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Truman Capote (1924-1984) - original name Truman Streckfus Persons |
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American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Truman Capote gained international fame with his "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood (1966), an account of a real life crime in which an entire family was murdered by two sociopaths. The Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama area provided the setting for much of Capote's fiction. Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life—to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scutting tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. A the not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. (from In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Mureer and Its Consequences, New York: Random House, 1966, p. 5) Truman Capote was born in New Orleans, the son of a salesman and a 16-year-old beauty queen, Lillie Mae Faulk. When she was pregnant, she tried to abort him. Capote's father, Archulus "Arch" Persons, worked as a clerk for a steamboat company. Persons never stuck at any job for long, and was always leaving home in search for new opportunities. The unhappy marriage gradually disintegrated. After his parents divorced, five-year-old Truman was brought up in Monroeville, Alabama. While Capote's mother pursued happiness in her own way in New York City, he lived with his relatives, one of whom became the model for the loving, elderly spinster of the author's novels, stories, and plays. "Her face is remarkable – not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind," described Capote in A Christmas Memory (1966) his distant relative Sook, Nanny Rumbley Faulk. Sook was sixty-something, "small and sprightly, like a bantam hen..." Capote's mother, Lillie Mae, wrote letters and telephoned to her son, often crying that she had no money and no husband. In his childhood Capote made friends with Harper Lee, who portrayed him as Dill in her world famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird. "Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead." After Capote's mother married again, this time a well-to-do businessman, Capote moved to New York, and adopted his stepfather's surname. He attended the Trinity School and St. John's Academy in New York, and the public schools of Greenwich, Connecticut. At the age of seventeen, Capote ended his formal schooling. He found work at the New Yorker, where he attracted attention with his eccentric style of dress. "... I recall him sweeping through the corridors of the magazine in a black opera cape, his long golden hair falling to his shoulders: an apparition that put one in mind of Oscar Wilde in Nevada, in his velvets and lilies." (Brendan Gill in Here at The New Yorker, 1975) Capote's early stories were published in quality magazines and in 1946 he won the O.Henry award. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, (1948), depicted a boy, Joel Knox, growing up in the Deep South. Joel is "too pretty, too delicate and fair skinned." He seeks his father but falls into a relationship with a decadent transvestite. The book gained a wide success and created controversy because of its treatment of homosexuality. During this time Capote had already established his fame among the cultural circles as the thin voiced, promising young writer, who could brighten up parties with his sharp and clever remarks. Next year Capote went to Europe, where he wrote fiction and
non-fiction. Jean Cocteau introduced him to Colette, the grande dame of
French literature, who gave him a paperweight with a white rose in its
center. Capote's travels accompanying a tour of Porgy and Bess
in the Soviet Union produced The Muses Are Heard. These
European years marked the beginning of Capote's work for the theatre
and films. Before getting to know Andy Warhol
personally, Capote had received fan letters and drawings from him.
"They certainly weren't like his later things," Capote recalled. "They
were rather literal illustrations from stories of mine . . . at least,
that's what they were supposed
to be." Warhol seemed to him the loneliest, most friedless person he
had ever met. Once Capote got a glimpse of Warhol's big collection of
pornography, which included an album of famous people, ". . . it's
rather amusing because they're mostly taken of people who didn't know
they were being photographed . . . like in locker rooms." A Tree of Night, (1949) gathered together short stories published in Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and other magazines. When the director John Huston was making The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Capote met Marilyn Monroe, who acted in the film. "With her tresses invisible, and her complexion cleared of all cosmetics, she looked twelve years old, a pubescent virgin who had just been admitted to an orphanage and is grieving her plight." (from Marilyn Monroe: Photographs 1945-1962 by Truman Capote) While in Kyoto, Capote met Marlon Brando, and wrote
for The New Yorker a profile of the actor. The
House of Flowers,
a musical set in a West Indies bordello, originated from a trip to
Haiti in the winter of 1948, where he spent many of his evenings
sitting on the porches of the whorehouses along the Bizonton Road.
