Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

What's amazing about the new Truman Capote movie is that it got made at all. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall when this idea was pitched. Apparently, the screenplay was infused with the research that author Gerald Clarke did for his massive and fascinating biography, Capote. There is not an extensive history of big studio movies about writers, and especially gay ones. There was a film based on a book by the late Hunter Thompson in which HT was a character. There was Beloved Infidel, based on Sheilah Graham's account of her life with Scott Fitzgerald. It was sold as a woman's picture, and Scott was a good subject, romantic, early success, tragic marriage and dead at 44. I suspect few writers live lives full of dramatic appeal-- Byron would be at the top-- and so don't wind up the subject of screenplays. Hollywood also avoids Presidents as subjects (except for Oliver Stone, who has done two; well, one was actually a police procedural after the assassination). The Merchant-Ivory production of Jefferson in Paris is the most fascinating and troubling of the movies about presidents or, to be exact, men who would be president. Hollywood likes presidents as candidates (Primary Colors) or as newly elected (Abe Lincoln in Illinois) or facing a personal challenge (Sunrise at Campobello).

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But back to Capote. Truman Capote grew up a pretty little sissy-boy in a small southern town. His parents were very unhappily married and young Truman spent much time with female relatives. After his mother got a divorce, she and Truman moved to New York, where she married a Cuban businessman and reinvented herself as Nina Capote (Truman was adopted by his stepfather and took his name, just part of his extensive makeover). Nina would kill herself in 1954 (booze and barbiturates). Capote got famous young, a series of short stories in popular magazines and then his breakthrough book, Other Voices, Other Rooms. He was also fortunate to have some important and influential mentors, among them Newton Arvin and George Davis (an important editor and mover-and-shaker in the New York world of letters). It was Davis who made the crack about Other Voices: "I suppose someone had to write the fairy Huckleberry Finn." The book-jacket photo of Capote on the back cover, posed in a languid, somewhat fey seductiveness, was often reprinted along with reviews and used as promotional material. Capote had made it.

He wasted no time. New York loves fame and Capote circulated among the rich, powerful, and snooty. He became a favorite of The Ladies, women married to important men, who often needed an amusing lunch date. Truman filled this slot well. He had a sharp tongue, loved to gossip, and could be counted on when they needed a good cry. He was also seen as non-threatening to the husbands. Capote continued writing and did stage and film work as well as remaining a fixture on the celebrity circuit (Gore Vidal's quip: "And all Capote did was dance with Marilyn Monroe.") In the late fifties, Capote saw a small item in the paper about the apparently random murder of a well-to-do family in Kansas. This put in motion his investigation, research and writing of what would turn out to be his most famous book, In Cold Blood, first serialized in the New Yorker in 1965.

What I've always found strange is why famous writers get involved with murderers for subject matter, especially three literary writers of the same generation. Capote had his two murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Norman Mailer has his Gary Gilmore. Vidal wrote a brief for Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, with whom he had correspondence. This is not quite Zola and the Dreyfus Affair. Why did Capote select the murder of the Clutter family as his subject? Why did his work cause such a sensation? Capote was also put in what I regard as a distasteful ethical position. The murderers had a spate of appeals made on their behalf to stop their executions and there were many delays. But Capote's story required their executions, even though he had befriended both men and had become a tutor to Perry. Capote, in the end, attended their executions (by hanging). How did he live with this? The answer to this question seems to be the central story line in the movie.

The book was published and was a huge success. Then came Capote's super-famous ball at the Plaza Hotel. In the few years after that, the decline began, the arrests for drunk driving, the shrinking output and then the tittle-tattle story in Esquire, "La Côte Basque, 1965." After the publication of this story, his Society Ladies dropped him like a brick (in the story, Capote tells tales out of school about the private behaviors, including sexual, of the elite, and the Ladies were not amused). His exile from swell circles came as a surprise to him. He drank more. His last years were not a pretty sight. He died in 1984, in California, at the home of Joanne Carson, Johnny's ex-wife. He was just short of his 60th birthday and had consumed a considerable quantity of medical drugs in the days before his death. Gore Vidal, who had long-ago fallen out with Capote (and had sued him for libel after Capote had told some whoppers in an interview with Playgirl) said of Capote's demise: "Good career move."

Maybe Gore has turned out to be right.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com