Such Good Friends

by Stephen Greco

Genres: Friendship; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Fans of Capote and the era of Camelot should be delighted." —Shana Abé, New York Times bestselling author of The Second Mrs. Astor



A must-read for fans of Truman Capote and Jackie Kennedy, this star-studded, evocative novel revels in the glamor, gossip, and casual betrayal of 1960s and '70s high society New York and the socialite "swans" that ruled this scandalous world.



On a Thursday morning in May 1961, a well-mannered twenty-one-year-old named Marlene enters the Fifth Avenue apartment of Lee Radziwill to interview for the position of housekeeper and cook. The stylish wife of London-based Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, Princess Lee is intelligent and creative, with ambitions beyond simply jet-setting. But to the public, she is always First Lady Jackie Kennedy's little sister.



As Marlene becomes a trusted presence in the Radziwill household, she observes the dazzling array of famous figures who flit in and out of Lee’s intimate circle, including Gloria Vanderbilt, Rudolf Nureyev, Jackie and the President, Ari Onassis, Gore Vidal, Andy Warhol, and, most regularly, celebrated author Truman Capote. At the height of his fame following the success of Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman has granted Lee place of honor in his flock of glamorous socialite "swans."



Their closeness stems from an unexpected kinship. Both know too well the feeling of being second-best. Seeing his shadow in the woman he refers to as his most unconventional swan, Truman uses his influence and talent to try and make Lee a star.



Their bond deepens through the decade’s extraordinary events, from JFK's assassination to the era-defining Black and White Ball. But Marlene, who Truman has taken under his wing as an aspiring writer, can see Truman's darker side—especially his penchant for mining his friends' private lives for material. And there are betrayals on either side that may signal the end not just of a friendship, but of the shared expectation that wealth and fame can shield against every heartbreak.

Release date: May 23, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 480

Sample

My flight had been delayed. There was a mix-up over my seat assignment. My hip was acting up. But my friend Judy met me at JFK with a hired town car, which I thought a terribly sweet thing to do, and so typical of her. She was standing at the gate as I exited the baggage claim area: a perfectly put-together, upper-middle-class New York lady in her youngish-looking seventies, in a navy wool pea jacket and a pair of tidy jeans; her shoulder-length hair, which she kept dark, tucked into a youthful-looking, white cashmere beanie. It was almost the same look that her late mom, Sandy, might have been sporting thirty years before, on a similar errand, except that Sandy would also have been carrying a poppy-orange Hermès Kelly bag with an Hermès equestrian scarf tied around the handle.

“Oooh, welcome, welcome,” said Judy as we hugged.

“Hello, hello,” I said.

“Is that all you have?”

I was carrying a briefcase and pulling a small spinner-wheel suitcase.

“I travel light,” I said.

“Good flight?”

I made a cheery-grim face.

“Like a long MRI,” I said.

We headed for the terminal doors, comparing the February weather in New York with that in West Palm Beach, where I have lived since retirement.

“The last few days have been a bit gray,” said Judy.

“Perfect for a requiem mass, no?” I said.

“I’m so sorry, Mar. I know how much she meant to you.”

Judy and I had known each other for decades, since she was eighteen and I was nineteen, living in her family’s home for a couple of years as the paid companion of her grandmother, a Park Avenue blue blood. Then we remained in touch after her grandmother went into a nursing home and Judy’s mother recommended me for a staff position in the home of a friend of hers, Lee Radziwill—a position I held for fifty-five years. It was Lee’s funeral bringing me back to New York, as Lee had become one of the two people in my life who were closest to being friends, souls I cared about greatly and who cared about me in some way—the other soul being Lee’s former best friend Truman Capote, who had died thirty-five years before.

Outside the terminal, a security guard showed us where to cross the lanes of slow-moving traffic, to the pick-up zone where a black Lincoln SUV was waiting at the curb. The driver took my bag and stowed it in the tailgate, while Judy and I installed ourselves in the back seat. A tiny bar featured champagne, mineral water, and an assortment of sweet and salty snacks, none of which I had much stomach for.

“I wish you were staying with us,” burbled Judy. “Our guest room is always there for you.”

“I didn’t want to bother you so soon after the wedding,” I said.

“Burt is dying to meet you.”

Judy had lost her first husband, John, two years before, after nearly fifty years of marriage.

“He’s a lawyer?” I said.

“Another lawyer, yes,” said Judy. “Go figure.”

“How did you meet?”

“At a Philharmonic fundraiser.”

Some women don’t remarry at our age, but I wasn’t surprised when Judy did. She seems to have a knack for domestic happiness, which I have always envied. I never married; my own family was a disaster, which is probably why, throughout the years, I’ve been so grateful to be included in the warmth of Judy’s family. Actually, maybe Judy’s knack is more specifically for mothering, which she undoubtedly learned from a loving mother and grandmother. It is a gift, this kind of motherliness, mystifying to someone like me, who’d had a rotten relationship with my own mother—though I have to admit that this gift can be shockingly lovely to see in action, as it was in so many tender moments I witnessed between Lee and her children, and between Lee’s sister, Jackie, and hers. Except for Judy, I have benefited little, myself, from this supposedly essential life force, yet I have come through well enough. Good mothering is apparently not like food, water, and air. It’s something you can live with or without.

“You seem very happy,” I said.

“Burt is wonderful,” said Judy. “You’ll see. Though no one replaces the man you’ve spent a lifetime with.”

She said this with a little exhalation that was almost a laugh. She has always had this way of half-smiling when making assertions—as if reflexively meaning to entertain and apologize at the same time.

“Some women wouldn’t dive in again,” I said. “Good for you.”

I liked John and had thought him good for Judy since the day I met him, at a Washington Square Art Show, in the early ’60s. I was probably one of the few people left, other than her children, with whom Judy could reminisce about him.

“He used to lecture us about Rauschenberg and Johns—remember?” she said. “He could be a bit pompous, but I was so impressed.”

“Do you still have Marilyn?”

“The Warhol? Of course! You wouldn’t believe what Kelly says it’s worth now.”

Sunday morning traffic was light. As the car sailed toward the Belt Parkway, heading ultimately for my hotel located only a few blocks from Judy’s Upper East Side apartment, she and I caught up on the current events of our lives. Her new husband was a retired copyright lawyer, who was now investing in start-up ventures focused on cultural content. Judy’s son James, a psychology professor, had been granted tenure at Yale, and her daughter Kelly, an auctioneer at Christie’s, had just sold an Ingres drawing for a record sum. My news was less momentous, but Judy listened with characteristic pride and delight when I told her about the writing classes I have been teaching and the recent publication of a short story of mine in a literary journal. The latter led the conversation in a direction I hadn’t expected.

“So exciting, to be a writer,” said Judy. “But then, you had Truman as your mentor.”

“I did, indeed,” I said. “And I learned so much. I wanted to be like him. Though of course at a certain point, you have to find yourself and write like that.”

“Interesting you say that, Mar. Tell me, do you think our stories make us who we are?”

It was an oddly philosophical question for an airport pick-up ride.

“How do you mean?” I said.

“Our stories, the histories we carry around—how important do you think they are? They are important, aren’t they?”

“Well . . . of course.”

“I mean, I know they are.”

Though Judy knows that I’ve met several famous writers in my lifetime, we’d never talked seriously about the principles and craft of writing.

“Judy, are you in a class or something?” I said. “If this is for an exercise, I’d be happy to help, but . . .”

“No, no, I’ve just been thinking.”

“Okay.”

“We’re both in our seventies now . . .”

“Are we?”

She laughed at my attempt to make light of the moment, but I saw that she had something to say.

“Listen, I don’t mean to be coy,” she said. “I want to share something with you—something that I don’t think you know, that I should have told you a long time ago, except that Mother and Granny said I shouldn’t. Only now that Mother’s gone . . .”

“Uh-oh.”

Was Judy a lesbian? That would be a neat surprise.

“No, it’s nothing scary or anything like that,” she said. “It’s just about my mother finding you that job.”

Had Lee been pressured to take me on or something? That was unlikely and, moreover, of no consequence now.

Judy and I have both led such conventional lives—me, a self-declared orphan who’d come through violence and wound up in domestic service; Judy, an upper-middle-class daughter and then wife; both of us circumscribed by basically the same set of cultural rules. Flashing back over the innocuous coffees and lunches that comprised the almost sixty years of our friendship, I doubted that Judy had anything of a skeleton-in-the-closet nature to divulge. It was probably just a nice story about her grandmother’s final days at Shady Hill. Still, at that moment, I suddenly felt resistant. I’d been up early for my flight. I needed coffee. I was preoccupied with the funeral. If it were an historical footnote that Judy wanted to share, surely it could wait until the dinner we’d planned for two days hence.

“Sure,” I said. “But maybe not right this very second? Can it keep until Tuesday?”

“No, no—sure, that’s fine,” said Judy. “You know me. I’m just a little . . .” She made a hand gesture that I believe translates as “impulsively high-spirited.”

They say we tell ourselves stories in order to live. But that’s not quite the full picture, is it? Surely it’s better if the stories are accurate and complete. What I learned two days later, at dinner with Judy and Burt, was that I had reached the age of seventy-eight without knowing an important detail of my own story—a plot point, you might say, that once radically altered the flow of events in my life, that now puts a slightly different cast on my voice as a narrator and may influence the events unfolding as my narrative heads toward a close.

It had been ages since I’d last seen New York. I had returned only once since retiring in ’05, to help Lee for a few days on the occasion of her being interviewed by Sofia Coppola for The New York Times—shot on video in Lee’s Lexington Avenue apartment, with a small complement of light and sound people for whom we provided coffee, lunch, and snacks. I saw Judy then, too—stayed with her and John—but otherwise, there was nothing else to bring me back. I have no family or other friends, really. Lee and I had remained in touch with a note now and then, and I knew that she’d been ill recently. And I wept a little when I heard on the news that “one of the world’s most glamorous socialites” had died, thinking of all the kindness she showed me over the years, despite the ups and downs of her own life. I knew the funeral would be private, so I was surprised when Carole, Lee’s daughter-in-law, called to see if I would be able to attend. Frankly, I was half-expecting Carole to ask if I would supervise the catering; but she was more gracious than I’m afraid I give her credit for.

The hotel I’d chosen for the visit was the Lowell, on East 63rd. I was staying for three nights, so that on the day after the funeral, I could meet with the producer who had shown interest in the pages I’d sent her and have an early dinner with Judy. Once installed in my room, I unpacked and hung up my black wool-crepe pants suit, which had a minimum of wrinkles because I always pack with layers of stiff paper, as Lee did. It was a bit of a splurge to stay at such an expensive place, but I can afford it, and I wanted to feel more than comfortable. After all this time away from New York, settled into the torpor of life in West Palm Beach, I wanted to feel protected from any assault by the city’s more hectic energy. Truman used to remind me that “this glamorous city of ours” was also a “voluptuous opponent.” Yet that fear of assault began dissolving into excitement, even on the ride into the city from the airport with Judy, on the expressway that runs along the bay, when we rounded a curve and I caught the first glimpse across the water of Manhattan’s skyline, spiky with some of the new towers I’d read about—a next New York that had been constantly evolving, but which for me, away for fourteen years, was the sudden future. Even the Lowell, which I remembered as respectable but sleepy, now quietly embodied some fashion-forward fizz, the result of a recent overhaul that a conscientious bellboy in wire-rim glasses explained “takes the best of the traditional into the future . . .”

Lee was all about the next—in style and culture, certainly, but also in her search for fulfilling personal occupations. For a while, back in the early ’80s, she was working away at interior design and even created a few hotel rooms herself, when she was seeing that charming real estate man that she was engaged to for a while, Newton Cope. I remember she said the rooms were meant to be pretty, but also to be based on “historical styles and ideas, not notions.” There was no such style as “Orientalist,” she insisted; that term was too imprecise. Instead, there was Persian, there was Mughal, there was Colonial Moroccan, and so on. She used to show me the sketches she was working with, the mood boards she was creating with chips of color and swatches of fabric. I learned so much from Lee about décor and the arts—about everything!—though her rooms turned out to be too expensive to maintain in a hotel’s punishing daily service. She told me later she hadn’t understood that hotel rooms had to be engineered as much as designed. She had simply been trying to follow the philosophy of her great friend, the architect and decorator Renzo Mongiardino, who had done her homes in England—Buckingham Place, in London, and Turville Grange, in the country. “Renzo always said he wanted to make his clients feel at home in the world,” she told me once. “Isn’t that a lovely idea—‘at home in the world’? A room should be comfortable, of course, but he thought it should tell you something about the world, even about history—news about why life was so marvelous.”

I thought about that idea later as I had a bite of lunch in one of the hotel’s restaurants and then took a little stroll down to 57th Street and back. News of the world was on view in every shop window—well, news of marvelous parts of the world, anyway. And now that Valentine’s Day was over, the theme was spring. Rather, early spring 2019, as window designers who work at this level are every bit as specific as journalists and fine artists. Thus spring right now! was bursting from the windows of Fendi and Prada, Hermès and Vuitton, Chopard and Fred Leighton, Smythson and Montblanc; in the form of must-have items that we never knew we needed so much, that suddenly we wanted to inspect and think about more intently; items of sparkling jewels and lustrous precious metals, of sumptuous leathers, luminous silks, and lighthearted cottons; all displayed with bits of whimsy and touches of magnificence that subtly implied that material splendor might well point the way toward spiritual opulence. Especially here in the bosom of New York’s most affluent audience, the onrush of the next is always presented in products and experiences that are amusing, seductive. And that’s what fashion and style are for, aren’t they?—to make the essential unknowableness of the future feel exciting, or at least less terrifying, for those who can afford such therapy.

Anyway, the stroll felt exciting to me. Even the air I was breathing in the chilly street, laced with that smell I remember fondly, of asphalt and metallic steam, was a refreshing change from South Florida’s persistent swampiness. I’d read that New York was losing its soul, now that artists were being forced out by the high cost of living and foreign billionaires were buying up zillion-dollar floors in new apartment towers and leaving them empty. Yet to me, the city looked as good as ever.

In the creative writing classes I teach, I always ask my fellow senior citizens to think about what else is being shown them in a story besides the obvious plot points. Fred Leighton may be showing us sapphire and ruby brooches, but what else is going on when the brooches are popping up like flowers from miniature Fabergé-like flowerpots? Is right now! a time when ten-thousand-dollar brooches can be picked like springtime blooms? It was Truman who got me to question my view of the world this way—the world-famous author who was Lee’s best friend for years; the provocative charmer who became my esteemed friend, too. Improbably, except in fiction like his, Truman made me a confidante and then even started sharing his trade secrets—which is why, even on a little stroll, part of me questioned the impressions I was getting of the world, this moment in New York. Was I, an old lady lucky enough to have witnessed close-up some of the most glamorous social goings-on of the late twentieth century, now truly seeing my old hometown for what it had become? Or was I compelled to observe it only through a lovely cloud of nostalgia?

Long after Truman died, years after Lee’s anger over his betrayal had faded, she sometimes wondered aloud with me, about some event or person, “What would Truman think?” It is the same question I am asking myself now that Lee is gone: “What would she make of sapphire periwinkles in a little gold flowerpot?”

Lee’s funeral, the next morning, took place under one of those gray, February New York skies that seem to accentuate the smug stateliness of the Upper East Side’s prestigious, old apartment buildings. Those limestone façades impose most assuredly not in summer sunshine, but in winter’s coldest light, when it’s clear that the warmth they promise corresponds precisely to the metaphysical comfiness afforded by money and status. I walked the thirty or so blocks up Park Avenue from my hotel to the church. Even on such a sad day, I felt buoyed by the bustle of other pedestrians striding in and out of portals flanked by potted shrubs, stepping in and out of black town cars with tinted windows. So many wore black! It was a characteristic that had always been true of certain city sophisticates, I suppose, but it refocused itself for me now, after my years in a town where people looked splashier. Lee loved color, but always said that in the northern light of New York and London, black made everyone look “like Spanish royalty”—by which she meant the expensively tailored looks of the accomplished socialites and celebrities who were her friends.

The funeral took place amidst the restrained Gothic Revival grandeur of the church of St. Thomas More, on East 89th Street, between Park and Madison. It was the church where Lee’s sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was a parishioner until her death in 1994. I arrived ten minutes early and was greeted by one of a small team of elegant young women in black, who were discreetly making sure that anyone seeking entry had been invited. The women recognized celebrities and welcomed them in. Of me, they would have asked for a name, but I offered it first, and they admitted me without consulting an iPad or conveying my name to someone else via headset, as might happen at a less solemn society event. Among the press, I recognized photographers from People and the Daily Mail. If there were security people around—well, there must have been—I didn’t notice any.

