2

Capote in the Queer House of Fame Stars and Celebrity Personas

In Music for Chameleons Capote famously declared: “I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius” (MC 261). This statement from the twilight of his career reflects his determination to live his life openly, as it also reveals his canny understanding of how to employ his celebrity to maintain his presence in the public eye. These apparently shocking “confessions” were well known to anyone paying him the slightest attention, and so Capote’s pronouncement of his troubled genius serves less as an expression of self-realization than as yet another illustration of his extraordinary ability to generate media coverage for himself. Surely, more than any other author of the twentieth century, Capote was recognized, if not lionized, as a celebrity, famous for being famous as much as he was revered as a remarkably talented writer. Moreover, he performed his celebrity queerly, living openly as a homosexual man in nonchalant defiance of American mores. In many ways, Capote enjoyed the role of the gay clown who minces to amuse his various audiences: “I’m this funny, sawed-off fellow with a high voice, and it’s hard for people to accept me. But if I come in and say, ‘I don’t want to sit with the boys, I want to sit with the girls,’ everybody giggles and everybody’s more comfortable. I do that on purpose to make it easier for people to be around me because then I’m easier and the whole thing works better.”1 As a homosexual man employing a stereotypical persona, Capote benefited from his astute recognition that acting gay would allow him more comfortably to be gay.

Capote was a celebrity, not a Hollywood star, but it is nonetheless helpful to view his fame as analogous to that of stars. As Richard Dyer explains of Hollywood stardom: “The star phenomenon consists of everything that is publicly available about stars. A film star’s image is not just his or her films, but the promotion of those films and of the star through pin-ups, public appearances, studio hand-outs and so on, as well as interviews, biographies and coverage in the press of the star’s doings and ‘private’ life. Further, a star’s image is also what people say or write about him or her. . . . Star images are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual.”2 Although authors of literary fiction are rarely celebrities in the same manner as film actors, one could replace “film star” with “author” and “film” with “novel” in Dyer’s analysis and approximate Capote’s marketing of himself and his fictions. Furthermore, exposure and publicity often lead to larger sales and profits, whether of a Hollywood film or a bestselling novel. Celebrities who attend to their public personas carefully, protecting or exaggerating their images while maintaining their presence in the public eye, are often rewarded with financial success due to the echo effect of their celebrity, a dynamic that Capote exploited throughout his career.

Capote clearly understood the demands and payoffs of Hollywood’s star system. In discussing the careers of Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, he observed, “They were real stars created by the studios for a very specific purpose who were continuously promoted.”³ Indeed, his definition of a movie star parallels (and predates) Dyer’s: “Defined practically, a movie star is any performer who can account for a box-office profit regardless of the quality of the enterprise in which he appears” (DB 319). In this blunt assessment of the economics underlying Hollywood stardom, in which he distills celebrity as irrelevant to a film’s aesthetic success but crucial to its financial prospects, Capote also summarizes the conundrum of celebrity for his own career, for his celebrity often eclipsed his writing.

  Capote and the Stars

As a result of his fame and literary achievements, Capote circulated in the same social networks as many movie stars, and his nonfiction writings frequently address his personal reactions to them, commenting on the tension between their star personas and their personalities as he perceived them firsthand. During his childhood Capote revered Hollywood actors, particularly the young celebrities of his generation. In a 1967 interview with Gloria Steinem, he recalled his juvenile fantasy of joining the ranks of child stars of the 1930s, a fantasy that he divulged at the time to his beloved cousin Sookie: “‘Sookie,’ I used to say to her, ‘someday you and I are going to Hollywood, and I’ll be a tapdancer in the movies.’ . . . I was extremely jealous of all children whose names or pictures were in the paper—Shirley Temple, Bobby Breen, Jackie Cooper, Jackie Coogan; everybody.”4 These childhood sentiments are echoed in his short story “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” when the narrator Buddy daydreams about running away from home for a glamorous life in Hollywood: “One thing I knew: I was going to quit that house, that town, that night. Hit the road. Hop a freight train and head for California. Make my living shining shoes in Hollywood. Fred Astaire’s shoes. Clark Gable’s. Or—maybe I just might become a movie star myself. Look at Jackie Cooper. Oh, they’d be sorry then. When I was rich and famous and refused to answer their letters and even telegrams, probably” (CS 263). Like Miss Bobbit in “Children on Their Birthdays” and Middy and Appleseed in “Jug of Silver,” both Capote as a child and his alter ego Buddy in “The Thanksgiving Visitor” find inspiration from dreams of stardom and the life of financial ease that accompanies it. Capote, unlike his fictional counterparts, succeeded in his aspiration of becoming a celebrity and, as a corollary, befriending many Hollywood stars (while antagonizing others).

Katherine Anne Porter, with whom Capote enjoyed a friendly relationship and whose work he greatly admired, observed that he was often “on the prowl for celebrities,”⁵ and this desire to mingle with the Hollywood elite reflected his striving both to enhance his personal celebrity and to puncture the personas of those he deemed pretenders. Capote enthusiastically dished dirt about stars, particularly enjoying a pastime known as International Daisy Chain, in which celebrities are linked to one another through their sexual liaisons. (Capote’s favorite round of International Daisy Chain links Cab Calloway to Adolf Hitler: “Cab Calloway to Marquesa Casamaury to Carol Reed to Unity Mitford to Hitler.”)⁶ Although it borders on the titillating, it should not be overlooked that Capote was sexually involved with at least three famous film stars. Recalling his fling with Errol Flynn, Capote confessed its disappointments—“We were both drunk . . . and it took him the longest time to have an orgasm. I never did”⁷—and commenting as well, “Frankly, if it hadn’t been Errol Flynn, I don’t think I would have remembered it” (MC 236).8 John Malcolm Brinnin recounts Capote’s affair with John Garfield, who starred in a string of hits in the 1940s including The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), and Force of Evil (1948), about whose homosexuality Capote declared, “I’m as surprised as you are. After all, he’s still Mister Tough Guy to most of the American population. . . . He’s sweet . . . and sort of teddy bear cuddly.”⁹ In a letter to Andrew Lyndon, at the time when Indiscretion of an American Wife was filmed, Capote mentions a fling with its star Montgomery Clift.¹⁰

Hollywood stars are recurrent subjects of Capote’s essays, including the portraits of John Huston, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Jean Cocteau, and Mae West in Observations, a collection that also features luminaries from noncinematic fields, including Jacques Cousteau, Maya Plisetskaya, Ezra Pound, Robert Oppenheimer, and Louis Armstrong. Capote also wrote extended essays on Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, viewing his 1956 Brando essay, “The Duke in His Domain,” as an early effort in developing the nonfiction novel. He brought this literary innovation to its fullest achievement in In Cold Blood, but his interview with Brando allowed him an early opportunity to hone his journalistic skills, as he sensed the artistic challenges that the trite genre of celebrity interviewing might provide: “I thought, ‘What is the most banal thing in journalism?’ After a time I realized that it would be an interview with a film star, the sort of thing you would see in Photoplay magazine.”¹¹ In treating the celebrity interview as an art form, Capote succeeded in shifting the adulatory tenor of most such ventures into a revealing exposé of an actor’s soul.

