Revisiting a Book
The Author at Eleven I was eleven when four members of the Herb Clutter family were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, November 15, 1959, by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock—two men who cut the Clutters’ telephone lines, entered through an unlocked door, and later left with no more than $60 and the Clutters’ blood on their hands. Residing a little over two hundred miles away, I tried to read the accounts in the Wichita Eagle but usually quit before I was finished. It wasn’t difficult reading, but neither was it very engaging as reportage goes: Just the facts, ma’am. I wanted more than the five W’s delivered on a platter. Yet what made me wish to know why two men had killed an innocent family of good people? And could I ever know the answer?
One thing that brought the story even closer to me was the fact that the Clutters had an older daughter who was away at college when the killings occurred. The institution she'd attended (for two years before transferring to another school) was Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, where my mother had received her degree. I would later matriculate there myself. As a child I felt desperately sorry for that young Clutter woman, who would now have no family. I believe she married her fiancé sooner than they had planned so that she might have some family of her own—so that she would not be utterly alone, so that she and her young husband might experience some joy during that holiday season. The fact that the Clutters were Methodists, as were most of my family, made everything even more poignant—that if something this dreadful had happened to us, they would have been feeling a similar kind of sorrow on our behalf.
The Author as Choir Member Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood—an account of this horrific event—was released in 1965, and since then I’ve read it twice. The first time was early in 1967, when Southwestern College’s a cappella choir conducted a tour of Western Kansas: our jolly bus traveling the same narrow blacktops that the murderers drive as they approach the Clutter farmhouse in Holcomb. The film version of In Cold Blood had just come out, and I’d bought the book to have something to read during the long hauls between towns—where we filled various venues with our youthful yet precise and round tones that, on a good day, made us sound like eight voices (SSAATTBB) instead of forty-four. We’d sung concerts in Dodge City and Garden City, and, to arrive at Ulysses, where our choir was to perform at the high school, we had to pass near the Clutter home. At least it seemed like a coincidence.
The Clutter Home Outside Holcomb, Kansas I can't remember whether our bus driver actually drove us by the house, where it sat not far from the road, or if I'm recalling a scene from the film. In any case, elms grew on each side of the road leading to the house (an allée), protecting the property from the razor-sharp winds of the cold flat plains. The dwelling, designed by Mr. Clutter and completed in 1948, seems to be a prototype of the American ranch house (3,700 square feet), not as sprawling, yet with a second story and basement—a cheerful combination of clapboards and limestone. Three picture windows face the front yard in a welcoming and open manner, though the rest of the windows, by comparison, seem small, as if to claim a privacy for the rooms they harbor.
Capote’s “non-fiction novel” read, to an eighteen-year-old, like a sensational piece of literature—something right off the newsstands, yet with much more to offer, if only, as a callow youth I might have been able to discern its finer qualities. I’d seen nothing of Truman Capote’s writings prior to that. I had no idea who he was, what he had accomplished (in his early forties by then)—didn’t realize as many others wouldn’t, that the best part of his career was over. I read from ICB every chance I got. Other choristers talked and laughed, seeking, at times, to engage me, but each time we re-boarded our bus I continued to travel with Capote as he crisscrossed the state, the nation, as he traveled from New York to Kansas and back. Reading the account is like witnessing a train wreck in utter slow motion, from its very departure until the murderers are hanged. That paperback is one of the few books of that time period to get away from me. I can't imagine where it went to.
Capote’s “non-fiction novel” read, to an eighteen-year-old, like a sensational piece of literature—something right off the newsstands, yet with much more to offer, if only, as a callow youth I might have been able to discern its finer qualities. I’d seen nothing of Truman Capote’s writings prior to that. I had no idea who he was, what he had accomplished (in his early forties by then)—didn’t realize as many others wouldn’t, that the best part of his career was over. I read from ICB every chance I got. Other choristers talked and laughed, seeking, at times, to engage me, but each time we re-boarded our bus I continued to travel with Capote as he crisscrossed the state, the nation, as he traveled from New York to Kansas and back. Reading the account is like witnessing a train wreck in utter slow motion, from its very departure until the murderers are hanged. That paperback is one of the few books of that time period to get away from me. I can't imagine where it went to.
