I've mentioned the following extract before but I don't think I've heard anyone else discuss it - including in Salinger biographies - so I thought a lot of you may not have read it, so I've posted it here in full. It's from `Answered Prayers', Truman Capote's last novel (or the three surviving unfinished chapters thereof - you can also find it in a Penguin 60s called `First and Last') It's a bawdy, bitchy, gossipy mix of the real and the imaginary - and that goes for this anecdote, which I for one have never been able to verify or find in any other source and thus may or may not be true. The `Mrs Matthau' mentioned is, for example, the real-life wife of the actor Walter Matthau. But I've never heard that Mrs Matthau is the same woman mentioned in `In Search of JD Salinger' who started sending William Saroyan - whom she later married twice - the `lousy, glib' letters she copied from JDS. Likewise I'm sure I've heard some of the quotes they use - `tenderer than God' for example - but not coming from their mouths. As you can see, whether they are real or Real - my guess is as good as yours. (p.s.Oona is of course Oona O'Neill-Chaplin and Charles is Charlie Chaplin.) ----- >From `Answered Prayers' by Truman Capote Mrs Matthau extracted a comb from her purse and began drawing it through her long albino hair: another leftover from her World War II debutante nights - an era when she and all her compares, Gloria and Honeychile and Oona and jinx, slouched against El Morocco upholstery ceaselessly raking their Veronica Lake locks. 'I had a letter from Oona this morning,' Mrs Matthau said. 'So did I,' Mrs Cooper said. 'Then you know they're having another baby.' 'Well, I assumed so. 1 always do.' 'That Charlie is a lucky bastard,' said Mrs Matthau. 'Of course, Oona would have made any man a great wife.' 'Nonsense. With Oona, only geniuses need apply. Before she met Charlie, she wanted to marry Orson Welles ... and she wasn't even seventeen. It was Orson who introduced her to Charlie; he said: "I know just the guy for you. He's rich, he's a genius, and there's nothing that he likes more than a dutiful young daughter!"' Mrs Cooper was thoughtful. 'If Oona hadn't mar- ried Charlie, I don't suppose I would have married Leopold.' 'And if Oona hadn't married Charlie, and you hadn't married Leopold, I wouldn't have married Bill Saroyan. Twice yet.' The two women laughed together, their laughter like a naughty but delightfully sung duet. Though they were not physically similar - Mrs Matthau being blonder than Harlow and as lushly white as a gardenia, while the other had brandy eyes and a dark dimpled brilliance markedly present when her ne- groid lips flashed smiles - one sensed they were two of a kind: charmingly imcompetent adventuresses. Mrs Matthau said: 'Remember the Salinger thing?' 'Salinger?' 'A Perfect Day for Banana Fish. That Safinger.' 'Franny and Zooey.' 'Umn-huh. You don't remember about him?' Mrs Cooper pondered, pouted; no, she didn't. 'It was while we were still at Brearley,' said Matthau. 'Before Oona met Orson. She had a mysteri- ous beau, this Jewish boy with a Park Avenue mother, Jerry Salinger. He wanted to be a writer, and he wrote Oona letters ten pages long while he was overseas in the army. Sort of love-letter essays, very tender, tenderer than God. Which is a bit too tender. Oona used to read them to me, and when she asked what 1 thought, I said it seemed to me he must be a boy who cries very easily; but what she wanted to know was whether I thought he was brilliant and talented or really just silly, and I said both, he's both, and years later when I read Catcher in the Rye and realized the author was Oona's Jerry, I was still inclined to that opinion.' 'I never heard a strange story about Salinger,' Mrs Cooper confided. 'I've never heard anything about him that wasn't strange. He's certainly not your normal everyday Jewish boy from Park Avenue.' 'Well, it isn't really about him, but about a friend of his who went to visit him in New Hampshire. He does live there, doesn't he? On some very remote farm? Well, it was February and terribly cold. One morning Salinger's friend was missing. He wasn't in his bedroom or anywhere around the house. They found him finally, deep in a snowy woods. He was lying in the snow wrapped in a blanket and holding an empty whiskey bottle. He'd killed himself by drinking the whiskey until he'd fallen asleep and frozen to death.' After a while Mrs Matthau said: 'That is a strange story. It must have been lovely, though - all warm with whiskey, drifting off into the cold starry air. Why did he do it?' 'All I know is what I told you,' Mrs Cooper said. Camille verona_beach@geocities.com @ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442 @ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest