The Truman Show: A Capote Reader
Welcome back to Culture Club, the recurring feature where David and I discuss our preoccupations—what we’ve been thinking about, reading, watching or playing—for premium subscribers.
2024 has already been a banner year for Truman Capote, and we've only barely inched our way into February. August will mark forty years since the writer died at the age of 59, while September will mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. But the reason you may have noticed Capote's name in your news feed recently is the debut earlier this week of Ryan Murphy's Feud: Capote vs. the Swans on FX. Starring Tom Hollander as Capote, and Naomi Watts, Chloe Sevigny, Diane Lane, Calista Flockhart, and Demi Moore as the high society "swans" he fluffs up and then tears down, the series has spawned countless articles explaining Byzantine hierarchy of Park Avenue's ladies who lunch.
Feud is actually the third time in less than two decades that Hollywood has taken a crack at the writer; Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar for 2005's "Capote," and Toby Jones took on the writer's wispy lisp in "Infamous" the following year. Of course, Hollywood had already helped fortify Capote's celebrity with big screen adaptions of his 1958 novella "Breakfast at Tiffany's", starring Audrey Hepburn, and 1967's "In Cold Blood," which was based on on his bestselling "nonfiction novel" of the same name. Between them, the two movies were nominated for nine Academy Awards.
Both of these works came from Capote's first act, when he was among the most celebrated writers in America. This is the version that Hoffman embodied—Tru at the height of his powers, cracking the story at the center of In Cold Blood. "Feud," on the other hand, depicts Capote's second act, when he was no longer one of America's most critically acclaimed writers, but almost certainly the most recognizable. And, in his final act, following the high society defenestration featured in Feud, he was America's most publicly self-destructive writer.
This week's journey down the archival rabbit hole covers all three of these acts. I've collected excerpts from some of Capote's most iconic works, including those mentioned above, as well as stories that chart the tiny terror's rocket-like rise, and slow, sad fall. Still, you can track the arc of Capote's writing throughout these pieces: the humid, impressionistic early fiction; the cool, dry true-crime writing of In Cold Blood; the dishy, toxic gossip of "La Côte Basque, 1965." That last piece, which serves as something like Feud's MacGuffin, ends with an image that Holly Golightly might have dreamt up: "It was an atmosphere of luxurious exhaustion, like a ripened, shedding rose, while all that waited outside was the failing New York afternoon."
— David
Shut a Final Door
By Truman Capote
The Atlantic, August 1947
He said you said they said we said round and round. Round and round, like the paddle-bladed ceiling-fan wheeling above; turning and turning, stirring stale air ineffectively, it made a watch-tick sound, counted seconds in the silence. Walter inched to a cooler part of the bed, and closed his eyes against the dark little room. At seven that evening he’d arrived in New Orleans, at seven-thirty he’d registered in this hotel, an anonymous sidestreet place. It was August, and it was as though bonfires burned in the red night sky, and the unnatural Southern landscape, observed so assiduously from the train, and which, trying to sublimate all else, he retraced in memory, intensified a feeling of having traveled to the end, the falling off.
Why he was here in this stifling hotel in this faraway town he could not say. There was a window in the room, but he could not seem to get it open, and he was afraid to call the bellboy (what queer eyes that kid had!), and he was afraid to leave the hotel, for what if he got lost? and if he got lost, even a little, then he would be lost altogether. He was hungry; he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he found some peanut-butter crackers left over from a package he’d bought in Saratoga, and washed them down with a finger of Four Roses, the last. It made him sick: he vomited in a wastebasket, collapsed back on the bed, and cried until the pillow was wet. After a while lie just lay there in the hot room shivering, just lay there and watched the slow-turning fan; there was no beginning to its action, and no end: it was a circle.
The Duke in His Domain
By Truman Capote
The New Yorker, November 2, 1957
Ten years ago, on the remembered afternoon, he was still relatively unknown; at least, I hadn’t a clue to who he might be when, arriving too early at the “Streetcar” rehearsal, I found the auditorium deserted and a brawny young man stretched out atop a table on the stage under the gloomy glare of work lights, solidly asleep. Because he was wearing a white T-shirt and denim trousers, because of his squat gymnasium physique—the weight-lifter’s arms, the Charles Atlas chest (though an opened “Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud” was resting on it)—I took him for a stagehand. Or did until I looked closely at his face. It was as if a stranger’s head had been attached to the brawny body, as in certain counterfeit photographs. For this face was so very untough, superimposing, as it did, an almost angelic refinement and gentleness upon hard-jawed good looks: taut skin, a broad, high forehead, wide apart eyes, an aquiline nose, full lips with a relaxed, sensual expression.