The second time I read In Cold Blood was after I’d located a first edition in a used bookstore. One night in 2003—after having retired from teaching and my father had come to live near me—I couldn’t sleep, worried about his medical problems, as well as unresolved issues between us. When I’d bought the paperback in 1967 my father had declared, I don’t know why you’d want to read that, the papers were full of it back then. I remembered trying, as a child, to read them. Yes, I’d wanted to understand. I pulled the beige and black hardback off the shelf and was once again drawn into Capote’s barren landscape: his desire to apply the techniques of fiction to a non-fiction subject. Though I read it with more of a critical eye than the first time—and more jaded, as well, for in the 1960s I’d lived through three assassinations and later read of countless other murders—I found myself mesmerized. I didn’t read it in one sitting. I tired finally and went to bed—finishing it in the days to follow.
I had read Gerald Clark’s biography Capote in 1988, so I knew how attached Capote becomes to killer Perry Smith. One of the more vivid scenes in Capote’s book, aside from the events of the murders themselves, takes place in the Finney County Jail, where the killers are first incarcerated. In the four-story building, almost as if it is another character, Perry is held in a cell adjacent to the caretaker’s quarters. It is perhaps more like a free-standing cage, one that normally serves as a cell for women prisoners. From an open window Perry feeds a pet squirrel, yet, by stark contrast and by his own account, he has killed at least two of the four Clutters. The irony is almost too obvious, and I’m not sure Capote ever verbalizes it. Can only someone this feral in nature coax a squirrel through a jail window to eat a few crumbs each day, as Capote himself coaxes Smith to confess his story? I was not as enthralled with this reading as I was the first one in 1967. I’m not sure the non-fiction novel has ever caught on, and that would be all right with Capote, who felt he’d created something quite unique. Ultimately, I find it difficult to tell what is actual and what is surmised on the part of Mr. Capote—almost negating the validity of either genre.
Revisiting the Cinema
In 2006, two films depicting Truman Capote’s life are released, and I see them both. Each one is a fine work, and it is sad, in a way, that each appears at about the same time—because, separately, each casts new light on its subject. Capote premiers early in the year—to much commercial fanfare, boasting a commercially viable cast: Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Capote; Catherine Keener as his friend and compatriot (Nelle) Harper Lee (Pulitzer Prize winning writer of To Kill A Mockingbird); and Bruce Greenwood as Capote’s lover Jack Dunphy. Infamous, which may be the better of the two films, opens very quietly in November of that year (I become aware of it through a New Yorker review), Sandra Bullock playing a subdued and dowdy Harper Lee. Both accounts portray Lee at the typewriter as Capote dictates to her his daily notes, which must make it true. Isabella Rossellini, Jeff Daniels, and Daniel Craig (as Perry Smith) round out the list of well-knowns in Infamous. Brit Toby Jones, the actor portraying Truman Capote, uncannily becomes the man; you think he may never work in film again unless he can somehow separate himself visually and verbally from his knockout punch performance in this film—which, happily, he has gone on to do, playing in W and Frost/Nixon, among others.
One both adores and despises Capote’s character at times, as he worms his way into the hearts of others and then exploits them or their words to create his work. In Infamous—based on George Plimpton’s Truman Capote and directed by Douglas McGrath—much is made of Capote’s relationships with New York’s chic society of matrons and patrons. Bennett Cerf is portrayed, replete with his Long Island lockjaw dialect, by actor/director Peter Bogdanovich. The film is a labor of love for many, providing a slender voluptuous Gwyneth Paltrow, as "Kitty Dean," an opportunity to croon “What Is This Thing Called Love?” before a nightclub audience where Capote and his friend, Sigourney Weaver’s Babe Paley, swill drinks (always plural when Capote is in the room). Tears appear in Paltrow’s eyes, and the orchestra halts when her head droops and she ceases to sing, only to be resurrected a few seconds later as she concludes the song and her apparent meltdown. Yet the film is flawed in small ways that perhaps only a native Kansan would notice. When Capote and Lee are finally invited into the home of one of Garden City's finest families—Alvin Dewey, district attorney (Jeff Daniels), and his wife—we find ourselves on their front porch Christmas Day. The lawn has green patches; in fact, there is a potted plant, still alive, on the porch. In Finney County, Kansas, in late December, I can assure you there isn’t a blade of green grass to be seen anywhere. I suspect, as I later examine the credits, the scene is shot in winter time Austin, Texas in a house, the camera reveals, on the 4200 block of some street located there. No small town street in America, as Garden City is, has a "forty-two hundred block." When the film surmises what the harrowing murder scene at the Clutter house is like, the camera pans Herb and Bonnie’s bedroom. A wooden crucifix centered over the head of the bed goes almost unnoticed, until, as a Kansan, you realize the Clutters are staunch Methodists. That Christ arose from the dead is a major sticking point with the Methodists, and yet the crucifix appears in this film, as if it is the truth. And if it is, I find it hard to believe; I remember not reading of any such Catholicism in Capote’s book. The garishly red Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe cars move away from a forlorn “Holcomb” sign sadly in need of paint. The camera doesn’t show at all what is pulling the cars away from the platform for there is no station. Indeed, the signs of a low bud pic?
