The Sheila Variations

Happy birthday, Truman!

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers - Truman Capote.

I am so excited to see Philip Seymour Hoffman's take on him. The film got a great review in The NY Times and I'm just so excited about it. Look at the similarities there. Amazing.

Truman Capote has been one of my many life-long obsessions - so forgive my autuistic knowledge of this man - his life, and his work. Also - I just had to go out and find all the great photos of him, and post them here. People LOVED to photograph this man (at least in his early wunderkind days) - and all of them are online, which is so exciting. So I've found some of my favorites, to post them here for you.

Example:

Most of my generation only remembers Truman from his appearances on various talk shows, mainly Johnny Carson, when he was a bloated guy with a high lisping voice who was vaguely embarrassing to watch - At least I felt that way. He was obese, he had face lifts, he wore a white Panama hat, he was kind of grotesque. I didn't know that he was basically caricaturing himself by then - which is always death to an artist of any kind.

But he was stuck. He had horrendous writer's block at the very end - which tormented him. The end of his life was full of despair. It's wrenching to read about - you just want his suffering to stop.

But as a youngun? As the new writer in town? He was a golden boy. He was a creature like Thomas Mann had written about. The golden-haired child-man who led others to do naughty naughty things, and then pled innocence. Photographers lined up to capture this guy.

See what I mean?

Hard to realize just how provocative those photos were back then. Especially because he was openly gay. And not just "openly gay" - but openly PRISSY and gay - which some people find unforgivable. Fine, be gay ... but ... do you have to be so ... GAY about it?? Can't you just PRETEND to be straight so I don't have to feel so ... ikky? Truman, even back in the early 40s, didn't put on an act for the straight world. He didn't turn himself inside out to make people feel comfortable with his gayness. He just was who he was. If people felt uncomfortable, then that was THEIR problem. He was prissy, he lisped, he flounced about like a Southern belle - AND he happened to be a kick-ass writer with a literary voice that no one could forget.

I still remember the impact that The Grass Harp had on my heart when I first read it.

That book literally hurt my heart. I was too young then to really understand regrets, or loss - the way I understand them now - but his elegaic writing in that story touched some deep universal chord in me - the part of me that is HUMAN, and not just an age on a timeline. There was a kind of soul-growth spurt that happened to me when I read that sad beautiful story. I still have a real fondness for it.

His first book, published in 1948, was Other Voices, Other Rooms, and it took the literary world by storm. It was one of THOSE debuts. High level reviewers praised the book - in glowing terms - and it truly is a wonderful book. Not as good as his others, and CERTAINLY not as good as In Cold Blood (just saying the name of that book gives me a chill up my spine) - but you could tell that there was a real VOICE in that book.

Just to add to the controversy - here is the "author photo" that appeared sprawled across the back of the book:

hahahahaha Truman! Please! It caused an outrage. A stir. People loved it. People hated it. People TALKED about it, and that was what Truman cared about. Truman had talent - yes - but he understood the whole 15 minutes of fame thing long before Andy Warhol came along. Truman wanted to be FAMOUS as well as being a good writer. He wasn't one of those writers who holed themselves up in their apartments (at least not until In Cold Blood when he disappeared off the face of the earth for almost 5 years - he said later that writing that book nearly killed him.) ... But before In Cold Blood he was out at every party, he hung out with the rich and famous (at least until the huge debacle at the end of his life when he alienated all of them in one fell swoop)

This photo is just ... kind of says it all, don't it?

Look at how he's holding her wrist!!! Like - hold her HAND, Truman. But also - look at how sweet she is. The two of them were actually very good friends and he wrote one of my favorite pieces about her, which appears in the gorgeous collection Music for Chameleons. The piece describes a day in New York when he and Marilyn attended a funeral of a mutual friend. I love that piece. It's called "A Beautiful Child", because that's what Truman saw her as. Not the sex goddess. But a beautiful child. Still, though. What a FUNNY photo of the two of them.

He was the darling of New York. He wasn't just friends with celebrities - whose wealth is a rather transitory thing. He became friends with REAL rich people. The international tycoon types. The Onassis types. He was invited to all of the "society" parties.

And he threw a party that is still famous. It was called The Black and White Ball, and he threw it for Katherine Graham - who he didn't even really know.

She wrote in her autobiography (which I've read): "I was truly baffled as to why I was the guest of honor. But it seemed really important to Truman ... so I said yes."

Odd. It was, many people say who care about this stuff, the "party of the century".

Everyone had to come wearing masks, and everyone had to dress in black and white. Truman had just finished In Cold Blood - or maybe he had just returned from Kansas - not sure - but he needed to let off steam, he needed to shake off In Cold Blood which had literally taken over his life. So he threw this party - where everyone who was anyone showed up.