Not the least suggestion of Williams’ unpoetic Kowalski. It was therefore rather an experience to observe, later that afternoon, with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated—just as, in this Kyoto hotel room ten years afterward, my 1947 memory of Brando receded, disappeared into his 1957 self. And the present Brando, the one lounging there on the tatami and lazily puffing filtered cigarettes as he talked and talked, was, of course, a different person—bound to be.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
By Truman Capote
Esquire, November 1 1958
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.
It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again.
Holly Golightly had been a tenant in the old brownstone; she’d occupied the apartment below mine.
In Cold Blood—I: The Last to See Them Alive
By Truman Capote
The New Yorker, September 17, 1965
Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans—in fact, few Kansans—had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life—to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club. But then, in the earliest hours of that morning in November, a Sunday morning, certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal Holcomb noises—on the keening hysteria of coyotes, the dry scrape of scuttling tumbleweed, the racing, receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time, not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them—four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again—those sombre explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust, in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.
Horror Spawns a Masterpiece
LIFE, January 7, 1966
When Truman Capote first appeared in Garden City in late November 1959, only two people there, high school English teachers, had ever read any of his books. Distracted by the grief and rage and suspicion the murder of the Clutters had caused, the people of Garden City were not impressed to find Capote in their midst. They even asked to see his credentials, which consisted of a letter of introduction he had obtained en route from the president of the Kansas State University and, for want of any other identification, a passport. A well-stamped passport it was, too, bearing evidence of Capote's fondness for what he calls "footloose escapades" over Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. None of these wanderings had equipped him for the look and the mood of Kansas. "It was as strange to me," he says, "as if I'd gone to Peking."
He was just as strange to Kansans. "We did feel pretty put off by Truman at first," one man in Hoi-comb remembers, "with that funny little voice of his and the way he dressed and all, but after we'd talked to him only for an hour or so, we just got so we thoroughly enjoyed him." Another adds, "That little Truman, he's got plenty on the ball all right, even if he never did finish high school. That little rascal's just as smart as a whip.”
Voice from a Cloud
By Truman Capote
Harpers, November, 1967
I was born in New Orleans, an only child; my parents were divorced when I was four years old. It was a complicated divorce with much bitterness on either side, which is the main reason why I spent most of my childhood wandering among the homes of relatives in Louisiana, Mississippi, and rural Alabama (off and on, I attended schools in New York City and Connecticut). The reading I did on my own was of greater importance than my official education, which was a waste and ended when I was seventeen, the age at which I applied for and received a job at The New Yorker magazine. Not a very grand job, for all it really involved was sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers. Still, I was fortunate to have it, especially since I was determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom. I felt that either one was or wasn't a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome. I still think I was correct, at least in my own case; however, I now realize that most young writers have more to gain than not by attending college, if only because their teachers and classroom comrades provide a captive audience for their work; nothing is lonelier than to be an aspiring artist without some semblance of a sounding board.
Truman Capote Talks, Talks, Talks
By C. Robert Jennings
New York, May 13, 1968
The manuscript of Answered Prayers awaits. "It's a sort of romanà clef, drawn from some people I've known and places I've been. It is very strangely constructed, moving in time both past, present and future all at the same time, but it is a completely realistic novel-nothing experimental about it other than technique. I've been working on it for a year and a half and will finish by January of '69. Santa Teresa said more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones-and four or five people in the book get precisely what they wanted and the result? I'm not tellin', baby."
Lee Radziwill calls Capote her very own "answered prayer" and said as much on a recent gift. Lined schoolboys' notebooks and a lot of yellow paper and a little white bond litter a corner of the simple guest bedroom, recently vacated by the princess, where Answered Prayers is being written—first in longhand in the notebooks (in a chicken-scrawl), then on yellow—"yellow gives everything a sense of impermanence"—and finally on white via the electric machine. If Hemingway is the Paganini of the paragraph and Henry James, as Capote puts it, "is the maestro of the semi-colon", Truman is the Toscanini of the colon.
