking by at a company where open doors were an unspoken convention.
Oddly, though, the door was half closed, probably because Fox had hung his suit jacket on the hanger he kept on a peg.
Wanting to let Fox know that I’d returned from lunch, I went into his office with some letters to be signed. It was a shock to see Capote sitting on the couch in a blazer worn over a French sailor’s shirt, white canvas pants, and the same navy-blue Belgian loafers worn by so many of the women he called his “swans.”
“Thank you, Alec. I know I have a meeting in a few minutes,” said Fox, clearly desperate for their tête-à-tête to end.
“Joe, I think you should know that Alec is a slut, a cocaine slut,” Capote said. “I saw him making out with a busboy at Studio 54 last night. I think you should fire him.”
I was dumbfounded that Capote had recognized me at the nightspot. But he saw everything, even when he was drunk, which was often. I blushed, Joe blushed, and Capote went on. “And last weekend someone told me he wore a madras boxer bathing suit into Calvin Klein’s hot tub at a pool party on Fire Island!” (Everyone else was naked.)
How had he known that? It took some sleuthing to figure out that one of Andy Warhol’s assistants, a bitchy boy from Memphis who was also at the pool party, had fed my sartorial humiliation into the gossip mill of boldfaced Manhattan night owls.
Joe laughed. “Well, Truman, if that story is true, then I like Alec even more for his modesty and common sense. I need to get to work now. Alec, could you please show Truman to the elevators?”
“I really do hate you,” Capote hissed at me as the elevator doors were closing. Fox made no further reference to Capote’s outburst in his office, but it was a very, very long afternoon. The following morning, Joe handed me an envelope with 10 $10 bills. “Truman,” he’d written on its face with his black fountain pen.
“Keep this locked in your desk, Alec, and if Truman shows up in a bad way, please get him in a cab and take him back to his apartment at 860 United Nations Plaza.” At noon, Joe came out of his office to go play squash at the New York Athletic Club, a brief walk from Random House’s offices at 201 East 50th Street, just off Third Avenue. Afterward, he’d go out to his house in Sagaponack, on the East End of Long Island, for the weekend. This was his summer schedule.
“Please try and finish the Packenham manuscript by Monday, if you can,” he said, sentencing me to a long, dull weekend reading a history of the Boer War by an eminent British historian. He started to walk away, and then he turned back.
“Did you really wear a pair of bathing trunks in Calvin Klein’s hot tub?” Mortified all over again, I nodded, and he let out a whoop of laughter. “Have a good weekend, Alec,” he said, and laughed his way down the hall.
The following Friday, Joe left the office at 11:00 in order to avoid the Memorial Day weekend traffic. Most of the other editors also had houses on Long Island or somewhere in Connecticut, so the floor was thinly populated by assistants, copy editors, and publicists, who’d start drifting away around three p.m. I was typing a letter from a Dictaphone tape when the receptionist startled me with a tap on the shoulder.
“Alec, Truman Capote’s out in the reception area and won’t leave. You’d better come,” she said.
Capote pouted that he wanted to see Fox, and I told him the only way to do that would be to go to Long Island. He stomped his feet and vanished into the men’s room for 40 minutes. When he returned, I finally managed to coax him back downstairs, hoping to bundle him into a taxi and bring him home. But he ran away from me, screaming at people on 50th Street that I was trying to mug him or molest him. When I finally caught up with him, he was crying.
“I won’t go home until I’ve had a drink,” he said, which was how we ended up at an empty Irish bar with a green neon shamrock in the window on Third Avenue around four o’clock in the afternoon. When the good-looking Irish barman finished drying a glass and came to take our orders, Capote said he’d have a vodka gimlet. I ordered a club soda, and Capote exploded. “No! No! No! You’ll have a drink with me. God, you’re such a boring boy. Why on earth did Joe hire someone like you? I liked the Black boy who worked for him before you came much, much better.”
I told the bartender I’d have a gimlet, too, and when he was making my drink, our eyes met in the mirror and there was a flicker of a smile on his lips. He poured the lime cordial but put his thumb over the spout of the vodka bottle, sparing me from inebriation, and raised his eyebrows. I nodded.
“You know, I probably have the largest penis in New York City,” Capote said to the barman. “If that’s the truth, God was good to you, then, my friend,” he said with a chuckle. “Would you like to see it?” Capote asked. “No, thank you very kindly, but I worry my wife would if she had the chance.” His name was Patrick, and his good humor was unflappable.
“So what are you two fellas up to this afternoon, then?,” Patrick asked me.
“This gentleman is a very famous writer. I work as the editorial assistant to his editor, and so I was just taking him home.”
“You know, I probably have the largest penis in New York City,” Capote said to the barman.
“Alec’s trash—he’s just a bad secretary. And a slut!” Capote sipped his gimlet. “And I think he’s in love with Joe Fox, my editor. But Joe only loves me.” Patrick turned on the television on a shelf over the bar. “You boys feel like watching the game with me?” he asked.
“I hate baseball—turn that off,” snapped Capote, adding, “Why do so many Irishmen have trouble keeping an erection?”
“If you’re a Catholic, sir, I think that’s a question for your priest. Otherwise, alcohol seems to have a way of wilting ardor.”
“I’ll have another drink,” Capote said.
“I’m afraid you won’t, my friend, because I’m closing up for a few hours to go see my old mum in the hospital.”
“Can I come, too?,” Capote asked.
“I don’t think that would be so good for her health, but I’ll send her your best wishes.”
When Truman showed up at our office the following Friday, he was barefoot.
“Where are your shoes?”
“I took them off, because my feet hurt.”
“Where?”
“I’m not telling you!” he said. So I went downstairs to buy him some flip-flops from the drugstore on the corner before I began the usual arduous struggle to get him home. Inevitably, this meant a stop at the Irish bar.
“I hope you’re getting hardship pay for this, my friend,” Patrick said while Capote went to the toilet. “Does your boss know the little wordsmith’s been making a habit of pestering you on Friday afternoons?” I shook my head.
“Tell him, then! The little whiner likes coming in here with you. You’re his foil, because you’re so polite. He’s not going to let you go, unless you put an end to it,” said Patrick. He was right, but I never did. Being Capote’s occasional minder was part of my job.
Fox knew what was going on, though, because I burned through the first hundred dollars he gave me pretty quickly, and since I was so meagerly paid, I could never have spotted a couple of round of drinks out of my own salary. I had to ask for more money. When I did, Fox shook his head but said nothing.
On a sweltering afternoon just before Labor Day, Capote made a confession. “I love Joe Fox! I really do!” he snorted, and burst into tears. “Do you think he likes me?”
“I think he admires your writing enormously,” I replied.
“But does he like me?”
“I think he’s fond of you.”
“Fond?! The hell with fond! Fuck fond! I want him to love me!” he sobbed, throwing his arms around me.
After Labor Day weekend, Capote must have gone away somewhere, because to my enormous relief his Friday-afternoon visits stopped.
In the end, I liked him almost as much as I loathed him, because that’s the kind of man he was. Capote was deeply endearing at the same time that he insisted on smiting the world around him with his own self-loathing.
Then, one afternoon before Christmas, I ran into him again in Random House’s lobby. I knew he had a lunch date with Joe Fox, because I’d made the reservation at Quo Vadis.
“Alec!” he said. “I’ve really missed you!”
“I’ve missed you, too, Truman. Have a nice lunch.”
Alexander Lobrano is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. His latest book is the gastronomic coming-of-age story My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris