Disappeared's return · Dunphy's memoir

The crime
The murders of the Clutter family, I suppose, tangentially. Or perhaps the overprescribing by multiple Drs. Feelgood that let Truman Capote slowly kill himself.

The story
Jack Dunphy was Capote’s partner until Capote’s death in August of 1984, and I had hoped that “Dear Genius…”: A Memoir Of My Life With Truman Capote might fill in some of the ellipses left by George Plimpton’s oral history. In Plimpton’s book, Dunphy recedes markedly when Capote goes to Kansas to work on In Cold Blood — characterized as an outdoorsy introvert to the point of neurodivergence, Dunphy apparently didn’t care for Capote’s society friends, and the sense I’ve always gotten from the Plimpton is that Dunphy was…excused, for lack of a better word, from dealing with them, or with the maelstrom of dramatics that attended Capote’s other romantic attachments.

But Capote also struggled with prescription drugs and alcohol, and consequently with a literally shrunken brain and seizures, and it doesn’t appear that Dunphy excused himself from that battle when it raged past his door, although in the end Capote bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles and posted up in Joanne Carson’s guest room to die. That entire situation, the entire last half-decade of Capote’s life — the pitiably inebriated TV appearances, the “naps” at Studio 54, the big talk about future work, the friends discovering that he’d emptied their larders of clear liquor, Carson’s determined insertion of herself into the mythos — works the same way on me as a more traditional cold case might. I can’t really tell you why; I don’t think knowing more about that benighted period of Capote’s life would let me know it better. But Dunphy, a writer himself, had such a watercolor way with his quotes in the Plimpton that I thought perhaps I’d find some insight, or at least more information on why Capote fell away from the Dean Corll story. Well, I did and I didn’t.