Capote's lyrical style and melancholy marked his novel The Grass
Harp (1951). In the story an orphaned boy and two old ladies
observe life from a china tree. Eventually they come down from their
temporary retreat, unlike Cosimo Piovasco di Rondō in Italo Calvino's
novel The Baron in the Trees (1957). The book was adapted into
screen in 1996, starring Piper Laurie, Sissy Spacek, and Walter
Matthau. Capote's first important film work was collaboration with John
Huston on Beat the Devil (1954), based on Claud Cockburn's
bestseller about a band of international crooks. For the David O.
Selznick production of Indiscreation of an American Wife
(1953), directed by Vittorio De Sica and starring Jennifer Jones and
Montgomery Clift, Capote had written dialogue. Nearly penniless Capote
lived in Rome in an expensive penthouse on the Via Margutta. Huston
offered him a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a week. Capote, who
wrote the scenes only two or three days ahead of the shooting schedule,
changed the whole concept of the film. For Peter Lorre he gave some of
the best lines: "Time, time, what is time? The Swiss manufacture it.
The French hoard it. The Italians squander it. The Americans say it is
money. Hindus say it does not exist. You know what I say? I say time is
a crook." Following return to the United States, Copote wrote Breakfast
at Tiffany's
(1958). Its central character, Holly Golightly, was an amalgam of
several people: her dreams came from Capote's mother, her rootlessness
from Capote himself, and her personality from the glamorous, beautiful
young women of Manhattan, of whom especially Babe Paley fascinated the
author. "She was one of the two or three great obsessions of my life,"
Capote once said. In addition, Marguerite Littman, a confidante of
Tennessee Williams and
Elizabeth Taylor's voice coach in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is said to
have been the model for the character. Holly comes to New York seeking for happiness. "What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there..." She has a nameless cat and a brother named Fred. The narrator, whom she calls Fred after her own brother, is an aspiring writer who has the same birthday as Capote (September 30). Though it is never explicitly stated, he is a homosexual. The novel is constructed as a memory of events, that happened about 15 years earlier. Holly has left the country before the end of the war, and the narrator has not seen her since. After Harper's Bazaar turned down the manuscript, it was serialized in Esquire and published by Random House. Norman Mailer praised the work: "I would not have changed two words in Breakfast at Tiffany's, which will become a small classic." Breakfast at Tiffany's
was made into a successful film, directed by Blake Edwards and starring
Audrey Hepburn. George Axelrod updated the story to the 1960s and later
told: "Nothing really happened in the book. All we had was this
glorious girl – a perfect part for Audrie Hepburn. What we had to do
was devise a story, get a central romantic relationship, and make the
hero a red-blooded heterosexual." Most of the film was shot in
California, not in New York City. Johnny Mercer wrote the
lyrics to Henry Mancini's 'Moon River': "We're after the same
/ Rainbow's end, / Waitin' 'round the bend, / My Huckleberry friend, /
Moon river and me." The music is first heard in the opening title
sequence: Audrey Hepburn as Holly stands in front of Tiffany's wearing
a black evening gown and dark sunglasses and eating breakfast from a
paper bag. The nameless cat was played by Orangey, who received in 1962
the PATSY award (Picture Animal Top Star of the Year). Capote's own cat
Diotima was named after a woman philosopher, who taught Socrates all
about love. Diotima died in February 1974. Increasing preoccupation with journalism formed the basis for the bestseller In Cold Blood, a pioneering work of documentary novel or "nonfiction novel". The work started from an article in The New York Times. It dealt with the murder of a wealthy family in Holcomb, Kansas. Sponsored by the magazine, Capote interviewed with Harper Lee local people to recreate the lives of both the murderers and their victims. During the process he became emotionally attached to both killers. However, this did not prevent him from telling the story with utmost objectivity. The research work and writing took six years to finish. Capote used neither a tape recorder nor note pad, but emptied his interviews and impressions in notebooks at the end of the day. He also recorded last days of the death-obsessed criminals. Richard Brooks' screen adaptation of the book, with its black-and-white photography, avoided all sensationalism. The trial scene was re-enacted at the Finney County Court House in the Garden City, where the actual trial had taken place. Brooks