Checking in with Truman Capote
By Gerald Clarke
Esquire, November 1972
At forty-eight, Capote is no longer the slim, exotic-looking faun who was pictured on the dust jacket of his first novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms". “At that time,” he says, in the quarrelsome tone of a pioneer who finds his territory suddenly crowding up, “I was considered way beyond the pale. I made a whole life-style twenty years before its time. I was the only public character who didn’t care what anybody said or thought.” The wispy, childlike voice—“It is not a lisp,” he says firmly—and the peculiar, yes, delicate, mannerisms that seemed so shocking in 1948 are now amusing eccentricities, always good for sales, and Capote himself has been canonized by Suzy and Johnny Carson as a Public Character, St. Truman of "The Tonight Show."
La Côte Basque, 1965
By Truman Capote
Esquire, November 1975
Mrs. Kennedy and her sister had elicited not a murmur, nor had the entrances of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Cornell and Clare Boothe Luce. However, Mrs. Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client. There was nothing surreptitious in the attention allotted her as she moved with head bowed toward a table where an escort already awaited her—a Catholic priest, one of those high-brow, malnutritional, Father D’Arcy clerics who always seems most at home when absent from the cloisters and while consorting with the very grand and very rich in a wine-and-roses stratosphere.
“Only,” said Lady Ina, “Ann Hopkins would think of that. To advertise your search for spiritual ‘advice’ in the most public possible manner. Once a tramp, always a tramp.”
“You don’t think it was an accident?” I said.
“Come out of the trenches, boy. The war’s over. Of course it wasn’t an accident. She killed David with malice aforethought. She’s a murderess. The police know that.”
Truman Capote in Hot Water
By Liz Smith
New York, February 9, 1976
“Well,” sniffs Truman, “let them all martyr and identify themselves if they like … let them hang from the cross claiming they’re hurt … those who want to say they are models, that’s up to them!”
Other characters in “LCB ’65” are so thinly disguised as to be seen through tissue paper clearly—among them “Ann Hopkins,” undoubtedly representing Mrs. William Woodward Jr., who killed herself on October 10, seven days before Esquire hit the stands, and “the governor’s wife,” said to be the late Marie Harriman.
Many other names were dropped, some in passing, some to devastating effect. John Hersey has said that “the final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.” But try telling that to the friends of the late Cole Porter, or Maureen Stapleton, Elsie Woodward, Josh and Nedda Logan, Johnny Carson, “Babe” Paley and her powerful husband, Bill. (I remarked to Truman that I didn’t know that his now ex-friend Mr. Paley had ever been an “adviser to presidents,” as “Sidney Dillon” is described in the piece. Truman just grinned and said, “I didn’t either.”)
The Private World of Truman Capote
Part 2: The Descent from the Heights
By Anne Taylor Fleming
New York Times, July 9, 1978; July 16, 1978
Precocious about sex as about most things, Capote said he was 8 when he started “going to bed” with the older boys in school and that he “never had any problem about being homosexual. mean, look at me. 1 was always right out there. The other kids liked me for that. I was really quite popular. I was amusing and I was pretty. I didn't look like anybody else and I wasn't like anybody else. People start out by being put off by something that's different, but very easily disarmed them. Seduction—that's what I do! It was: You think I'm different, well, I'll show you how different I really am. So it was layers of this thing building, this persona, and didn't even realize I was doing it. I was totally self‐created.”
He left the South when he was 9, returning summers until he was 16. The big old house in Monroeville finally felt lonelier than the apartment at 1060 Park Avenue where his mother and stepfather lived, an apartment that was his home base for the next five years. His mother gradually became, for her young son with high imagination, a tragic heroine. It was to be a lifetime habit, that of seeing women as heroines in their own lives, heroines of varying degrees of tragicalness whom the older Capote would help to shape as if they were characters in a novel of his.
The Snows of Studiofiftyfour
By George Plimpton
Harpers, November, 1979
He thought about the people in the notebooks he wished were not there. They were the ones who cut him the way Ford Madox Ford had cut Hilaire Belloc at the Closeries des Lilas. Except that it was a mistake and it was Aleister Crowley, the diabolist, Ford was cut-ting. Well, Ford said he cut all cads. But then he was not a cad. He wrote things simply and truly that he had heard at the dinner tables when he sat with the very social and listened with the total recall that was either 94.6 or 96.8 percent, he never could remember which. The very social liked to talk about each other, but they did not understand him when he wrote about this and wrote about what they talked about at the Côte Basque and about the bloody sheet that one of them wanted to hang out a window at the Hotel Pierre, where downstairs in the lobby they had the good robberies. So they cut him. Slim Keith Mariella Agnelli, Pamela Harriman, Gloria Vanderbilt, Gloria Guinness, Anne Woodward' cut him, and so did Babe Paley, whom he loved and who called him "daughter." He knew he would never be invited to dine with Mr. Paley under the great tiger painting at the polished table which reflected the underside of the silverware. He tried not to think about that.
