Capote, based on Gerald Clarke’s biography, tells the story of Truman Capote’s writing of In Cold Blood. It covers the period from 1959, when Truman Capote becomes interested in writing an article for the New Yorker on the murder of an entire family in a farmhouse in Kansas, to 1965, when the killers are executed by hanging. The film unobtrusively gives us the pieces to put together the character and pathological narcissism of the central character. 1 Two other well known films intersect with this one to help us understand the childhood antecedents.
The Outsider
The film presents us with a seeming contradiction. We first see Truman Capote at a late night party in Manhattan. The scene is in stark contrast to the preceding one in which an adolescent girl enters a quiet farmhouse on a Kansas morning to find her best friend murdered in her bed. Holding a drink, Capote is the center of a circle of admirers and friends who are delighted by his repartee, his stories, his exaggerated gestures and his famous friends.
“I had lunch with Jimmy Baldwin the other day.”
Someone asks, “How is he?”
“He’s a lovely man. And he told me the plot of his new book and he tells me he just wants to make sure it’s not one of those problem novels. I said, Jimmy, your novel’s about a Negro homosexual who’s in love with a Jew. Wouldn’t you call that a problem?”
His story brings laughter. Even such a snatch sets the viewer up as an admiring, perhaps envious outsider looking into a special world. The contradiction is that it is Capote who is the outsider.
That comes out when Capote arrives in Kansas. His odd and effeminate mannerisms, his high pitched voice and sensitive demeanor appear false and out of place in the prairie. He initially acts as if he is still in New York, telling an investigator in the office of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, “Bergdorf’s”. When the man clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he adds, “The scarf, it’s from Bergdorf’s.” He also makes the mistake of telling Alvin Hughes, the lead investigator, that he doesn’t care if they find the killers or not, that he just wants to see how the town reacts. Hughes tells him, “I care.” Mirroring the investigator’s confusion about Bergdorf’s, Capote invites an explanation. “I care a great deal if we catch who did this as do a lot of folks around here.” As the investigators are leaving, one of them points to his hat, “Sears and Roebuck.”
He looks even more incongruous, even perverse, trying to approach the best friend of the murdered girl outside the high school, prompting his research assistant, Nelle to ask him to let her do this part of the research. We learn about Capote’s subjective insight into his role with two comments he makes, the first on the phone to his lover, Jack:
“I saw the bodies today. … I looked inside the coffins.”
“That’s horrifying”
“It comforts me, something so horrifying it’s a relief. Normal life falls away, but then I was never much for normal life. Yeah, people here won’t talk to me. They want someone like you, like Nelle. Me they hate.”
The contradiction is explained for us as we watch Capote ingratiate himself with the townspeople. He changes his clothes to fit in better, shedding the Bergdorf’s scarf and the bright colors for a conservative dark suit. He uses his literary fame to get inside the chief investigator’s home. His wife is a “reader”, a fan of Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He also brings an autographed book to the sheriff’s wife in order to get a close look at one of the killers after they’ve been arrested.
More importantly, he applies his acute perceptiveness about people to win them over. He and Nelle do get to talk with Laura, the girl who discovered her friend’s body. They ask her about Danny, the dead girl’s boyfriend. She says, “Danny is pretty shattered. Nothing terrible has ever happened to him before” and tells them how people in town have been talking about Danny. Here, Capote uses his personal sense of difference to reach Laura empathically. He touches on a part of himself, the sense of being a stranger that resonates with many adolescents.
“Oh it’s the hardest when someone has a notion about you and it’s impossible to convince them otherwise. Ever since I was a child people always have thought they have me pegged because of the way I am, the way I talk, and they’re always wrong.”
Capote, as he is shown in the film, is an odd man who sees himself as an outsider—someone who “was never much for normal life—who uses his perceptiveness to empathize with others so that he can fit in. It would be wrong to call him a chameleon because he certainly does not blend in to his surroundings; but, he adapts by finding out how to shine in his new environment.
We should probably not be surprised that he craves the attention and adulation he creates. Despite repeated protestations in the film that he does not lie, we see that he will create boastful lies to garner attention and admiration, even bribing a porter on a train to praise him in front of his old friend and research assistant, Nelle. He is later quietly resentful when Nelle becomes the center of attention, saying to himself, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
The Killer
Perry Smith, the killer that Capote draws close to in order to get his story for In Cold Blood, is also an outsider. It makes him an easy target for Capote’s empathic seduction. Capote’s first words on seeing Perry kept alone in a small kitchen cell in the sheriff’s office are probably meant to be empathic with his victimized state: “They put you in the woman’s cell.” Perry’s mother was an alcoholic who could not raise her children. He grew up in an orphanage. It is when he has learned that that Capote tells him, “We’re not so different as you might think”, and tells him about his own traumatic childhood with his “Mama”.
