Priscilla is Heard

The Muses Are Heard is a largely forgotten book by Truman Capote. Published in 1956, it is a nonfiction account of an American company of Porgy and Bess and its visit to the Soviet Union.

When I first read it a dozen or so years ago I was surprised by the appearance of someone associated, indirectly, with the JFK assassination. To wit: one Priscilla Johnson, later Priscilla Johnson McMillan.

Johnson was ostensibly a journalist when she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald at Moscow’s Hotel Metropole in November 1959, some four years after the events in The Muses Are Heard. She profiled Oswald, a supposed defector, for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

Right after the assassination, claiming she “had been thinking about him ever since” their 1959 meeting, Johnson wrote another article, “Oswald in Moscow.” It supported the argument that Oswald shot JFK largely because he was a publicity seeking lone nut.

Sometimes journalists get lucky: they’re in the right place at the right time. Was this the case with Johnson and her Moscow meeting with Oswald? Elements of her tale smell funny: she worked for John F. Kennedy in the early 1950s, when Kennedy was a Massachusetts Senator, and sought employment with the CIA, without success. So the story goes.

Priscilla Johnson testified before the Warren Commission. Later she befriended Oswald’s widow Marina and began writing a book, Marina and Lee. After its publication in 1977 she became a persistent and reliable supporter of the lone nut scenario, drawing on her brief acquaintance with Lee Oswald and longer acquaintance with Marina to pose as an expert. (As this is written she is still alive at 92, according to her entry in Wikipedia.)

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And lo! She makes a cameo appearance in The Muses Are Heard. This short work, remember, describes events that took place in late 1955 – some four years before Priscilla Johnson’s encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Capote accompanied an all-Black cast of Porgy and Bess to Russia, part of an entourage that included the wife of the opera’s lyricist, Ira Gershwin. The trip was newsworthy as the first performance of an American theatrical company in the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik revolution. (The New Yorker magazine picked up Capote’s tab, and serialized The Muses Are Heard before it appeared in book form.)

Capote wrote his piece in the first person – “observant, gossipy, bitchy, and always entertaining,” said biographer Gerald Clarke – inserting himself among his subjects. At one point he described how the cast, before one of their own performances, attended a ballet in Moscow.

Sitting in the row ahead, there was one girl whose hair was neither plaited nor a sour bundle of string; she had an urchin-cut, which suited her curious, wild-faun face. She was wearing a black cardigan, and a pearl necklace. I pointed her out to Miss Ryan.

“But I know her,” Miss Ryan said excitedly. “She’s from Long Island, we went to Radcliffe together! Priscilla Johnson,” she called, and the girl, squinting near-sighted eyes, turned around. “For God’s sake, Priscilla. What are you doing here?”

“Gosh. Gee whiz, Nancy,” said the girl, rubbing back her tomboy bangs. “What are you doing here?”

Miss Ryan told her, and the girl, who said she was staying at the Astoria, explained that she had been granted a lengthy visa to live in the Soviet Union and study Russian law, a subject that had interested her since Radcliffe, where she’d also learned the Russian language.

“But, darling,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “how can anyone study Russian law? When it changes so often?”

“Gosh. Ha ha,” said Miss Johnson. “Well, that’s not the only thing I’m studying. I’m making a kind of Kinsey report. It’s great fun, gosh.”

“I should think,” said Miss Ryan. “The research.”

Gosh. Johnson added that she was writing and submitting articles to American magazines. “Priscilla,” Miss Ryan whispered to Capote, “is sort of a genius.”

She also participated in a “pub crawl” through Moscow with Capote, Miss Ryan, and several others, “indulging [Capote’s] lifelong passion for ... foul-smelling, vile places,” Gerald Clarke wrote.

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An Atlantic article about Priscilla Johnson McMillan, published at the time of the assassination’s fiftieth anniversary, called her the only person to know both JFK and Oswald – “his killer,” as the stuffy rag dutifully referred to him.

Not so fast! Capote made the same claim. In “A Day’s Work,” a story collected in Music for Chameleons, he said he was a guest at a dinner party hosted by then-Sen. JFK. He described meeting Oswald in a story/interview with, of all people, Robert “Bobby” Beausoleil, who, when Capote talked to him, sat in prison for crimes associated with Charles Manson and his murderous “family.”

“Does that make you the only one that knew both of them, Oswald and Kennedy?” a startled Beausoleil asked, after Capote’s revelation.

“No. There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. [sic] in Moscow. She knew Kennedy, and she met Oswald around the same time I did.”

True? Maybe. I’m not sure the chronology adds up. More to the point, Capote had an uneven relationship with truth, and for me at least, has almost no credibility anymore. I have been an admirer of his in the past, and still think his oeuvre contains some very fine work. But you need a good bullshit detector.

Capote is, or was, an inveterate liar. “He took substantial liberties for the sake of lively reading,” Gerald Clarke wrote of The Muses Are Heard. “In one case he invented a whole scene.”

Not only that, he fabricated sections of his acknowledged masterpiece, In Cold Blood. This, alas, is beyond dispute. As with any liar, once a falsehood is exposed it reflects negatively on everything you’ve ever done, said, or written.

