Truman Capote

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 23rd of August 1984, Truman Capote boarded a flight from New York to Los Angeles with a granny-square baby blanket. A relative he called Sook had made it for him when he was small. Friends said he was seldom without it, even when he traveled.

  Two days later he died at the Bel Air home of his friend Joanne Carson. According to Carson, his last words were "It's me, it's Buddy," followed by "I'm cold." Buddy was the name Sook had always used for him.

  The man who died reaching for a childhood keepsake had spent decades as a celebrity writer, first adored and later shunned by the people he courted. His life has been the subject of more than 20 films and television productions.

  How does a lonely boy from a small Alabama town turn himself into a household name? What happens when a writer swears that every word of his masterpiece is true? And what did he write that cost him his closest friends?

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• 2. The Boy From Monroeville

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  Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. His mother was Lillie Mae Faulk and his father was a salesman named Archulus Persons. His parents divorced, his mother was away for a long stretch, and the family moved often. For the next four to five years, relatives on his mother's side raised him in Monroeville, Alabama.

  In that house he formed his closest bond with a distant cousin of his mother's, Nanny Rumbley Faulk, whom he called Sook. In "A Christmas Memory" he described her face as remarkable, craggy like Lincoln's and tinted by sun and wind. A cousin recalled how the children found her in the darkened house on South Alabama Avenue. They simply looked for the bright colors of her coat.

  Next door lived Harper Lee, who would grow up to write To Kill a Mockingbird. Capote said her father was a lawyer, and the two children went to courtroom trials instead of the movies. The character of Dill in her novel was likely modeled on him. He drew the defiant Idabel in his own first novel from Lee.

  At age five he was often seen carrying a dictionary and a notepad, having taught himself to read and write before starting school. He began writing fiction at eleven, and his nickname then was "Bulldog." He remembered coming home every day and writing for about three hours, the way other children practiced the violin.

  In 1932 he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, José García Capote, a former Spanish colonel. A string of schools followed. He attended Trinity School, St. Joseph Military Academy, and Greenwich High School in Connecticut, where he wrote for the literary journal The Green Witch. He finished at the Franklin School, graduating in 1942. That was the end of his formal education.

  While still at Franklin, he took a job as a copy boy in the art department at The New Yorker, sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers. He lasted two years before he was fired for angering the poet Robert Frost. During World War II, the armed services turned him away. He told a friend he was found "too neurotic."

  He went back to relatives in Alabama and started a first novel called Summer Crossing. Lee, meanwhile, would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. After Capote published In Cold Blood in 1966, the two friends grew increasingly distant.

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• 3. Miriam to Fame

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  In June 1945, Mademoiselle magazine published a short story called "Miriam," and it won a prize the following year as the Best First-Published Story. It belonged to a flood of fiction Capote produced between 1943 and 1946. Other titles included "My Side of the Matter" and "Shut a Final Door." His stories ran in quarterlies and popular magazines alike, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, The New Yorker and Story. "Shut a Final Door" earned him the O. Henry Award in 1948, when he was 24.

  In the spring of 1946 he was accepted at Yaddo, the writers colony at Saratoga Springs, New York. He later backed Patricia Highsmith for a place there, and she wrote Strangers on a Train during her stay.

  Bennett Cerf, the publisher at Random House, noticed "Miriam" and offered Capote a contract for a novel with an advance of $1,500. Capote began in Monroeville and kept working in New Orleans, Saratoga Springs and North Carolina. He finished in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Other Voices, Other Rooms appeared in 1948.

  It follows thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, sent from New Orleans after his mother's death to a crumbling mansion called Skully's Landing in rural Alabama. There he meets a sullen stepmother named Amy, a figure named Randolph, and a father who has been paralyzed since a shooting accident. Capote called the book "a poetic explosion in highly suppressed emotion." Decades later he wrote that it was an attempt to exorcise demons. He admitted he had failed to see how autobiographical it was.

  The novel stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks and sold more than 26,000 copies. Yet the object that made Capote famous was a photograph. Harold Halma shot a 1947 portrait of him reclining and staring hard into the camera, and it ran on the dust jacket.

  His biographer Gerald Clarke later wrote that Capote claimed to have been caught off guard. In fact, he had posed himself and engineered the publicity. The Los Angeles Times said he looked as if he were dreamily contemplating some outrage against conventional morality. The novelist Merle Miller complained about it at a publishing forum. Mad magazine spoofed the pose, making Capote one of the first four celebrities it lampooned. The humorist Max Shulman copied it for his own book. The stage revue New Faces had Ronny Graham parody it. Random House ran ads headed "This is Truman Capote," and bookstores displayed huge blowups.

