Familiar Voices, Familiar Rooms
By JULIA REED
By JULIA REED
.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
TRUMAN CAPOTE
In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. (By George Plimpton.Illustrated. 498 pp. New York:Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.)
There is a point in "Truman Capote" in which John Knowles says, "There are only two American writers who are recognized by the man on the street in this century: Truman and Ernest Hemingway." It is not clear when exactly Knowles made that pronouncement to George Plimpton, but he apparently had forgotten about the 1980's, a decade in which most people on the street were forced to recognize Tama Janowitz. These days authors are right up there in the celebrity pantheon with supermodels and movie stars. When Jay McInerney writes about Bruce Willis, say, in Esquire, it is star writing about star. Capote was the first of the luminaries. Sure, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal generated plenty of ink (a lot of Vidal's stemmed from his long-running feud with Capote). Capote, however, developed fame not just into an art form but finally into a substitute for art itself.
"Celebrity was absolutely essential to him," says Knowles, who touchingly admits to being annoyed that nobody ever asked for his own autograph when he made the rounds with his friend. But unlike Knowles, or even Hemingway, Capote (or TC, as Plimpton insists on calling him throughout) relentlessly cultivated his fame, broke into high society and, once ousted from it, became a fixture at places like Studio 54. He wallpapered the bedroom of his house in Sagaponack, N.Y., with clippings about himself from even the B gossip columns and lined the spare room of his United Nations Plaza apartment with copies of an Interview magazine cover with Andy Warhol's silk-screen portrait of him. Toward the end of his life, his masterpiece never finished -- never written, really -- he was a regular on "The Tonight Show," made more than one appearance on "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour," took a role in Neil Simon's "Murder by Death." His value had been reduced to his ability to generate ratings. "He realized," Peter Beard says, "that writing was so much work . . . and that it wasn't worth it." He "could go on the Johnny Carson show and have millions of people respond to him." But as much as he was responsible for the equation that fame equals accomplishment, he knew it wasn't true and that knowledge proved to be his downfall.
The problem with an author whose greatest achievement is his own celebrity is that for most of his life he was more read about than read. This is also the problem with Capote as subject. The book is billed as a series of reminiscences by "his friends, enemies, acquaintances and detractors." But we've heard it all before: the eccentric family and unconventional early childhood in Monroeville, Ala.; his first literary success with "Other Voices, Other Rooms" and his "invention" of the literary nonfiction thriller with "In Cold Blood"; the triumph of the black-and-white ball that he gave for Katharine Graham; and finally, his long, slow decline beginning with the publication in Esquire of "La Cote Basque 1968," the 1975 tell-all "book excerpt" that led to his alienation from the "swans," the society women like Babe Paley and Slim Keith whose affection was so important to him. We get the booze, the pills, the tall tales, the problematic boyfriends -- even endless descriptions of his bizarre appearance and high voice, as though we could have possibly forgotten them.
Since Plimpton helped Jean Stein compile "Edie," the highly-regarded biography that is also in the form of oral history, comparisons are inevitable. The thing about Edie was that most people, until the book, had never heard of her. It wasn't really even about her, but about families and what they can do to you, about a budding American religion of style and fashion and drugs. It was tightly told, immediate and powerful. The vigorous voices on its pages admitted us into worlds that most of us had never been privy to.
When Capote died, Vidal told Jason Epstein that it was "a good career move," but it turned out to be a bigger boon to Capote's friends. There have already been three books about him since his death 13 years ago, including the definitive biography by Gerald Clarke, and a Broadway play starring an eerily good Robert Morse. C.Z. Guest and Phyllis Cerf Wagner, two close friends, planned to write their own memoir until Joe Fox, Capote's editor at Random House, wisely talked them out of it. Guest was eventually cut from Plimpton's book, but Clarke is all over the place, as are two other Capote biographers, including his lifelong companion Jack Dunphy (represented almost entirely by excerpts from his book) and John Malcolm Brinnin, a friend and critic. One speaker is identified in the "Biographies of Contributors" as a "Capote lecturer." As a result, these voices -- and many others -- have the flat, regurgitated quality of people who have been talking about their subject for way too long. Capote knew better than anyone that for gossip to be good it has to be fresh.
