The Truman Capote Thread

[Mississippienne]

@Starving_Artist

See, to me this is the problem with literary license (or perhaps with too much information available after the fact ;)). Once you know that an author interjects things to make the story more interesting, you can’t take for granted that anything described really happened. Maybe they ran over dogs like he said, or maybe Capote just said they did to make them even more evil, and thus more interesting to read about.

The dog bit is real. Dick Hickock liked running dogs over with his car. Read Truman Capote: Conversations (1987) sometime, Capote specifically addresses this scene.

Q: With the nonfiction novel I suppose the temptation to fictionalize events, or a line of dialogue, for example must at times be overwhelming. With In Cold Blood was there any invention of this sort to speak of – I was thinking specifically of the dog you described trotting along the road at the end of a section on Perry and Dick, and then later you introduce the next section with the two with Dick swerving to hit the dog. Was there actually a dog at that exact point in the narrative, or were you just using this habit of Dick’s as a fiction device to bridge the two sections?

CAPOTE: No. There was a dog, and it was precisely as described. One doesn’t spend almost six years on a book, the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions.

Dick apparently had an amazing memory – Capote claims he had the most amazing eye for details. He could remember the tiniest, most insignificant details, like what the signs said on the beaches at Florida, and when Capote visited the hotel and went to the beach, it would be exactly like Dick described. In my opinion, the main danger when it came to the facts lay in Capote’s blind spot for Perry, not in anything Dick told him.

[Arnold_Winkelried]

@gonzomax

In Cold Blood was a terrific book. The disregard for life that they showed was frightening. If memory serves they were driving down the street and would veer over just to hit a stray dog walking down the street. And then laugh. They give me the creeps.

I’m pretty sure I remember Tom Joad doing the same thing with turtles in Grapes of Wrath (the John Steinbeck novel), which I though was odd, since Tom Joad is supposed to be our “hero”. Perhaps it was a thing commonly done in the country, that shocks only us modern-day suburbanites?

[Mississippienne]

@Arnold_Winkelried

This might be a good place to ask something that I’ve always wondered about. In Cold Blood is obviously based on true fact. How about Handcarved Coffins? (part of the Music for Chameleons anthology) It was written in the same style as In Cold Blood, but it is wholly fictional. Right?
(Handcarved Coffins is the story of several murders of seemingly unconnected people, linked by the appearance of a small handcarved coffin received by the victim before their death.)

As far as I know, HC is fictional. Capote had an interest in crime and prisons long before writing In Cold Blood.

[Starving_Artist]

While you’re here, Mississippienne, thanks for info and the recommendation on Conversations. I’ll check it out.

[Mississippienne]

@Starving_Artist

While you’re here, Mississippienne, thanks for info and the recommendation on Conversations. I’ll check it out.

It’s a really good book, and the interviews are fascinating because it’s Truman Capote and he could talk about the weather and you’d be captivated. Just the way he phrased things could crack me up. Here’s a funny bit from a Playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: Why are older men better?

CAPOTE: Well, first of all, there’s so much more security attached to an older man. And with an older man, a woman is just as – probably more – agreeably active sexually. You’re not going to get your brains pounded out morning and afternoon as – I read in Ann Landers – many women are. In fact, to hear Dear Abby tell it, the women in this country are in hysterics over getting fucked to death.

[Starving_Artist]

Thanks.

I recall watching a film clip of him explaining what he was trying to accomplish with *In Cold Blood[/I, explaining the difference between fiction and journalism and that it was his ambition to get the writer out of the reportage…

Never mind, I just remembered where I found the clip. Here it is.

Not as funny as your quote, but pretty interesting nonetheless. A couple of other snippets of the interview are available under “Related videos” further down the page, and as you said, he is a kick to listen to.

[Mississippienne]

I saw that clip; Capote’s great, as usual. Disappointingly little Capote content on youtube, though. I couldn’t find any of his appearances on Johnny Carson (but there’s one with him and Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett Show that’s a hoot).

Here’s a few photos I found online. This one’s Truman Capote and Perry Smith, taken by Richard Avedon. Perry has a nice smile. You wouldn’t think he’d shot a 16-year-old girl in the head.

These of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith showing off their tattoos are from Avedon’s online studio.

[Starving_Artist]

I just discovered there’s more on Youtube than was shown in the related videos section I referred to. Only the first couple of pages are primarily Capote, but there are more interesting things shown there than were listed in the ‘related videos’ section I mentioned before, including the A&E Biography of him (which you may already have seen) which is shown divided into several clips of ten minutes or so each. Link.

[Mississippienne]

@Starving_Artist

I just discovered there’s more on Youtube than was shown in the related videos section I referred to. Only the first couple of pages are primarily Capote, but there are more interesting things shown there than were listed in the ‘related videos’ section I mentioned before, including the A&E Biography of him (which you may already have seen) which is shown divided into several clips of ten minutes or so each. Link.

I’ve devoured almost everything Capote-related on youtube. Man, how I long for the days when talk shows would have people like Capote who actually had something interesting to say.