Perry’s eventual description of the murders reinforces the theme of the outsider. We might see Perry as affectionately envious of the members of this loving family. He nestles their heads on pillows before killing them, protects the girl from his partner. That envy also turns to murderous rage as he describes “why” he killed the father to begin the mass slaughter.
“He was looking at me. Just looking at me. Looking at my eyes. Like he expects me to kill him—expects me to be the kind of person who would kill him. I was thinking —this nice man, he’s scared of me. I was ashamed. I mean, I thought he was a kind man, a good … a gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat. I didn’t realize what I’d did till I heard the sound.”
The dialogue is enigmatic, but it suggests that Perry killed the father when he realized that the man saw him as an outsider, a threat, someone who did not belong in his world and his family. He felt ashamed at his role, murdering in a somewhat dissociated rage. It is this sense of exclusion that seems to bind Perry and Truman together. As we shall see, neither had a father, although Truman eventually had a stepfather whose name he took for his own.
Capote is using his similar experience to get what he wants from Perry, but in this case, the identification appears to go deeper. Nelle asks Truman if he has fallen in love with Perry. He answers,
“I don’t know how to answer that. … It’s as if Perry and I started life in the same house. One day he stood up and walked out the back door while I walked out the front. With some different choices, he’s the man I might have become.”
To learn about the inside of that metaphorical house, we are aided by outside sources.
Childhood
On his way to Kansas, Capote sits in his train compartment with his research assistant and lifelong friend, Nelle, when a porter comes in with his bags and tells him how honored he is to meet such a wonderful author, talking about how his last book was even better than the first and capping it with, “Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better.” Nelle sees through the ploy. “Truman you’re pathetic. You paid him to say that.” He is surprised that she has seen through him so easily, but we soon learn that they have grown up together, in Alabama, where Truman stayed with his aunts. Fortunately, we have fictionalized “home movies” of their life in Alabama.
The train porter lets us know that Nelle is actually Nelle Harper Lee. We later see her celebrating the sale of her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, to a publisher and still later see a party celebrating the opening of the film made from that novel. (An unhappy Capote, bemoaning interminable delays in the publication of his own book, mumbles drunkenly, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”).
Early in the film, To Kill a Mockingbird, six year old Scout and her older brother, Jem, meet a funny looking boy, who introduces himself.
“I’m Charles Baker Harris. I can read. You got anything needs reading, I can do it.” Jem thinks he’s 4 1/2 because of his size, and is surprised to learn he is “going on seven.” The boy, whose nickname is Dill, answers, “I’m little, but I’m old.”
Dill comes from Meridien, Mississippi, but is visiting his aunt. He is boastful, and more than willing to embellish if not outright lie. He has told them his mother is a photographer’s assistant who “entered my picture in the ‘Beautiful Child’ contest and won five dollars on me. She give the money to me and I went to the picture show 20 times with it.” When Scout asks about his father, he first says he doesn’t have a father, later backtracks when Scout says if his father’s not dead, he must have a father. He tells Scout’s family’s housekeeper, “My Daddy owns the L&N Railroad. He’s gonna let me run the engine all the way to New Orleans.” No wonder that Nelle/Scout years later sees so easily through his ploy with the train porter.
Early in life, Truman/Dill has learned how to cover over his weaknesses, turning them into strengths. His oddness forces him to use his imagination and perceptiveness to make others want to enter into his world.
Dill is a continuously curious fellow who keeps urging Scout and her brother into trouble. He is particularly curious about the mysterious Boo Radley. Jem tries to scare him with stories about Boo, who stalks at night. Dill appears frightened, but even more curious, egging Jem on to go into the Radley’s yard to try to sneak a peak at Boo.
Dill is drawn with sado-masochistic excitement to this violent man. His aunt tells him that Boo stabbed his own father in the leg one day, then went back to what he was doing, cutting newspaper. Boo was held in the courthouse basement for some time after that. Dill is eager to see that jail where Boo was held.
“My aunt says it’s bat-infested, and he nearly died from the mildew. Come on! I betcha they got chains and instruments of torture down there.”
It presages his fascination with Perry Smith. We are left to speculate about the interest of a boy who is ashamed that he has no father, an abandoned son, in a man who has stabbed his father unprovoked and another who brutally murdered the father of a family. But, we learn that Capote’s sado-masochism and his interest in imprisonment also has origins in his relationship with his mother. In Capote, he tells Perry,
“I was abandoned repeatedly as a child. My mama’d drag me along to some new town so she could take up with another man she’d met. Night after night she’d lock me in the hotel room. Mama’d turn the latch and tell the staff not to let me out no matter what. I was terrified—I’d scream my head off—till finally I’d collapse on the carpet next to the door and fall asleep. After years of this she just left me with relatives in Alabama.”