Here's Candice Bergen at the party:

Here's Norman Mailer and his wife - hahahaha

Here's Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra- who had just gotten married:

People jostled to get invited. People sucked up to Truman. He was in his glory. But even then - he had the oddest mix of desire and contempt when it came to the rich. He wanted to hang out with them - but he had contempt for them as well. On some level, I think he knew that they would drop him like a hot potato the second his friendship became inconvenient. He knew that his friendships with these people were were pretty one-sided: Truman was there to entertain, to keep things light and amusing. The second he started falling on hard times later in life, they stopped tolerating his company.

Perhaps all those rich people just liked the cache of having a literary star at their parties - it made their parties seem more ... substantial. Maybe they really did like him. But I don't think so. And I don't think Truman liked them all that much, either. He saw right through them. Only he kept that to himself, and let the rich people think that he bought their game, that he was fooled, that he did not see the essential shallowness beneath their facade. When he finally came out and wrote about them and their pettiness, their stupidity - they could not and would not forgive him. (By that point in his life, long after In Cold Blood, Truman had actually lost a lot of what had made him a success in the first place ... and that was his compassion for others. His ability to love his fellow man, and to try to step into their shoes and describe for us, the reader, what it is "like" to be that person. By the 1960s, drugs and drinking had taken hold ... and Truman was angry. He wrote about his former friends with bitchy - but spot-on - RAGE. He had NO compassion for THEM. He could find it in his heart to be compassionate for Dick Hickock and Perry Smtih even though they had committed such a heinous crime. But he was NOT compassionate for the fat Upper East Side cats. He unleashed his wrath on them, and it was like a bomb going off in international society.)

Truman Capote found himself bereft, and alone. He never recovered from that shattering of his world, even though he said over and over, "I'm a writer! What did they think I did in my spare time? I observed life - and I wrote about it!" They did not forgive him for telling the truth. Years later, when Gerald Clarke wrote his tremendous biography of Capote - there were people who refused to be interviewed for the book becaue they were STILL seething at Truman's "betrayal".

I'm going to post something I wrote a long time ago on this blog - which ended up being published elsewhere. It's called "Fairy on the Prairie", and it's about the writing of In Cold Blood which is pretty much on my Top 10 favorite books ever written. Certain books come and go on that list - titles get bumped off - moved on - but not In Cold Blood. There are a couple of others that never get bumped off - Harriet the Spy, A Wrinkle in Time, Catch-22. These are great great books.

I'm proud of the piece I wrote on Truman.

Before we get to that, though, I would like to share my favorite photo of Truman Capote. It's done by the great photographer Irving Penn. I like it because - it's not the "carefree" look of his golden-boy self - which was a pose, to some degree. It's not the provocative just-got-out-of-bed look he sported as an early writer - which was also a pose. And it's not a photograph from his later years, which just really hurt me to see.

Irving Penn had photographed Spencer Tracy, famously, boxed up in a corner. (That was one of Penn's "things" - he put famous people into corners of rooms and photographed them. Strangely effective.)

Look. Amazing photo of Spencer. Look at the EXPRESSION on his face.

Penn took basically the same photograph of Truman - boxed him up in a corner. I looked for a larger version of the photo - a clearer one - but couldn't find it. This is the best I could get.

There is something about this photo that not only haunts me, but strikes me as deeply painfully TRUE. The oversized coat, it makes him look so small and frail. The cramped quarters, the walls pressing in. Now, I did not know Truman Capote, and it is not for me to say who is the "real" Truman Capote - but something about the look on his face in this photo, its flat blank-eyed stare, the gaze is a bit confronting, but also - so accepting of himself, of the soul behind those eyeballs - something about it lands for me. I feel that I am getting a glimpse not of a personality, a famous person ... but someone's soul. I feel the same way about the Spencer Tracy photograph - so I don't know what that's about, and I'm sure it has all to do with Irving Penn's gift. It's extraordinary to me.

And now. Onto In Cold Blood, and my old post about him. There may be some repeats of information here.

Happy happy birthday, dear dear Truman.

Truman Capote said later that if he had known what he was getting into, when he traveled down to Kansas ("a fairy down on the prairie - who'd have thought?") to write a piece on the murder for The New Yorker, then he never would have gone. He went to Kansas only 2 weeks after the murders took place. The killers had still not been found, the community was in an uproar of suspicion and paranoia. Capote's main interest was to do a long profile of the townspeople, how regular church-going farmers handled such a disaster. Little did he know what the book would eventually be! The project took up years of his life. He had to wait for the executions of the 2 murderers, in order to complete his book. So he waited, and waited. Appeal after appeal ...He was unable to write anything else. Nothing else interested him. He was a man obsessed, in the grip of his obsession for years. His health was ruined. His friends were sick of hearing about the Clutter family. He tried to take vacations with his long-time partner, and would just drink, and try to sleep, and have fits of despair. He thought those boys would never be executed, he thought he would be in limbo forever. Yet - the morbidness of his entire life being on hold because of commuted death-sentences in Kansas - the morbidness of trying to go on, when really all you want is for those 2 boys to be killed - so that YOU can go back to YOUR life ... This paid a huge toll on him.