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Capote’s interview with Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson Family, at San Quentin in 1979. They start off chatting about Sirhan Sirhan (who Beausoleil says is “a sick guy. He don’t belong here. He ought to be in Atascadero.”) and then segue into something Beausoleil has never seen: the execution chamber.

RB: … When they railroaded me on that Hinman deal and I got the death sentence, well, they had me up on the Row a good spell. Right up to when the court abolished the death penalty. So I used to wonder about the little green room.
TC: Actually, it’s more like three rooms.
RB: I thought it was a little round room with a sort of glass-sealed igloo hut set in the center. With windows in the igloo so the witnesses standing outside can see the guy choking to death on the peach perfume.
TC: Yes, that’s the gas chamber room. But when the prisoner is brought down from Death Row he steps from the elevator directly into a ‘holding’ room that adjoins the witness room. There are two cells in this ‘holding’ room, two, in case there’s a double execution. […] But the interesting thing I discovered in there’s a third room in this little suite. It’s behind a closed door right next to the ‘holding’ cell. I just opened the door and walked in and none of the guards who were with me tried to stop me. And it was the most haunting room I’ve ever seen. Because you know what’s in it? All the leftovers, all the paraphernalia that the different condemned men had had with them in the ‘holding’ cells. Books, Bibles, and Western paperbacks, and Erle Stanley Gardner, James Bond. Old brown newspapers. Some of them twenty years old. Unfinished crossword puzzles. Unfinished letters. Sweetheart snapshots. Dim, crumbling little Kodak children. Pathetic.

:eek: I think Capote’s description of this creepy room filled with dead men’s belongings will give me the creeps until the day I die. Robert Beausoleil, by the way, has never had his little date with the executioner; his sentence was commute to life imprisonment in 1972, so he’s still rotting in prison instead of choking in that little green room.

Anyway, Beausoleil then asks Capote if he’s seen anyone executed. Capote replies that he’s seen one man go to the gas chamber ‘like he was going to the dentist’. Capote interviewed so many men on Death Row that I’m unsure precisely who’s he’s referring to here. But his next reference is unmistakeable.

TC: But in Kansas, I saw two men hanged.
RB: Perry Smith? And what’s his name – Dick Hickock? Well, once they hit the end of the rope, I guess they don’t feel anything.
TC: So we’re told. But after the drop, they go on living – fifteen, twenty minutes. Struggling. Gasping for breath, the body still batting for life.

It took Dick Hickock about twenty minutes to die after being hanged in 1965. Anyway, Beausoleil and Capote discuss the Tate-Bianco murders, tattoos, Kenneth Anger, Beausoleil’s involvement with the Aryan Brotherhood and his philosophy on life and murder (“If my brothers and sisters did it, it’s all good.”). Towards the end of the interview, Capote asks Beausoleil what he’ll do if he’s paroled one day.

RB: [strums guitar] I’d like to record some of my music. Get it played on the air.
TC: That was Perry Smith’s dream. And Charlie Manson’s, too. Maybe you fellows have more in common than mere tattoos.
RB: Just between us, Charlie doesn’t have a whole lot of talent.

[Sampiro]

He also referred in an interview to being in China and seeing small dogs in cages. He at first thought they were being sold as pets but found out they were being sold for meat, especially stew. He said that when he was on death row he used to think of those little dogs in their cages being taken away.

Bobby Beausoleil felt betrayed by that interview and said Capote made a lot of it up. That’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility- he was a notorious embellisher. OTOH, the factual information checked out and, as noted, at the time of the interview Beausoleil was facing death whereas afterwards he had the possibility of parole (hasn’t made it yet), so he probably wished to recant some things.

Beausoleil’s website- he actually has some talent as an artist. I’d never buy any of his works (they’re for sell on his website) but he does have talent. Like Tex Watson and Susan Atkins he’s married since becoming incarcerated and his wife handles the website and the business end. Here’s an interview in which he discusses Capote.

[Mississippienne]

Ugh, I can’t bring myself to look at Beausoleil’s website. As for whose version to believe, when it comes down between Capote and the guy who stabbed his drug dealer to death and scrawled ‘Political Piggy’ on the wall with his blood, I’m going with Capote.

Beausoleil also scored Kenneth Anger’s movie Lucifer Rising. For what it’s worth, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock were also rather talented amateur artists – and IIRC, Perry could play several musical instruments – so it seems tattoos were not all they had in common.

[Mississippienne]

@Sampiro

He also referred in an interview to being in China and seeing small dogs in cages. He at first thought they were being sold as pets but found out they were being sold for meat, especially stew. He said that when he was on death row he used to think of those little dogs in their cages being taken away.

That reminds me, have you ever read Capote’s “Lola”, about his pet raven that flew off the terace when he lived in Italy and that he never saw again? It’s actually online!

[TWDuke]

@Arnold_Winkelried

I’m pretty sure I remember Tom Joad doing the same thing with turtles in Grapes of Wrath (the John Steinbeck novel), which I though was odd, since Tom Joad is supposed to be our “hero”.

No!Tom encounters the turtle after it survives getting hit by a truck, decides to take it home to his little brother, but eventually sets it free.