Whether we take this as an accurate description or another dramatic embellishment, it gives us a window into Truman’s inner world.
Neither Capote nor To Kill a Mockingbird shows us Dill’s life with his mother. To get a glimpse of “Mama,” I think we have to turn to yet another film. Holly Golightly, the central character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, is a delightful character, more endearing perhaps for Audrey Hepburn’s characterization. She is portrayed as a “drifter” (from the accompanying song, “Moon River”) who uses men and allows them to use her. She calls them “rats and super rats”, but takes $50 to go to the powder room and $100 per week from mob boss, Sally Tomato, to carry coded messages in the form of weather reports to his lawyer while she looks for a rich man to marry her.
Holly appears to have only one attachment, to her brother, Fred, who shared a wild, sad childhood with her, stealing for food. We are told that she married Doc Golightly at 14, but abruptly abandoned him and his children to explore the world. She has changed her name from Lula Mae to Holly. For most of the film, she toys with her neighbor, Paul Varjak, while pursuing rich men. She calls him Fred, seemingly denying his identity to make him her brother.
Like Capote, Paul is a writer. We see him falling in love with Holly, wanting to help her, wanting to possess her. He is hurt by her continual rejection of him. We can easily imagine some of Capote, himself, in Holly as well, this narcissistic woman who lives off the adulation of others.
We come upon Holly as a young woman, not yet a mother, at least in the literal sense. But the film does give us a reminder of the child whose “… mama’d drag me along to some new town so she could take up with another man she’d met.”
When Paul walks into Holly’s apartment on his arrival in New York, he almost steps on a cat. The cat screeches.
Paul says, “I’m sorry. Is he all right?”
Holly says, “Sure, sure, he’s O.K. Aren’t you Cat? Poor old Cat. Poor slob. Poor slob without a name. I don’t have the right to give him one. We don’t belong to each other. We just took up by the river one day.”
We will see Cat under foot again at a crowded noisy party in Holly’s apartment. We see him jumping on intoxicated party goers or leaping up to shelves, trying to get out of the way of the crowd.
Cat has two moments that might get us into the head of that little boy, left locked in a hotel room, moving from town to town with such a mother. When Holly receives a telegram telling her that her beloved brother has been killed in a jeep accident, she goes into a frenzy, smashing things in her apartment. Almost out of notice, we see her tearing a cover off a nightstand that Cat had jumped onto, throwing him violently up against a door, screeching. We can easily imagine the child, Truman/Dill getting lost in the rage of such a narcissistic woman. At that moment, Cat does not exist for her.
Because he is a cat, we do not think of him as we would a child. Cats are tougher. But the film completes the equation at the end. Holly’s plans to marry a rich Brazilian have fallen through. Paul picks her up in a cab with Cat and her other belongings, thinking he’ll take her with him, but she wants to go to Brazil anyway (jumping bail) to look for rich men. He tells her he’s in love with her. She says he wants to put her in a cage, that she and Cat are a couple of “no name slobs” who “don’t even belong to each other.” Stopping the cab, Holly pushes Cat into the street in the rain to fend for himself in an alley with garbage cans.
At this point, Cat becomes an abandoned child. In the film’s tearful, happy ending, a disgusted Paul gets out of the cab a few blocks later to leave Holly. He tells her that she’s afraid to accept a world in which people do care about each other. Holly follows him, and finds him looking for Cat. “Where’s Cat?” she asks. For a few poignant moments, it appears they will not find him. Holly’s distress tells us that she has learned to care. Cat shows up to the vibrant tones of “Moon River”. In the final scene, Paul and Holly embrace and kiss with Cat held between them. Holly kisses Paul and pets Cat. They are an intact, loving family. It is a scene that the boy, Capote, could only dream of. His reality, beneath the flamboyance, was as a nameless cat in his Mama’s world. 2
The Enactment
Although we never see Truman’s Mama directly in any of the films, we have one more shadow of her presence in Capote’s relationship with Perry. Perry Smith presents a particular dilemma for Capote. He attempts to use Perry for his purposes. Perry uses Capote as well to get legal help and support. But Capote cannot successfully maintain his detachment.
He describes his ambivalence to Nelle,
“Jack thinks I’m using Perry, but he also thinks I fell in love with him when I was in Kansas. Now, how both of those things can be true is beyond me.”
Whether his ambivalence towards Perry is truly “beyond” Capote’s awareness or not, it leads to an enactment of their mutual pathological mother/son relationships.
