The Books: Capote: A Biography, by Gerald Clarke

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on this shelf is Capote: A Biography, by Gerald Clarke

A definitive biography of Truman Capote. It looms as large in the Capote landscape as Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce looms in Joyce-land. Published in 1988, no book since addressing the onslaught in American culture that was Truman Capote has even come close to competing with Gerald Clarke’s masterpiece. (He also wrote a pretty definitive biography of Judy Garland as well. He’s damn good.)

Truman Capote is, hands down, one of my favorite writers and I have written a lot about him. All of the elements of his vast body of work – the elegiac tone of his earliest novels, the bittersweet tang of his short stories, his unmatched work as a journalist, and then his tragic tailspin at the end when he could barely write anymore – but even the late stuff is compulsively readable – it can’t help but be, it was written by Truman Capote … every single phase he went through as a writer is something that calls to me. My introduction to him was in middle school when we had to read his short story “Children On Their Birthdays in English class. It didn’t make as big an impression on me as some of the other books we had to read in class – Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, for instance, which remains one of my favorite books of all time. But funnily enough, years and years later, when I was a full-blown adult, and I was obsessed with Truman Capote due to In Cold Blood, and went back to read everything – when I came across “Children On Their Birthdays” and re-read it, I remembered it almost word for word. So somewhere, the impression that it made on me was quite deep.

His work is something I revisit, over and over and over again. His chilling interview with Bobby Beausoleil, for example. And I love “Handcarved Coffins”, too, with its script format, and its pretense (is it pretense though?) that all of this really happened. Capote had already started to lose it at the time he wrote that. Words were starting to leave him. He had lost his confidence, his bravado. He was moving more and more away from strict narrative – not just because it no longer interested him, but because the words would no longer come. Capote’s final years were harrowing, the writer’s block absolute. He had made enemies of all of his rich friends, in one fell swoop, and the response had been devastating. They had all cut him off. Capote always ran in multiple circles at the same time. He hung out with movie people, and actors/actresses, he hung out with (and battled with) the other big writers of the day – Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer – he had many contacts in law enforcement circles, post In Cold Blood, and was able to gracefully maneuver his way through that macho world in order to get the access he needed for the stories he wanted to write – He was a chameleon, in that respect, despite his flamboyant openly gay manner. But hanging out with the rich (and not just the rich, but the international billionaire set) was how he got by, it fed him, it validated him, it filled up the vast hole of worthlessness he had going on inside. These were not fairweather friends, so much – although they did all ruthlessly cut him off (I’ll get to that). They loved him. They loved having him around. Perhaps because he flattered their vanity (that was a part of his disarming charm – it was Marlon Brando’s undoing when he allowed himself to be interviewed by Capote), perhaps because it made them feel like they weren’t just soulless upper-crust people – they too could brush shoulders with their Bohemian sides. Go party at Studio 54, hang out with Andy Warhol, and then go back to their Upper East Side fortresses. Truman Capote gave them access to a world where they could be cool. Fabulous. Again, though, these friendships (especially not his friendship with Bill and Babe Paley – pictured below at Capote’s famous Black and White ball) were not surface friendships.

They did bankroll him, and take him with them on their Greek island yacht jaunts, allowing him to live a life of luxury closed to most writers, even very successful ones. Bestselling authors, as Capote was, still don’t get to live the life of an Onassis. That’s a heady club, closed to most of the planet. Capote and Babe Paley were soulmates, best friends. Capote’s companionship helped her deal with some of the more upsetting parts of her marriage – he gave her validation, companionship, humor, fun. Bill Paley was a friend, too. The three of them were inseparable.

All of that changed with the publication of one chapter of his upcoming novel (never finished), called Answered Prayers. The one notorious chapter was called “La Côte Basque 1965”, and it was published in Esquire in 1979. Capote had been chattering about his next book for years. In Cold Blood had wiped him out. In order for the book to be complete, Capote had been forced to wait through all of the various appeals until the two murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were executed. It was macabre (perhaps perfectly so, since it is one of the most frightening macabre books ever written). But having to wait, year after year, through appeal after appeal, knowing that the book needed to end with the deaths of the two monsters who had killed the Clutter family. The wait was excruciating, and waiting for two men to be put to death was too much for even Capote, who could be quite ruthless in getting what he wanted. He had visited the two murderers in prison over the years, and utilized much of their reminiscences in the book, but he knew that he had to wait for the execution to complete the book. When Hickock and Smith were hanged, Capote was there. It was such a “shattering” experience for Capote that I believe he never fully recovered. The book came out and was a smash success. He had been famous since the publication of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (and also famous because of the overtly sexual author photograph, showing Capote lying reclined across a couch giving the camera a come-hither-and-fuck-me glance), and had had much success, but In Cold Blood brought him to another level. His earlier works had been delicate elegies to his Southern childhood, his family, the memories of growing up a small effeminate boy in a dusty town, and so no one really saw In Cold Blood, with its meticulous and almost cold prose, coming. It was a game-changer, not only for Capote, but for the entire American literary scene. There was an ongoing war between Norman Mailer and Capote over who invented this new form of nonfiction-fiction. But Capote got the laurels. He could do no wrong.

