Capote by Gerald Clarke

a hangout where they could smoke Joe’s long, dark Cuban cigarettes; drink liquor, mostly sweet fruit brandies they had filched from their parents; and dance to jazz records. On weekends they would move their boisterous convention to the cavernous old Pickwick Theater on the Boston Post Road. Emboldened by the omnipresent sweet brandy, which they would sneak in in paper bags, they would laugh when they were expected to cry, pretend to cry when they were supposed to laugh, and vie with one another in embellishing Hollywood’s love scenes with a more amusing dialogue of their own invention. Eventually the actors themselves could not be heard above their din, and the weary ushers yet again would chase them out into the evening twilight. “We were out to shock and we did,” said Phoebe. “We were just awful. We couldn’t buy an ice cream cone without causing a riot. We were rude and intolerant, and we had perfected to the point of magnificence what the British army calls ‘dumb insolence.’ We did things partly to please ourselves and partly to set everybody else on edge. We were creative troublemakers.”
    Friday or Saturday night, they might drive to nightclubs in nearby towns, like the Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle or Aladdin’s Cave in Stamford, to dance to the music of the big bands. Truman, who was almost always short of cash, would depend on the dutiful Jaeger sisters to help pay his share of the bill; but there was one memorable occasion on which he made up for past omissions. All that day he walked the halls of Greenwich High, asking everyone he met for a penny to buy a stamp, and when they set out for Aladdin’s Cave that night, his pants were sagging from the weight. “I’ve got a surprise,” he explained mysteriously. Later, when the two sisters automatically reached for their purses, he stopped them. “This is my treat,” he announced proudly. Emptying his bulging pockets, he covered the table with a coppery mound, hundreds of his hard-earned pennies. To the sputtering waiter he said: “Just because of your rudeness we don’t care to come here again. We don’t like the people who come here, anyway.”
    It was a privileged and, to all appearances, a carefree, idyllic life Truman and his company enjoyed in those months before Pearl Harbor. Spring and summer they would swim and play tennis at the country club. Winter they would skate on the upper lake, and Mrs. Jaeger would greet them with steaming mugs of hot cocoa when they returned, cold but exhilarated, to shore. Autumn they would attend a never-ending round of parties.
    Nina herself organized one such party, a scavenger hunt, setting the example, with her usual flair in such matters, for many happy evenings to follow. “It was the Halloween of 1939,” said Howard Weber, Truman’s friend from Trinity days, who was visiting that weekend. “There was a full moon and it was a clear, crystal night, with a smell of burning leaves in the air. You had to draw a name out of a hat, and when I drew mine, Truman’s mother said, ‘Ah, you’ve got the cream of the crop!’ She was right—the name I had drawn was Phoebe’s—and off we went, shuffling through the un-raked leaves to people’s doors, asking them to loan us statues of the Venus de Milo or whatever else was on our list. When we had found what we needed, we rushed back to the Capotes’, where everybody danced, including the parents. The boys all wore coats and ties, and the girls looked sensational in their sweaters and skirts, saddle shoes, and camel’s-hair coats. We had a great time. Truman had some wonderful friends, and I was so envious I could hardly see straight to watch them having as much fun as they were.”
    They were all good friends, but Truman’s closest companion in those Greenwich years, the partner of his secret thoughts, was the girl Nina had exclaimed so over, the witty and amusing Phoebe. Truman met her at a party shortly after he arrived from New York, and once