Still, I’m drawn into Infamous, the calamity that is Capote’s life: the gossipy tongues that wag in New York giving Capote something to write about (most assuredly in his unfinished book Answered Prayers) until murder in Kansas calls to him; the two wardrobes of mid-century America, one for Manhattan and one for the heartland; the breathless relationship between Capote and Smith, in which the latter realizes he loves Capote and declares it and Capote reciprocates; Capote’s insistence on burying himself in the lives of these people; the rigors that the writing of this book requires in concert with his Olympian efforts to consume drink, so that he can produce the greatest book of his career. And yet we know he never writes anything of significance again. He drinks himself to a hauntingly premature death, almost in salute to his inability to write. By contrast, Harper Lee, two years younger, still lives at this writing. Capote knows what it would take to top himself and he has nothing left to give. When a writer cannot write, it is like experiencing death. Capote only wants to make it official, and yet, as his character claims, “Alcohol is the coward’s way out.” He cannot end his life swiftly. He must mock it, taunt it, tease it, draw it to a close as only some alcoholics can: with great drama and a habit that cannot be broken, for if it is, he will have to face the truths of his life.
In the other film, Capote, based on Gerald Clarke’s book, the narrative is more staid. Thankfully, no re-creation of the murders exists except by way of Perry’s confession. This version would have it that Perry does not reveal to Truman what happens in the Clutter home until the very end of their relationship, when Capote is trying to end the book. Much is made of Capote’s ability to find the boys a better lawyer—which I come to see as a stalling tactic that allows him more time to write. Again, I both love and hate this character played by Oscar-winning Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Someone sends Perry a newspaper account of Capote’s New York reading, in which the author recites segments of the first three parts of the book and reveals the title In Cold Blood, one supposes, to build interest, so that when the book finally appears, it will inspire sales. Today, we would call such a process “building a platform.” Later, when a knowing Perry asks Truman what the title of his book will be, Capote lies through his teeth: “I really have no idea, Perry.” He constantly placates Perry and assures him of his sincerity, yet one isn’t sure it’s real, not even, I think, Capote himself.
Before Capote witnesses Perry’s hanging, he is allowed to visit both killers one more time under crowded supervision—at least four other prison officials are present—and the tenor of the conversation is jovial on the part of the killers trying to keep a façade of bravado up to the last. Capote is flummoxed by them, the situation, unable to get beyond superficial speech. He exits, saying several times that he is sorry, that if he could save them he would—almost as if his leaving the room will cause their demise. He’s already tried more than any other human being to “save” them— although life imprisonment would hardly seem like salvation. Had they been allowed to live out their lives in prison, they might still be alive.
In most ways, Capote is the quieter film, though I don’t remember it that way before my recent viewings. There exist minor but strange discrepancies between the two versions, based, according to film credits, on the two previously mentioned biographies. In Capote, Harper Lee chauffeurs Truman around Finney County, Kansas in a 1955 Chevrolet, a rather old rental for the early 1960s. In Infamous, she drives a 1959 model. This scenario is more likely if the car is indeed a rental and not a loaner. And which one of the locals would lend them a car? In Infamous, Bennett Cerf accompanies Capote to the hanging in Kansas; in Capote, it is Mr. Shawn, Capote’s editor. I don’t believe both can be correct unless both men are present. There exist pictures of the actual Clutter house on the internet. Neither dwelling in either film comes close to matching the original in architecture or its forlorn, isolated character on the plains of western Kansas, somewhat more treeless (except for the shelter belts) than the Canadian landscape where Capote is filmed.