also used the real jury who had convicted Perry Smith and Dick Hicock. Among Capote's other works from the 1960s is the classic A Christmas Memory, a story about a seven-year-old boy, Buddy, his cousin, an eccentric old lady, and a tough little orange and white rat terrier called Queenie. Buddy and his cousin are each other's best friends, whose special relationship is symbolized by baking of fruitcakes, a kind of a Proustian Madeleine remembrance. The story gained a huge success as a television play. After the publication of In Cold Blood, Capote planned to write a Proustian novel to be called "Answered Prayers". This plan never materialized. Problems with drink and drugs, and disputes with other writers, such as Gore Vidal, exhausted Capote's creative energies. "Well, how does it feel to be an enfant terrible?" he had asked Vidal when they were introduced in 1945. Much later Capote claimed in Playgirl that Vidal had been thrown out from a party at the Kennedy White House. Vidal filed a suit in a New York State court, charging that Capote had libelled him. In interviews, Capote negative anecdotes about the people he knew distanced him from his friends. "I had a big discussion with Saul Bellow about Richard Wright," Capote said in 1974. "I said, Richard Wright was a good friend of mine and do you know what Saul Bellow said? He said, "Huh! Well, Wright just became a victim of these heavyweight intellectuals. I used to see him carting around books on Wittgenstein. He was becoming convinced he was an intellectual." I thought that was very sad and pathetic. It certainly wasn't true." (The Critical Response to Truman Capote, edited by Joseph J. Waldmeir and John C. Waldmeir, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 33) Answered Prayers remained unfinished, but three pieces
from the novel appeared in Esquire
in the 1970s. Suffering from a severe case of writer's block, Capote
was treated by at least four psychiatrists. Moreover, he was drinking
heavily. The surviving
portions were republished in 1986. Capote's thinly disguised fictional
description of the
chorus-girl-turned-socialite Ann Woodward (named "Ann Hopkins") in the
final piece, 'La Côte Basque', characterized her as a cold-blooded
murderess. She had shot her
husband in October 1955 but was cleared by a grand jury three weeks
after the shooting. Most Americans believed that she was guilty of
murder, officially the death was judged to be an accident. Almost
obsessed by the story, Capote had collected every bit of
information about her he could find. His portrayal of the Woodward
tragedy is said to have precipitated her suicide in 1975. She jumped
out of an upper-story window. Capote's
autobiographical novel also presented such real-life as Colette, the
Duchess
of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead, but its depiction
of the smart set was characterized in The New York Times as "a
socio-pornographic ''Ragtime'' rife with the low cackle of camp." Music for Chamelons (1981) was a collection of short pieces, stories, interviews, and conversations published in various magazines. Truman Capote died in Los Angeles, California, on August 26, 1984, of liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication. His life and work inspired Bennett Miller's film Capote (2005), based on the Gerald Clarke biography from 1988, and Have You Heard? (2006), based on George Plimpton's interviews. For further reading: Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood": A Critical Handbook, edited by Irving Malin (1968); The Worlds of Truman Capote by William L. Nance (1970); Sextet: T.S. Eliot and Truman Capote and Others by John Malcolm Brinnin (1982); Truman Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke (1988); Truman Capote: A Study of the Short Fiction by Helen S. Garson (1992); Truman Capote's Southern Years by Marianne M. Moates & Jennings Faulk Carter (1996); Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career by George Plimpton (1997); Critical Essays on Truman Capote, edited by Joseph J. Waldmeir (1999); The Critical Response to Truman Capote ed. by Joseph J. Waldmeir (1999); The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote by Marie Rudisill, James C. Simmons (2000); Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke (2001); Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson (2010); Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood by Ralph F. Voss (2011); Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon by Tison Pugh (2016); 'Truman Capote,' in Writers and Their Cats by Alison Nastasi (2018); Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Learner (2021); Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire's Wife, and the Murder of the Century by Roseanne Montillo (2022) Selected works:
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