“I used to reach down and pick them up,” he tells Grobel. Capote talks of boyhood adventures catching carp with his bare hands. Grobel’s interviews, collected in Conversations with Capote, affirm the author’s notion that talk, properly shaped, could be a form of theater.

“Do you think that remarks can be literature?” interviewer Lawrence Grobel asked Capote. Like a latter-day Oscar Wilde, Capote relished the pithy bon mot. It “isn’t writing at all,” he deadpanned. Perhaps Capote’s most famous fusillade concerns his critique of Beat Generation writers. “Did I read somewhere that you said all actors are stupid?” TV personality Dinah Shore once asked him. When he wasn’t chatting about his favorite subject, himself, Capote took guilty pleasure in cutting everyone else down to size. Talk-show hosts courted Capote because he was a gifted storyteller who could be counted on to say something provocative. “Gore Vidal used to say it could only be understood by dogs,” writer George Plimpton said. Capote’s constant presence on the national stage in the 1960s and 1970s was vivid and unforgettable.Īt about five feet three inches tall, he came off as a flamboyantly effeminate elf, his tiny body and sharp tongue best summarized in his own assessment: “I’m about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.” The high-pitched voice, too, seemed ready-made for parody, a frequent inspiration for stand-up impressionists. 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. And so he took refuge in booze and pills, pills and booze.”īuckley was oddly prescient in focusing on Capote as a creature of film, since more than three decades after his death, the controversial author has become known to younger Americans primarily through two biopics, Capote in 2005 and Infamous in 2006. He seemed astonished, at first, that old friends hung up the telephone when he called, and that others took trouble to avoid him. “It collected brilliantly and with relish related every ugly fact and rumor about New York’s glitterati that Truman Capote, in years of knowing and mixing with them, had assembled.

“That work finished Truman Capote’s social life as decisively as a hangman’s trapdoor,” Buckley told readers.

Shortly before Murder by Death entered production, Capote had published a portion of Answered Prayers, his unfinished novel, in Esquire. The plot, in which many wanted the worst for Twain, seemed a wry case of art imitating life. Buckley instead recalled a 1976 visit to the set of Neil Simon’s campy mystery movie, Murder by Death, which featured Capote as homicide victim Lionel Twain.

საუზმე ტიფანისთან by Truman Capote