In spring 1983, I was living in New York, failing to become a great Anglo-American novelist.
A local friend had worked as a secretary to the author John Cheever, who had died a year earlier. Now he, the friend, was organising an informal wake at a bar across town called The Guardsman, where the deceased had often come to linger of an evening.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived was a middle-aged man seated on a high stool at a table in the middle of the room, his tiny legs dangling down short of the floor. He was wearing rumpled grey trousers and what looked suspiciously like a blue crested school blazer. Five or six young people were standing attentively around him.
‘Truman,’ my friend hissed in my ear, as if the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s might not be instantly familiar. It was Capote all right: diminutive, sallow-faced, such hair as remained a sort of cornfield- blond stubble, pink-framed sunglasses, the trademark singsong voice. He smelled a bit musty, but with a patchy application of dynamite-strength cologne.
The great man and I had just one direct exchange. After a bit, he asked me my name and occupation, and when I mumbled the word ‘writer’, he said, ‘Oh?’ and enquired what I was working on.
‘Not much’ was the truthful answer, but I got up the nerve to mention the late Charlie Chaplin, who I always thought would make a good subject for a true-life novel of the sort Capote had practically invented in In Cold Blood. It was a bit like telling Mozart about the little piece you were larking about with on your piano.
Capote listened politely, and then began a long and magnificently obscene story about ‘my friend Charlie’ which concluded with an account of how, a few years earlier, a pair of feckless Bulgarian auto mechanics-turned-grave robbers had removed Chaplin’s body from its resting place in a Swiss cemetery in a bid to extort money from his family for its return.
‘Poor Charlie must have smelled worse than Gore Vidal by then,’ said Capote.
Capote himself died a year later, at 59. Vidal, unable to restrain his glee at the news, called his death ‘a wise career move’.
Some months later, I was again thinking of the strange tale of Chaplin’s exhumation when it was reported that Capote’s own ashes had briefly been stolen. After that, they were put up at public auction and sold for $44,000 to an anonymous bidder.
The Southern Gothic writer in him would have been sardonically amused by the idea of complete strangers competing to own his mortal remains. Before he left the bar that night, Capote had unexpectedly given me a phone number, and invited me to call. I’d been told he could be a bit erratic in his behaviour by then, and that he suffered from nerves.
On 4th July 1983, I rang the number he’d given me, hoping to talk to him further about Chaplin. The instant he picked up his phone in Los Angeles, my upstairs neighbour in New York set off a deafening firework display to celebrate America’s independence.
Capote immediately hung up, and we never spoke again.