And that's pretty much what the book is, gossip. There is little about Capote the writer, and lots about Capote the personality, which is hardly the fault of the editor, since it was Capote himself who traded in the former role for the latter. Literary criticism is limited to Diana Trilling's review of "Other Voices, Other Rooms," which she dismisses, persuasively, as "the latest chic example of Southern Gothic." The protagonist's father, we are reminded, is a paralytic who drops red --"not even white" -- tennis balls down the stairs when he needs attention, that the stepmother is "feebleminded" and has a wooden hand, that cousin Randolph collects the wings of bluebirds, which the stepmother kills for him with a poker. Capote has a lot to answer for: there is an entire school of imitators who still persist with this kind of claptrap.
Further literary assessment is consigned to a chapter "In Which TC and His Contemporaries Have a Word to Say About Each Other," a festival of bitchery. "I don't know if there was ever a large idea that bothered him for one minute," Mailer said. Vidal, as usual, went one better: "I'm not interested in the awakening of the young homosexual in the South and whether or not to wear crepe de chine before sundown."
Indeed some of the best bits reveal more about the speaker than about the subject. Since almost all the sources included are celebrities themselves, their comments are necessarily designed to protect their own personas, and they are often hilariously revisionist. Marella Agnelli and Slim Keith, for example, claim that they ceased to trust Capote long before "La Cote Basque," even though they told him their innermost thoughts and Keith is the model for the story's narrator who dishes all the dirt. Candice Bergen, bunny ears bobbing, appeared to be having a marvelous time at the black-and-white ball. Now she professes to be appalled that such an event could have taken place during the Vietnam War. By nature, oral history lacks a consistent point of view. So, when these folks aren't busy rewriting history, they're accidentally arguing with each other. On a single page, Kenneth Jay Lane says, "I cannot think of one funny thing that Truman has ever said" while Dotson Rader insists: "He was a great raconteur. Probably the greatest of this century."
Among the freshest voices is that of Jennings Carter, Capote's first cousin from Monroeville, who describes the author's early childhood as less tragic than spoiled. Capote's aunts hand-washed his clothes every day; he was allowed to sleep late and was brought coffee in bed, where he honed the art of holding court. His farewell coup, before leaving Monroeville to join his mother and stepfather in New York, was to persuade the aunts to give an extravagant Halloween party, a precursor of sorts to the black-and-white ball. "He said he wanted to throw a party so grand that everybody would remember him," Carter reports. To that end the 7-year-old Capote thought up dozens of imaginative games; he hired "a soot black man named John White" to tend to the apple bobbing and instructed him to wear a white suit, white shirt, white shoes and white hat. It was memorable not just because, as Carter points out, "children didn't have nighttime parties" but also because the party was visited by members of the Ku Klux Klan who had heard that "Mr. Truman had invited Negroes to the party." The Klan was faced down, and Capote was beside himself with delight. Mythmaking, he and Carter rehashed the evening over leftovers. "How does it feel to see history in front of your eyes?" Capote asked. "The Klan . . . died last night."
The people of "In Cold Blood" are finally allowed to speak for themselves. My favorite is Charles McAtee, the former Kansas Director of Penal Institutions, who supplies a version, far less distanced than Capote's own, of the hangings of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. "When they drop they're in full view," he says. "There's a strong spring on the trapdoor and there's a loud clang when it snaps open. The body drops straight down. They're trussed up straight as a board , almost as if you put a 2 by 6 right up their back. . . . The body doesn't swing. It does bounce a bit." McAtee still can't get over Hickock's last meal. "Royal shrimp and strawberry pop. My gosh! How long has it been since you drank a strawberry pop?" Then there's the prison chaplain who caught the wad of Juicy Fruit chewing gum Smith spit from the gallows and threw it away. "Maybe I shouldn't have. It's amazing how valuable things like that get to be."