  Halma once overheard two women outside a Fifth Avenue bookstore window. One said, "I'm telling you: he's just young," and the other replied, "And I'm telling you, if he isn't young, he's dangerous!" Capote loved to retell that story.

  The picture also hooked a twenty-year-old Andy Warhol, who wrote Capote fan letters. After moving to New York in 1949, Warhol repeatedly tried to meet him. His fascination led to his first New York solo show. It was called Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote, and it ran at the Hugo Gallery from the 16th of June to the 3rd of July 1952.

  The short stories kept coming. Random House followed the novel with the collection A Tree of Night and Other Stories in 1949. In 1950 Capote published Local Color, nine travel essays that had first run in magazines. In a 1957 interview for The Paris Review, he said a story has found its right form when it silences your imagination. It feels final, as an orange is final.

  The novel he began as a teenager was not gone, though. Capote later claimed he had destroyed the Summer Crossing manuscript, the tale of a summer romance between a socialite and a parking lot attendant. In fact a house sitter pulled it from the trash in 1950, and it surfaced in 2004, twenty years after his death. Random House published it in 2006. By 2013, Scarlett Johansson owned the film rights and reportedly planned to direct.

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• 4. Hollywood and Tiffany's

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  In the fall of 1952, the producer David O. Selznick hired Capote and two Hollywood screenwriters to work on the script for Terminal Station. A few months later, in early 1953, John Huston brought him in on Beat the Devil. That same year, 1952, saw his first play, a stage version of his 1951 novella The Grass Harp. It later became a 1971 musical and a 1995 film.

  In 1954 came the musical House of Flowers, which gave the world the song "A Sleepin' Bee." In 1960, when Capote was deep into a different book, director Jack Clayton asked him to rewrite the script for The Innocents. Capote set his book aside and delivered the script used for the finished film in eight weeks.

  A trip through the Soviet Union with a touring production of Porgy and Bess produced a series of New Yorker articles. They became his first book-length work of nonfiction, The Muses Are Heard, in 1956. In 1961 he signed an advertisement for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He later regretted it, since he had sincerely believed Fidel Castro was not a communist.

  The work that defined these years nearly missed readers in the form he wanted. Breakfast at Tiffany's was meant for the July 1958 issue of Harper's Bazaar. The Hearst Corporation, its publisher, demanded changes to Capote's tart language. He reluctantly agreed, partly because he liked the David Attie photographs and the design by art director Alexey Brodovitch.

  Hearst then pulled the novella anyway, calling its language and subject matter "not suitable." There was also worry that Tiffany's, a major advertiser, would object. Capote sold it to Esquire for its November 1958 issue. He had asked for Attie's photographs, but the magazine ran only one full-page image.

  Random House brought it out as Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories. The other three tales were "House of Flowers," "A Diamond Guitar" and "A Christmas Memory." Holly Golightly became one of his best-known creations. Norman Mailer called Capote "the most perfect writer of my generation."

  Blake Edwards filmed it in 1961 with Audrey Hepburn, in a role many consider her defining one. Capote disliked the many changes made to appeal to a mass audience.

  Talking with Roy Newquist, Capote said he had lived two careers. The first was precocity. The second began with Breakfast at Tiffany's and brought a clearer, more pruned prose, harder to do though less evocative. He added that he was nowhere near where he wanted to go, and pointed to his new book.

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• 5. Kansas and Its Critics

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  A 300-word item in The New York Times of the 16th of November 1959 described the unexplained murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. It quoted the local sheriff calling it "apparently the case of a psychopathic killer." Capote knew nothing about Kansas. He thought the story might be the subject he had been seeking for an experiment in journalistic writing.

  He arrived two days after the Clutters' funeral, with Harper Lee at his side. For two and a half months the case stayed a mystery. He befriended detectives and townspeople while he waited. Lee won over the wives of the people he wanted to interview.

  In January the killers were caught. Capote then saw the two young men often until they were executed, four years later. He did not take notes during interviews. He memorized conversations and wrote the quotes down the moment each one ended, claiming his accuracy was tested at "over 90%." Even a year and a half in, he told an audience in 1974, he did not know if the effort would pay off. In all, the book took him six years.

