Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (59 page)

She found him sexually appealing, even though he was not handsome, but rather, short, round, and bespectacled. He had dark hair slicked back, and could have been a boxer, as he had a thick neck, powerful chest, and muscular arms.

The bookseller and literary archivist, Andreas Brown, later wrote that “Lillie Mae was a great Southern beauty, by the standards of her day. She stood five feet, with dark blonde hair.” Brown considered her “a bubblehead—irresponsible, childlike, a case of arrested development.”

She won a small beauty pageant sponsored by Lux. In later years, her son would exaggerate this contest, saying that, “My mother became Miss America,” although that claim could quickly be disproven.

Marie Faulk Rudisill, Truman’s aunt, later claimed that “Lillie Mae was so anxious to leave home that she married the first thing in pants that came along, jiggling a few coins in his pocket.”

Lille Mae and Arch were married on August 23, 1923.

Almost from the beginning, the marriage was a disaster. It turned out that Arch had only enough money to provide for them for a week’s honeymoon in a seedy boarding house near Gulfport, Mississippi, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. After a miserable week, Lillie Mae was dumped back at the Faulk homestead in Monroeville as Arch set out on the road again as a salesman.

Lillie Mae wanted to get an annulment, but as weeks of indecision dragged by, she discovered she was pregnant. She wanted to abort her future son, but in Monroeville in 1924, pregnancies weren’t easily terminated. “I was forced to have Arch’s child,” she later said. At no point did she ever call Truman “my child.”

On an autumn morning deep in the heart of Dixie, Truman Streckfus Persons was born an unwanted child on September 30, 1924.

Lillie didn’t want him, but found the Faulk relatives willing to look after the child. The young boy was virtually adopted by his distant cousin, Nanny Rumbley Faulk, whom he called “Sook.”

In his story,
A Christmas Memory
(1956), he described her: “Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind.”

As he grew up, his best pal was Harper Lee, a neighbor. In
To Kill a Mockingbird
, her megaseller of a novel, she provided a portrait of Truman as her character of “Dill Harris.”

“
He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like dandruff. As he told us an old tale, his blue eyes would lighten and darken; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead. We came to know him as a pocket of Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”

Truman reciprocated Harper Lee’s creation of Dill Harris with the character of Idabel in
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, as inspired by Harper.

The young boy’s days with his parents were numbered. They stashed him in hotel rooms when they went off separately pursuing other affairs. “Sometimes, I would scream until I finally fell asleep exhausted,” Truman said. “I was constantly afraid of abandonment, which did come eventually.”

“My marriage to Truman’s father lasted in reality, not years, but as long as a plucked wildflower,” Lillie Mae recalled. Later, in New York, she confided to friends that she had an estimated three dozen affairs during the course of her seven-year marriage. “It’s always exciting when a man first drops his shorts,” she said. “You never know what’s in store for you: A small cucumber pickle or a huge carrot.”

Her brother-in-law, John Persons, claimed that Lillie Mae specialized in “Greeks, Spiks, college sheiks wearing raccoon coats, and football players. She later preferred famous men, especially movie actors.”

Her first famous big name conquest was one of the most celebrated men in America, the charismatic boxer, Jack Dempsey, a cultural icon of the 1920s who held the World Heavyweight Championship from 1919 to 1926. His aggressive style and exceptional punching power made him one of the most popular sports figures in history.

Lillie Mae was sitting with her young son when Dempsey walked down the aisle of a train traveling between Memphis and St. Louis. He struck up a conversation with her and invited her for a drink in his compartment. She carried Truman with her. Once inside the compartment, Dempsey told his manager to take the young boy to the Observation Car for a Coca-Cola. For three hours, the manager acted as babysitter for Truman, until Dempsey finally came for them.

Before Dempsey parted with Lillie Mae, they made some sort of arrangement to keep in touch as a means of continuing their affair in some other city.

Somehow, Arch found out about this arrangement. Far from being angry, he interpreted his wife’s friendship with Dempsey as a major commercial opportunity for him. He got her to persuade the boxer to appear as the featured VIP at Jack Dempsey Day in Columbus, Mississippi—a wrestling event Arch both organized and aggressively promoted. In the days leading up to the event some 12,000 tickets were reserved in the wake of a massive publicity furor. Extra wooden stands had to be constructed to hold the capacity crowds.

On the day of the event itself, only 3,000 spectators showed up because Columbus was hit that day with one of the worst storms in its history. Arch lost a lot of money and had to flee from his creditors.

One summer evening in 1925, Lillie Mae found herself in New Orleans, staying overnight at the Monteleone Hotel. That night, she met Joseph Garcia Capote, a former colonel in the Spanish Army during the Spanish-American War. Beginning in 1894, he had been stationed in Cuba, defending the interests of the Kingdom of Spain. One of the most dramatic highlights of his military career had involved his unit’s armed conflict against Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Battle of San Juan Hill.
[This, the bloodiest and most decisive battle of the Spanish American War, occurred on July 1, 1898, a short distance south of Santiago, Cuba.]

He spent the night in her bedroom, departing the next morning. They agreed to keep in touch by writing letters. Later, after migrating to New York, he obtained a good-paying job as the office manager of a respected textile-brokerage firm, Taylor, Clapp, & Beall. There, he met a beautiful secretary, fell in love with her, and married her. Despite that encumbrance, he continued writing letters to Lillie Mae, promising, “We’ll get together again if you ever visit New York.”