I thought I would be able to say definitively, after viewing both again, which is the better film, but I find that an impossible task. Each is a work of art, brought to life by different directors, conceived and underwritten by the support of different producers. In the Infamous portrayal of Harper Lee, Sandra Bullock is quieter, her range as a character not fully explored—though it is a fine attempt by a major talent to reach beyond her commercial fare. As the other Harper Lee in Capote, Catherine Keener seems more fully realized, a true friend to Capote, and, in the role, more capable of telling Truman the harshest truths about himself. She is, for example, able to walk away from him when he insults her on the eve of To Kill A Mockingbird’s film release in New York. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Capote says, slurring his words and sipping what one can assume is his umpteenth Martini. Hoffman’s Capote knows what the fuss is about; he must be wondering if his book will stand up to the success of Lee’s. Will he, too, receive a movie deal? And so Harper Lee, instead of taking the bait, sails back into the happy maelstrom of her post-premier party, to enjoy it to the hilt because even she may realize it will be her first and only film premier.
Because Hoffman has created so many fine roles including a macho homophobe in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his performance as Truman Capote is perhaps the most difficult to accept, whereas Toby Jones is so unfamiliar to American audiences that his portrayal seems, at times, to outquirk Hoffman’s. And yet Hoffman’s interpretation may have the greatest depth, if only by degree. There exists in his performance a playful arrogance missing in Jones’s youthful wistfulness, a sense of humanity that seems to grow as the film progresses—whether the scenes are shot in this order or not. In good fiction, in good film, both, I expect a character to grow in some manner, and it is Hoffman’s Truman that appears to grow the most.
Either way, I am left with my original curiosity about the murders. How can anyone kill four innocent people? Further, why can’t Richard Hickock and Perry Smith enter the house in masks, and, finding that there is no large sum of money to be had, leave the Clutters bound and gagged for the night—alive—so that when Nancy Clutter’s friend discovers them the next morning, the two men might only be sixty dollars richer and perhaps hundreds of miles away, free to rob once again and face a different flirtation with death? The tale of robbery would otherwise remain a family narrative, a short story the Clutter people tell their children on dark, cold nights when the wind blows across the plains like a knife shearing anything in its way.
Still, I’m drawn into Infamous, the calamity that is Capote’s life: the gossipy tongues that wag in New York giving Capote something to write about (most assuredly in his unfinished book Answered Prayers) until murder in Kansas calls to him; the two wardrobes of mid-century America, one for Manhattan and one for the heartland; the breathless relationship between Capote and Smith, in which the latter realizes he loves Capote and declares it and Capote reciprocates; Capote’s insistence on burying himself in the lives of these people; the rigors that the writing of this book requires in concert with his Olympian efforts to consume drink, so that he can produce the greatest book of his career. And yet we know he never writes anything of significance again. He drinks himself to a hauntingly premature death, almost in salute to his inability to write. By contrast, Harper Lee, two years younger, still lives at this writing. Capote knows what it would take to top himself and he has nothing left to give. When a writer cannot write, it is like experiencing death. Capote only wants to make it official, and yet, as his character claims, “Alcohol is the coward’s way out.” He cannot end his life swiftly. He must mock it, taunt it, tease it, draw it to a close as only some alcoholics can: with great drama and a habit that cannot be broken, for if it is, he will have to face the truths of his life.
In the other film, Capote, based on Gerald Clarke’s book, the narrative is more staid. Thankfully, no re-creation of the murders exists except by way of Perry’s confession. This version would have it that Perry does not reveal to Truman what happens in the Clutter home until the very end of their relationship, when Capote is trying to end the book. Much is made of Capote’s ability to find the boys a better lawyer—which I come to see as a stalling tactic that allows him more time to write. Again, I both love and hate this character played by Oscar-winning Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Someone sends Perry a newspaper account of Capote’s New York reading, in which the author recites segments of the first three parts of the book and reveals the title In Cold Blood, one supposes, to build interest, so that when the book finally appears, it will inspire sales. Today, we would call such a process “building a platform.” Later, when a knowing Perry asks Truman what the title of his book will be, Capote lies through his teeth: “I really have no idea, Perry.” He constantly placates Perry and assures him of his sincerity, yet one isn’t sure it’s real, not even, I think, Capote himself.