Unanswered Prayers: The Death and Life of Truman Capote.
Part 1
Part 2
By Julie Baumgold
New York, October 29/November 26, 1984
It was evident from what he produced that it was hard for him now to write anything long and sustained, like In Cold Blood. It was timing too. He was prepared to write Answered Prayers before his research for In Cold Blood took him too far. He had lived the research and was ready to write the book he described to John Malcolm Brinnin as a “book that will rattle teeth like The Origin of Species.” He is said to have used cocaine to get himself writing again in the early ‘80s. He told someone he took it in “controlled amounts” to keep himself alert and offset the effects of sleeping pills. A doctor to whom he read his cocaine writing found it to be “gibberish.” Capote kept his cocaine in a hollowed-out Bible on the top of his toilet. At first, it may have been a tool to get him going, as the writing exercises had been; later it became something else. Once, borrowing a Hemingway idea, he advised a magazine writer how to work on her novel, telling her to quit in the middle of a thought, at a point where she could start the next day, to make sure “there was enough gas in the car so it would start up.”
A Côte Capote
By John Richardson
New York Review of Books, December 17, 1987
Truman was traveling with a man I’ll call Jimmy N., a nice, dim, blue-collar worker whose name could easily be mistaken for a popular poet of the day and whom “Little T.” had enticed away from a wife and a job repairing refrigerators in Palm Springs. Instead of keeping this humble love object dark, Truman insisted on showing him off to one after another of his smart friends. This caused problems. A socially ambitious Palm Springs lady had thought Truman said he wanted to bring the poet to dinner and had organized a disastrous evening around Truman’s poor friend, who knew even less about poetry than she did.
Next, one of Truman’s cult figures had decreed that if Jimmy came to the house, “he had better use the tradesman’s entrance.” Finally the Italian friends who had been prevailed upon to invite Jimmy for a cruise on their luxurious yacht had done their best to put the Palm Springer at his ease, but to no avail; he would clearly have been happier with the crew.
Bye Society
By Gerald Clarke
Vanity Fair, April 1988
Of all Truman's writing, "La Côte Basque" is probably the one piece that can be called a tour de force: he has transformed a table in a Manhattan restaurant into a stage on which he has placed his own jet-set Vanity Fair. One by one, he shines a spotlight on his glittering cast, which includes, besides his fictional characters, the very real Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Lee Radziwill. There is no plot—the only unifying element is a tone of profound disenchantment—and he has pulled off one of the most difficult tricks in fiction, which is the fashioning of a seamless narrative out of disparate characters and unrelated deeds. "La Côte Basque" is not great art, but it is superb craftsmanship, storytelling at its most skillful.
But Truman had more than literature in mind when he wrote "La Côte Basque." He also used it to get back at some of his rich friends who, for one reason or another, had offended him over the years. Wrapped inside it is a hit list. Ann Woodward is on that list, of course. Besides being fascinated by her rather compelling biography, he remembered a much-talked-about meeting in Saint Moritz in which she had called him a "fag," and he, in return, had nicknamed her "Bang-Bang," a label that stuck.
Unmourned Losses. Unsettled Claims
By Molly Haskell
New York Times, June 12, 1988
Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in a New Orleans hotel in 1924, of parents who were alike only in their frightening inadequacy as parents. Lillie Mae Faulk realized she had made a mistake hours after marrying Arch Persons, and they more or less went their separate ways thereafter, leaving Truman to be raised by an eccentric family of maiden aunts and a bachelor uncle. Lillie Mae was that most treacherous of mothers, a discontented small-town beauty who would appear in his life for a day or two, wafting the perfume of motherhood over him, then disappear. Arch was a charming, no-account con man, but it was Arch who, in preventing Lillie Mae from having the abortion she had desperately wanted, saved Truman's life. And it was Arch whom Truman had to thank for his literary talent: the Persons family were great letter writers, and the samples of Arch's wheedling, money-grubbing epistles included here are comic masterpieces, marvels of double talk and self-deception.
Babe
By Sally Bedell Smith
Vanity Fair, September 1990
[Babe’s] mood was hardly improved by the publication in Esquire late in 1975 of Truman Capote's "La Côte Basque, 1965," which recounted a sordid sexual tale about a "conglomateur" named Sidney Dillon whose resemblance to Paley was purely intentional. In the view of Capote biographer Gerald Clarke, Capote's tale was a form of revenge. "Now that she was dying," wrote Clarke, Capote "was avenging her in the one way he knew how: by holding up to ridicule the man who had caused her so much hurt."
Babe, said New York Times social columnist Charlotte Curtis, was "devastated" by the treachery of Capote, to whom she had confided her secrets over the years. She could never forgive him, explained Babe's friend Jean Stein, because of her ingrained loyalty to family. "Truman didn't understand the kind of woman she was, that she would have to be loyal first to her husband, and that Truman would be left out.
A Shot in the Dark: The Golden World and Fatal Marriage of Ann and Billy Woodward
By Susan Braudy
New York, Aug 3, 1992
In New York, Truman Capote was appearing on the Tonight Show and at society dinner parties, spinning tales spiced with malice and wit about movie stars and society people. With the help of a friend at the New York Times, Capote collected clippings about the Woodward shooting. A Nassau County policeman copied the microfilmed police report that had been gathering dust in a metal file drawer in Mineola. Capote relished the private-detective reports on Princess Marina Torlonia.
Capote liked to tell about his "shoot-out" with Ann [Woodward]. He claimed he and Ann had once been sitting at separate tables at a bar at Biarritz when someone pointed over Ann's shoulder and said, "There's Truman Capote.." Ann asked, "Where's that faggot?" Unfortunately, Capote said, he was only two feet away, hidden from view by a pillar. Ann made a gesture of apology to him, but Capote just stared. The next evening, he toasted her silently from the bar. Then, he claimed, he'd cocked his thumb and pointed his forefinger at her, saying, "Bang-bang, bang-bang."
Tru Confessions
By Elizabeth Hardwick
New York Review of Books, January 15, 1998
Capote had, like a leper with a bell announcing his presence, horrified those he most treasured and with many he was marked with the leper’s visible deformities, a creature arousing fear of infection. There is much ado about this in Plimpton: calls unanswered, intervention by friends unavailing. “Unspoiled Monsters,” another section of Answered Prayers, concerns itself with the chic homosexual world and what used to be called stars of stage, screen, and radio. P.B. Jones is again the narrator, about thirty-five, a writer, sponger, and wit: “Starting at an early age, seven or eight or thereabouts, I’d run the gamut with many an older boy and several priests and also a handsome Negro gardener. In fact, I was a kind of Hershey Bar whore—.”
Capote's Swan Dive
By Sam Kashner
Vanity Fair, December 2012
"Have you seen Esquire?! Call me as soon as you're finished," New York society doyenne Babe Paley asked her friend Slim Keith over the telephone when the November 1975 issue hit the stands. Keith, then living at the Pierre hotel, sent the maid downstairs for a copy. "I read it, and I was absolutely horrified," she later confided to the writer George Plimpton. "The story about the sheets, the story about Ann Woodward... There was no question in anybody's mind who it was."
The story they were reading in Esquire was "La Côte Basque 1965," but it wasn't so much a story as an atomic bomb that Truman Capote built all by himself in his U.N. Plaza apartment and at his beach house in Sagaponack, Long Island. It was the first installment of Answered Prayers, the novel that Truman believed would be his masterpiece.
The Sensational Rise and Fall of Truman Capote
By Edward Sorel
New York Times, May 25, 2018
The Scandalous True Story Behind 'Feud: Capote vs. the Swans'
By Alex Belth
Esquire, February 1, 2024
Why do we still care about Capote? He’s outlasted so many of his more decorated contemporaries (Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Gore Vidal) in the public consciousness. The glib answer, according to Baitz, is that we all love an Icarus story—someone who flies too close to the sun. After the crowning achievement of In Cold Blood came a “deluge of distraction leading to inebriation, disinhibition and disease.” It’s not just the loss of genius or talent, but of human spark. “A brilliant observer is reduced to a slightly mangled, lesser version of what he was,” says Baitz. “And it’s done in public for the public without regard to his own safety. He’s the patron saint of his own lost cause.”
In the end, Feud: Capote vs. the Swans is a cautionary tale. Are we the guardians of our own talent? Or of our well-being? Do we have a responsibility to take care of the people we profess to love? Capote and the Swans were unforgiving; they lived in a ruthless world, and all suffered because of it.
I’ll give the last word to Capote, who once said he’d like to “wake up one morning and feel that I was at last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts, and other wasteful, childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult.”