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The Truman Capote Centennial
Born 100 years today, Truman Streckfus Persons (1924-1984), better known to most as Truman Capote.
Mid 20th century fiction is far from my main jam, but writers of that era did leave footprints in show business to varying degrees, Capote more than most. Having done similar profiles of Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, I wasn’t going to shirk in this case. He looks a little like Wally Cox as Mr. Peepers in that pic above, eh? Sounded kind of like him, too. A physically small man, Capote possessed a gigantic personality, so grand and eccentric that it was surely known to millions who never read his writing. Homophobia has always driven the attitude which a certain portion of the public takes to Capote the character: he spoke in a kind of simpering sing-song, with a baby-ish lisp. His worst sin as far as most are concerned no doubt was his way with words, which somehow has come to be regarded as a defect among the wider public in the Through-the-Looking-Glass-Land that America has become. It’s fine on the page, for the few who still read books, but if you can talk in complete sentences, quote authors and ideas and so forth in conversation, woe betide you for a striver — count yourself lucky if you’re not stoned to death.
Capote is interesting for so many reasons. Among them (I think) is that he is both a Southern Gothic Writer AND a New York sophisticate. All artists who move to New York are bifurcated in this way, but Capote happened to be a product of both regions. He was born in New Orleans and wrote much of his first novel there. The first several years of his childhood were spent with relatives in Monroeville, Alabama after his parents divorced. This period of his life was immortalized by childhood friend Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird (the character of Dill was based on him). The latter part of his childhood was spent in Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut once his mother remarried. Later he would also live in Brooklyn Heights and on Long Island, among other places. His stepfather was Cuban; the source of his otherwise perplexing surname. Truman had the advantage of good private schools during the New York leg of his formative years, but he had been an independent and displined autodidact since childhood. He never attended college, scorning the very idea of it. He’d already taught himself so much by that point, what could he learn from a professor?
So he went to work as a copy boy at The New Yorker (briefly) and then began to get short stories published. He was only 24 when his first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) was published. (For reference: Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead came out the same year; Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie was four years earlier). Capote was hailed as a phenom from the very first, and Other Voices, Other Rooms continues to be highly regarded as a landmark work of gay fiction, concerning as it does a young man’s coming to terms with his own identity. But you will find that it tends to be neglected in lists of Greatest 20th Century Novels. I would imagine that among the factors contributing to that is that the book is WAY over the top with sensational elements: a spooky decaying mansion at the center of a landscape filled with circus midgets, a mute quadriplegic, a 100 year old man, an uncle in drag at the top of the stairs, and several other similar touches.
Capote possessed rare gifts as a writer. He was one of the greatest American authors of his time. Gore Vidal, who insulted his memory when he died, wasn’t fit to change Capote’s typewriter ribbon. But Capote had his weaknesses. Among them was compulsive attention seeking, which warped some of the choices he made, literary and otherwise. A famous example was his provocative author photo on the jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms, which has more than a little of the Come Hither about it:
The couch pose reminds me of this one of Oscar Wilde, also considred scandalous in its time:
Or, to reach back even farther, this one of Adah Isaacs Mencken, though there exist several of her in poses like this:
At any rate, now a little survey of some of Capote’s major works, with a special focus on stage and screen:
“House of Flowers” was a short story originally published in 1950 concerning two competing Haitian bordellos, and a plot by a madame to eliminate the impoverished lover of one of her employees. In 1954 Capote adapted it into a Broadway musical with songs by none other than Harold Arlen. It is notable for featuring calypso music (soon to become a national craze) and for being the first Broadway production to showcase Caribbean steel drums. The cast included Pearl Bailey, Alvin Ailey, Diahann Carroll, Geoffrey Holder, and Ray Walston. It was directed by Peter Brook.
“House of Flowers” was not Capote’s first Broadway show, however. That has been 1952’s The Grass Harp, based on his semi-autobiographical novella of the year before, a poetic tale about an orphaned boy and his two aunts and other townsfolk who decide to withdraw to the woods and live in a giant treehouse! The original Broadway cast included Mildred Natwick, Ruth Nelson, Jonathan Harris, Sterling Holloway, and Alice Pearce. In the late ’60s it was developed into a musical, which came to Broadway in 1971. (Adrian Hall directed one of the early productions with his Trinity Company in Providence!)
In between those two Broadway shows, Capote got a most unusual Hollywood assignment. He was hired to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953) starring Humphrey Bogart,Peter Lorre, Robert Morley,Jennifer Jones, and Gina Lollobrigida. Ostensibly he was adapting a novel (not one of his own), but he was actually present for the shoot in Italy, and turned out the pages of dialogue by night as the shoot progressed. It is regarded as a sort of parody of The Maltese Falcon. There was a lot of tomfoolery on and off the screen. Hobknobbing with all of these stars surely turned Capote’s head.
In 1956 Capote wrote the short story “A Christmas Memory”, the first of Capote’s literary efforts to be widely regarded as a classic. I first read it as a teenager, surely the first Capote work I was exposed to. The semi-autobiographical tale recounts the last Christmas a seven year old boy spends with his best friend, an elderly, eccentric female cousin. A decade later, Frank and Eleanor Perry turned it into a television movie for the holidays starring Geraldine Page. He followed it up with a sequel “The Thanksgiving Visitor” which was also turned into a television film starring Page.
In 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany‘s was published, what many would consider his high water mark. My post about the ill-advised and much reviled (among my set in any case) screen version from 1961 is here.
In 1960, Capote did some rewrites on The Innocents, which I consider the best of the many screen versions of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. I think we have established by now that Capote was very good at writing children — even ones possessed by ghosts!