He threw the Black and White Ball in New York City, inviting the elite of society – showgirls and heiresses, Mia Farrow and Gloria Vanderbilt – and it was a smashing success, making it seem as though hanging out with Truman Capote was the coolest thing one could ever do. People begged and pleaded to get invites to that ball. It was the event of the year.

Everyone wondered what the boy wonder with the lisp would write next. Years passed. He worked on films, he published other books, he wrote short stories, but something essential appears to have drained out of him. He could not write another In Cold Blood. Instead, he turned his cold eyes onto his friends – the society people who had been so kind to him – and decided to have a little bit of fun. Nobody had the access to their secret high echelon of life like he did. He decided to tell all of their secrets in a lightly fictionalized book, which would be called Answered Prayers. He bragged about the progress of the book to whoever would listen, he hinted coyly to his friends that “you’ll be in it, sweetheart”, but made it sound like whatever he revealed would of course be flattering. How could it be otherwise? He had been hanging out with these people for decades. Only a couple of chapters of Answered Prayers have ever been found, so it seems that Capote had been bragging about the book in order to make himself believe that he was actually working on it and making progress. Writers need courage, to put out a new work, and Capote, who was battling alcoholism, drug addiction, horrible relationships, and all the rest, needed all the courage he could get – so bragging that the book was almost finished, when, in reality, he had only written 3 chapters, was probably one of the way he tried to force himself to believe that he “still had it”. It’s tragic. Even more tragic when you actually read Answered Prayers, and you see how THIN it really is. There’s nothing there. It’s bitchy mean-spirited gossip. That’s all it is.

From the great compassionate and brutal sweep of In Cold Blood, where he managed to imagine the two killers as human (and everyone else in the book, too – from the sheriff, to the dead family, to the townspeople) – he descended into vicious tale-telling, immaterial, meaningless, who gives a shit, Truman, about your soulless friends. YOU’RE the one who insisted on hanging out with such a despicable crowd. Answered Prayers may be a glimpse into a society that very few of us ever get to witness, but it’s hard to care about any of it. It’s fascinating, though, as a work – because it would be his ruin.

The one chapter, “La Côte Basque 1965”, was published in Esquire in 1979, and it was like a bomb went off in high society. In a matter of days, Capote found himself exiled. He had hurt people irrevocably. He had told their secrets. He had speculated. He had made them all seem ridiculous, nasty. It was unforgivable. It is difficult to understand his motivations, although Gerald Clarke does an excellent job at examining the character of Truman Capote and what drove this great artist to do what he did. Underneath the love he had for this circle of friends, was contempt. He knew, on some level, that they were just “letting him” hang out with them. That, at heart, he was an outcast, always would be an outcast. There was a lot of buried anger in this damaged man, who had been so scorned and so underestimated, the victim of such harsh judgment, abandoned by his parents, etc. By deciding to publish “”La Côte Basque 1965”, he decided to kill the friendships. There had to be a level of self-awareness in his actions, despite his protests. He had to know what he was doing. He was too smart for anything else. But still: he was not prepared for the impact. A couple of friends stayed by his side, but for the most part he was shunned. He was cut off. Completely. He didn’t realize how much he loved these people until they all refused to speak to him ever again. Yes, he brought it on himself. But that is small comfort. Other friends had tried to warn him off, tried to tell him that not only was “”La Côte Basque 1965” not worthy of him, but that the fallout would be extreme, he had no idea. But he was convinced otherwise. He never really regained his footing after 1979.

Capote’s final years were brutal. And sad. Gerald Clarke’s book is a masterpiece, because I remember feeling, as I read the final chapters, “Just die already, Truman. It’s okay. You deserve some peace. No more sadness. It’s okay.” I yearned for his release from this cruel life.

Truman Capote went to his grave thinking that his “great book” was still unwritten. Thinking of In Cold Blood, I must beg to differ.

One of my favorite writers. I will always cherish him, even Answered Prayers.

Here is an excerpt from the “La Côte Basque 1965” section of Gerald Clarke’s book.

