Those productions, which featured Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones in spot-on portrayals of Capote, evoked the man those of an earlier generation immediately recognized as a bon vivant of the Gotham social scene and network TV talk-show circuit. Talk-show hosts courted Capote because he was a gifted storyteller who could be counted on to say something provocative. Like a latter-day Oscar Wilde, Capote relished the pithy bon mot.
There are anecdotes on every page. Capote talks of boyhood adventures catching carp with his bare hands. According to Plimpton, he would work up a list of the stories he planned to tell before he visited admirers. Whether the stories were true was another matter. The Capote depicted on the big screen, a variation of the talk-show guest who endures in a lively half-life on YouTube, invites us to regard him first and foremost as a character—a carefully constructed image that seems more mask than man.
But beyond his position as a pop-culture oddity, what about the writing that Capote left behind? His most obvious claim on posterity is In Cold Blood , his book about the murder of a Kansas farm family, the Clutters, and the arrest, conviction, and execution of the culprits, Richard Hickock and Perry Edward Smith.
In , Wall Street Journal writer Kevin Helliker published evidence that Capote distorted a chronology of the police investigation to burnish the reputation of Kansas lawman Alvin Dewey Jr.
Other writers have uncovered other discrepancies. He mentions using neither a tape recorder nor a notebook during interviews with his subjects, an approach embraced by other writers of the emerging New Journalism school of the s, which sought to apply the techniques of literary fiction in chronicling real-life events.
Instead, Capote relied on memorization. I had a natural facility for it, but after doing these exercises for a year and a half, for a couple of hours a day, I could get within 95 percent of absolute accuracy, which is as close as you need. Here, he describes how Smith spent time behind bars as one season gave way to another:. Other Voices, Other Rooms received instant notoriety for its fine prose, its frank discussion of homosexual themes, and, perhaps most of all, for its erotically suggestive cover photograph of Capote himself.
With literary success came social celebrity. The young writer was lionized by the high society elite, and was seen at the best parties, clubs, and restaurants.
He answered accusations of frivolousness by claiming he was researching a future book. His ambition, however, was to be great as well as popular, and so he began work on a new experimental project that he imagined would revolutionize the field of journalism. In , Capote set about creating a new literary genre — the non-fiction novel.
In Cold Blood , the book that most consider his masterpiece, is the story of the murder of the four members of a Kansas farming family, the Clutters. Capote left his jet-set friends and went to Kansas to delve into the small-town life and record the process by which they coped with this loss. Most critics found the chapters disappointing. His friends felt betrayed and refused to have contact with him.
During his youth, Capote developed a flashy and humorous style. He often became a frequent guest on television shows. He admitted that he was obsessed with fame. He constantly sought social privilege and public celebrity, objectives he achieved back in with the appearance of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Throughout his life Capote made friends with the rich and famous, observing their weaknesses with a watchful eye and developing trust and close friendships he would later betray.
In , Music for Chameleons, a final collection of short prose pieces, was published. Capote approached his writing by setting himself at "center stage. Critics gave less than warm reviews of Music for Chameleons. Afterward, Capote took to alcohol, drug addiction, and suffered poor health.
He died in Los Angeles, California, on August 24, , shortly before his sixtieth birthday. According to his friends and editors, the only portions of Answered Prayers he had managed to complete were those that had appeared in Esquire several years before. Critical assessment of Capote's career is highly divided, both in terms of individual works and his overall contribution to literature. Though the nonfiction novel was his most original contribution to the literary world, Capote also produced short stories, plays, straight reportage, television adaptations from books or plays, and film scripts.
His main faults were overwriting and creating strange plots. Most praise his storytelling abilities and the quality of his prose.
Brinnin, John Malcolm. New York: Delacorte Press, Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. Grobel, Lawrence. Conversations with Capote. In Monroeville, he was permitted to use the household typewriter and did so enthusiastically.
There he developed and refined some of the personality traits that would later become his trademarks: eccentric and flamboyant behavior and dress, a high-pitched lisping voice, and extreme outward self-confidence. He also cultivated friendships with influential people, especially women.
Unlike several other famous gay people of the time, Capote was very open and public about his sexual orientation. Fired by the New Yorker for offending poet Robert Frost by walking out on one of his readings, Capote began to work on his writing in earnest.
During his early twenties, he published several stories in Harper's Bazaar and Mademoiselle, and in , at 24, he published a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, with Random House. The book received great praise for the excellence of its prose and earned national attention because of a provocative photograph of the author posing seductively on a couch.
Henceforth, Capote, like his literary contemporaries Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, was known as much for his public persona as for his writing. It was also at this time that Capote began his long-term relationship with Jack Dunphy, an author, playwright, and former professional dancer some 10 years Capote's senior.
With the success of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote began his lifelong habit of seeking out inspiring places, mainly in Europe, to write and socialize. He also owned an apartment at the upscale United Nations Plaza. But he never stayed anywhere long. Truman Capote and Katharine Graham Capote loved to surround himself with the rich and famous, and he became a friend and confidant to numerous well-known people, including designer and photographer Cecil Beaton, playwright Noel Coward, and movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift, as well as Pres.
John F. He was the darling of a group of very rich women—he called them his "swans"—who entertained him aboard their yachts and at luxurious resorts throughout the world. He also gained even greater fame across the country as a frequent guest on television talk shows such as the Johnny Carson Show and the Dick Cavett Show.
Despite his heavy socializing, Capote maintained a rigorous writing schedule for most of his life. He published A Tree of Night, a collection of stories, in , followed in by Local Color, a collection of travel essays. The Muses Are Heard, his comic satire of his travels in Russia with the cast of the George Gershwin musical Porgy and Bess, came out in , and in he published one of his best-known works, Breakfast at Tiffany's, a short novel set in New York.
Three years later, Paramount Pictures released a highly acclaimed film version starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. Two of Capote's works were produced for the stage on Broadway.
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