To enhance his celebrity interviews, Capote believed that he needed to make himself virtually invisible: “Because the ideal portrait is something in which the interviewer is totally removed and you set the whole thing up so that if it’s good, the person that it’s about comes across with no distortions on the part of the interviewer—well, of course if he’s any good he’s an artist, and any artist distorts what he touches. But it’s not artificial; it’s just a form of art.”¹² Elaborating further on this journalistic strategy, Capote outlined his ploy for winning Brando’s confidences: “The secret to the art of interviewing is to make the other person think he’s interviewing you. You tell him about yourself, and slowly you spin your web so that he tells you everything. That’s how I trapped Marlon.”¹³ “The Duke in His Domain” remains one of the most notorious interviews of Hollywood history, a devastating exposé of Brando’s intellectual pretensions and troubled family history. Joshua Logan, Brando’s director for Sayonara (1957), sensed the impending publicity disaster and warned Brando not to grant the interview: “When I heard [of Capote’s interest] I almost stripped gears. The Muses Are Heard was vicious and personally humiliating to everyone, especially Ira Gershwin and Leonard Lyons. It treated human beings like bugs to be squashed underfoot. And Truman would have even juicier fodder to chew on with us. . . . I knew from his conversation at many parties that he had it in for Brando and wanted to shatter his powerful image.”14 More succinctly, Logan cautioned that Capote would “make idiots of us all.”¹⁵ Brando nonetheless spoke with Capote for hours. Capote called the interview “one of the all-time perfect interviews,”¹⁶ and the resulting portrait of Brando—“A deity, yes; but more than that, really, just a young man sitting on a pile of candy” (DB 353)—dismisses the star as a pretender, one who confesses that he has lived the “last eight, nine years . . . pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much” (DB 315). Capote repeated such derogatory views of Brando in The Dogs Bark, dismissing him as “a wounded young man who is a genius, but not markedly intelligent” (DB xvii) and summarizing him thus: “No actor of my generation possesses greater natural gifts, but none other has transported intellectual falsity to higher levels of hilarious pretension” (DB 414). Inevitably Capote’s reporting on Brando became part of the story of the interview, with several voices criticizing him for his treatment of the star. Film critic Pauline Kael defended Brando and riposted that the essay reveals as much about Capote as it does about Brando: “Despite Capote’s style and venomous skill, it is he in this interview, not Brando, who equates money and success with real importance and accomplishment. His arrows fit snugly into the holes they have made only if you accept the usual middlebrow standards of marksmanship.”¹⁷

From his interviews and portraits of celebrities, Capote’s opinions of various stars emerge, and it is apparent that he appreciated the personalities, foibles, and magnetic beauty of many of Hollywood’s elite actresses. As a child, he dreamed of writing a screenplay for Greta Garbo: “When I was twelve, I had a tiresome series of mishaps, and so stayed a good deal in bed, spending most of my time in the writing of a play that was to star the most beautiful woman in the world, which is how I described Miss Garbo in the letter accompanying my script.” Later in life, he defended her from aspersions on her intelligence by urging the appreciation of her radiant beauty: “Someone asked, ‘Do you suppose she is at all intelligent?,’ which seems to me an outrageous question; really, who cares whether or not she is intelligent? Surely it is enough that such a face could even exist” (LC 14). In Observations he painted Marilyn Monroe as “an untidy divinity—in the sense that a banana split or cherry jubilee is untidy but divine” (O 85). His deep affection for Monroe shines through such characterizations, and the title of his portrait of her, “A Beautiful Child,” limns her winsome innocence. Capote was shocked when she died in 1962, and he eulogized, “She was such a good-hearted girl, so pure really, so much on the side of the angels.”18 Capote drew Elizabeth Taylor as “a sensitive, self-educated lady with a tough but essentially innocent attitude—if you sleep with a guy, gosh, that means you have to marry him!” (PO 298). This simple sketch registers his appreciation of her naiveté, despite her lifetime in the limelight due both to her successful film career and to her string of failed marriages. He wrote of Mae West’s vulnerability—“Removed from the protecting realm of her hilarious creation, her sexless symbol of uninhibited sexuality, she was without defense”—as he also captured her tart tongue when responding to an ostensible compliment from a fan who recently, at a museum’s retrospective showing, had viewed She Done Him Wrong (dir. Lowell Sherman, 1933, also known as Diamond Lil): “And a dismayed Miss West, seeking shelter in the sassy drawl of her famous fabrication, inquired, ‘Just whaddya mean, honey? A museum?’” (O 90).

In addition to deriding Brando, Capote disparaged numerous other acclaimed stars with acid-tongued quips. Although she is generally recognized as the finest actress of her era, Capote dismissed Meryl Streep as “the Creep . . . she looks like a chicken. . . . She’s totally untalented.”¹⁹ Of Jane Fonda he sniped, “Jane Fonda is a rather good actress; I think she’s very dumb. I’ve known her since she was seventeen years old; I never thought she had much but fleas in her head,” although he conceded, “She was very good in Klute, an excellent performance.”²⁰ He also declared that she “has always been, to me, a fake and a bore.”²¹ In a litany of his dislikes that, in curmudgeonly fashion, includes Santa Claus—“And to hell with Santa Claus, too”—he belittled “Another bête noire: Sammy Davis Jr. Out! Out.”²² Alluding to the star’s multiplicity of styles and sounds, Capote proclaimed, “There is no Sammy Davis, Jr.”²³ Additional famous men, although not entertainers, who elicited Capote’s opprobrium include multimillionaires Paul Getty, Aristotle Onassis, and J. Paul Getty, as he wondered, “What have these three ungenerous superheroes ever done to justify the demands they make upon our attention?”24 On another occasion while insulting the rich, he labeled Howard Hughes as “the most boring man in the world” and Aristotle Onassis as “very boring.”²⁵

