Truman Capote
Truman Garcia Capote[1] (/kəˈpoʊti/ kə-POH-tee;[2] born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966). His works have been adapted into more than 20 films and television productions.
Truman Capote
August 25, 1984 (aged 59)
Truman Garcia Capote
- Novelist
- playwright
- screenwriter
- actor
1942–1984
- Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)
- Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)
- In Cold Blood (1966)
- Southern Gothic
- True crime
Jack Dunphy (1948–1984; his death)
Capote had a troubled childhood caused by his parents' divorce, a long absence from his mother, and multiple moves. He was planning to become a writer by the time he was eight years old,[3] and he honed his writing ability throughout his childhood. He began his professional career writing short stories. The critical success of "Miriam" (1945) attracted the attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf and resulted in a contract to write the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood (1966), a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home. Capote spent six years writing the book, aided by his lifelong friend Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).[4]
Last years[edit]
Capote was in and out of drug rehabilitation clinics in the late 1970s, and news of his various breakdowns frequently reached the public.[59] During a 1978 on-air interview with Stanley Siegel, an extraordinarily intoxicated Capote confessed he had been awake for 48 hours, and when Siegel asked "What's going to happen unless you lick this problem of drugs and alcohol?" Capote responded, "The obvious answer is that eventually, I mean, I'll kill myself...without meaning to."[60] The live broadcast made national headlines. One year later, feeling betrayed by Lee Radziwill in a feud with perpetual nemesis Gore Vidal, Capote arranged a return visit to Stanley Siegel's show, delivering a bizarrely comic performance revealing an incident wherein Vidal was thrown out of the Kennedy White House due to intoxication (later refuted in detail by Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest). Capote also shared salacious details regarding the personal life of Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Andy Warhol, who had looked up to the writer as a mentor in his early days in New York and often partied with Capote at Studio 54, agreed to paint Capote's portrait as "a personal gift" in exchange for Capote's contributing short pieces to Warhol's Interview magazine every month for a year in the form of a column, Conversations with Capote. Initially the pieces were to consist of tape-recorded conversations, but soon Capote eschewed the tape recorder in favor of semi-fictionalized "conversational portraits". These pieces formed the basis for the bestselling Music for Chameleons (1980).
Capote underwent a facelift, lost weight, and experimented with hair transplants.[61] Despite this, Capote was unable to overcome his reliance upon drugs and liquor and had grown bored with New York by the beginning of the 1980s.
After the revocation of his driver's license (the result of speeding near his Long Island residence) and a hallucination-based seizure in 1980 that required hospitalization, Capote became fairly reclusive. These hallucinations continued unabated; medical scans eventually revealed that his brain mass had perceptibly shrunk. On the rare occasions when he was lucid, he continued to promote Answered Prayers as being nearly complete and was reportedly planning a reprise of the Black and White Ball to be held either in Los Angeles or a more exotic locale in South America. On a few occasions, he was still able to write. In 1982, a new short story, "One Christmas", appeared in the December issue of Ladies' Home Journal; the following year it became, like its predecessors A Christmas Memory and The Thanksgiving Visitor, a holiday gift book. In 1983, "Remembering Tennessee", an essay in tribute to Tennessee Williams, who had died in February of that year, appeared in Playboy magazine.[62]
Archival sources