Also included is Harold Nye, the agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation who makes the absurd insinuation that Capote and Smith enjoyed jailhouse assignations. "I can't prove it, but they spent a lot of time up in the cell. . . . They were both homosexuals." The homophobic Nye had been gunning for Capote from their first meeting in Capote's Kansas hotel room, where the author greeted his guest in a pink silk and lace negligee. Capote compounded Nye's animosity by taking the agent and his wife -- "Truman knew what kind of lady she was" -- to a lesbian bar, a gay bar and a musical revue by female impersonators.
"It was typical of Truman -- taking people to some bizarre place and seeing how they'd react," says John Richardson. But Capote also had his generous side. He wined and dined all the Kansas folks in Manhattan, long after they ceased to be useful to him. He took McAtee to dinner at "21" with Bill and Babe Paley ("pretty heady stuff") and a far less appreciative Duane West, who was the prosecutor in the case, to Sardi's. "That's where I had my first experience with cold potato soup, which is supposed to be a delicacy." West recalls. "I told my wife, I said, 'If you ever brought me a bowl of cold potato soup out of the kitchen I'd turn around and ask you to heat it up! Vichy-shwash or whatever. That's gotta be a big-city ploy if I ever heard one.' "
By the end, after Capote has taken an awfully long time to die, there is a distinct feeling of anticlimax, much like his own funeral. Poor Truman. He would have wanted a bash to fit the status he had so desperately sought for himself. But the chairman of the board of the William Morris Agency had a service scheduled same day, same time, and alas, the Morris man got the stars and Capote got their wives. Fearing a low turnout, Capote's loyal friend Carole Matthau pressed John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion into attendance. Dunne gives a brilliant description of the eulogies. A bewildered Artie Shaw began by saying, "I'm not quite sure why I'm here." Artie Deutsch, a neighbor in Palm Springs, stood up and said, "I suppose Truman's life hit its apex with his party, and from then on it was downhill." Dunne nudged Didion and said, "Scratch Artie Deutsch from speaking at my funeral." But however sad and inappropriate the statement may have seemed, it was, of course, the truth.
"Celebrity was absolutely essential to him," says Knowles, who touchingly admits to being annoyed that nobody ever asked for his own autograph when he made the rounds with his friend. But unlike Knowles, or even Hemingway, Capote (or TC, as Plimpton insists on calling him throughout) relentlessly cultivated his fame, broke into high society and, once ousted from it, became a fixture at places like Studio 54. He wallpapered the bedroom of his house in Sagaponack, N.Y., with clippings about himself from even the B gossip columns and lined the spare room of his United Nations Plaza apartment with copies of an Interview magazine cover with Andy Warhol's silk-screen portrait of him. Toward the end of his life, his masterpiece never finished -- never written, really -- he was a regular on "The Tonight Show," made more than one appearance on "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour," took a role in Neil Simon's "Murder by Death." His value had been reduced to his ability to generate ratings. "He realized," Peter Beard says, "that writing was so much work . . . and that it wasn't worth it." He "could go on the Johnny Carson show and have millions of people respond to him." But as much as he was responsible for the equation that fame equals accomplishment, he knew it wasn't true and that knowledge proved to be his downfall.
