THE RELEVANT QUEER: Novelist, Playwright and Short-Story Writer, Truman Capote, Born September 30, 1924

“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

TRQ: Truman Capote, Born September 30, 1924

Novelist, playwright and short-story writer, Truman Capote, best known for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the true crime novel In Cold Blood, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on September 30, 1924.

He was born Truman Streckfus Persons, and he spent his childhood with elderly relatives in the American South. He grew up in small towns in Louisiana and Alabama, attended private schools, and started writing as a child.

In 1932 he moved to Park Avenue in New York City, to live with his mother and her new husband, Joseph Garcia Capote, whose surname he adopted. In 1936, when he was 12 years old, his work received recognition The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

After his stepfather was convicted of embezzlement, Capote’s family temporarily moved to Connecticut in 1939. They returned to New York in 1941, where Capote started work in the art department at The New Yorker, until he clashed with poet Robert Frost and was fired two years later. He then moved to Alabama to start writing Summer Crossing, his first novel.

Beginning in 1943, Capote worked on short stories of lost people in strange circumstances. This work was published in a range of popular and literary magazines. In 1945 Capote’s “Miriam” was published in Mademoiselle, and the short story won the O. Henry Memorial Award, his first of four. “Shut a Final Door,” published in The Atlantic, won an O. Henry Award in 1946, and was added to the collection A Tree of Night and Other Stories.

In 1948 Capote published Other Voices, Other Rooms, a partly autobiographical novel about a son’s acceptance of his own homosexuality while he searches for his father. Idabel, one of the book’s characters, was based on his childhood best friend, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Capote openly courted controversy with not only the subject matter of Other Voices but also with the book’s cover photo featuring him in a suggestive pose that turned a pre-famous Andy Warhol into a Capote fan. Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote at the Hugo Gallery in 1952 was Warhol’s first show in New York. The book stayed at the on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks.

During his 20s, Capote met and started a relationship with writer Jack Dunphy.

Like Warhol who followed him, Capote was a continual self-promoter. As Capote’s career progressed, he consciously courted fame and controversy. He sold an image of himself through a life lived in photos taken around the world. Capote sought to be surrounded by celebrities and fashionable society women whenever possible.

In 1951 he published The Grass Harp, which tells of people who retreat to a tree house temporarily, and later adapted the novella for the stage in 1952. In 1953 he co-wrote a screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1953). 1954 he followed up the stage musical House of Flowers.

After Capote published The Muses Are Heard (1956) about his travels through the Soviet Union, he published Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories (1958). First published in Esquire, Capote’s novella about Holly Golightly is one of his best known and most well liked. He had worked to refine and evolve his style, and Norman Mailer praised Capote as “the most perfect writer of my generation.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s was adapted into a film directed by Blake Edwards and starred Audrey Hepburn in one of her most iconic roles.

In 1965 Capote published In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1965). The book explores the murder of the Clutter family from Kansas. Capote travelled with Harper Lee to Holcomb, Kansas to see the crime scene, meet everyone involved in the investigation, and interview the two men eventually executed for the crime. Capote wrote the book as an experiment in immersive New Journalism and was originally published as a series in The New Yorker. The book version was a commercial and critical success.

In 1966, he garnered immense publicity and notoriety with his masked Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York. He hosted the social event in honor of his friend, The Washing Post publisher Katharine Graham.   With the glowing reception of In Cold Blood and his place in the jet-setter celebrity scene,  Capote was at his peak socially and professionally.

In 1975, Capote began publishing selections from Answered Prayers, a social satire project in Esquire. As he had with In Cold Blood, he drew from his social encounters to form the project’s barely disguised depictions of the celebrities who had allowed him into their circles.

In particular, the “La Côte Basque 1965” chapter published in Esquire took aim at Tennessee Williams, William and Babe Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lee Radziwill and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, among others. This amounted to social suicide for Capote. Outraged, his celebrity circle ostracised him.

Capote never finished Answered Prayers. He was often seen at Studio 54, and his heavy abuse of drugs and alcohol was covered in the media.

In 1976, he starred in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death (1976), for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination. That year he was also sued for libel by friend and novelist Gore Vidal, for saying that he had been drunk and thrown out of the White House by Robert F. Kennedy. The next year Capote appeared in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977).

Though he never completed another novel, Capote did continue contributing articles to publications. Warhol invited Capote to contribute monthly articles to the Conversations with Capote column in Interview magazine. They were compiled into Music for Chameleons (1980), which became a bestseller. Capote’s “One Christmas” was published in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1982.

Playboy published his tribute to Tennessee Williams after his death in 1983. A little over a year later, Capote would also be dead.

He had been suffering from hallucinations caused by a reduction in brain mass. On August 25, 1984, Capote succumbed to liver disease at the home of friend Joanne Carson, ex-wife of talk show host Johnny Carson. Vidal called Capote’s death “a wise career move.”

Two years after his death, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel (1986) was published.

Dunphy, who shared Capote’s ashes with Carson, died in 1992. In 1994 his and Capote’s ashes were spread at Crooked Pond near Sagaponack, New York, where the couple shared property.

The Truman Capote Literary Trust was started in 1994 and established the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.

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Sources:

NY Times

LA Times

Biography

Britannica