Table 2 - Where the Swells Sit chapter 2

My funeral was not as well attended, as it should have been. Bad timing really. What a difference a decade makes, actually twenty-two years, I’m so used to shaving years off my birth date I shave them off my death date automatically.
Now I have fans, all of us do, the beautiful Babe Paley, the sophisticated Gloria Guinness, that whore Pamela Harriman and even little bad girl Brahmin C.Z.Guest. Vogue actually did a story on her original style. Hah! What was original about her style she stole from me. The rest was just laziness remembered as intentional. She had the good fortune to live just long enough for people to notice.
If I died today it would be a media event, gay and straight designers – are there any decent straight designers really, certainly not any male ones – would be genuflecting at my coffin. Perhaps they would even have bothered to discover the truth of my death.
In retrospect, I wouldn’t have settled for that ghastly couch my daughter Cecily picked for me to be buried in. I shouldn’t have left the choice up to her; poor thing’s always been so fragile I wanted to empower her. Babe was the clever one; she left nothing to chance, not even her own funeral. The one day she could be guaranteed off from being ‘Babe Paley’ and still, she orchestrated it. Do you know she not only left all the details in order, including guest list and instructions for the eulogy co-authored by Betsy and yours truly, she actually penned two menus for her funeral lunch, one for fall/winter the other for spring/summer?
‘A beacon of perfection in an era of casual convenience,” That’s what Babe’s sister Betsy Whitney and I wrote. So true, and utterly beside the point. We meant it kindly, the ultimate tribute – instead it was a life sentence. Bill was her warden. His demands, his standards, his liaisons – I was only one of many – cancer killed her, but despair was the penultimate villain. The Times did a better job by her “…a gracious woman with a ready and warm smile. Her friends readily noted her sense of humor, enthusiasm and thoughtfulness.” Now, why didn’t we write that, we were the friends that readily noted her kindnesses. We loved her. In many ways, we did her as great a disservice as Truman. No I take that back, nobody did her as great a disserve as Truman Capote.
A pine box, I should have expressly asked for a pine box. Sets the tone - a good quality pine - but pine nonetheless, austere, self-effacing perhaps, and utterly irreverent. Especially now that I know that death doesn’t hurt, and tufted cushions are completely superfluous. Especially pink, polyester satin ones – really what was Cecily thinking? I loathe pink.
That’s exactly what she was thinking: Mother loathes pink. She was still completely pissed off at me. I died in the summer of 1983 at the age 66. Another decade would have made all the difference. The public rediscovered Truman’s swans and our legendary charm in the ‘90s. There would have been legions of fans at my funeral in the 90’s.
With all that therapy Cecily has since squandered her inheritance on – my ill-gotten gains - she would now be emotionally ready to lay me to rest in a more becoming fashion. She’d have to, since she’s traded on my name to become this generation’s, generation X or is it Y now - who knows - a perfectly ridiculous thing to call a generation anyway, utterly unromantic or telling. The Lost Generation, now that’s a tasty label. However, I’m digressing; Cecily has become the home decorator, in the manner of Sister Parish or Billy Baldwin, for Manhattan’s moneyed. She would now do something graceful, understated and a touch provocative. Not just something effusive and impressive, reminiscent of the Gambino crime family.
My murder on the other hand was exquisite.
Elegant and well-planned, it remains undetected. I don’t even blame my grim reaper for ending my life, I suffered no pain, he saw to that. It might have been revenge, but he wasn’t vengeful. And truly by the time he slipped into my apartment my body was barely sputtering.
I designed a lovely bathroom, white. Arctic snow. A pure, clean gray white. Imagine white absent of warmth, completely tiled – even the ceiling – if my maid Marta cursed the grout once if she cursed it a thousand times. If we create our own heaven – I’m still not sure – then we create our own hell too. Marta’s hell is a room with endless white tiles and endless grout.
They found me on my bathroom floor, arranged on the oversized terrycloth bath mat. Truman was the one who called for help. He popped by to bring me a present, one of his famous snakebite kits. Accidental overdose, the coroner deemed it. No surprise really, considering all the meds I was on, and of course, I was a lavish drunk, nobody denied that. Truman was questioned of course. Our falling out was famous. But he easily proved we’d started up a friendship again, ‘made our peace.’ I had visited his apartment in recent years, as his doorman later attested.
Tru created hundreds of these snakebite kits, and gave them to the significant in his life. He covered each box with bits of colored and metallic paper. Very clever things – some astonishingly pretty. He glued images he snipped from magazines and newspapers or even art books - he was terribly irreverent about his books, odd for a writer. Sort of cannibalistic. Tru considered this gift an honor. Mine was covered in yellow paste stones and jet beads.
