Feud’s Truman Capote Doesn’t Shine Like the Man I Knew

A minute before the Today show’s cameras rolled in February 1985, Jane Pauley smiled and said, “I’ll begin by asking you about Truman’s hate list.” My own smile disappeared, and my eyes widened in fright. I was about to go on national television to promote my first book, Conversations with Capote, and she wanted me to talk about some of the two thousand people Truman Capote claimed to have on his “hate list.” In the seconds before the camera’s red light turned green, my mind whirred through some of those people, and I didn’t feel confident that I’d get his dislikes right. Was it Saul Bellow or Philip Roth who was “a nothing writer”? Meryl Streep or Jane Fonda who was “a fake and a bore”? In his book Music for Chameleons, Capote had named some of the people on the list, like Billy Graham, Ralph Nader, Indira Gandhi, Jerry Brown, and Werner Erhard, but was it Jackie O or Richard Nixon at the top?

My mouth went dry, and I whispered to Pauley, “Why don’t you start with how I met Capote?” She caught my fear and when we went live, she introduced me and threw out the softball. Thank you, Jane Pauley!

It all started on July 16, 1982, when I met Truman for lunch at La Petite Marmite, across the street from where he lived at the UN Plaza, to discuss doing an interview with him. Though I was on time, he had already ordered his food and chuckled when I asked whether I was late or he was early. I had read everything he had written and considered him to be one of America’s great living writers. Before Capote criticized Norman Mailer for being nothing more than a “rewrite man”—he believed Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Executioner’s Song was a rip-off of his own classic, In Cold Blood—Mailer considered him “the most perfect writer of my generation; he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm.”

The Capote I knew was a more rounded personality than what we’ve seen on Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, though the man who was considered outrageous, petty, pitiful, and lonely comes through loud and clear. I found it uncomfortable watching how Truman was portrayed—being beaten up by a lover, being isolated by his “swans,” who felt he had betrayed them, talking with his dead mother, who, when he was two, locked him in a hotel room for hours while she went out with her boyfriends. “I would become hysterical because I couldn’t get out of this room,” Truman told me. It wasn’t that these things didn’t happen to Capote, it was that the portrayal seemed unbalanced, and sometimes, tedious.

One of his swans, Slim Keith, wrote in her memoir about what made Truman so enchanting: “He wasn’t just bright, he was riveting—and so shrewd a conversationalist…that you couldn’t help but take an instant liking to him.”

I could understand why his swans enjoyed his company. The Capote I got to know over five-hour lunches and numerous calls during the last two years of his life was entertaining, quick, garbled, sickly, slick, and someone who occupied a lot of space. In other words, complex. But where is that Truman in Feud? The man I sat with talked about how Montgomery Clift once set fire to Capote’s kitchen; how he arm wrestled Humphrey Bogart and danced with Marilyn Monroe, who told him about Erroll Flynn playing the piano with his penis. Truman interviewed serial killers in prison and concluded that the only thing they had in common was Tattoos. He went on tour with the Rolling Stones and decided they weren’t worth writing about. He thought Georgia O’Keeffe was a “hack” and a “horrible person.” Ernest Hemingway, “a closet queen.” Mark Twain, “evil.” William Faulkner, “reckless.” Thomas Pynchon, “ghastly.” Jack Kerouac, “a joke.” Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, “a great Mutt-and-Jeff team.” He said all this with a twinkle in his penetrating eyes, and I was encouraged to keep his stiletto sharp. He gave me a definition of what a masterpiece was by describing how Gore Vidal had never written one: “He has not done the one essential thing: He has not written an unforgettable book that was the turning point in either his or anyone else’s life. He has never written a book that has lifted off the page.”

by Ullstein Bild/Getty Images.

Slim Keith considered Capote a genius, something Capote echoed when he said of himself, “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m a homosexual. I’m a genius.” I once asked him to define “genius” and he said, “Being able to do something in an exceptional way that nobody else can do.” He did that with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Muses are Heard (his favorite book), In Cold Blood, and with the way he insinuated himself into the often humdrum lives of the very rich women married to powerful men who are depicted in Feud. What Capote was going for was a modern version of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: He had achieved enormous success with In Cold Blood; with Answered Prayers, he was aiming for immortality.

When I asked James Michener to write a forward to Conversations with Capote, he told me that if Truman finished Answered Prayers, it would very likely be the most remembered book of the last half of the 20^th century. After reading the first two excerpts in Esquire, Michener wrote a note to himself that he included in his foreword: “A shocking betrayal of confidence, an eating at the table and gossiping in the lavatory…. A masterly study in pure bitchiness which will close many doors previously opened. Why did he do it? Has he no sense of responsibility or noblesse oblige? A proctologist’s view of American society. But I am sure that if he can bring off the whole, Answered Prayers will be the roman à clef of my decade, an American Proust-like work which will be judged to have summarized our epoch…. Like Toulouse-Lautrec, he will come to represent his period, and he will be treasured for the masterly way he epitomized it. But only if he can finish his work in high style…only if he masters his subject rather than allowing it to overwhelm him. I hear he’s drinking so much and into drugs so heavily, that the chances of his making it are slim.”