Capote’s short portraits of directors Charlie Chaplin and John Huston, which were published in Observations, illuminate his understanding of the travails of the cinematic arts. Filmmaking’s collaborative nature bears the potential to destroy a director’s vision, but Capote’s homage to Chaplin characterizes him as a giant stepping over these pitfalls: “One father to a baby is nature’s requirement; the necessity of collaborative seeding is the oddity-making curse of film-art, that blasted heath upon which few giants, and as few middling grown men, stride: those who do, all honor to them” (O 18). Of Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) he exclaimed in a letter to his high school English teacher Catherine Wood, “I loved it.”²⁶ Capote collaborated with John Huston on Beat the Devil and labeled him one of the “people I really like.”²⁷ In a portrait that leads to an exploration of the director’s preferred themes, Capote celebrated Huston’s talent and larger-than-life personality:

Huston’s stylized person—his riverboat-gambler’s suavity overlaid with roughneck buffooning, the hearty mirthless laughter that rises toward but never reaches his warmly crinkled and ungentle eyes . . . all intended as much for his own benefit as that of his audience, to camouflage a refrigerated void of active feeling, for, as is true of every classic seducer, or charmer if you prefer, the success of the seduction depends upon himself never feeling, never becoming emotionally inserted: to do so would mean forfeiting control of the situation, the “picture”; thus, he is a man of obsessions rather than passions, and a romantic cynic who believes that all endeavor, virtuous or evil or simply plodding, receives the same honorarium: a check in the amount of zero. (O 10)

Truly, as Capote demonstrates in this portrait, this theme carries across many of Huston’s films: the worthless treasure of The Maltese Falcon (1941), the lost fortune of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), through to the end of his career with the hollow dénouements of Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and The Dead (1987).

Despite his praise for individual stars, Capote maligned acting and its practitioners as a whole, glibly stating: “all actors are liars, I’ve never met one that wasn’t” (DB 153). In addition to questioning their honesty, he insulted the collective intelligence of actors, selecting John Gielgud as the epitome of the profession’s vacuity: “But the trouble with most actors (and actresses) is that they are dumb. And, in many instances, the dumbest are the most gifted. Sir John Gielgud, the kindest man alive, an incomparable technician, brilliant voice; but, alas, all his brains are in his voice” (DB 414). Holly Golightly expresses a similar sentiment in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, explaining why she rejects the siren song of a Hollywood career: “I knew damn well I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing” (BT 38). Insulting actors became part of Capote’s shtick for his many television appearances, notably when conversing about the stupidity of stars with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, with his parallel assertion that intelligent actors were poor at their craft. Capote repeated his taunts of Brando: “He’s so dumb it makes your skin crawl.” Carson attempted to defend the collective intelligence of actors, asserting that Jill St. John reportedly had a genius-level IQ, but Truman simply agreed with him: “Yes, she’s a rotten actress.” (At this point Carson jovially conceded the argument: “No one explained it to me like that before.”)28

In contrast to his essays and gossip about Hollywood celebrities, Capote’s literary fiction focuses more on his characters’ Hollywood aspirations than on actual celebrities, save for the extensive name dropping of Answered Prayers, where on a single page (15) Capote mentions Marilyn Monroe, Lena Horne, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and a score of others, in a cavalcade of celebrities that does little to advance the plot. The primary exception to this pattern is his portrait of Montgomery Clift, also in Answered Prayers. The protagonist P. B. Jones first introduces Clift to the reader because he has viewed Red River, the “cowboy love story . . . that made [Clift] a ‘star’” (AP 102). Many years after his sexual liaison with Clift during the filming of Indiscretion of an American Wife, Capote conjured a scene in which the actor joins Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Parker, and others at a dinner party but is so intoxicated (or otherwise incapacitated) that he withdraws into a catatonic state:

Clift dropped a cigarette into his untouched bowl of Senegalese soup, and stared inertly into space, as if he were enacting a shell-shocked soldier. His companions pretended not to notice, and Miss Bankhead continued a meandering anecdote. . . . While she talked, Miss Parker did something so curious it attracted everyone’s attention; it even silenced Miss Bankhead. With tears in her eyes, Miss Parker was touching Clift’s hypnotized face, her stubby fingers tenderly brushing his brow, his cheekbones, his lips, chin.

Miss Bankhead said: “Damn it, Dottie. Who do you think you are? Helen Keller?”

“He’s so beautiful,” murmured Miss Parker. “Sensitive. So finely made. The most beautiful young man I’ve ever seen. What a pity he’s a cocksucker.” Then, sweetly, wide-eyed with little girl naïveté, she said, “Oh. Oh dear. Have I said something wrong? I mean, he is a cocksucker, isn’t he, Tallulah?”

Miss Bankhead said: “Well, d-d-darlin, I r-r-really wouldn’t know. He’s never sucked my cock.” (AP 108–9)

Bankhead’s rejoinder ends the scene with humor, but it is nonetheless a devastating portrait of Clift—and, according to Donald Windham, a heavily fictionalized account as well.29 The actor died in 1966 and so was spared Capote’s outing of his sexuality and his addictions, but this scene, coupled with the thinly veiled accounts of high society’s misdeeds throughout the novel’s surviving chapters, illustrates Capote’s determination to expose the secrets of friends and lovers past and present. As Amy Lawrence suggests, in outing Clift as a gay addict, Capote paradoxically erases Clift from this episode: “Capote’s story isn’t really about Clift at all. Even Clift’s sexuality can hardly be said to belong to him. A topic of conversation, subject of speculation, ‘his’ homosexuality is presented as an obstacle for others.”³⁰ The scene can also be read as Capote’s indictment of screen personas, which, in Clift’s case, masked his homosexuality so that he could be cast as a sex symbol and leading man. Capote’s celebrity persona as an author and socialite allowed him relative candor concerning his homosexuality, whereas the homophobia of Hollywood stardom prohibited Clift from enjoying such freedoms.

As these literary portraits and gossipy snippets about Hollywood stars attest, Capote’s candor about the rich and famous played a key part in his identity as a writer and as a celebrity in his own right. In penning belles lettres on figures ranging from Brando to Monroe, he elevated the quality of Hollywood journalism, and as a gadabout celebrity, he increased publicity for himself through his acid assessments of the intelligence and craft of various actors. With appraisals ranging from devastating to fawning, Capote’s treatment of stars reveals his seriousness as a writer and his insouciance as a cultural commentator. He exploited both of these roles to maintain his own queer celebrity, as the following section explores.

Capote’s Queer Celebrity

Capote attended to his celebrity persona throughout his literary and extra-literary career. After his short story “Miriam” won the 1945 O. Henry Award and Herschel Brickell dubbed him the “most remarkable new talent of the year,”31 Capote was seen as an up-and-coming writer of his generation in the late 1940s. Acclaim was followed by notoriety due to the dust-jacket photograph of Other Voices, Other Rooms. In it Capote reclines languorously with pouty lips and come-hither eyes. Combined with the homosexual themes of the novel, the photograph shocked readers of the time, for the author seemed quietly yet defiantly to be inviting them to join him in decadent pleasures. In a subsequent interview Capote described the photograph as “perfectly innocent,” claiming elsewhere, “It was part of my complete naiveté. . . . There was nothing calculated about it at all.”³² He dismissed the public outcry: “When people read the book . . . and realized what the theme was, and coupled that with the picture, the whole thing took on a kind of outré peculiar quality that it was never meant to have had.”³³ Even when proclaiming his guileless intentions, however, Capote puckishly revealed that he understood how the picture would be received: “I suppose some tiresome people thought I looked depraved—ready for man, woman, or fire hydrant.”³⁴ Quite simply, such protestations appear to be part of Capote’s performance of innocence, for he also acknowledged that the scandalous photograph successfully marketed the book. John Malcolm Brinnin remembered Capote’s defense of the picture—“It’s sold a lot of copies, hasn’t it? Been printed in every paper from here to Salt Lake City, hasn’t it?”³⁵—and it is likewise evident in the various professional and candid photographs taken of him throughout his life that he knew how to pose. In Richard Avedon’s assessment, Capote “always thought of photography in the same way he thought of the press, as something to be used for the purposes of public relations. He was very inventive; he always had an idea for every session.”³⁶

Gossipy accounts quickly made Capote’s life the stuff of legend, albeit a legend gilded with artifice, exaggeration, and posturing. Writing of the New Bohemians—his term for the early 1950s writers and gadabouts striking their way into the public eye—Charles Rolo summarized and questioned Capote’s insouciant celebrity:

It has been reported that on one of his trips across the Atlantic, Mr. Capote hired the bridal suite on the Queen Mary; that in Italy he was taken for the President’s son and, stepping into the role of good-will ambassador, did a power of damage to the Communist party; that after traveling through Spain, he landed in North Africa partially accoutered as a bullfighter (and so on in this vein).

The legend contains one ounce of fact to every pound of fancy. And it must be said—without disrespect to Mr. Capote’s talents as a myth maker—that not all of the fancy is pure Capote.37

Such coverage kept Capote a topic of gossip even when he was not publicizing his fiction, but, above all other concerns, the financial benefits of hype for selling books sparked Capote’s fervent efforts at exposure. For his 1959 collaboration with Richard Avedon, Observations, a coffee table book combining Avedon’s photographs of Hollywood stars with Capote’s prose portraits of them, Capote explicitly advised Avedon on publicity for their venture, briefly observing that “Jack Paar sells books” and concluding sternly, after a litany of detailed instructions, “I know I don’t have to emphasize how important these matters are, so buckle down.”³⁸ On another occasion he explained the logistics and benefits of a marketing blitz: “My theory about publishing a book . . . is that everything—the reviews, the interviews, and everything else—has to happen within two weeks of publication. If it’s scattered, it’s not going to work. But if it all comes together simultaneously, you’ll spin right up the list.”³⁹ At the same time, Capote realized that serious artists should not be seen as hucksters of their craft, and he deplored publicity hounds in general (“The most pretentious thing is a person who hires a press agent to get his name in the papers”) and Gore Vidal in particular (“Because Gore’s books are number one or two on the best-seller list doesn’t mean anything. That’s because he spends half his life on TV”) for seeking the limelight.⁴⁰ In a 1963 letter to his friends Alvin and Marie Dewey, he criticized Harper Lee for promoting the film version of her novel To Kill a Mockingbird: “our friend Nelle . . . is so involved in the publicity for her film (she owns a percentage, that’s why; even so, I think it very undignified for any serious artist to allow themselves to be exploited in this fashion).”⁴¹ Capote’s hypocrisy is virtually palpable in these lines: the master publicist and self-promoter condemns his lifelong friend for engaging in the activities he himself pursues and which he insists his collaborators likewise undertake.

Several of Capote’s literary peers disdained his penchant for celebrity, attempting to discredit his authorial achievements by attacking his hucksterism. Brendan Gill, in his memoir of life at the New Yorker, recalled Capote avowing, “A boy must hustle his book,” and concluded: “Capote promotes himself as other people promote lipstick or baby powder, with an endearing and profitable assiduity.”⁴² In a Paris Review interview in 1974, Gore Vidal scorned Capote for his attention to fame: “Every writer ought to have at least one thing that he does well and I’ll take Truman’s word that a gift for publicity is the most glittering star in his diadem.”43 To Vidal, Capote’s literary achievements were merely “a public relations campaign masquerading as a career.”⁴⁴ Mary McCarthy similarly sneered that Capote’s “greatest contribution to literary innovation was to publicize the author first, the book second.”⁴⁵ (Capote avenged himself on McCarthy in Answered Prayers, when his narrator P. B. Jones snipes, “Creative females are not often presentable. Look at Mary McCarthy!” [AP 15].) Even Capote’s allies deplored his need for celebrity. His close friend Slim Keith declared in her autobiography, “Celebrity slowed him down and distracted him from his calling.”⁴⁶ John Malcolm Brinnin sketched Capote’s need for fame as almost an obsession—“More hungry for attention than anyone else, he’s learned to bestow what he craves. For recipients, enchantment; for himself, a restless longing for a bigger audience”—and once asked Capote, “How are you going to hide yourself in fame long enough to remind yourself who you are? As far as I can see, you’ve achieved a reputation at the cost of a career.”⁴⁷ Capote responded to such charges with an appeal to the pecuniary advantages of his celebrity: “When the chips are down, what was it but my reputation that could parlay five figures into six?”⁴⁸ Tennessee Williams was one of few who appreciated Capote’s talent in seeking publicity, complimenting him as “a great self-publicist” due to his “theatrical personality.”⁴⁹

Undoubtedly the greatest social achievement of his life, as well as an opportunity for him to unite the worlds of literary arts and Hollywood, Capote’s famed Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York on November 28, 1966, commemorated the successful publication of In Cold Blood. “Katherine Graham, head of the family that owned The Washington Post and Newsweek, was to be the guest of honor,” David Grafton wrote. “Truman’s selection of the publishing magnate . . . was just one more example of his genius for publicity.”⁵⁰ Truly, Capote orchestrated the media coverage of In Cold Blood and the Black and White Ball masterfully. His sedulous attention to publicity led writers at the New York Times to marvel at and to lament his marketing chutzpah: William D. Smith referred to In Cold Blood as “one of the greatest promotional successes in publishing history,” and Eliot Fremont-Smith railed against the “vast, self-generating promotional mill in which everyone—author, publisher, magazine editor, critic, bookseller and reader—is trapped.”⁵¹ As with his literary efforts, the cross-pollination between art and hyping art demanded Capote’s detailed attention to his creation’s public reception, and Leo Lerman described the event as equivalent in its aesthetic pitch to Capote’s literature: “The ball was one of his major works. As much a major work as some of his short stories.”52

In choosing the theme of the Black and White Ball, Capote paid homage to his friend Cecil Beaton’s designs for My Fair Lady (dir. George Cukor, 1964), as Katharine Graham recalled: “He told me that he’d always loved the black-and-white scene at the racetrack in My Fair Lady.”⁵³ With its thematic allusion to the world of cinema, Capote infused his literary celebration with a Hollywood panache also evident in his guest list, which included such stars as Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Henry Fonda, Vivien Leigh, and Claudette Colbert.⁵⁴ Capote increased the publicity surrounding the ball to a fever pitch by openly mulling his guest list. As Deborah Davis avers, “Columnists were on the lookout for the big story of the 1966 social season, and Truman’s ball had all the right ingredients: mystery (who would be invited?), glamour (the masquerade theme), drama (the frenzied preparations), and, finally, spectacle (the evening itself).”⁵⁵ After the ball, Capote denied that it reflected any desire for media attention, claiming artlessly, “It was just what it set out to be. . . . I just wanted to give a party for my friends.”⁵⁶ The subsequent release of the guest list to the press, which humiliated numerous celebrities and socialites who claimed to have been invited but were not, led many to doubt his protestations of innocence, as this final bit of scandal produced yet more publicity weeks after the party. Indeed, the Black and White Ball metamorphosed into such a cultural watershed that, one year later, a cover story in the December 1967 Esquire headlined “We wouldn’t have come even if you had invited us, Truman Capote!” featured Jim Brown, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis, Pat Brown, Ed Sullivan, Pierre Salinger, Lynn Redgrave, and Casey Stengel publicly consuming their sour grapes over Capote’s snubbing.

Beyond his high-profile lifestyle as an author, Capote kept himself in the public eye through numerous appearances on television talk and variety shows. The hosts of such programs appreciated Capote’s appearances, as they often created publicity for the shows themselves with Capote’s brash performance of his queer celebrity, which mixed quick wit with trash talk about various stars. During an appearance on David Susskind’s Open End in 1959 when he shared the stage with Dorothy Parker and Norman Mailer, Capote uttered his devastating assessment of Jack Kerouac’s and other Beat writers’ fiction: “What they do . . . isn’t writing at all—it’s typing.”⁵⁷ Despite her reputation as an acerbic wit, Parker was rather silent during the program, with Capote and Mailer exchanging assessments of various authors. After Capote complimented E. M. Forster as the greatest living writer, Mailer interjected, “I must say, I find Mr. Capote here far the more exciting writer. He excites me far more,” to which Capote, in reply, put his face in his hands and laughed.58 Mailer, after viewing this program, commented on Capote’s performance: “Capote did not look small on the show, but large! His face, in fact, was extraordinary, that young-old face, still pretty and with such promise of oncoming ugliness; that voice, so full of snide rustlings and unforgiving nasalities; it was a voice to knock New York on its ear. The voice had survived; it spoke of horrors seen and passed over; it told of judgments that would be merciless.”⁵⁹ As Janet Winn wrote in her review of the program, “Mr. Capote’s weird good looks are well enough known to readers of his book jackets; his voice and inflections are, similarly, a little terrifying. . . . Mr. Capote may look effete, but he is not: his mind is vigorous and extremely able.”⁶⁰

As much as interviews allowed Capote to embrace the limelight, he could not fully control the ensuing discussions, as when Groucho Marx upstaged him in a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett Show, to the extent that Cavett ironically queried, “Do you feel that Truman is dominating the conversation?”⁶¹ In a moment of clarity, Capote proclaimed that writers should avoid alcohol to preserve their craft—“I don’t think anyone can write when they’re drinking”—but the conversation took a queer turn when Marx encouraged Capote to marry for the accompanying tax benefits: “Truman, have you ever thought of getting married and splitting the tax?” Capote, obviously nonplussed by Marx’s apparent ignorance of his homosexuality, countered, “Well, you find someone for me to marry, and I’ll consider it, okay?” Marx gamely replied, “I would marry you in a minute, if you would write another hit book like you did about Kansas. Will you consider this an engagement?” Marx’s rhetorical ploy was brilliant, for in appearing to overlook Capote’s homosexuality, he prepared the audience for a final titillating line: “I can’t give you what you’re entitled to . . . ,” a euphemistic but clear reference to sex, from which Cavett pivoted to a commercial break.

Johnny Carson, famed host of The Tonight Show, invited Capote to appear on his program many times, for Carson knew that Capote would be amusing, if at times rather cruel. Capote’s feud with Jacqueline Susann, the sensationalist author of Valley of the Dolls (1966) and The Love Machine (1969), began on Carson’s program when he said she looked like a “truck driver in drag.”62 She threatened to sue, but Capote responded acerbically, “She was told she had better drop that lawsuit because all they had to do is bring ten truck drivers into court and put them on the witness stand and you’ve lost your case.”⁶³ On the episode of The Tonight Show airing November 27, 1973, when he shared the stage with Carl Reiner, the Lennon Sisters, and Jerry van Dyke, Carson introduced Capote as a “writer and conversationalist of the first quality.” When Capote entered the stage yo-yoing, Carson deadpanned: “Here I say one of the finest, distinguished writers, and you come out with a yo-yo.” Their conversation, in which Reiner joined, ranged over a variety of topics, with Capote weighing in on censorship—“You cannot define pornography, and therefore you cannot censor it”—discussing his uncomfortable travels on the Orient Express, and detailing his recent appearance on the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. He also commented on several celebrities, again deriding the intelligence of John Gielgud (and of Laurence Olivier as well) and offering a scathing assessment of Marlon Brando: “you cannot get dumber than Marlon Brando . . . he’s got great sensibility and no sense.” From his yo-yoing entrance to his insulting of various celebrities, Capote played his role of the queer gadabout to perfection—eccentric, candid to the point of rudeness, but always amusing.

The tables were turned on Capote—the taunter became the taunted—when he appeared as the guest of honor on a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast in 1974. For this program Martin featured a Man or Woman of the Week whom the various guest stars mocked good-naturedly, and the celebrities roasting Capote included Ted Knight, Audrey Meadows, Donald O’Connor, Rich Little, Joseph Wambaugh, Rocky Graziano, Jean Simmons, and Foster Brooks. Many of the jokes centered on Capote’s sexuality. Knight painted an ironic portrait of Capote as a heterosexual lothario, intoning, “Truman Capote is the biggest stud in Hollywood,” and then suggesting with lascivious eyes, “Yes, as every leading lady in Hollywood knows, Truman Capote is not only a literary giant . . . ,” trailing off to leave the audience surmising the size of Capote’s genitals. In contrast, Audrey Meadows, channeling the persona of an editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, teased Capote about his gender identity: “He is living proof that in America, you can grow up to be anything that you want. And as a boy, Truman wanted to be Bette Davis.” Joseph Wambaugh likewise needled Capote about his effeminacy: “I haven’t heard such tributes to a man’s background since I left the vice squad. . . . I respect Truman Capote. In my opinion, he’s the greatest male literary figure since Jacqueline Susann.” Ever the salesman, Capote accepted the ribbing in good spirits, and his final words to the audience, “If you people had any sense at all, you’d have turned your sets off long ago and started reading my new book, The Dogs Bark,” revealed the pecuniary motives of appearing on the program.⁶⁴

FIG. 1 Dean Martin Celebrity Roast: Host Dean Martin with Capote. During the program Capote suffered numerous good-natured barbs from such stars as Ted Knight, Audrey Meadows, Donald O’Connor, and Rich Little, until he turned his appearance to good advantage to sell his book.

Capote’s more ridiculous television appearances include his performance as Captain Bligh on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. He also appeared in the pilot episode of The Sonny Comedy Revue in 1974, in a skit in which he played Herb Parns, a daredevil in a yellow jumpsuit and red plastic helmet in an obvious parody of Evel Knievel. Throughout the skit Capote hams up his southern roots to comic effect. “You know how it is with us ole southern boys,” he drawls, as Bono, in the role of the interviewer, Teddy, asks Parns why he undertakes his daredevil act of getting into a box packed with dynamite. Capote/Parns replies, “Aw shucks, Teddy, it’s just that I—” as he then twitches and jerks in imitation of a crude redneck speech impediment, “I’m trying to commit suicide.” The skit is not particularly funny, but it showcases Capote’s “playing southern” to garner media attention, mocking his southern roots to signify his dismissal of the region.

In another moment of lowbrow humor, Capote appeared as a celebrity panelist along with Jill St. John on The Cheap Show (1978), a game show hosted by Dick Martin of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In fame. The show’s format involved posing obscure and outrageous questions to the celebrity panelists, who would offer opposing witty answers, only one of which was correct; the contestants opted for the celebrity’s answer they found most convincing. The Cheap Show focused less on trivia and prizes than on celebrity banter, as when Capote flirted with a contestant who was a vice squad officer: “I have a funny feeling I’ve seen this guy before, vice squad or not.” The closing credits of the program caution, “The celebrities have been furnished with questions; answers are provided which may or may not be used,” which underscores its reliance on celebrities and humor over knowledge and competition.65 Chris Bearde, the producer of The Cheap Show, recalled Capote’s time on the set, for which Capote brought an ample supply of vodka and orange juice and slept—or passed out—for large amounts of time: “He’s Truman. What can you do? Do you think he’ll be brilliantly funny if I wake him up? He’ll probably tell us to all go and fuck ourselves.”⁶⁶

Television appearances such as these bestowed upon Capote the publicity he craved, but they came at a cost to his literary reputation. Capote’s friend Peter Beard asserted that Capote’s huckstering of himself detracted from his vision of himself as an artist: “He’d had a lot of very successful Johnny Carson shows, and he realized that the audience responded to him because it was the Johnny Carson show, not because of his writing.”⁶⁷ For the author hoping to increase his readership, such moments revealed the paradox of his queer celebrity: fame kept him in the public eye, but often for reasons other than his literary talents. A homosexual playing the bitchy queen and insulting other celebrities may have been amusing, but such performances did little to enhance the critical reception of Capote’s literature; on the contrary, they contributed to the perception of him as fundamentally trivial.

Given his infamous appearances on various television programs, Capote considered undertaking a talk show of his own throughout his career, again demonstrating his continued attention to exploiting his celebrity persona. He approached his friend John Malcolm Brinnin with a concept for a television program, albeit one that never reached the airwaves: “What would you say to the idea that you and I work up a television series?—poets reading and talking about themselves. . . . I’m thinking of something with a special angle, visually. Remember that old Carl Dreyer movie about Joan of Arc? The one where what’s-her-name [Maria Falconetti] carries the whole thing in closeups? The camera stays on her face like a microscope and you get this feeling that just one lifted eyebrow’s as full of action as a battle scene.”⁶⁸ If Capote was serious about this plan, it is not surprising that it failed to come to fruition. Dreyer’s riveting close-ups of Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) bring a sense of searing emotion to his film, but sustaining this level of heightened feeling in weekly interviews with poets would be exhausting for hosts, poets, and viewers alike. Toward the end of his life in the early 1980s, Capote was involved in discussions to host a talk show on cable television with Joanne Carson, Johnny’s second wife who divorced him in 1972, but these efforts never gained traction.69

Thanks to his fame and queerly witty persona, Capote was cast in Neil Simon’s murder-mystery farce Murder by Death (dir. Robert Moore, 1976), which featured a truly all-star cast. Capote played the mysterious Lionel Twain, a fan of detective fiction who summons parodic versions of famous sleuths to his estate to punish them for their outlandish plots and too-clever-by-far solutions. In Simon’s hands, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot becomes Milo Perrier (James Coco); Jane Marple transforms into Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester), accompanied by her nurse (Estelle Winwood); Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles metamorphose into Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith); Hammett’s Sam Spade becomes Sam Diamond (Peter Falk), who is accompanied by Tess Skeffington (Eileen Brennan); and Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan is re-imagined as Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers), who travels with his son Willie (Richard Narita). Capote’s participation in a Simon vehicle reveals a dash of hypocrisy, for he denigrated Simon’s talents in a 1973 interview with Andy Warhol: “Neil Simon can write 500 million plays that’ll be successes forever and forever, but he will never write a work of art . . . because there is no mystery there. It’s simply a formula. That he manipulates and maneuvers around one way or another until there’s no mystery to it.”⁷⁰ Still, Capote also expressed appreciation for some of Simon’s plays: Charles McAtee recalled Capote describing The Odd Couple as “wonderful,” and Capote himself affirmed it was “very funny.”⁷¹ Also, in a 1975 interview, he described Murder by Death as “a great comedy script.”⁷²

Although Capote claimed that “Neil Simon wrote [the role of Lionel Twain] for me,” Simon refuted this assertion, insisting that the film’s producer selected Capote because of the author’s status as a celebrity: “Truman was the last person I would have thought of for the part of the mystery aficionado. On the other hand, Ray Stark, the producer, was always looking for publicity, perfectly willing to sacrifice the part and hire someone like Truman. . . . He was a great raconteur; we all know how funny he could be on his own, but he got stuck when he had lines to say.”⁷³ Capote’s catty commentary on talk shows did not translate well into portraying a character on film, and his performance is indeed wooden, as he delivers his lines with mechanical venom. As director Robert Moore concluded, “To put Capote at a table with international stars was too much of a test for any literary figure to withstand. It’s like saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get [the President of the United States] to play the President of the United States?’ The answer is ‘No.’”⁷⁴

FIG. 2 Murder by Death: Publicity photo of Capote as criminal mastermind Lionel Twain with, from left to right, Elsa Lanchester (as Jessica Marbles), Estelle Winwood (Nurse Withers), Peter Falk (Sam Diamond), David Niven (Dick Charleston), Maggie Smith (Dora Charleston), and James Coco (Milo Perrier).

Murder by Death exploits Capote’s queer celebrity, playing on lisping homosexual stereotypes even in the character’s name, Lionel Twain, which puns on the children’s toy Lionel Trains. (This joke continues with the street address of the millionaire’s remote manor as 22 Twain, which Sidney Wang pronounces, with a stilted Chinese accent, as “too-too twain.”) When the detectives first meet Twain, he purrs, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m your host, Lionel Twain.” The shot captures a hand in an armchair pressing a button, which unleashes a strobing uproar of lighting in various hues, accompanied by music that is disorienting until it resolves into a harsh twang. Jessica Marbles exclaims, “Good God, what an entrance!” and Twain replies, with queer modesty, “Oh, a bit theatrical, Miss Marbles, but I do so love an illusion.” When Sam Diamond comments on Twain’s youthful appearance despite the character’s seventy-six years, Twain rhapsodizes on his narcissism and the requirements for maintaining his youthful glow: “How do I look so young? A complete vegetable diet, twelve hours of sleep a night, and lots and lots of makeup.” Twain’s queerness is also evident in his distaste for women. When Dora Charleston questions Twain’s foretelling of the murder that the detectives have been summoned to solve—“I know it’s none of my business, but doesn’t that mean you’re the murderer, Mr. Twain?”—Capote/Twain responds dismissively and misogynistically, “No wives. I refuse to discuss this with wives,” turning aside as if he cannot bear to even look at a woman.

Lionel Twain’s queerness corresponds with Capote’s homosexuality, and Capote’s success as an author likewise aligns him with the character he plays. Twain’s desire for revenge stems not from some long-forgotten misdeed of the past, a clichéd trope in many mystery novels, but in his desire for coherent plotting in fiction. When he reveals his identity to the detectives, removing the mask that disguised him as the butler Bensonmum (Alec Guinness), he excoriates his guests for their faulty plotting: “You’ve all been so clever for so long, you’ve forgotten to be humble. You’ve tricked and fooled your readers for years, you’ve tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You’ve introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before! You’ve withheld clues and information that make it impossible for us to guess who did it. . . . When the world learns I’ve outsmarted you, they’ll be selling your dollar-ninety-five books for twelve cents.” An appealing poetic justice arises with an esteemed author in real life delivering these lines, even if his acting pales in comparison to the rest of the company. Despite his hammy acting, Capote’s sexual and literary convergences with the character make him an apt choice for the role of Lionel Twain.

Praising his performance in Murder by Death, Capote professed his acting skills with typical brio, yet with tongue firmly in cheek: “The original intent may have been for me to parody myself, but that’s not how it’s going to work out. How am I as an actor? Let’s just say this, ‘What Billie Holiday is to jazz, what Mae West is to tits . . . what Seconal is to sleeping pills, what King Kong is to penises, Truman Capote is to the great god Thespis!’”75 Such exaggerated posturing could not shield Capote from harsh reviews, such as Vincent Canby’s assessment: “Mr. Capote is possibly acting, but it looks more as if he’s giving us an over-rehearsed impersonation of himself as people see him on unrehearsed TV talk shows.”76 Capote also self-deprecatingly proclaimed, “If they say I’m a lousy actor, who cares? Whoever said I was a good actor? That isn’t the area where my vanity lies.”⁷⁷ In a more restrained tone during his self-interview in “Nocturnal Turnings,” Capote commented that through his experiences with Murder by Death, he came to realize the challenges of acting: “I’m not an actor; I have no desire to be one. I did it as a lark; I thought it would be amusing, and it was fun, more or less, but it was also hard work. . . . the critics gave me a bouquet of garlic. But I expected that; . . . Actually, I was adequate” (MC 251). Capote also suggested that financial considerations influenced his decision to participate, claiming that he “did it for the moola—and to satisfy that clown side [of him] that’s so exasperating” (MC 258).⁷⁸ Nonetheless, he was nominated for a 1977 Golden Globe for the male category of Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture, losing to Arnold Schwarzenegger for Stay Hungry. A particular pleasure from the experience arose for Capote in the hope that his archrival Gore Vidal would be jealous: “Gore Vidal must be dying.”⁷⁹