Before Capote witnesses Perry’s hanging, he is allowed to visit both killers one more time under crowded supervision—at least four other prison officials are present—and the tenor of the conversation is jovial on the part of the killers trying to keep a façade of bravado up to the last. Capote is flummoxed by them, the situation, unable to get beyond superficial speech. He exits, saying several times that he is sorry, that if he could save them he would—almost as if his leaving the room will cause their demise. He’s already tried more than any other human being to “save” them— although life imprisonment would hardly seem like salvation. Had they been allowed to live out their lives in prison, they might still be alive.
In most ways, Capote is the quieter film, though I don’t remember it that way before my recent viewings. There exist minor but strange discrepancies between the two versions, based, according to film credits, on the two previously mentioned biographies. In Capote, Harper Lee chauffeurs Truman around Finney County, Kansas in a 1955 Chevrolet, a rather old rental for the early 1960s. In Infamous, she drives a 1959 model. This scenario is more likely if the car is indeed a rental and not a loaner. And which one of the locals would lend them a car? In Infamous, Bennett Cerf accompanies Capote to the hanging in Kansas; in Capote, it is Mr. Shawn, Capote’s editor. I don’t believe both can be correct unless both men are present. There exist pictures of the actual Clutter house on the internet. Neither dwelling in either film comes close to matching the original in architecture or its forlorn, isolated character on the plains of western Kansas, somewhat more treeless (except for the shelter belts) than the Canadian landscape where Capote is filmed.
I thought I would be able to say definitively, after viewing both again, which is the better film, but I find that an impossible task. Each is a work of art, brought to life by different directors, conceived and underwritten by the support of different producers. In the Infamous portrayal of Harper Lee, Sandra Bullock is quieter, her range as a character not fully explored—though it is a fine attempt by a major talent to reach beyond her commercial fare. As the other Harper Lee in Capote, Catherine Keener seems more fully realized, a true friend to Capote, and, in the role, more capable of telling Truman the harshest truths about himself. She is, for example, able to walk away from him when he insults her on the eve of To Kill A Mockingbird’s film release in New York. “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Capote says, slurring his words and sipping what one can assume is his umpteenth Martini. Hoffman’s Capote knows what the fuss is about; he must be wondering if his book will stand up to the success of Lee’s. Will he, too, receive a movie deal? And so Harper Lee, instead of taking the bait, sails back into the happy maelstrom of her post-premier party, to enjoy it to the hilt because even she may realize it will be her first and only film premier.
Because Hoffman has created so many fine roles including a macho homophobe in The Talented Mr. Ripley, his performance as Truman Capote is perhaps the most difficult to accept, whereas Toby Jones is so unfamiliar to American audiences that his portrayal seems, at times, to outquirk Hoffman’s. And yet Hoffman’s interpretation may have the greatest depth, if only by degree. There exists in his performance a playful arrogance missing in Jones’s youthful wistfulness, a sense of humanity that seems to grow as the film progresses—whether the scenes are shot in this order or not. In good fiction, in good film, both, I expect a character to grow in some manner, and it is Hoffman’s Truman that appears to grow the most.
Either way, I am left with my original curiosity about the murders. How can anyone kill four innocent people? Further, why can’t Richard Hickock and Perry Smith enter the house in masks, and, finding that there is no large sum of money to be had, leave the Clutters bound and gagged for the night—alive—so that when Nancy Clutter’s friend discovers them the next morning, the two men might only be sixty dollars richer and perhaps hundreds of miles away, free to rob once again and face a different flirtation with death? The tale of robbery would otherwise remain a family narrative, a short story the Clutter people tell their children on dark, cold nights when the wind blows across the plains like a knife shearing anything in its way.
Next Time
In 1978 I marched in San Francisco's Gay Pride parade. I will review what the experience--near the beginning of Gay Liberation--meant to me then. And what it means to me now. How far we've come, baby!
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