Excerpt from Capote: A Biography

Few readers could have guessed that Dillon was supposed to represent Bill Paley. He did not look or act like Bill, and there no obvious hints, as there usually are in romans a clef. But to some of those who knew Truman and the Paleys well, it was clear that Bill was his target. The first clue was his description of Dillon’s deceived wife, Cleo – “the most beautiful creature alive,” in Lady Coolbirth’s reverential words. Truman employed such extravagant language to describe only one mortal, Babe Paley; even Lee was not accorded such an encomium. The second clue was his emphasis on Dillon’s hungering for WASP gentility; Truman was convinced that Bill Paley shared that appetite as well. In any event, he thought that by means of such cryptic signals he was doing to Bill what the former governor’s wife had done to Dillon: putting him in his place. Through words, he liked to think that he was hitting perhaps the only vulnerable spot possessed by a man of such monarchical self-confidence: his sensitivity about being a Jew.

“Truman told me that the point of the bloody-sheets story was that Bill Paley was a Jew from the Midwest who was doing a number on a New York WASP,” recalled John, who proofread “La Côte Basque” before it was sent off to Esquire. Offended by the anecdote – “That’s gossip! that’s bullshit!” he exclaimed – John tried to shame him into removing it. He pointed out that they had been the Paleys’ guests at Kiluna Farm a few weeks before, that over the years the Paleys had laden him with gifts, and finally, that he might hurt Babe, who, as they had had sad occasion to observe, was gravely ill with lung cancer. Take the Dillon section out, John urged him; but Truman could not be persuaded. “It was a vicious story,” said John, “and I’ve never understood, and will never understand, why he put it in. There’s something there that defies analysis.”

Only someone who had observed that curious trio – Babe, Bill, and Truman – in earlier times could have fathomed Truman’s tangled reasoning. He liked and admired Bill; some even speculated that he had a crush on Bill as well as Babe. But he was also jealous of him, as he would have been jealous of anyone married to Babe. Yet at the same time, he resented Bill’s inexplicable failure to appreciate that glorious woman; he was infuriated by what he saw as Bill’s putdowns of her, his insufferable condescensions. Divine Babe! Revered by Truman and so many others, but mocked and belittled by her own husband! Contemplating the unfairness of it all was more than Truman could bear. She was the one person in the world he loved without qualm or reservation, and he alone realized how unhappy she was. Now that she was dying – for that was the case – he was avenging her in the one way he knew how: by holding up to ridicule the man who had caused her so much hurt.

Truman wanted Bill to be aware that he was being ridiculed; otherwise the Sidney Dillon anecdote would have had no purpose. But so confused and contradictory were his thoughts, he also tried to convince himself that neither Bill nor some of the others he had made fun of would recognize themselves. One day in July he took a friend for a swim in Gloria Vanderbilt’s pool in Southampton – Gloria and Wyatt were away in Europe – and after the friend had read his manuscript, Truman identified, one by one, the models for his characters. “But Truman, they’re not going to like this,” protested the friend. Floating on his back and looking up at a sky of cloudless serenity, Truman lazily responded, “Nah, they’re too dumb. They won’t know who they are.”

But they did know, and when “La Côte Basque” reached the stands in mid-October, their wrath shook the ground beneath his feet. The first tremors were felt on October 10, even before it appeared. Learning of her own leading role – someone had smuggled her an advance copy of the November Esquire – Ann Woodward swallowed a fatal dose of Seconal, the same drug that had killed Nina Capote. Ann had been deeply depressed anyway, and “La Côte Basque” may only have been the catalyst that hastened the inevitable. What had bothered Ann most, a weary Elsie Woodward told a friend, was not Truman’s dredging up of the sordid past, but his suggestion that her marriage to poor Bill had been bigamous. Few regretted Ann’s death, in any event; the general feeling was that justice had been served at last. But many were angered by the embarrassment Truman had caused that beloved icon, ninety-two-year-old Elsie, who had spent twenty years trying to make everyone forget the scandal. Now, in a few paragraphs, he had destroyed all her hard work.

When “La Côte Basque” was available to everyone a week later the earthquake itself struck, sending shock waves from New York to California, where Truman was beginning rehearsals for his movie. The reaction was most succinctly summed up by a cartoon on the cover of New York magazine: a French poodle – Truman, complete with glasses – disrupting a formal party with his sharp and rapacious teeth. “Capote Bites the Hands That Fed Him,” read the magazine’s headline, which expressed the shocked and outraged feelings of most of his society friends: their favorite household pet, their ami de la maison, had turned against them.

Within hours, phones were ringing all over the East Side of Manhattan. One of the first callers was Babe, who asked Slim to identify Sidney Dillon. “Who is that?” Babe inquired suspiciously. “You don’t think that it’s Bill, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” answered Slim, who knew very well who Dillon was meant to be – Truman had told her months before. But Babe found out anyway, and instead of accusing Bill of infidelity, she blamed Truman for putting such a distasteful tale into print. Although Truman had studied her with the rapt attention of a lover, he had failed to understand perhaps the most important component of Babe’s character: her loyalty to her family. Brought up to honor the stern Roman virtues of Old Boston, she had different values from many of her fashionable friends, including Slim. She believed, as Peg O’Shea did, that whether or not he had strayed, or whether or not he had humiliated her, a wife’s duty was to stand beside her husband. She was now standing beside Bill. In attacking him, Truman had also attacked her family and the cody by which she lived, and she could not forgive him.