In addition to Murder by Death, Capote appeared or almost appeared in several other films. In a 1950 letter to Cecil Beaton he mentioned, “Another strange thing: Orson Welles asked me to play a part in a movie he is going to make here. Naturally I declined.”⁸⁰ He was shot in a street scene for The Light Touch (dir. Richard Brooks, 1952), but the producer objected, “Isn’t that Truman Capote? You can’t use him! Cut him out!”⁸¹ Already famous for being famous in the early 1950s, Capote generated interest from filmmakers, yet his appearances in film, however fleeting, would undermine the suspension of disbelief necessary for viewers to enter the narrative due to the very fact that he was already famous. Capote plays himself in an unbilled cameo role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), in a scene in which Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) sit on a bench in Central Park and crack jokes about the various passersby. A man wearing a pink jacket is dubbed Mr. Miami Beach, and when two gay men walk by, one wearing white jeans and the other in very short jean shorts, Alvy intones, “that’s hilarious . . . they’re back from Fire Island.” An imposing figure strides past, who they agree must be a member of the Mafia, and then Alvy announces, “There’s the winner of the Truman Capote Look-Alike Contest,” as Capote himself ambles across their path. Capote wears a cream fedora, gray suit, and red bow tie, and holds a book in his hand. Perhaps what is most surprising about Capote’s appearance in the film is that viewers cannot really ascertain that this figure is indeed Capote; shot at medium range, Capote is too distant to identify definitively as himself.

Capote’s queer celebrity was in many ways a shield, but when the shield fell, all of his demons emerged for public consumption. As alcoholism and drug abuse took over his life throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he made public appearances when he was physically and mentally incapable of functioning, such as when he was removed from a speaking engagement at Towson State University after drunkenly declaring, “I’m going to read you something I like and if you don’t like it, the hell with you.”82 A more widely viewed incident occurred on July 18, 1978, when he appeared on The Stanley Siegel Show, a local New York City program. He was obviously incapacitated during the interview, with his head rolling, his mouth open, and his eyes staring off, as he grimaced and opened and closed his eyes, with perspiration visible on his face. “I haven’t actually been to bed in forty-eight hours,” he declared through slurred words as the interview began. When Siegel asked with concern, “When was the last time you’ve been to bed?” Capote managed a witty rejoinder: “With whom?” Capote also mused on the challenges of his life, “My life is so strange; it’s not like anybody’s.” Siegel offered to stop the interview, but Capote insisted that they continue, despite his evident discomposure, as they discussed his problems with addiction. When Siegel confronted Capote about his addictions—“You have had a history of alcoholism”—Capote replied, “Alcoholism is the least of it.” In a particularly poignant exchange, Siegel asked Capote, “What do you care about?” to which Capote blankly answered, “Well, that’s a really good question. I’m beginning to wonder myself.” When Siegel asked what would happen to him in the future, Capote candidly mumbled: “The obvious answer is that eventually I’ll kill myself, without meaning to.” After Siegel ended the interview, he called it “heartbreaking” and “one of the damnedest shows we’ve seen in a long time.”⁸³ The interview in many ways mirrors Capote’s depiction of Montgomery Clift’s drug-addled incoherence in Answered Prayers. As his editor Joseph Fox lamented, “over and over again at lunch during the last six years of his life . . . he was often almost incoherent because of drugs or alcohol or both” (AP xxi). The exposure of Clift’s addictions and homosexuality adhered to Capote’s narrative goals in Answered Prayers, as he revealed many of his friends’ sordid secrets in this text, creating a firestorm of publicity but also a backlash in which many of his society friends ostracized him; a bitter irony emerged as he publicly suffered for failings that mirrored Clift’s.

In light of Capote’s reliance on the media to maintain his celebrity status, it is perhaps surprising that he often professed ambivalence concerning his fame: “It all depends on whether you think fame is an asset or a hindrance in an artistic career. I feel rather indifferent about the whole thing, but then, I’ve been in public life over twenty years now, and you become neutral about publicity,” he proclaimed in a 1968 Playboy interview.84 When Mademoiselle’s interviewers posed the question whether his public image was his creation, he denied, in a world-weary tone, that he controlled his celebrity: “Not exactly. There’s a certain point where a celebrity image starts to be self-perpetuating. It’s like a stone you sink in the sea where the shells and barnacles attach to it until you don’t know the truth yourself.”⁸⁵ His response achieves a surprising poignancy, as he confesses that he has lost himself in the miasma of his celebrity. With more insouciant flair, Capote also professed to David Frost (in a witticism often attributed to Dorothy Parker), “I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.”⁸⁶ Here his words reveal a core truth of celebrity culture: words spoken about a famous person are often more important than truths told, for chatter is more conducive to continued attention than silence. Summarizing his sense of his celebrity, Capote commented on himself in a Rolling Stone article by Jann Wenner: “I always attracted a lot of attention, because—well, really—there really isn’t anybody else like me,”⁸⁷ a striking declaration of his uniqueness both arrogant and modest, yet certainly cognizant of the limelight’s benefits to his career. And truly this sword cut both ways, for as much as Capote’s fame redounded to his benefit, it also detracted from his identity as an artist.

His queer celebrity and his close associations with Hollywood stars through friendships and filmmaking placed Capote in the public eye throughout his career. In assessing the potentially dire consequences of fame, Capote likened it to poison: “Somebody asked me about a year ago what am I famous for, and I said, ‘I’m famous for being famous.’ You know? That’s one way people can be destroyed. I’ve always been famous for being famous; but at the same time, I was aware of it. So therefore it didn’t affect me, and it wasn’t the poisonous thing that it is. It’s a subtle kind of poison, and people don’t realize when it starts.”⁸⁸ Capote pronounced himself impervious to fame’s poison in this passage, as he also suggested that most people never feel its effects until it is too late to save themselves. It is difficult, when one considers Capote’s downward spiral into drugs and addiction from the 1970s until his death, not to believe that he failed to perceive fame’s subtle poison coursing through his veins. Capote’s theme in Answered Prayers, that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones, finds a striking echo in plaintive words he attributed to Elizabeth Taylor: “What do you suppose will become of us? I guess, when you find what you’ve always wanted, that’s not where the beginning begins, that’s where the end starts.”89 Capote’s queer celebrity as a writer, conversationalist, gossip, and publicity hound, pursued so relentlessly throughout his life, brought him wealth, fame, and prestige yet never, it appears, peace.