The problem with an author whose greatest achievement is his own celebrity is that for most of his life he was more read about than read. This is also the problem with Capote as subject. The book is billed as a series of reminiscences by "his friends, enemies, acquaintances and detractors." But we've heard it all before: the eccentric family and unconventional early childhood in Monroeville, Ala.; his first literary success with "Other Voices, Other Rooms" and his "invention" of the literary nonfiction thriller with "In Cold Blood"; the triumph of the black-and-white ball that he gave for Katharine Graham; and finally, his long, slow decline beginning with the publication in Esquire of "La Cote Basque 1968," the 1975 tell-all "book excerpt" that led to his alienation from the "swans," the society women like Babe Paley and Slim Keith whose affection was so important to him. We get the booze, the pills, the tall tales, the problematic boyfriends -- even endless descriptions of his bizarre appearance and high voice, as though we could have possibly forgotten them.
Since Plimpton helped Jean Stein compile "Edie," the highly-regarded biography that is also in the form of oral history, comparisons are inevitable. The thing about Edie was that most people, until the book, had never heard of her. It wasn't really even about her, but about families and what they can do to you, about a budding American religion of style and fashion and drugs. It was tightly told, immediate and powerful. The vigorous voices on its pages admitted us into worlds that most of us had never been privy to.
When Capote died, Vidal told Jason Epstein that it was "a good career move," but it turned out to be a bigger boon to Capote's friends. There have already been three books about him since his death 13 years ago, including the definitive biography by Gerald Clarke, and a Broadway play starring an eerily good Robert Morse. C.Z. Guest and Phyllis Cerf Wagner, two close friends, planned to write their own memoir until Joe Fox, Capote's editor at Random House, wisely talked them out of it. Guest was eventually cut from Plimpton's book, but Clarke is all over the place, as are two other Capote biographers, including his lifelong companion Jack Dunphy (represented almost entirely by excerpts from his book) and John Malcolm Brinnin, a friend and critic. One speaker is identified in the "Biographies of Contributors" as a "Capote lecturer." As a result, these voices -- and many others -- have the flat, regurgitated quality of people who have been talking about their subject for way too long. Capote knew better than anyone that for gossip to be good it has to be fresh.
And that's pretty much what the book is, gossip. There is little about Capote the writer, and lots about Capote the personality, which is hardly the fault of the editor, since it was Capote himself who traded in the former role for the latter. Literary criticism is limited to Diana Trilling's review of "Other Voices, Other Rooms," which she dismisses, persuasively, as "the latest chic example of Southern Gothic." The protagonist's father, we are reminded, is a paralytic who drops red --"not even white" -- tennis balls down the stairs when he needs attention, that the stepmother is "feebleminded" and has a wooden hand, that cousin Randolph collects the wings of bluebirds, which the stepmother kills for him with a poker. Capote has a lot to answer for: there is an entire school of imitators who still persist with this kind of claptrap.
Further literary assessment is consigned to a chapter "In Which TC and His Contemporaries Have a Word to Say About Each Other," a festival of bitchery. "I don't know if there was ever a large idea that bothered him for one minute," Mailer said. Vidal, as usual, went one better: "I'm not interested in the awakening of the young homosexual in the South and whether or not to wear crepe de chine before sundown."
Indeed some of the best bits reveal more about the speaker than about the subject. Since almost all the sources included are celebrities themselves, their comments are necessarily designed to protect their own personas, and they are often hilariously revisionist. Marella Agnelli and Slim Keith, for example, claim that they ceased to trust Capote long before "La Cote Basque," even though they told him their innermost thoughts and Keith is the model for the story's narrator who dishes all the dirt. Candice Bergen, bunny ears bobbing, appeared to be having a marvelous time at the black-and-white ball. Now she professes to be appalled that such an event could have taken place during the Vietnam War. By nature, oral history lacks a consistent point of view. So, when these folks aren't busy rewriting history, they're accidentally arguing with each other. On a single page, Kenneth Jay Lane says, "I cannot think of one funny thing that Truman has ever said" while Dotson Rader insists: "He was a great raconteur. Probably the greatest of this century."