When Capote goes to the prison where Perry and his co-defendant, Richard, are being held, he learns that Perry is refusing all food. Capote buys cans of baby food and begins to spoon it to Perry, telling him, “It’s OK. It’s Truman, it’s a friend.” He nurses him back to life, visits him regularly. Perry shows him a picture of his mother, tells him about the orphanage, talks of “me and Linda” (his sister).
But Truman’s lover, Jack, importunes him to return. Capote comes to a decision. He arrives at the prison with a stack of books for Perry and seems to be ready to leave the books outside the sleeping Perry’s cell when Perry is startled awake.
Capote doesn’t enter the cell. He tells Perry,
“I have to fly back East.”
Perry asks “When?”
Truman answers, “An hour. I miss you already. Write me every five minutes.”
Perry cries out, “Capote! Capote!” as Truman turns and walks out of the cell block.
Time passes. Capote works on his book. Nelle visits him and Jack in Spain, carrying a plaintive letter from Perry.
“Dear Friend Truman, where are you?” He gives a definition of “death by hanging” from a medical dictionary and adds “not too comforting as we lost our appeal. Missing you—alone and desirous of your presence. Your amigo, Perry.”
Truman defensively tells Jack and Nelle,
“I write him all the time. I’ve been so focused on the book, lately.”
With Perry, Truman has recreated the trauma of both their childhoods, abandoning him abruptly to a small cell, walking out on him to chase after a man. The enactment pushes Capote into the role of a cruel abandoning mother.
We never see directly how Truman’s mother interacted with him. In Holly Golightly, we see perhaps an idealized version of her, a character who, with her faults, is universally loved. Now, we see Capote as a colder Holly using his guile and empathy to extract from Perry the story that he needs. He lies to Perry about the title of his book, denying that he has christened it, “In Cold Blood.” He lies to him about Perry’s sister, telling him that she missed him and sent him pictures out of love, when, in fact, she described him to Capote as a pure psychopath and gave him the pictures to get rid of them.
Capote finally uses Perry’s desperate need for the attachment to the man who suckled him when he was near death and whom he hopes will save him from the hangman. He lets Perry know that the one thing he wants from him, the only thing that will get his full attention, is the story of that night. In its characteristic style, the film does not spell out for us why Perry tells him about the murders, but it appears that at this point it is his last means of holding Truman close.
Unfortunately for him, with the story told, Capote no longer needs him for his project. The enactment takes a still more gruesome turn as Capote finishes his book and must wait for the final chapter, the execution of Perry Smith and his accomplice. Now Capote avoids Perry with more intensity, avoiding his pleas to help with another lawyer, knowing that each delay of the execution, every appeal, delays the completion of his masterpiece. He drinks more heavily, even drinking by mixing liquor into the jars of baby food that he had used to feed Perry, spooning it out of the jar. He drunkenly complains to Nelle that he is being tortured by the delays. Now, the enactment is not just of an abandoning mother, but of a mother who wishes her son’s death.
When the last appeal has failed and the date of execution set, Perry begs Capote to visit him. Capote drinks heavily and hides under his covers, clearly terrified. It is Nelle who prods and shames Capote into visiting Perry and Richard on the night of their execution, after he had tried to ignore Perry’s desperate telegrams. At Perry’s request, Capote agrees to be present at the execution. With him, we see Perry hung.
Truman is deeply shaken, trying to rationalize his guilt. He tells Nelle,
“It was a terrible experience and I will never get over it. There wasn’t anything I could have done to save them.”
Nelle, still the truth telling Scout, answers,
“Maybe not. But the fact is, you didn’t want to.”
We are told as the film comes to an end that Capote’s epigraph for his last (unfinished) book was, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones,” a testimony to the grief and guilt that comes from angry wishes. In the final scene, a somber Capote leafs through Perry’s journal, stopping to look at his childhood picture with his sister and his drawing of Capote. In the film’s epitaph, we are told that In Cold Blood made Truman Capote the most famous writer in America, but that he never finished another book and died in 1984 of “complications due to alcoholism.”
Footnotes
1. I believe that a film based on a biography should still be treated to a greater or lesser extent as fiction. The observations and speculations here should be understood as based on the characterization of Capote in the film, with an indefinite relationship to the historical life of Truman Capote.
2. By this point, you may feel I have gone too far. Harper Lee did not even write the screenplay for To Kill a Mockinbird. I did learn from a DVD extra that the screenwriter, Horton Foote, was told by her that Dill was Truman Capote. Capote isn’t given credit for the screenplay for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, either (George Axelrod). Besides, the Truman Capote we see in the film, Capote, is at least in part the creation of the filmmakers (see footnote 1), not to mention the autobiographer. Can we say that this character wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s? You may ask how I can justify such a hodge podge. It seems indefensible. The answer is actually very simple. You’re right. It’s indefensible.