A few of them did try LSD, at their therapists’ urging. For a while it was the thing to do—go to a party, drop some acid, lie on velvet pillows staring at the ceiling, waiting to be told the secrets of the universe. But the next morning was always hell, and the ladies didn’t like what it was doing to their skin, so they stopped.
Truman didn’t, however. Truman, in the years after In Cold Blood, the fabulous ball, the apex of his fame, grew puffier, less disciplined. Slept later, roamed pockets of the city he’d never roamed before, brought home men he’d never have looked at before. None of his swans ever figured out exactly what happened between him and Jack. They only knew that the relationship no longer involved sex—Truman was more than happy to let them know that, anyway! And they all found, to their surprise, that they missed Jack, that gruff, humorless, rude-to-the-point-of-insanity man (after all, he’d once told Loel Guinness that he was a Nazi, and while everyone knew this to be true of both Guinnesses, no one had ever said it to their faces!). But they all recognized the steady, no-nonsense influence Jack had had on Truman; he was the ballast to Truman’s airy sails. While they were still somehow in each other’s lives—they still took vacations together, to Verbier, Switzerland, to their twin houses on Long Island—it wasn’t the same as before. Truman was different, because of it. More unstable; some said untrustworthy, at least when they were outside of Babe’s hearing.
But Gloria and Babe and Marella and Slim and Pam weren’t any different. They held on—clung—to their disciplined lives, their shared belief that sophistication and elegance counted for something; counted for everything, in their world. Their clothes might have changed some; Gloria was one of the first to introduce the Pucci pantsuit into society, and Babe’s skirts grew imperceptibly shorter. They all flocked to Halston, their former millinery magician at Bergdorf’s, when he opened his own salon and introduced long, flowing, caftanlike dresses made of jersey, sometimes one-shouldered, sometimes halter-backed. Still tasteful, but smacking, slightly, of the younger fashions.
They clung to their former hairstyles with strange devotion; if their skirts were looser, no longer requiring girdles (although of course, they still wore them), then their hair remained rigid, unyielding. Not for them the long, stringy styles of the flower children or the precision boy cuts introduced by Vidal Sassoon. They still looked forward to their twice-weekly visits to Kenneth’s, depended on them, really; found refuge in the soothing music, teacups, champagne flutes, stylists still clad in the suits and ties that Kenneth himself wore. They were pampered, but, more important, they were prized, still. In the reliable townhouse in which few young women would be seen, the Babes and Marellas and Glorias of Manhattan still found themselves desired, and desirable. And so they retained the kind of hairstyles that required setting, hairspray, sleeping in a hair net or curlers every night. Hairstyles that, unlike the rest of Manhattan, were impervious to the winds of change.
But Truman, oh, Truman. How he changed! How he adopted the fashions, tragically, of the youth movement (he never wore love beads, but, good God, those caftanlike suits he wore! The Nehru jackets!). The feuds he got into! Of course, he and Gore Vidal had never liked each other, but now they were actually engaged in a lawsuit (Truman repeating a story he insisted that Gore had told him, of Bobby Kennedy decking Gore in the White House; Gore was suing for libel). And he’d always had a love/hate relationship with Norman Mailer, which devolved into hatred, pure and true, when Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Armies of the Night—awards that Truman hadn’t won for In Cold Blood. So Truman accused Mailer of ripping him off, of doing what Capote had done first, and more brilliantly; of writing another “nonfiction novel.”
And the things he’d said about Jackie Susann! That the Valley of the Dolls author was a truck driver in drag—even if he had a point, it was a vicious thing to say. Especially on The Tonight Show.
Truman. On The Tonight Show. Talking to Johnny Carson on the West Coast, Dick Cavett on the East. Truman had gone Hollywood, of all things. Truman had gone global; he was everywhere and nowhere, peripatetic. He was in Rome, he was in Switzerland, he was in Palm Springs, he was in Venice. He was on the cover of Time, he was writing articles for Rolling Stone. He was dropping acid with The Who.
What he wasn’t doing, as far as anyone could tell, was writing his next book.
“So what are you writing next?” asked Johnny, asked Dick, asked the world.
“It’s brilliant. My masterpiece, called Answered Prayers, after that saying by Saint Teresa of Avila—‘There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.’ Isn’t that brilliant! It’s going to be a darkly comic observation of society, real society. I’ve had a first-class seat to it all, and darlings, the things I’ve seen! I’m a modern-day Proust.”