Among the freshest voices is that of Jennings Carter, Capote's first cousin from Monroeville, who describes the author's early childhood as less tragic than spoiled. Capote's aunts hand-washed his clothes every day; he was allowed to sleep late and was brought coffee in bed, where he honed the art of holding court. His farewell coup, before leaving Monroeville to join his mother and stepfather in New York, was to persuade the aunts to give an extravagant Halloween party, a precursor of sorts to the black-and-white ball. "He said he wanted to throw a party so grand that everybody would remember him," Carter reports. To that end the 7-year-old Capote thought up dozens of imaginative games; he hired "a soot black man named John White" to tend to the apple bobbing and instructed him to wear a white suit, white shirt, white shoes and white hat. It was memorable not just because, as Carter points out, "children didn't have nighttime parties" but also because the party was visited by members of the Ku Klux Klan who had heard that "Mr. Truman had invited Negroes to the party." The Klan was faced down, and Capote was beside himself with delight. Mythmaking, he and Carter rehashed the evening over leftovers. "How does it feel to see history in front of your eyes?" Capote asked. "The Klan . . . died last night."
The people of "In Cold Blood" are finally allowed to speak for themselves. My favorite is Charles McAtee, the former Kansas Director of Penal Institutions, who supplies a version, far less distanced than Capote's own, of the hangings of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. "When they drop they're in full view," he says. "There's a strong spring on the trapdoor and there's a loud clang when it snaps open. The body drops straight down. They're trussed up straight as a board , almost as if you put a 2 by 6 right up their back. . . . The body doesn't swing. It does bounce a bit." McAtee still can't get over Hickock's last meal. "Royal shrimp and strawberry pop. My gosh! How long has it been since you drank a strawberry pop?" Then there's the prison chaplain who caught the wad of Juicy Fruit chewing gum Smith spit from the gallows and threw it away. "Maybe I shouldn't have. It's amazing how valuable things like that get to be."
Also included is Harold Nye, the agent from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation who makes the absurd insinuation that Capote and Smith enjoyed jailhouse assignations. "I can't prove it, but they spent a lot of time up in the cell. . . . They were both homosexuals." The homophobic Nye had been gunning for Capote from their first meeting in Capote's Kansas hotel room, where the author greeted his guest in a pink silk and lace negligee. Capote compounded Nye's animosity by taking the agent and his wife -- "Truman knew what kind of lady she was" -- to a lesbian bar, a gay bar and a musical revue by female impersonators.
"It was typical of Truman -- taking people to some bizarre place and seeing how they'd react," says John Richardson. But Capote also had his generous side. He wined and dined all the Kansas folks in Manhattan, long after they ceased to be useful to him. He took McAtee to dinner at "21" with Bill and Babe Paley ("pretty heady stuff") and a far less appreciative Duane West, who was the prosecutor in the case, to Sardi's. "That's where I had my first experience with cold potato soup, which is supposed to be a delicacy." West recalls. "I told my wife, I said, 'If you ever brought me a bowl of cold potato soup out of the kitchen I'd turn around and ask you to heat it up! Vichy-shwash or whatever. That's gotta be a big-city ploy if I ever heard one.' "
By the end, after Capote has taken an awfully long time to die, there is a distinct feeling of anticlimax, much like his own funeral. Poor Truman. He would have wanted a bash to fit the status he had so desperately sought for himself. But the chairman of the board of the William Morris Agency had a service scheduled same day, same time, and alas, the Morris man got the stars and Capote got their wives. Fearing a low turnout, Capote's loyal friend Carole Matthau pressed John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion into attendance. Dunne gives a brilliant description of the eulogies. A bewildered Artie Shaw began by saying, "I'm not quite sure why I'm here." Artie Deutsch, a neighbor in Palm Springs, stood up and said, "I suppose Truman's life hit its apex with his party, and from then on it was downhill." Dunne nudged Didion and said, "Scratch Artie Deutsch from speaking at my funeral." But however sad and inappropriate the statement may have seemed, it was, of course, the truth.
