They come in threes, don’t they? Tuesday (when we’ll be on the road for a whirlwind, windstorm, stormfall trip to Cape Cod, which is why the pre-post), will see the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Truman Capote.

On August 25, 1984, Truman was holed up in Joanne Carson’s house in Los Angeles, fresh from his latest breakup with Jack Dunphy, his companion of thirty years, tortured by his seeming inability to write sustained fiction after In Cold Blood appeared in 1965 (and ’66, in book form), and still the social pariah after excerpts of his brilliantly snotty tell-all (and unfinished) autobiographical novel, Answered Prayers, appeared in Esquire.

In George Plimpton’s compilation biography, Truman Capote, someone named Andreas Brown dates the writer’s first thoughts about a scathing piece against cafe society all the way back to his mother’s suicide in 1954, a full thirty years before. Capote felt that Nina’s (nee Lillie Mae) longing to be part of a society she wasn’t born into caused her to yearn beyond her means, to batter herself against the walls that wouldn’t let her in, to destroy her will.

It makes interesting speculation, that for so many years, Truman held this in him. Of course, he had dived into that same society himself when the door was swung wide after the publication of his first, and most beautiful, work, Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, so this may not hold water, but we are fascinated by even the frailest of connections.

When his friends felt betrayed by his thinly disguised characterizations in the Esquire pieces, Capote countered with something like, “Of course, I was observing you. You didn’t think I was there to entertain you, did you?” Meaning, a writer owes no allegiances. He steals, he uses, he betrays — they’re byproducts of his creative art. It’s what he does and what he is.

There is a place in Chatham called The Blue Coral. It wasn’t around when Truman was alive, nor have I come across any mention of him on this part of the Cape. Nevertheless, a glass will be raised there. The further you get from 1984, the less it seems to matter (if it ever did to the reading public at large) who felt betrayed by what. So, we’re thankful for whatever a great stylist and observer gives us.

And the title of this piece? Something he muttered to Joanne on his deathbed (as reported by Gerald Clarke); we’ll let Truman have the last word:

“Just let me go. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’ve decided to go to China, where there are no phones and there is no mail service.”

Another post another death. Yesterday it was Les Paul. I had a 1967 Les Paul Goldtop that I bought new at Banko’s in Ansonia for $300 or so and was in a number of bands finally fronting my own which was the worst of them. My recollection is that it was called Raccoon. The Goldtop replaced a flesh-tone Danelectro pressboard “convertible” instrument with a single lipstick-case pickup wedged across the hole and a movable bridge that never stayed in tune; quite a step up. After some while I removed the Les Paul’s pickguard for a cleaner look, and the gold surface greened from sweat in a couple of spots. It was a heavy piece of machinery, a substantial block of wood. Sometime in the early 80s, after college, after I had stopped playing, I sold the Les Paul for next to nothing to a semi-professional player who I later found out turned right around and swapped it for an echo machine, proving there were at least two idiots in the transaction. He was the brother of a woman my wife worked with though I have never blamed my wife in any way and repeated this when she told me yesterday about Les’s passing and how she feels that the selling was partly her fault. Once not long after I sold the guitar the sister played a tape of her brother playing. I remember asking if he was playing my guitar on the tape because it sounded so good. After a pause she said Yes. Later, when I tried to buy the guitar back and tracked him down and he told me what he had done, I realized that the tape was made with the echo machine. You feel a fool sometimes. Things conspire. You feel betrayed by stuff. By people, of course, but by circumstances, too.

While the bronze plaque outside the building does not mention his name (among Faulkner, Thurber, and others), today marks the 50th anniversary of Preston Sturges’s death at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Working on his autobiography (later published as Sturges on Sturges), he paused to order cole slaw and a couple of beers from room service, consumed same, complained to his secretary of indigestion, and keeled.

It struck me the other day that ten years ago at this time, I also happened to be in the city, delivering an ill-fated comedy manuscript to Pocket Books (it died aborning) that had the inspiration of Sturges’s comedies all over it, and stopped to raise a salutary glass to old Preston in the Hotel’s Blue Bar. I did again this past Tuesday. True, it wasn’t beer (I was soon to take part in an author reception at Scholastic as part of their Summer 2010 Sales Conference, so it was club soda), and I wasn’t in the mood for a side of slaw (if they even have it on the menu), but a glass was tipped to the master, and that’s the point. The marking of an anniversary. A death becomes a celebration.

Somewhere in my notes from the 40th anniversary is the actual room number where Sturges passed away, but I can’t find it now (a couple of computers ago). I think it was on the second floor. Back in 1999, I chatted with some folks, including a doorman who was at the same post from the early 1960s on, a real gem of a find these days. But this time, I was mute.

I was alone in the dim bar with the tender and an occasional waiter delivering a drink order. No, they wouldn’t know the name; why should they? Moving out of the bar through the narrow hall, I sized up the hotel lobby, its low tables, the registration desk staffed by twenty-somethings. But I couldn’t muster the words to try to explain Sturges to them, either — try to explain who he was or why it’s significant that fifty years ago a great light blinked out right above their heads. I could have asked for the manager, true, and proselytized about the zenith of screwball comedy, but everything sank. My heart wasn’t in it. Just as his wasn’t. It failed.

Sturges was an example of the outsider who made lots of money. The main incident I find myself ever referring back to was the Ella Raines episode at Paramount. The story goes that the front office didn’t like the rushes of her performance in Hail the Conquering Hero. They wanted her off the picture. Sturges insisted Ella stay, said that taking her off the picture after she’d been announced as a lead would ruin her career. He got his way, but his career at Paramount was over. His contract wasn’t renewed, and he was out. Studio wrath. True, he made scads of dough when he moved to Fox, but his amazing string of comedies at Paramount — Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Lady Eve, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek — and that wholly particular feeling of them, ended on that sun-filled lot, that day.

The lesson of Preston’s Last Stand? Well, I don’t know. On the one hand, he was true to the picture, true to Ella, honorable as artist, and noble as craftsman. So studio be damned. He made a move so few of us are able to do; and why? Because we are not crying in the wilderness; we’re on payroll. And art doesn’t do its work unless it’s seen. On the other hand, the particular beauty and brilliance of his Paramount comedies — a real thing, the character of that studio behind the arch — had, in a single argument, maybe a single word, become a thing irrecoverable. Should Preston have held back, not stamped his foot, for the sake of retaining the status quo and the chance of producing more fine art? There are some, I’m sure, who would rate Sturges’s post-Paramount work as just as good, better, olympian. Maybe. But they never had that stamp of family (and I mean that in the best possible way) the way his work of the early 40s had.

Marking anniversaries of events big and little, visiting the places where things happened, standing in writers’ rooms, placing the fingers on Balzac’s desk or Melville’s doorknob — these are richnesses in a fairly drab life, after all.