Capote’s Southern Childhoods
Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, and Children on Their Birthdays Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, and Children on Their BirthdaysA dangerous child: such is the image that some readers formed of Capote from the louche dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms. As Cecil Beaton and Kenneth Tynan recall, the author delighted in his decadent persona of defiled youth: “Capote tells a story of how he saw two Philadelphia matrons staring fixedly at a display pyramid of his book in the window of a Fifth Avenue book-store. Crowning the pile was a picture of Truman couchant. After a while the elder woman adjusted her spectacles, motioned towards the picture, and said beadily: ‘Daisy—if that’s a child—he’s dangerous!’”1
This photograph, notorious for its relaxed yet defiant sexuality, can also serve as a representation of many of Capote’s child characters, who appear on the surface as avatars of innocence and introspection, but whose subterranean desires surface to reveal their queer investments in adult eroticism. Whereas in his holiday tales Capote portrays himself as a queer yet pre-sexual child through the character of Buddy, in Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, and “Children on Their Birthdays,” Joel Harrison Knox, Collin Fenwick, and Billy Bob similarly confront the sexual pressures of adolescence on their journeys to self-recognition. For Capote, the myth of childhood sexual innocence serves as a cultural façade designed to protect adults, not children, from sexual knowledge, for children need such knowledge if they are to understand their very selves.
Early reviewers of Capote’s literature noted his thematic interest in children, with many applauding his efforts in this regard. Popular press reviews of A Tree of Night, and Other Stories mostly agreed that Capote’s tales featuring children, as the Time reviewer stated, “are written with full sympathy for their juveniles.”2 In a review in the New York Herald Tribune, Iris Barry posited that Capote’s artistic talents surface in his stories of the young: “It is in presenting children—as Mr. Capote does in several of these stories—that he seems to be at once most effective and most perfectly master of his craft.”3 Leslie Fiedler succinctly observed, “Children are Capote’s greatest successes,” but he also acknowledged the queer underbelly of Capote’s treatments of children that “project the invert’s exclusion from the family, his sense of heterosexual passion as a threat and an offense.”4 Building on this interpretation, Fiedler believed that Capote’s child characters reflect a desire to escape from adult sexuality: “Once the child has been remade by homosexual sensibility into the image of an ambiguous object of desire, the lust for the child is revealed as a flight from woman, the family, maturity itself.”5 Such a skewed interpretation of children’s sexuality in Capote’s fiction exposes the ways in which stereotypes against homosexuality undermine otherwise insightful analyses of Capote’s texts. Nonetheless, whether in explicating or in filming Capote’s treatment of children, one must engage with the meaning of sexuality within these narratives, for sexuality is at the heart of these southern bildungsromans of adolescent boys. In transforming Capote’s narratives of queer childhood into films, David Rocksavage’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1995), Charles Matthau’s The Grass Harp (1995), and Mark Medoff’s Children on Their Birthdays (2002) must tackle the complexities of childhood sexuality, as they cinematically depict how Capote’s young male protagonists mature into adult sexuality, whether in terms of homo- or heteroerotic attractions.
Other Voices, Other RoomsWhen published in 1948, Other Voices, Other Rooms achieved a striking literary success, bringing fame and significant sales to Capote. Given its homosexual story line, the novel presented numerous obstacles to any filmmaker interested in adapting it to the screen. In Hollywood under the Hays Code, homosexuality was a forbidden topic, and producers would be compelled to strip the novel of its foundations if they were to film it. In 1957 Curtis Harrington, the director of such mysteries as Games (1967, starring Simone Signoret and James Caan), What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971, starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters), and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972, starring Shelley Winters), wrote a treatment of Capote’s novel for Jerry Wald’s production company. Although the treatment remained undeveloped, it is an intriguing document, for it illuminates the many (and florid) changes necessary to bring the story to the screen. In Harrington’s conception, Capote’s queer bildungsroman would be sacrificed in favor of the story’s gothic elements: “As I see the film version treated, the terror-suspense elements of the story would be strengthened and considerably developed. This would entirely remove the homosexual theme that Capote put into the novel, and still not harm it.”6 Conceding the unlikeliness of the undertaking—“Although I realize this is a (very) long shot, I wanted you to see how this story might be approached to make it filmable”—Harrington reimagines the novel’s trip to the Cloud Hotel as a climactic encounter of gothic horror: “Then, just as Joel is about to be pushed off the balcony by the terrifying and macabre figure [a living skeleton], somebody comes running out of the corridor and pushes the figure over the balcony. The mask falls away, and Joel sees that it is Randolph, who falls screaming to his death.” Joel’s savior is the tomboy Idabel, who tells Joel that she witnessed Randolph changing into his costume. When Amy learns of Randolph’s death, she explains that he wanted to steal Joel’s inheritance so that he could search the globe for his lost love Dolores (not Pepe, as is the case in Capote’s novel). Harrington’s treatment of Other Voices, Other Rooms demonstrates his detailed understanding of Capote’s literature and its themes—even the “macabre figure” of the “living skeleton” alludes to Collin Fenwick’s Halloween costume in The Grass Harp—yet such a radical reimagining of Capote’s plotline, particularly in its erasure of homosexual themes, would result in a film thematically and stylistically divorced from its source novel.
