Capote: A Biography

...He still showed up on talk shows, only drunk, not witty...

...The little of the book that was published in Esquire in the mid-seventies can without much exaggeration be said to have killed him...

...Plaza came a level of celebrity he could scarcely have imagined...

...It didn't matter...

...For many years that operation was calamitous, and Capote is lucky to have found someone—rather in the way Oscar Wilde eventually found Richard Ellmann—who has been able to make far more sense of his life than he hifnself did...

...sent Christmas fruitcakes to the Roosevelts...

...Capote did not fall into the manic promiscuity of his sometime friend Tennessee Williams...

...It was so glittering that professional killjoys like Pete Hamill had to print scoldings about such things being allowed to occur while there was a war going on...

...Throughout the fifties Capote succeeded with delicate fictions, travel sketches, and personality pieces...

...He became a fixture of the talk-show couch...

...Clarke quotes E. B. White's description of The New Yorker during World War II: "a worse madhouse than ever now . . . on account of the departure of everybody for the wars, leaving only the senile, the psycho-neurotic, the maimed, the halt, and the goofy to get out the magazine...

...The swans recognized themselves dopily dishing their marital secrets—secrets Capote had hardly refracted into anything like art—in the chapter called "La Cote Basque, 1965...

...With the help of what was advertised as a secret Egyptian drug, he could retard his heartbeat to such an abnormally slow rate that . . . he could remain alive in an airtight coffin for up to five hours...

...The novel is called 'Answered Prayers...

...So exhausted was Capote from his emotional immersion in the case (he bought the killers' gravestones) that when it was over, and the book was a commercial and critical phenomenon, he was finished...

...Arch and Lillie Mae abandoned Truman, leaving him to live with three aging maiden cousins and an unmarried uncle...

...He would later do a little time in Sing Sing...

...About that book one wants to use the old advertising slogan "Often Imitated, Never Equalled," because it surely applies...

...If he had been handsome, had boasted a fine physique, or had been out of the ordinary in any other way, Truman would not have given him a second glance...

...One of his promotions was "the Great Pasha, otherwise known as Sam Goldberg from the Bronx...

...This is a well-researched book...

...But even it is flawed by "Handcarved Coffins," something that falsely claims to be "A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime," but ismore like a parody of In Cold Blood, just as Capote's 1970s (sleazing through Studio 54) were a bad-joke version of the real high life he lived in the sixties...

...and was addicted to morphine...

...He even managed to lose his job (not an easy task there, then or ever) for offending the dignity of that monstrous false god of American poetry, Robert Frost...

...There are patches of flat writing and overwriting (the two are really the same thing), but Clarke's prose is generally solid and in a few places memorable: "It was a strange household he entered in Monroeville, unique to the South, peculiar to the time: three quarrelsome sisters in late middle age, their reclusive older brother, and an atmosphere heavy with small secrets and ancient resentments...

...It was, says Clarke, a disaster "complete and absolute," over which Capote cried without comprehension...

...What's that?' [Harold] Ross himself demanded when he peered out of his office and saw him drifting down the hall...

...Still, Capote was silly enough to believe that he had accomplished something by it, and in the years of his crazy fame he was prompted to take on such empty projects as turning Lee Radziwill into an actress—an effort whose redundancy eluded him...

...Truman was grudgingly called north by his mother, and he spent most of his adolescence in Manhattan and Greenwich, enraging the drunken Lillie Mae with his bravely undisguised effeminacy...

...others, like Princess Lee, were nullities...

...All the achievers and parasites of our time begged for invitations...

...and, for another, he remained far more interested in the sitters themselves than any portrait he might produce...

...His serious lovers lacked his taste for limelight: Newton Arvin, a fastidious English professor at Smith ("Newton was my Harvard") and, enduringly, Jack Dunphy—angry, reclusive, butch, dignified, and it would seem from this book, something of a horror...

...Finally, he forgot the very saying from which he derived the title ("more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers...

...own mother: 'she was the single worst person in my life.' " She would kill herself with Seconal in the early fifties...

...Without really knowing it, he was moving toward his big book, learning to make one eye, the reporter's, work with the second, a novelist's, through a single pair of spectacles...

...An exact count of his [hospital] stays is hard to come by," Clarke says...

...His report on the trip of an American musical company doing Porgy and Bess in the Soviet Union (The Muses Are Heard, 1956) and an extended interview with deep thinker Marlon Brando read today like warm-ups for In Cold Blood (1966), the "nonfiction novel" that told the story of how Perry Smith and Dick Hickock killed the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 and how,five and a half years later, society exacted its retribution...

...For one thing, far from being silent, he did almost nothing but talk about it...

...Of such things is Southern Lit born...

...He was supposed to be in pursuit of an even bigger book than In Cold Blood, a novel...

...Having become famous to the extent only television will permit, he had gotten his wish to astonish...

...H e made one abortive revival...

...By 1970 his relationship with Dunphy was no longer sexual, and the two of them lived far from each other for months of the year...

...Along with great sums of money and a new apartment in the U.N...

...But the tally from Southampton Hospital, his favorite, gives an indication of the quickening pace of his decline: he registered there four times in 1981, seven times in 1982, and sixteen times in 1983...

...He didn't know it, of course, and the long social bender he embarked on would be interrupted with small achievements here and there, but his talent was prematurely aged, and he would spend what should have been his prime mostly dithering himself to death...

...He would soon launch himself with spooky, gorgeously written short stories in Harper's Bazaar and Mademoiselle, creating anticipation for his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms...

