Gerald Clarke wrote the 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.)
Truman Capote is 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, while always remembering to take EVERY. SINGLE. THING he says with a pound of salt, 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 has its fascinations.
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 – like 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 an adult, and 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.
His work is something I revisit, over and over again. His chilling interview with Bobby Beausoleil, for example (which Beausoleil has since said was all bullshit. Like I said: pound of salt with Truman). 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 “Handcarved Coffins”. Words were starting to leave him. He had lost his confidence.
Norman Mailer:
Look at poor Truman. His attitude became, if I’m not recognized in my own time then something absolutely awful is taking place in society. And that vanity is something we all have to approach and walk around with great care. It can destroy a good part of us if we get into it. You know, you really have to be able to exhale, just exhale, and say, Why don’t we just leave it to history?
He was moving further and further away from strict narrative – not because it no longer interested him, but because the words would no longer come. Capote’s final years were harrowing, his 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 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, 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: they fed him, validated him, his friendships with these people filled up some vast hole of worthlessness he had going on inside. These were not fairweather friends, not at the start: they didn’t just have him around at their parties. They loved him. This is why all of them banishing him to the outer depths was so catastrophic for him. He flattered their vanity about themselves (this was a part of his disarming charm, and it was Marlon Brando’s undoing when he made the disastrous – and yet fortunate, for us – choice to allow himself to be interviewed by Capote). Capote made them feel like they weren’t just shallow upper-crust people, they loved indulging their Bohemian sides. Go party at Studio 54, hang out with Andy Warhol, and then go back to their Upper East Side fortresses. Capote gave them access to a world where they could be cool. Fabulous. To reiterate, because it’s important: his friendships (especially his friendship with Bill and Babe Paley – pictured below at Capote’s famous Black and White ball) were not surface friendships.
They bankrolled him, and took 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 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 her marriage. Capote 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 Capote’s 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 the book for years. In Cold Blood had wiped him out. In order for him to finish In Cold Blood, Capote had been forced to wait through all of the appeals until the two murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were executed. The wait was excruciating. When Hickock and Smith were hanged, Capote was present. It was such a “shattering” experience for Capote (his word) 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, with Capote reclined across a couch giving the camera a come-to-bed 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 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. Capote got the laurels.
To let off steam, freed by the completion of In Cold Blood, he threw the famous Black and White Ball in New York City, inviting the elite of society – showgirls and heiresses, Mia Farrow and Gloria Vanderbilt – 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 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. For whatever insane reason, Capote decided to have a little bit of fun at their expense. Nobody had access to their secret echelon of life, but 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 “you’ll be in it, sweetheart”, but he 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. They thought he liked them.
Only a couple of chapters of Answered Prayers have ever been found, so it seems Capote had been bragging about the book in order to make himself believe he was actually working on it and making progress. Writers need courage to put out a new work, and Capote, battling alcoholism, drug addiction, horrible relationships, and all the rest, needed all the courage he could get. Bragging that the book was almost finished, when, in reality, he had only written 3 chapters, was probably one of the ways 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, not really.
From the great brutal sweep of In Cold Blood, 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 (despicable, according to you). 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. These chapters would be his ruin.
The one chapter, “La Côte Basque 1965”, was published in Esquire in 1979. 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 made them all seem ridiculous and nasty.
It is difficult to understand his motivations, although Gerald Clarke does an excellent job examining the character of Truman Capote and what drove this artist to do what he did. Underneath the love he had for his 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 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 only friendships he had.
There had to be a level of self-awareness in his actions, despite his later protests. He had to know what he was doing. He was too smart to not know. 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 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 still. 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 was convinced otherwise.
He never really regained his footing after 1979.
Capote’s final years were brutal. 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 his “great book” was still unwritten. Thinking of In Cold Blood, I must beg to differ.
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
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.”
Truman Capote Speaks
“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners.”
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“The possession of style, a style, is often a hindrance, a negative force, not as it should be, and as it is – with, say, E.M. Forster and Colette and Flaubert and Mark Twain and Hemingway and Isak Dinesen – a reinforcement. Dreiser, for instance, has a style – but oh, Dio buono! And Eugene O’Neill. And Faulkner, brilliant as he is. They all seem to me triumphs over strong but negative styles, styles that do not really add to the communication between writer and reader. Then there is the styleless stylist – which is very difficult, very admirable, and always very popular: Graham Greene, Maugham, Thornton Wilder, John Hersey, Willa Cather, Thurber, Sartre (remember, we’re not discussing content), J.P. Marquand, and so on. But yes, there is such an animal as a nonstylist. Only they’re not writers; they’re typists. Sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with formless, eyeless, earless messages.”
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“Flannery O’Connor – she has some fine moments, that girl.”
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“Style has never been a strong point with American writers. This though some of the best have been Americans. Hawthorne got us off to a fine start. For the past thirty years Hemingway, stylistically speaking, has influenced more writers on a world scale than anyone else.”
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“Faulkner, McCullers – they project their personality at once.”
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“Hemingway once said anybody can write a novel in the first person. I know now exactly what he meant.”
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“Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence – especially if it occurs toward the end – or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all.”
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“The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.”
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“These are the enthusiasms that remain constant: Flaubert, Turgenev, Chekhov, Jane Austen, James, EM Forster, Maupassant, Rilke, Proust, Shaw, Willa Cather – oh the list is too long, so I’ll end with James Agee, a beautiful writer whose death over two years ago was a real loss. Agee’s work, by the way, was much influenced by the films.”
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“Most of all, I believe in hardening yourself against opinion.”
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“Never demean yourself by talking back to a critic, never. Write those letters to the editor in your head, but don’t put them on paper.”
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Norman Mailer:
[Truman Capote] was an extraordinary person. Extraordinary. Not extraordinary in the depth of his intelligence, but extraordinary in his daring. I once made a comment that he was one of the bravest men in New York. And you’ve no idea what it meant to walk around the way he did when he was young. I remember he was living in Brooklyn, and there was a set designer – I think it was Oliver Smith – who had a house about two blocks from where I lived in Brooklyn Heights. Truman lived in the basement there, so we’d run into each other on the street once in a while. One time, when we did, we started walking, and I said, Let’s have a drink, and we went into the nearest bar. It happened to be an old Irishman’s bar. It was one hundred yards long, or so it seemed, and they all had one foot up on the rail, these tough working-class Irishmen, and probably some Scots, all drinking there.
And we walk in, and there’s Truman with the blond hair that he still wore in bangs and he had his little gabardine raincoat. He didn’t have his arms in his sleeves, he had it tucked around his shoulders like a cape. And he walked in, and I walked in behind him and suddenly realized, Oh my God. And we went to the back of the place and sat down and talked for a while, nobody bothered us, but you know it was one of those things where you just didn’t relax for a moment. I figured there could well be trouble before we got out of there. It occurred to me then that Truman lived with that every minute of every day of his life – he insisted on being himself. And he was ready to take on what might happen. I was most impressed by that.