It was a small congregation, even intimate. Whole rows at the back of the church were empty. I slipped into a spot at the edge of things, to a syrupy organ prelude incorporating themes of Puccini, one of Lee’s favorite composers. Deployed tastefully around the church were masses of pink, green, and white flowers, no doubt courtesy of Renny or one of the other fashionable floral and event designers whom Lee knew. Above the altar, under a glorious stained glass window depicting the Resurrection, hung a crucifix of understated design. One doesn’t gawk at an event like this, of course, but one does scan unobtrusively for friends—and I spotted several friends of Lee who had been decent enough over the years to remember my name and treat me more like an equal than a cook-housekeeper. Coppola, seated two rows ahead of me, managed to catch my eye when she twisted around to take stock of the crowd. The director flashed a little wave, and I was delighted to be recognized. She had not only been nice to me but revealed a few points about documentary storytelling during the interview with Lee, which I came to find useful in my subsequent work in writing and teaching. Sofia asked Lee all kinds of impertinent questions in a friendly way that day, about marriages and boyfriends and illnesses—though I noticed that the responses to many of those, curt and deflective, never made it into the finished video.

Truman, too, was unafraid of asking all the questions—though of course, that quality eventually became a parody of itself, as the drugs and the drinking and whatever else it was took him over. I was only a girl when I started working for Lee, so Lord knows I was susceptible not only to the glamour of both of them, but to their power . . . and genius, really. Genius and cheekiness. I remember serving lunch one day to the two of them in Lee’s library—poached salmon with a dill sauce—and Truman asked me if I wanted to brush my teeth.

“Truman . . . !” exclaimed Lee, more amused than shocked. I’d served them often in her home by then, yet I suppose Lee was taken aback by Truman’s familiarity. Even to the end, she never learned about the writing work that Truman and I did together secretly, which had already begun.

“Well, I’m sorry,” said Truman, “but there’s a little piece of dill stuck right there.” He bared his own teeth and touched a tooth with his pinky. “I thought she should know.”

“Still,” said Lee. “Really.”

“That’s okay,” said Truman, in that impish way of his. “Marlene and I, we have each other’s backs, don’t we . . . ?”

I smiled demurely. Lee knew I wasn’t offended.

As the organ warbled on, I spotted several other prominent types who moved in Lee’s circles: playwright William Ivey Long, fashion designer Carolina Herrera and her husband Reinaldo, magazine editor Richard David Story, author Hannah Pakula, author Meryl Gordon, and fashion guru André Leon Talley. Over the music hung a gauzy din of hushed conversations in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as English. A sudden glimpse of a well-known doyenne revealed a familiar face that had been radically altered since I saw it last; I almost gasped, then brightened. It seemed right to behold this new face in a church, a place commemorating miracles and martyrdoms, unusual occurrences that were neither comic nor strictly tragic. Indeed, the lady’s face now bore the expression of a plaster saint, her habitual poise and practiced grace newly hardened as if by the resolve of some unshakeable faith.

The organist concluded the Puccini and began a processional, as a trio of celebrants in white robes entered the sanctuary, accompanied by a flank of altar boys and girls, and the service began. I hadn’t noticed the presence of a small vocal ensemble until they sounded their first offering, a Kyrie. It was a cappella, something modern and modestly scaled—Delius? Poulenc? Celestial strains soared joyously among arches pointing heavenward. The music’s optimistic tone was so right for Lee, who always sought the best and brightest in life. And after so many bubbly lunches and parties that I know Lee and Truman enjoyed together, and so many frolics on yachts and private beaches that I heard about from each of them, so much affection and respect between them—after all that, I thought, and then those years of quiet acrimony—now both of them were gone; and sitting on the bookshelves of Rizzoli’s, sixty blocks south, were several volumes devoted to each of them. An aphorism that Truman once confided to me came to mind as the mass went on: “God is happiest when he’s playing with us.”

After the service, on the steps of the church, I briefly chatted with several people. I approached Carole Radziwill just as she was saying goodbye to the Herreras.

“So good of you to come,” said Carole, before instantly moving off to speak with Caroline Kennedy. A former star of Real Housewives of New York City, Carole was dressed in a conspicuously chic black suit and seven-inch black heels. I was never very close to Carole and am decidedly not a fan of America’s real-housewives culture, yet I admired how deftly she was handling her post-service greetings—like the pro she is. I understand that by virtue of her marriage to the late Anthony Radziwill, the son of Lee and second husband Prince Stanislaus Radziwill, Carole sometimes refers to herself as “Princess”—though Polish titles no longer legally exist, and it is an open question about whether and how one might use a title socially in New York. Truman’s affectionately waggish way of calling Lee “Princess, dear” neatly expressed this ambivalence, as well as his obvious awe of anything socially elevated.

Then I saw a neighbor of Lee’s, from the Fifth Avenue building.

“Hello, Lily,” I said. “Beautiful service, wasn’t it?”

