Feature by Ivan Waterman
Novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, playwright, creator of the "non-fiction", spellbinding raconteur, wit, genius and jet setter. Like him or loathe him, Truman Capote was one of the most astonishing and singular personalities of his age.
While Hunter S Thompson was down the road apiece at Rolling Stone getting stoned, that other Manhattan maverick was throwing yet another huge bash at the Plaza Hotel for his exceedingly uptown bunch of friends.
The only aspect of life urban guerrillas Thompson and Capote shared was in death. Capote overdosed just a month short of his 60th birthday in 1984 while the dangerously erratic Thompson remained in character, blasting himself into oblivion with a shotgun.
So, what of Capote, more a film about the writing of ‘In Cold Blood’ than pure biopic? There is no doubt that Philip Seymour Hoffman, who earned a Best Actor BAFTA and an Oscar nomination for his sublime portrayal of the tragic Capote, gave the project real stature.
Here was a performance of depth, subtlety and tingling intensity under the guidance of a novice director in Bennett Miller, hitherto best known for his work in documentaries. Actor Dan Futterman created the screenplay, using Gerald Clarke's acclaimed bible-like biography as his chief influence.
Hoffman, Miller and Futterman were buddies from way back which enabled them to construct a low-budget package which fascinated the now defunct United Artists and extracted financial backing from Sony Classics.
Is ‘In Cold Blood’ worthy of their combined attention? They deserve a nod of approval from scholars of the crime writing genre. Capote ‘travelled’ where no writer/journalist had been before.
He did have solid gold backing from one of the world's most prestigious magazines, and he surrounded himself with worldly-wise and skilled allies such as Nellie Harper Lee who wrote the Deep South classic ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. Catherine Keener, another Oscar nominee, brilliantly underplays her in Capote.
In November 1959 Capote, a favourite figure from the New York glitterati, read a small almost anonymous piece of copy on the back page of the New York Times. It detailed the murders of four members of a well-known family in the farming community, The Clutters of Holcomb, Kansas. Capote long held a theory that in the hands of the right writer, fiction can be as compelling as non-fiction.
He asked himself questions. What impact did the murders have on that tiny community in the wind swept plains? Was the mindless killings a microcosm of the ongoing conflict between America's legions of have-nots and their middle class neighbours?
The New Yorker gave him the commission and off he went. His childhood friend Harper Lee, soon to win a Pulitzer Prize for 'Mockingbird', accompanied him on a journey into a grey, unsophisticated America totally alien to New Yorkers.
Through his childlike voice, fey mannerisms and unconventional Bohemian Fifth Avenue clothes he aroused initial hostility, yet finally won the trust of locals including lawman Alvin Dewey from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation who led the hunt for the killers.
The white-trash murderers Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr) and Dick Hickock (Mark Pelleigrino) were soon tracked down to Las Vegas and returned to Dewey (Chris Cooper) in Kansas.
He believes he has a book, a profound work of literature to be remembered, roughly based on the collision of two American cultures. On one side there are those who inhabited the same rootless, amoral country as Smith and Kickock and on the other, plain, decent, white folk who fear a return to wild-west anarchy.
Capote wanted to produce a book for all seasons, saying. "Sometimes, when I think how good it could be. I can hardly breathe." Bennett traces his journey to the very different Beatles blessed world of 1965, when the subjects of his literary masterpiece were finally executed by the hangman.
Born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans in 1924, his father Arch was a small time con man while his beautiful mother Lillie Mae had a penchant for extra-marital sex. He moved with his mother to New York in 1931 where she re-married to Joe Capote, a Cuban who worked in textiles.
Having spent his teenaged years writing fictional stories, his first dramatic tale, ‘Miriam’, was published in Mademoiselle before Random House, sensing a fresh dynamic talent, published his first novel ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’.
During a period when homosexuality was anathema in America, he was nonchalantly and resplendently gay. Nobody blinked with surprise when writer Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood) became his companion in 1950, setting up home in the stylish village of Taomina in Sicily where he wrote his second novel ‘The Grass Harp’.
His reputation as a daring, perceptive liberal led him to collaborating with John Huston on the movie Beat the Devil in Ravello, Italy, in 1953. The quirky, light-hearted story about a gang of rogues heading for Africa starred Humphrey Bogart and Fifties bombshell Gina Lollobrigida. Bogart was unimpressed, saying it was a "mess" while doyen Pauline Kael thought the film "maybe the finest mess of all time."
Capote's mother was by now an abusive alcoholic who took her own life by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills in January 1954. He was still in Europe at the time and was bereft when she died before he could return to her New York home.
His next book ‘Breakfast at Tiffany's’ created a luminescent, unforgettable anti-heroine in Holly Golightly, a free spirited sprite in the Big Apple during the war years. Her solution to any bad time was to take a taxi down to Tiffany's first thing in the morning.
This was natural Capote territory. The clinking of champagne glasses, women wrapped in fur and endless, sad superficiality. He saw it more of a social study of a decaying class structure than mainstream entertainment.
Either way, Blake Edwards's 1961 movie of the book, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was a classic featuring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Mancini's ageless ‘Moon River’. A love story featuring Hepburn was grafted on which infuriated Capote. He wanted Marilyn Monroe in the lead role and claimed Edwards had tampered irrevocably with his work. Few agreed.
George Axelrod's screenplay was a cut above anything Capote might have produced. The experienced Axelrod handled the scenario gently as Paramount executives remained convinced that Capote would have lapsed into mean vulgarity.
Before they started making the film Capote was already immersed with Perry Smith and Kansas low-life. To introduce his book ‘In Cold Blood’ six years later in 1965, he wrote, by way of an explanation: "I have always lived the life I liked. I have never skipped a pulse beat over what others thought.
"My education has been rather do-it-yourself. To this day I cannot recite the alphabet or the multiplication tables. I left school when I was 15. My first and last regular job was with the New Yorker when I was 17."
The book was an immense success while the jury is still out on Bennett's film, which concentrates on his obsessional relationship with the doomed Smith and his stack of hang-ups.
But his depiction of Capote as a social alien, even when holding court at uptown soirees, adds poignancy to the sense of kindred, misunderstood spirits that evolved between the writer and Smith.
Smith transfixed Capote from first sight to his much-delayed execution, fuelling the writer's creative genius but also destabilising him emotionally. The drama often descends into an unconventional study of unfulfilled love.
His literary achievement, the first "non-fiction novel" , shattered his creative instincts. During the writing of ‘In Cold Blood’ he drank heavily and popped pills. He lost focus and directed his energies towards playing the celebrity. And when he attacked rich socialite chums through the pages of his next novel, he became a social pariah.
The Tiny Terror was shunned by Manhattan's literary set. Nothing could halt his downward spiral towards an early obit. His legacy as a literary groundbreaker, however, remains firmly intact.
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