Finally - there were no more appeals and Capote traveled to Kansas, to watch the execution. Hickock and Smith had asked him to be there. In the intervening years, he had interviewed the 2 killers numerous times. Their first-person descriptions of their own sorry lives make up important parts of the book. Capote became their conduit to the outside world. Hickock would draw self-portraits of himself and send them to Capote. Capote was playing a double-edged game here. He became "the listener", the one who would sit and ask them questions, and nod understandingly. The 2 of them got addicted to his concern. Yet Capote was horrified by most of what he heard. He wasn't without pity for these men, who had pretty much been beaten like dogs from the second they were born - and yet Capote hadn't had an easy road either, and HE hadn't killed anyone in cold blood. He had grown up with alcoholics, he had been abandoned by his father, his parents were ashamed of having a "fairy" for a son, he was sent to military school - can you imagine how awful that must have been for him? Capote may have acted like a cream-puff but that man was cold and hard as steel inside. He had to be.

Capote needed quotes, he needed access, he needed to enter into the psychologies of these 2 men. He was able to paint the graphic picture of the Clutter family through interviews with people who knew and loved them. But the Clutters were no longer around to speak for themselves. Hickock and Smith were alive for a couple of years, so he visited them often. On his way out of Death Row, he would feel the urge to vomit. It would take him days to recover, emotionally, from these macabre "visits". And he said, later, that he never recovered from the "shattering" experience of watching the two men hang. The letters he wrote to friends afterwards are nearly incoherent. Watching how hard the hanging body clings to life, watching the kicking feet, the flailing, the letting-go of bodily functions ... Capote was really never the same man again.

And he then sat down and wrote the book like a bat out of hell.

Truman Capote always thought that he had a "great book" in him. This mythical "great book" haunted his dreams, he would lie awake at night aching with ambition, dreaming about this great book ... He didn't think In Cold Blood was his masterpiece. He looked back on the experience of researching that book and writing it as a grim one, an almost universally unpleasant and grueling experience. I've read all of Capote's books. I love that guy's writing style. I even read his unfinished work - the 2 chapters of the novel he was working on when he died. He claimed to have it almost finished, but the rest of it (if it even existed) was never found. The 2 chapters are okay - it's a gossipy bitchy look at high-class New York society. It's merciless. It's very funny. Nobody is spared. Human beings are seen in their worst lights. Everyone is selfish, cynical, out for themselves ... It is quite funny, but it's very very mean. He was nearing the end of his life, and he had been abandoned by most of his friends. His outlook was not good, he was addicted to drugs, filled with anxiety and loneliness ... The 2 chapter are his way of lashing out at all those people who left him, who tossed him out with the trash. Hence, the mean-ness.

The thing in the rest of Capote's writing that, for me, sets him apart is his undeniable love of humanity. His tenderness. His ability to SEE people, with all their flaws - and to see them as beautiful. Much of his best writing is all about nostalgia, wistfulness, yearning for childhood ... Yes, it is sentimental, but it also has a depth of sadness beneath it, a grief ... which elevates it from mawkishness.

In Cold Blood taps into something else. In Cold Blood doesn't fit into either of the Capote categories: the bitchy mean queen telling all the nasty secrets of his high-class friends, or the lonely sweet man filled with hurtful nostalgia for childhood.

It was something completely new. For him, and for us. I don't even know if I can describe it. All I can say is - he never accomplished such a thing again. His writing never seemed so effortless again. You read that book and you feel like if you cut ONE WORD, the entire thread will unravel. It is so tight.

The other thing I had forgotten from the biography is Capote's personal experience leaving his home-environment of ritzy New York City (where there were lots of "fairies"), and venturing into the Kansas prairies to investigate a murder. Capote was openly gay. He wasn't a macho gay, either. He didn't try to blend in, or act straight, or hide his gayness. He was a small rotund man, who wore wide white hats, spoke with a lisp, fluttered about like Blanche DuBois, and literally said things like, "I declare!"

He took one of his best friends, Harper Lee (yes - THAT Harper Lee) as a co-researcher. She was much more "normal"-acting, and was able to blend in a bit more. She could get people to talk to her, because she seemed like one of them.

But Truman Capote was so relentless, and not only so relentless, but so committed to justice, so committed to discovering what had happened in the Clutter household, that people started opening up. The people in the town started competing about who had had him over for dinner the most times. Alvin Dewey, the head of the investigation, a tough gruff 3 pack a day smoker, eventually counted Truman as a valued partner. Truman was there when Dewey got the call that the 2 murderers had been picked up in Las Vegas, AND that they were still wearing the boots with the distinctive soles (that had left footprints - If the 2 hadn't confessed, the boots alone would have convicted them). Truman was standing right there, with Dewey's wife, listening to Dewey hear the news.

The people of Kansas, who had never met a person like Capote in their lives, who were Bible-Belt ranchers and farmers, took him into their homes, their families, their hearts. Without them, the book would not have been written.

It is a massive accomplishment.

Truman Capote went to his grave thinking that his "great book" remained unwritten. I beg to differ.

Posted by sheila