...Clarke is very good on the irony of these last romances...

...Mama drank and had affairs (one with Jack Dempsey) and Daddy was "a born salesman" who dealt mostly in snake oil...

...instead, he developed destroying obsessions for two completely unglamorous men: "Danny," an air conditioner repairman separated from his wife...

...the sacredness of love, whatever its form...

...and John O'Shea, a violent alcoholic, married "low-level bank vice president...

...During "the first few years of the eighties he was hospitalized in half a dozen states and Switzerland too...

...In every way Danny stood for the common man: that was his allure...

...The American Proust was what he wanted to be, declaring the ambition repeatedly: "A large novel, my magnum opus" was how he described it to Bennett Cerf...

...Whether the nonfiction novel was invented by Capote or two hundred and fifty years earlier by Defoe, the point remains that of all the New Journalism produced in the past quarter century In Cold Blood achieved a unique level of artistry...

...He was really Truman Streckfus Persons, born in Alabama in 1924 to Lillie Mae Faulk and Arch Persons...

...At least as important to Capote were his relationships with those Clarke calls the "swans"—rich women like Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, and Lee Radziwill—to whom he became confidant, jester, tastemaker, and toy...

...He was a positive vacuum cleaner for cocaine, and his body, moving from binge to spa, ballooned and deflated like a rubber syringe...

...Its jacket photo—TC in a calculated, Gothic kiddie-porn pose—remains nearly as famous as the book itself, though, as Clarke notes, Other Voices contains "the themes that dominate all of Truman's writing: the loneliness that afflicts all but the stupid or insensitive...

...he was going to make a Taj Mahal...

...Lillie Mae eventually reached New York City, where she married Joseph Capote, a Cuban working successfully on Wall Street...

...This alone makes him something more like Proust's opposite than successor...

...A book about which I must be very silent, so as not to alarm my 'sitters,' and which I think will really arouse you when I outline it (only you must never mention it to a soul...

...His "boundless and insatiable need to be loved now had to be filled by a B-team of swans, like Johnny Carson's second ex-wife...

...But it was granted with a Midas catch: exposed so widely and frequently, he soon became familiar, almost ordinary, a literary Charo on an upholstered Love Boat...

...His Black and White masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 was the Party of the Century...

...Some, like Mrs...

...All went nowhere...

...made herbal medicines for dropsy...

...he set out to be an Author...

...Danny, he says, represented all those carefree, freckle-faced Alabama country boys Truman had wished he could have been, mocking him, even if they uttered not a word, with the nonchalant assurance of the absolutely average...

...He died from either suicide or an accidental overdose—the question is pedantic—in 1984...

...Brilliant but shallow, he pursued no culture ("For him Venice was Harry's Bar," said Donald Windham), and he wound up with no intellectual resources for a rainy day...

...the disappointment that invariably follows high expectation...

...Of his contemporaries—Mailer, Vidal, and Baldwin, that bundle of talent all born around 1925—he has the least claim to the title man of letters...

...I wish Clarke wouldn't first-name everyone (Cerf is "Bennett" and Vidal is "Gore"), but I suppose this is meant to give the reader some sense of how "Truman" operated in the world...

...His terrible misadventures excited much scorn and satisfaction, but to his credit Capote authorized his biographer, Gerald Clarke, to operate with candor, and Clarke has told the sad story of Capote's finish with an unsensational thoroughness befitting the sturdy treatment he gives his beginning (also sad) and middle (productive...

...Suburban millions would gasp, and even take offense, when he first lisped hello to Johnny, but before the next commercial they would decide, rather like the residents of Finney County, Kansas, that the little fellow was so clever he must be all right...

...There is hardly a hormone left in the place . ." Still, copyboy Truman Capote managed to stand out, sashaying through the corridors, his blond bangs bouncing, ordering in his meals from 21: " 'For God's sake...

...He had nothing else to fall back on...

...Capote did not, after all, just set out to be a writer...

...and the perversion of innocence...

...There are some nice set pieces on 1940s New York and the fashion magazines that gave Capote's fiction its start...

...and, if all goes well, I think it will answer mine...

...Babe would no longer speak to him and Slim Keith ("Lady Ina Coolbirth") turned into an active enemy...

...she read only Grimm's fairy tales and the Bible...

...Music for Chameleons (1980) is a disciplined collection of lean stories and sketches, an intriguing sort of notebook from an artist trying to fight his way back...

...Clarke takes an orthodox Freudian view of Truman's tormenting Lillie Mae (who had rechristened herself Nina), and finds it "impossible to dispute his bleak and chilling judgment of his Thomas Mallon is the author of A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries, and, most recently, Arts and Sciences, a novel...

...Objections will be raised that there is more of the celebrity than the artist in this book, but given the subject, how could it be otherwise...

...Paley, were truly exquisite...

...One thing Clarke's book shows is that Capote's mind was engaged only by people, not such a bad thing for a novelist, but rather terrible for a person...

...Unwisely stagestruck, he had respectable failures with The Grass Harp and House of Flowers...

...He wrote almost nothing that could be called criticism, because he was one of those people with tastes instead of beliefs...

...Old Sook, who would show up in The Grass Harp and A Christmas Memory, was so shy she seemed simple-minded to some...

...Not an elegant little dolls' house like Breakfast at Tiffany's CAPOTE: A BIOGRAPHY Gerald Clarke/Simon and Schuster/$22.95 Thomas Mallon THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 43 (Clarke reveals that Holly Golightly was called Connie Gustafson in an early draft...

...it was also so successful that even Dunphy had a good time...