  In Cold Blood appeared from Random House in 1966 after running in The New Yorker. Capote called it a "nonfiction novel." It made him a literary celebrity and an international bestseller. He never completed another novel.

  The British critic Kenneth Tynan attacked it in The Observer. He suggested Capote wanted an execution to give the book a strong ending. He asked whether the work comes first, or life. In his view, Capote had done less than he might have to save men with whom he enjoyed such privileged intimacy.

  Another challenge concerned truth. In 1966, Phillip K. Tompkins wrote in Esquire that he had found discrepancies after traveling to Kansas. Mrs. Meier told him by phone that she never heard Perry Smith cry or held his hand, as Capote described. She said she spent little time with him. Tompkins called the book a work of art. He warned that insisting "every word" was true left Capote vulnerable.

  The true crime writer Jack Olsen went further and said Capote fabricated quotes and entire scenes. Olsen said the book made something like $6 million in 1960s money, and nobody in publishing wanted to question a moneymaker. He had been assigned the Clutter case by Harper & Row before learning that Capote and Lee had spent six months in Dodge City. Capote answered in Esquire that Olsen was jealous. Olsen conceded the point.

  Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective in the book, said the closing scene at the Clutters' graves was invented. Dewey and his wife Marie had befriended Capote and given him case files and Nancy Clutter's diary. When Columbia Pictures made the film in 1967, Capote arranged for Marie Dewey to be paid $10,000 as a consultant. Director Richard Brooks shot at the real Clutter house.

  A later work drew the same kind of scrutiny. In 1992, reporters Peter and Leni Gillman of the Sunday Times investigated "Handcarved Coffins." This was the story in Capote's last book, Music for Chameleons, billed as a nonfiction account of an American crime. They found no series of murders matching every detail, such as miniature coffins, a rattlesnake killing and a decapitation. A few details echoed an unsolved case Dewey had worked. They concluded Capote invented the rest, including his meetings with the suspect, Quinn.

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• 6. The Swans

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  On the 28th of November 1966, Capote threw a masked ball in the Grand Ballroom of New York's Plaza Hotel. It honored Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. The Black and White Ball was considered the social event of the season and of many seasons after. For months he dangled the coveted invitations. He snubbed early supporters such as Carson McCullers while deciding who was "in" and who was "out."

  Gore Vidal summed up his rival's ambition. Capote had tried, with some success, to enter a world Vidal had tried to leave. In the late 1960s Capote befriended Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He wrote the 1967 television adaptation of the film Laura for her, but reviews and ratings were poor. Radziwill replaced Babe Paley as his main public companion for much of the 1970s.

  Capote bought a house in Palm Springs and settled into aimless days and heavy drinking. This led to bitter quarrels with Jack Dunphy, a fellow writer with whom he had shared a nonexclusive relationship since the 1950s. In 1972 he toured with The Rolling Stones as a correspondent for Rolling Stone but refused to write the article. The magazine published an interview Andy Warhol conducted with him in April 1973 instead.

  In July 1973 he met John O'Shea, a married vice president at a Long Island bank. O'Shea became his manager and lover, and the pair fought a long war of jealousy and manipulation. Friends were appalled when he tried to take control of Capote's literary and business affairs.

  All this time Capote was collecting material for Answered Prayers, a tell-all novel in planning since 1958. He meant it as an American counterpart to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. It was scheduled for 1968 and delayed to 1972, which forced him to return money from 20th Century Fox for the film rights.

  In 1975 and 1976, Esquire printed four chapters. "Mojave" was well received. Then, in November 1975, came "La Côte Basque 1965," and the issue sold out immediately. It featured the women he called his "swans," some under pseudonyms and some by their real names. It drew in part on the unhappy private lives of William S. Paley and Babe Paley. One character, Ann Hopkins, was likened to Ann Woodward and accused of murdering her husband. It is rumored that Woodward killed herself with cyanide after being warned of the chapter.

  The betrayal of confidences alienated his wealthy female friends, who feared their private lives would be exposed. Society shut him out. Capote claimed he had not expected the backlash. It reportedly pushed him toward heavier drug use and drinking. His relationship with Dunphy turned platonic after the chapter ran, though their lives stayed intertwined.

  Later chapters, "Unspoiled Monsters" and "Kate McCloud," showed a changed narrative voice. The first contained a thinly veiled satire of Tennessee Williams, whose friendship with Capote was already strained. Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel came out only after his death, in 1986 in Britain and 1987 in the United States. It left out "Mojave." Capote had pulled that chapter from the master plan and put it in Music for Chameleons in 1980.

