Capote’s Car Will Survive Harbor Crash
A classic 1968 Ford Mustang that crashed into the front of a Sag Harbor store last Thursday evening once belonged to the writer Truman Capote.
The candy-apple red convertible suffered front-end damage when Myron Clement, 93, drove it over the curb and into the brick facade of the Henry Lehr store at 96 Main Street at about 7 p.m. He reportedly put his foot on the gas instead of the brakes after he mistakenly thought he was in reverse. A plate glass window was shattered, and the area was briefly closed off as the building was assessed for structural damage. No pedestrians were injured.
Mr. Clement was taken to Southampton Hospital as a precaution and released the next day.
The Mustang, owned by Mr. Clement and his husband, Joe Petrocik, is at Reid Brothers in Sag Harbor for repairs. “We love that car very much,” Mr. Petrocik said.
Capote, who died in 1984, was the couple’s close friend. He had purchased the car as a gift for his partner, the playwright Jack Dunphy, and used to tool around the South Fork in it.
He called the area “Kansas by the sea,” and an Architectural Digest article quoted him as saying that it he thought of it like “Kansas with a sea breeze.”
Despite having a house in Sagaponack, the “In Cold Blood” author often stayed at Mr. Clement and Mr. Pretrocik’s house on Madison Street in Sag Harbor, where he would drink vodka and orange juice. They still refer to a room in their house as “Truman’s bedroom.”
The couple first met Capote on the beach in Sagaponack in the late 1960s as they were packing up a Scrabble game on a Sunday evening before heading back to the city. “All of a sudden we looked down and there’s Truman,” Mr. Petrocik remembered. He came over and asked if they had seen his dog, Maggie. The next day, Mr. Clement, who ran a successful public relations firm in Manhattan with Mr. Petrocik, was having lunch in Manhattan with Horace Sutton, a travel writer. Capote was at a nearby table. “That was the beginning of a long, long friendship,” Mr. Petrocik said.
Turns out, Capote was never the greatest driver, he said. On one visit to their house in his big green Buick Riviera — “He could just reach the wheel” — he missed a turn as he drove into the driveway turn as he drove into the driveway and hit a tree so hard he totaled the car.
The couple drove him back to the city from the South Fork two days before his death. After he died, Gerald Clarke, Capote’s friend and biographer, his lawyer and literary executor, Alan Schwartz, and his Random House editor, Joe Fox, enlisted Mr. Clement and Mr. Petrocik to help search Capote’s Sagaponack cottage for his final unfinished manuscript, according to Vanity Fair.
“Truman would talk to us about all these things that were going into ‘Answered Prayers,’ ” Mr. Petrocik told the magazine in 2012. “But the thing is, at that time, I never saw the actual manuscript. And then it occurred to me, later, just before I nodded off to sleep, maybe he had made the whole thing up.” Driving to Manhattan from the South Fork later, however, Mr. Petrocik told the magazine that “Truman handed me the manuscript to read on the way. I actually had it in my hands.”
Mr. Clarke, who became the executor of Dunphy’s estate, knew that the couple fancied the Mustang, and some years after Capote’s death, they were eventually given the car.
When they took ownership, they had it refurbished, a process that took about a year. Its “Capote” license plates pay homage to their late friend.
“To this day, whenever we drive into town, somebody comes up with a story about the car and about the fact that they knew Truman,” Mr. Petrocik said on Friday, as he waited for Mr. Clement to return from his overnight stay at the hospital.
Dunphy died in 1992. His ashes, along with some of Capote’s, were spread in Crooked Pond, an area of the Long Pond Greenbelt that was purchased with money donated from the sale of their estate. The greenbelt runs from Sag Harbor to Bridgehampton.
Mr. Clement and Mr. Petrocik allowed the Mustang to be displayed at the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt’s Black and White benefit, honoring Capote, in 2010.
“We have a very sentimental attachment to it,” Mr. Petrocik said, but despite the accident, it appears that everything is fine, “nothing major, thank God.”