“So nice to see you,” said Lily. Her manner was haughty as usual. “She appreciated all your support during those difficult times. And of course your marvelous way with those tiny vegetables.”

“Yes,” I said.

“See you back there.”

As Lily turned away, I smirked. I had not been invited to the post-funeral reception, but I was amused that Lily still remembered a moment from a lunch I cooked and served years before, when she, Lee, Truman, and I shared a laugh over Truman’s much-publicized statement that “rich people serve such marvelous little vegetables, scarcely out of the earth.” I remember Truman at the table, which was set gaily with some of Lee’s incredibly varied china and crystal, pretending to want some vegetables that were “even tinier” and commanding me to go fetch some.

“Hello, Marlene. Good to see you again.”

Sofia Coppola was suddenly standing beside me, still looking like a twenty-something, with that lustrous brown hair.

“You, too,” I said. “You’re looking well.”

When we met and Lee introduced me, the director had asked if I were German, like Marlene Dietrich. No, I explained. The name was Cuban, not German, though it is pronounced practically the same way.

“Still writing, I hope?” said Coppola.

“Oh yes—you remember!”

“Of course. We all have stories to tell.”

I thought for a split second of telling her about the screenplay. Then I thought better of it. One of the most valuable things I learned from both Lee and Truman was when to impose upon friends and acquaintances, and when not to. Besides, the producer I was to meet with would have her own ideas, if she were interested.

“I loved Marie Antoinette,” I blurted out. “Such elegant choices about what to show and what not to show at the end.”

“Thank you so much,” said the director. “I can’t believe it was almost fifteen years ago.”

I suppose it was fifteen years ago, I thought as I walked back to my hotel, yet Marie Antoinette still feels to me like “one of the new movies.” By the same token, Truman’s funeral, in 1984, still feels like yesterday. By the time he died, he and Lee had been estranged for years, because of a position Lee had taken that Truman felt supported Gore Vidal in a nasty public squabble that blew up between Truman and Vidal. But Lee knew I was still fond of Truman and was kind enough, when he died, to give me a few days off so I could fly out to L.A. and attend the funeral.

How different Truman’s funeral was from the elegant little service at St. Thomas More’s. My chief memory is of talking with Truman’s great friend Joanne Carson as we stood before a niche reserved for Truman’s “cremains” in a spare, space-agey, outdoor mausoleum wall at the Westwood Memorial Park. Near us, I spotted bronze markers in memory of child star Heather O’Rourke and crooner Mel Tormé. Joanne, formerly the wife of legendary Tonight Show star Johnny Carson, had given Truman shelter in her Bel Air home for the final months of his life. She dedicated a bedroom to him as well as a room to write in—not that the poor soul was producing much by then, his body and mind ravaged by booze, cocaine, and the five or six different kinds of pills he was popping regularly. Those last days were wretched for him, Joanne said. He was often confused, depressed; he’d severed ties with his longtime companion, Jack. Joanne said she was grateful for the opportunity to take care of him, partly in memory of the glorious times they’d spent together when Truman was living out there and went around to the starriest parties.

“‘Alcohol used to be fun,’ he told me one day,” said Joanne. “‘Pills used to help. When did they make me dead inside?’”

Joanne surprised me by asking about “a screenplay Truman said he’d been working on with your secretarial help.” Did I know anything about its whereabouts?

I took special note of the word “secretarial,” and wondered if that were Truman’s word or hers. I deflected her query.

“We worked on a few things together . . .” I said.

She pressed.

“A story about the Cuban Revolution?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know Joanne very well and thought it best not to say any more on the subject. But she continued.

“He showed me pages of notes that he was trying to reconstruct, but they were incomprehensible. I found him weeping one day, because he couldn’t work as he used to.”

“Dear Truman,” I said. It was a sad state, his inability to work, and I’d seen it coming well before he left New York for the last time.

“Yet the desire to sit at his desk and do something stayed strong in him, somehow,” said Joanne, “until the very end.”

There is a welcoming hush when you enter the lobby of a small luxury hotel like the Lowell. Stepping through the hotel’s modestly scaled, newly refreshed main entrance was like passing through a force field into a temple where the acoustics and lighting are as beautifully composed as the vases of lilies and tulips on display. Sitting at either end of the reception desk were elegant table lamps in the form of bronze kylikes mounted on marble pedestals carved with wreaths, Second Empire French in the Néo-Grec style,