Nor could Slim. “You’re in it, Big Mama,” he had warned her, but expecting no more than a walk-on part, Slim was totally unprepared to encounter herself as the gabby Lady Coolbirth. “When you read it, there’s my voice, my armature, my everything!” she exploded. “She looks like me, she talks like me, she’s me! A mirror image of me! I was absolutely undone when I read it, staggered that he could be sitting across from me at a table and then go home and write down everything I had said. I had adored him, and I was so appalled by the use of friendship and my own bad judgment.”

Others were equally chagrined. “Never have you heard such gnashing of teeth, such cries for revenge, such shouts of betrayal and screams of outrage,” reported Liz Smith, who wrote the article that accompanied the New York cartoon. One cry came from the Logans, who were enraged by his witty gibe about their parties; “that dirty little toad is never coming to my parties again,” declared Nedda. Another came from Gloria Vanderbilt, who vowed that if she ever saw him again, she would spit at him. “After all,” explained her husband Wyatt, “they’ve known each other a long time. It’s not that a secret has been betrayed, it’s that a kind of trust has been betrayed.”

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer,” Somerset Maugham had said, and in the end Truman had elected to be the latter. He had broken the rules of the club, and he had to be punished. Just as it once had been the fashion to take him up, now it became the fashion to put him down, “the chic of the week,” as Charlotte Curtis phrased it. Those who were not hurt by “La Côte Basque” were often as angry as those who were. Marella Agenelli, who more than once had begged him to be her guest on one Mediterranean cruise or another, could not even bring herself to mention his first name. “Capote despises the people he talks about,” she complained. “Using, using all the time. He builds up his friends privately and knocks them down publicly.” Overnight, doors slammed in his face, and except for a few hardy loyalists like Kay Meehan and C.Z. Guest, who had not been made fun of, his society friends refused to speak to him. Not since Franklin Roosevelt came to power had the rich felt themselves so misused by someone they had considered one of their own. Truman had been accepted, pampered and allowed into the inner recesses of their private lives; in return, he had mocked them and broadcast their secrets. He was, in their opinion, a cad and a traitor.

“In society a great friendship does not amount to much,” was Proust’s cynical observation, and so it seemed to be, as even Cecil, who was eagerly following events from England, rushed to join the pack of Truman-haters. Forgotten were the unblemished days he and Truman had enjoyed together in Tangier, Portofino and Palamos; disregarded the many words of sticky adulation Cecil had scribbled about him in his diary; banished from mind the time Truman had rescued him from the two sailors in Honolulu. After having dedicated most of his life to protecting his place in the front ranks of fashion, Cecil did not want to be left behind now.

Actually, Cecil, whose chief defect was not snobbery, as many assumed, but a consuming envy, had secretly turned against Truman a decade earlier, after the success of In Cold Blood. “The triumph of Truman is salt in one’s wound,” he had bitterly noted in his diary at the end of 1965. The further triumph of the Black and White Ball had inflamed him still more. For ten years he had waited for the weather to change. To Cecil’s envious ears, the howls of indignation he now heard from the other side of the Atlantic were as soothing as a lullaby – Truman’s most venomous enemy could not have taken more delight in his downfall. “I hate the idea of Truman,” he happily confessed to one correspondent. “How low can he sink?” Even Truman’s erstwhile best friend had pronounced his name anathema: there could have been no clearer confirmation that he had been expelled from Olympus.

Naivete may be a necessary armor for writers who, like Truman, closely pattern their fiction on real people and real incidents. How, after all, could they ever write anything if they could foresee what their words would cost them? Only such protective ingenuousness could explain how Thomas Wolfe, for example, could have imagined that his family and friends would not have been wounded by Look Homeward, Angel. Only such deliberate blindness could account for Proust’s surprise when some of his titled friends were offended by their portraits in Remembrance of Things Past. And only such obstinate self-deception could explain the astonishment and dismay with which Truman now watched the reversal in his fortunes that followed “La Côte Basque”.

He had of course hoped to raise the blood pressure of people like the Logans and to cause momentary annoyance to a few more, like Bill Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt. What he had not anticipated was the disaster, complete and absolute, that had now befallen him. Forced to remain in California while he was making his movie, he kept in touch with events from afar. “He was the most surprised and shocked person you can imagine,” recalled Liz Smith, “and he would call to ask me – torment me – about what people in New York had said about him. After ‘La Côte Basque’ he was never happy again.”