That same year, Harper Lee’s acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird came out, which had the twin effects of enhancing Capote’s legend and making him very jealous of his old friend’s success. For decades it was widely rumored that Capote had written the book itself or given Lee substantial assistance, but in 2006 a letter turned up that finally put that whopper to bed. In the letter he tells a relative that he has read the book and is enjoying it, and otherwise indicates in many ways that he is not the book’s author. As it happens, it was Harper Lee who helped Capote with a book, not the other way around. It was:
You’ll note a major lag between major literary projects here. Capote wasn’t snoozing. He spent those years undertaking the most complex literary creation he ever completed. Today we are apt to regard In Cold Blood (1965) as a VERY well written true crime book, although he himself identified it as a new form: the non-fiction novel. If you think about it, such a thing is merely an extension of what one does in fiction with autobiographical elements. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that Capote is in the book himself, and his narration is the element that makes it a novel as opposed to straight journalism. His personal observations hover over the proceedings. His descriptions often have artistic effect in mind. He puts words in the mouths of his “characters”. The story was the brutal and senseless 1959 murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, by a couple of none-too-bright ex-cons, Dick Hickock and Perry Edward Smith. To get the story, Capote went to Kansas and conducted scores of interviews, aided by Harper Lee. It’s definitely my favorite Capote work and the one I have read the most, perhaps five or six times. The writing is extremely vivid. It’s surely the template for most true crime books that have come since. Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter for example, seems very much to draw from the style and structure of In Cold Blood.
Richard Brooks directed the amazing 1967 screen version, starring Scott Wilson and Robert Blake as Dick and Perry, with John Forsythe, Jeff Corey,Paul Stewart,Will Geer, et al. More tribute to it here. It was remade as a two-part TV movie in 1996, with Anthony Edwards (against type), Eric Roberts, Sam Neill, Kevin Tighe, Gwen Verdon, et al.
In the wake of the book’s success, Capote was the subject of a short documentary by the Mayles Brothers,With Love from Truman (1966). Later that same year he organized his famous, star-studded “Black and White Ball”, made possible from Capote’s substantial earnings from sales of In Cold Blood.
At this stage, Capote had grown so famous that he began appearing on all the top talk shows: those of William F. Buckley,David Frost, Dick Cavett,Mike Douglas, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin. These kinds of shows were almost certainly the first places I ever became aware of Capote, when I was a kid in the early and mid ’70s. He was also very probably the first person I ever saw, public or otherwise “on drugs”, as the expression goes. My mother surely said something disparaging about his effeminancy while also referring to that dreaded condition: “on drugs”. It was apparent, even to a child. Capote didn’t just lisp and mince and so forth. He SLURRED. He DROOPED. It was not subtle.
Speaking of drugs, in 1972 Capote got an assignment to cover the Rolling Stones’ U.S. tour, their first since the ill-fated one in 1969 that forever sullied the name of Altamont. Capote can be seen in Robert Frank’s rarely-shown documentary about the tour Cocksucker Blues. But who thought of this assignment? Putting Capote in the midst of all these macho straight dudes, balling groupies and so forth? Talk about strange bedfellows! Hunter S. Thompsonwould have been fine. Capote would pair better with, say, David Bowie, or Elton John (whose look seemed to owe a little to Capote). In the end, Capote never wrote the story, and he filed a profile of Andy Warhol instead.
As the seventies progressed, Capote became such a fame whore that he expanded his television presence beyond talk shows to VARIETY shows, like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In, The Dean Martin Show, and The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. Then he was cast (miscast) in what is essentially the star part in the Neil Simon comedy Murder by Death(1976), which I wrote about here. He also had a cameo as himself (or rather “the winner of the Truman Capote look-alike contest) in Woody Allen’sAnnie Hall (1977). Not having been around for young Capote, the version my generation knew looked like this:
This brief movie stardom may have been the apex of Capote’s popular fame, but meantime he was in the middle of a personal calamity. You may have noted that it had now been a decade since his last major work In Cold Blood had hit the bookstores. Theoretically Capote had since been working on his big masterwork Answered Prayers, which he promised would put all of his previous books to shame. In reality he was having trouble working on it, due to a mixture of his active social life, a descent into booze and drugs, and (surely) something like literary stage fright. How could he possibly attain his previous heights, let alone exceed them, as he had promised? But he was having money woes, having spent down his advance, so he published sections in Esquire magazine. His thinly veiled (and sordid) portraits of his powerful friends Bill and Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill (Jackie O’s sister) and others permanently alienated him from the high society he had begun to thrive on. You will find this documented in the 2019 documentary The Capote Tapes, and entertainingly dramatized in Feud: Capote vs The Swans (2024).
From this juncture to the end of his life, Capote became increasingly reclusive. He tried rehab several times, lost his drivers license, and began having frequent hallucinations. He died of drug and alcohol related causes at the home of Joanne Carson (Johnny’s second ex-wife) in August, 1984, just over 40 years ago.
Then, through the alchemy of the actor’s art, he was revived, memorably, multiple times. Here are just some of the notable posthumous portrayals:
Robert Morse played him in Jay Presson Allen’s one man show Tru on Broadway (1989-90) and then on PBS television’s American Playhouse (1992). Amazingly Paul Williams was originally to have played the role, but dropped out just before rehearsals were to start. That version might have been very, very good or very, very bad, but either way, I guarantee it would have been amazing.
Fifteen years later: a notable horse race of TWO Trus (“Two Tru to Be Good”, to misappropriate GBS):
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005), and…
Toby Jones in Infamous (2006)
Then, almost 20 years after that:
Tom Hollander on Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (2024). It’s really terrific. If you haven’t already, today is the perfect day to start watching it.
For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.
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