Post-death I’m simply delighted with how pre-occupied people are with me, how my name has become an adjective for American style. ‘The original California girl,’ that’s what they call me. America needs us now more than ever, icons to her industry and self-importance. Proof that all that glitters is gold – high-end, high-brow and precious. We weren’t exactly Grande dames, but we sure as hell were great dames. Even that Harriman whore, she wasn’t American of course, though she did manage to win the American Ambassadorship to France. With her talents she assimilated quickly – tea and fellatio. It’s all in the steeping I understand.
I don’t see Pamela Harriman here, but I know she must be. The space is quite white, noticeably white, not eggshell or ivory, but stark, high noon white. Which is strange, because I’d always envisioned Hell red, however, the white is more disturbing, even suffocating. I can see nothing else. I wonder how long I will be here. I expected I’d run into all sorts of folks in the afterlife. Kind of like a gauzy Piccadilly Circus or Gare St. Lazare, where you eventually run into everyone you know. Perhaps they are all here, maybe my version of hell is being alone – Christ, I hope I was more complicated than that. Yes, I take the Lord’s name in vain whenever I want to now. I’m kind of like one of those Scottish Covenanters who believes because of predestination that whatever act they commit is okay because they are either chosen by God to be saved or going to Hell anyway.
Have you noticed something does not have to be true for most people to believe it? It doesn’t even have to be an outright lie; it just has to capture the imagination. I learned that in my life – imagination is more important than truth. Profound? Sorry, philosophy isn’t really my forte. Nothing is, at least nothing you could name.
I did nothing to earn the privileges of fame or fortune – nothing real except capture people’s imagination – but I’ll be remembered anyway. A fair comment on the 20th century really.
I wasn’t the most attractive – that would be Babe – though I was pretty damn gorgeous. 5’9” (at death I measured 5’7” – too much bourbon, not enough Goddamn milk), skinny, skinny, skinny, with legs like muscled straws and brush loads of gold-colored hair marked by a platinum skunk-stripe right in the front, around my face. That skunk stripe was my claim to fame, completely natural, at least initially. Bazaar editor Carmel Snow rhapsodized about it, and my ability to wear clothes well. But as any mannequin will tell you, that gift has little to do with mythical style and everything to do with long, visible bones.
I would hate to be a young woman right now, too exhausting. All that jabber about having it all or not having it all. Terribly unattractive. Why should the ‘all’ involve a work ethic? Tiresome feminists. Anybody can work. It takes a lot of personal style to avoid it. Being interesting is a far greater accomplishment than reading a balance sheet. Who wants to talk about balance sheets? The only things worth talking about are people and art, after that it’s just administration.
I’ve been damn lucky. I met most of the celebrated folks of the century. Those I didn’t meet were either pricks or abstainers. Not that I minded the pricks, long as they were lively. Abstainers, however, I have no use for.
I just can’t figure out whom they are abstaining for? God? How enormously arrogant to assume God is watching their petty little sacrifices. Banal goodness seems both smug and fearful. God people in general strike me as a nasty lot, loving thy neighbor’s dirty little undies. I’m pretty sure they don’t meet St. Peter either. Then again, I didn’t get to meet him. Hell, unlike Walmart has no greeters. Otherwise I suspect there are similarities.
God-people and I parted ways when I was a child. I discovered their ever-ready bromides offered little comfort for real pain.
That being said, you should have a sense of where I came from – if only so you can be suitably impressed by where I went.
Why now? Why tell you about me twenty-two years later? Because you don’t know me really and you should. You want to. Your need to know me is why there are two, not one, but two Truman Capote films out. It’s why lovely buttery leather gloves are back in fashion for daytime, why brooches and garnets are enjoying a renaissance. It’s why my friend, society photographer Slim Aarons, that lanky, tall drink of water, re-released his book A Wonderful Life, a collection of photographs of the beautiful people from six decades and was able to sell it for $75. Seventy-five dollars. Outrageous. In 1948 Clark Gable filled my hotel room with flowers for $10; took me to a scrumptious dinner in New York City that I, of course would never finish, for $2.50; successfully seduced me in his full-floor terraced apartment at 57th and Park rented for a mere $63 a month.
Up until now I have been only a footnote in Truman Capote’s life story. Now I want him for a footnote to mine. My name is Abigail Gross Hayden Marcus, but you can call me Sunny.