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