“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.”
One time, the two of them had gotten very drunk and decided to call Babe, long distance, and tell her something shocking, something very un-Babe-like; they’d asked the operator for the trunk line, waited for the connection—drinking vodka shots all the while—and when Babe finally was on the other end, Slim had slurred a lurid little tale about having her period while having sex one time, and how horrified the man was, and then Slim started giggling so hard she was suddenly crying, so that Truman took the phone and told a shocked Babe that Slim must be on her period now, the poor baby, so please forgive her and kiss kiss, Bobolink, you’re my one and only and I miss you!
And then he hung up and begged Slim to tell him the story again.
Slim had been on top of the world then. Secure enough in her marriage to leave her husband at home while she traveled. Stupid enough to believe that she could have an affair or two—and tell him about it, the fatal mistake, and one that he, Truman, had begged her not to make—and believe that it wouldn’t matter. She took off soon after for another trip, this time to Italy with Betty Bacall. More drunken phone calls to friends in the middle of the night, but nobody minded, because it was Slim! And she was keeping Betty company, making her laugh, which she needed, since Bogie had so recently died.
But that Italian trip was when it happened. And now, look at her.
“Darling Slim, I just want to carry you around in my pocket all the time and take care of you. I have a wonderful idea! Let’s make something up about Pamela and start spreading it around! I could make up some dreadful disease or something!”
“How about the clap?”
“Perfect!”
Slim smiled wanly. But then she turned her head away, and Truman knew she was crying.
“Babe is devastated, of course. You know that, right?”
“Yes, yes. Babe comes here every day. She cleans up, has food delivered, makes sure I bathe. She invites me to Kiluna every weekend, said I could stay at Round Hill, in Jamaica, anytime I want. Babe is, well—Babe. The kindest friend I’ve ever had. And I don’t deserve her.”
“So you don’t blame her?”