What, then, of Priscilla Johnson McMillan? I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the characterization in The Muses Are Heard. Am I applying a double standard? Maybe. Or maybe it’s a judgment call.

Priscilla Johnson applied to the CIA in the early 1950s, according to the Spartacus website and other sources. Her application was supposedly rejected. Yet there she is, an American in Moscow during the Cold War. Seems highly unusual to me.

Could the encounter between Johnson, Capote, and Miss [Nancy] Ryan have been just a coincidence? Or could she have taken a seat one row before Capote and her erstwhile classmate in order to be spotted, thereby enabling her to keep surreptitious tabs on these Americans? Johnson, of course, dismisses the idea out of hand: “There’s a lot of stuff like that online,” she told The Atlantic.

I don’t know what to make of this. Maybe it’s only a literary curiosity, or maybe it’s absolutely nothing. But it’s at least worth knowing about; the intelligence swamp surrounding the Kennedy case is legendary.

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Notes

Capote meeting JFK is in Capote, A Biography, by Gerald Clarke. Also referenced in “A Day’s Work,” collected in Music For Chameleons. This collection includes “Then It All Came Down,” with the Beausoleil conversation.

Gerald Clarke discusses Capote having invented scenes for The Muses Are Heard and In Cold Blood in his biography. Surprisingly, the bio makes no mention of Oswald. Capote inventions are also  discussed in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, by Charles J. Shields, and Truman Capote, by George Plimpton

Vincent J. Salandria

Vincent J. Salandria died this past August at the age of ninety-two. It was my great privilege to befriend Vince after meeting him in Dallas in 1998.

Shortly after his death I was contacted by the host of “Black Op Radio,” a show out of Vancouver, and asked to be one of many participants in a tribute episode. My portion was recorded by phone on a Wednesday and the show was webcast the following evening.

To be blunt, I did not want to be involved. This was in part because I don’t do well on the air. But I felt I owed it to Vince, so I wrote up some remarks. When the host called to record our conversation I said I would simply read what I had written: “It lasts about four minutes.” After a long pause the host replied, “The last guy talked for over an hour.” Clearly he expected more. Regardless, I read the text reproduced below (trying to sound spontaneous), suffered through a Q&A that extended my participation by another ten or fifteen minutes, then wrapped it up.

The host did not ask about my book (the subject of this blog). No great loss – but I would like to say here that, for better or worse, it would not have been written without Vince Salandria. As described below, he gave me several boxes of his assassination-related correspondence that formed the initial raw material that got me started, and in time evolved into the book.

Vincent J. Salandria was one of just a handful of people who began to independently investigate the JFK assassination immediately after it happened. With his brother-in-law Harold Feldman he traveled to Dallas in the summer of 1964, where he talked to Marguerite Oswald and interviewed key witnesses like Helen Markham. That same year he wrote one of the earliest articles demonstrating what we might charitably refer to as flaws in the Warren Commission version of events.

Before I continue, Len, I have to say that I suspect Vince would not approve of any tributes to his work, like what we’re doing now. He was known for his humility, and not all that interested in getting credit for any of his research. To him it was much more important to find the truth, and put that truth before the public. Sylvia Meagher once said that while other early critics might bicker over credit for one discovery or another, Vince never concerned himself with any of that. Some of his friends even teased him about his humility, calling him “St. Vincent.” But he knew what he was about. As Christopher Sharrett once observed, Salandria “always knew he packed the gear.”

His contribution to our common cause is undeniable and immeasurable. He and Harold Feldman saw, virtually from Day One, what had really happened. Even at that early stage they both viewed it as a high-level killing, and felt the only the real question was the scope of the conspiracy.

In the 1970s Vince told Gaeton Fonzi that, and I quote, “the tyranny of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy can only perpetuate their power by promoting social upheaval both at home and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but to repression...” end quote. He said that nearly fifty years ago, but we need look no further than Lafayette Square in Washington, DC this past June to see that Vince Salandria’s insight remains valid, and that there is a direct line from November 1963 to today.

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I met Vince at the 1998 COPA conference in Dallas. About a year later he asked me whether I’d be interested in taking possession of his assassination-related correspondence, much of it dating back to the 1960s.

When I hesitated, he added, “My wife will just burn it all as soon as I’m dead.”

I think he was only joking, but that ended up tipping the scales. I said yes, and wound up with what I still consider raw material of great historic significance.

I only met Vince in person that one time, but over the next dozen or more years we had countless telephone conversations and emails. He consistently impressed me – not just with his insight, but with his encouragement and generosity.

In 2013, just before the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I asked him for his thoughts on the occasion. I’ll conclude my remarks to you by quoting his reply:

“The debate over the killing of President John F. Kennedy interminably rambles on. It dumps mountains of trash on the public in an effort to bury the self-evident truth of the JFK assassination coup and its cover-up. In the debate, the national security state and its puppets (the military industrial complex and the nation’s press), desperately seek to substitute for the plain historical truth of their guilt, a seemingly impenetrable mystery which is no mystery at all.”