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• 7. Last Years

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  In 1978, a visibly intoxicated Capote told interviewer Stanley Siegel on live television that he had been awake for 48 hours. Asked what would happen if he did not beat his addictions, he said he would eventually "kill myself...without meaning to." The broadcast made national headlines. A year later he returned to the show, feeling betrayed by Lee Radziwill during a feud with Vidal. He told a story about Vidal being thrown out of the Kennedy White House for drunkenness. Vidal later refuted it in his memoir Palimpsest.

  In 1979, Capote wrote a monthly column for Warhol's Interview magazine called "Conversations with Capote," trading it for the copyright. The pieces started as taped conversations and drifted into semi-fictionalized portraits. They became the basis for Music for Chameleons.

  That year he also had a facelift, lost weight and tried hair transplants. Drugs and liquor still held him. His driver's license was revoked for speeding near his Long Island home. Then a hallucination-driven seizure in 1980 sent him to the hospital, and he turned reclusive. Scans eventually showed that his brain mass had shrunk.

  He still read from his work at Lincoln Center in December 1980, and a story, "One Christmas," ran in Ladies' Home Journal in 1982. In 1983, Playboy printed his tribute to Tennessee Williams, "Remembering Tennessee." On his rare lucid days Capote kept calling Answered Prayers nearly finished.

  Capote died on the 25th of August 1984. The coroner's report named liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication. Vidal called it "a wise career move."

  His ashes had a strange afterlife. They were reportedly divided between Carson and Dunphy, though Dunphy said he received all of them. At a Halloween party in 1988, the ashes were reported stolen along with $200,000 in jewels. They turned up six days later in a coiled garden hose on the back steps of Carson's home. They were reportedly stolen again at a production of Tru, but the thief was caught before leaving the theater.

  Dunphy died in 1992. In 1994 the two men's ashes were reportedly scattered together at Crooked Pond on Long Island, near Sagaponack, where they had kept separate houses. Money from their estates helped the Nature Conservancy buy 20 acres around the pond, and a stone marker shows the spot.

  Capote's will also created the Truman Capote Literary Trust in 1994. It funds awards, including one named for his early lover Newton Arvin. Arvin was a Smith College professor who lost his job after his homosexuality was revealed. In 2016, some of the ashes once held by Carson were sold at auction by Julien's Auctions.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Capote in the 2005 film Capote. Bennett Miller directed, and Catherine Keener played Harper Lee. Dan Futterman's screenplay drew on Gerald Clarke's biography. The film portrays the years Capote spent on In Cold Blood and his conflict between compassion for his subjects and obsession with finishing the book. It received five Oscar nominations.

  Infamous, released in 2006, starred Toby Jones as Capote and Sandra Bullock as Lee. Overshadowed by Hoffman's film, it focused more on the killers and on Capote's relationship with Perry Smith. Jones still won the London Film Critics' Circle Award for British Actor of the Year.

  On stage, Robert Morse won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award in 1990 for the one-man show Tru. He won an Emmy for the 1992 PBS version. In 2024, Tom Hollander earned a Primetime Emmy nomination playing Capote in Capote vs. The Swans, the second season of the anthology series Feud.

  Capote acted too. In Neil Simon's Murder by Death in 1976, he played the reclusive millionaire Lionel Twain. The role earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Acting Debut. A year later he appeared uncredited in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, as the passerby Alvy jokes is the winner of a Truman Capote Look-Alike Contest.

  His own stories reached screens as well. A Christmas Memory aired on ABC Stage 67 on the 21st of December 1966, with Capote narrating and Geraldine Page winning an Emmy. She won another for The Thanksgiving Visitor. Documentaries followed, including With Love from Truman, a 29-minute film by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. It shows Capote taking Alvin Dewey and his wife around New York for the first time. The 2019 film The Capote Tapes, directed by Ebs Burnough, uses archive audio to examine Answered Prayers.

  Capote's childhood also lives on in the Old Courthouse Museum in Monroeville, Alabama, where a permanent exhibit shows photographs, letters and memorabilia. Jennings Faulk Carter donated the collection in 2005. It includes 12 handwritten letters Capote sent to his aunt Mary Ida Carter between the 1940s and the 1960s.

  New work still turns up. In 2023, The Strand magazine published "Another Day in Paradise." Capote wrote the story in Sicily in the 1950s, and it was found in the archives of the Library of Congress.

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