Whereas Harrington’s treatment of Other Voices, Other Rooms emphasizes its gothic qualities to make the novel more filmable in the 1950s, David Rocksavage’s 1995 film alludes to Joel and Randolph’s homosexuality, but ultimately in a conflicted manner. Starring David Speck as Joel and Lothaire Bluteau as Randolph, the film begins with Joel’s voice-over explaining how he came to live at Skully’s Landing, the decaying plantation where his father resides. Mimicking Capote’s wavering southern intonations, Robert Kingdom’s narration as Joel connects the film to the novel’s author. “One day, in the spring of 1938, a letter arrived,” Joel recalls, a letter he describes as “formal in tone” and “written in a fine italic hand.” While he details the letter’s contents in voice-over, viewers see the hand writing it with a quill pen, with this hand emerging from a kimono sleeve and featuring a ringed pinky finger. From Joel’s queerly inflected voice and from the extravagant mise-en-scène of the letter’s penning, the film announces its interest in the encounter between these two queer figures.
Despite Joel’s youth—he is just entering adolescence—the film’s opening scenes hint at his homosexuality, primarily through other characters’ reactions to him. When he overhears his aunt and uncle discussing his future, his uncle impugns his masculinity: “That momma’s boy gives me the creeps. His wandering around here with that long face, like he’s looking for a tit to suck.” Joel’s voice-over introduces the minor character of his friend Roger with words stressing their mutual estrangement from other children and their need to escape the drudgery of their everyday lives: “Roger was my only friend in New Orleans. We lived in a world of make-believe and tall tales,” he declares, as Roger turns a cartwheel and waves up to Joel from the yard where he is playing. (Although a young boy turning a cartwheel is not a certain signifier of homosexuality, it is a less iconographically masculine activity than, for example, tossing a football or baseball.) Arriving in Noon City to reunite with his long-lost father, Joel wears a light blue shirt and white pants, clothing prissily inappropriate for the town’s dustiness, and he attempts to assert his manhood. “I’d like a beer,” he says, but the café’s owner laughs at this request. When Joel turns away, she adds, “Aw, don’t go off in a huff.” These early encounters stress Joel’s alienation from normative society in New Orleans and Noon City, setting the stage for his acknowledgment of his queer desires.
As Capote’s novel focuses on Joel’s acceptance of his homosexuality, the film initially adheres to this story line in its depictions of Joel’s interactions with Randolph following his arrival at Skully’s Landing. Reading Joel’s palm, Randolph tells him, “You may find love when you least expect it,” with the camera focusing on their entwining hands to accentuate Randolph’s seduction of Joel. Randolph also compliments Joel on his attractiveness when planning to paint his portrait: “You have a fine complexion—touches of vermilion.” And as Randolph languidly leaves the room, in language brimming with sexual symbolism, he declares: “A flower is blooming inside you, and soon, when all the tight petals unfold, when the bloom of youth burns brightest, you will turn and look, as others have, at the opening of another door.” Falling to the allure of Randolph’s ministrations, Joel embraces his homosexuality, which is measured in his costume change, as he is now frequently clothed in an iconographic uniform of queer desire: the sailor suit.7 Indeed, in a shot of Joel dressing in a sailor suit, he stares at himself in the mirror, thus playing on tropes conflating homosexuality with narcissism. Randolph looks on in the background, and Joel’s voice-over proclaims, “Randolph spoke a language only he seemed to be able to understand. He said that his life was just a joke which he played on himself.” Modeling himself as an object of Randolph’s desire, Joel becomes attuned to his attractiveness to Randolph, particularly in scenes in which Randolph favors him over his sister Amy (Anna Levine), who plays her part with kewpie-doll jealousy darting from her eyes.
FIG. 18 Other Voices, Other Rooms: Joel (David Speck) models his new sailor suit as Randolph (Lothaire Bluteau) looks on admiringly, with the mirror marking the narcissistic tropes often associated with cinematic depictions of homosexuality.
Realizing their virtual entrapment at Skully’s Landing, both Joel and the African American maid Zoo (April Turner) attempt to escape, but their hopes are dashed. Their story lines are told in parallel editing. On her journey north (where she longs to see snow, like Buddy in “A Christmas Memory”) Zoo walks along fields and dusty roads until she is brutally raped and thus forced to return to the Landing. In the paired scenes, Joel and Idabel slog through a swamp, with Joel’s clothes—hitherto so pristine—now mucked with grime to indicate his murky understanding of sexuality, until a rattlesnake bites him and Idabel carries him back to the Landing. Rocksavage uses Zoo’s rape to give the character a new sense of personal integrity, as she describes to Amy the peace that washed over her during the attack. “Zoo, you ain’t gotta be a nigger if you don’t wanna be. You can be a fine Negro woman,” she realizes, and then tells Amy to pour her own coffee. While it is in some measure satisfying to watch Zoo stand up for herself, her new sense of inner strength as catalyzed by rape problematically conflates female empowerment with violence and sexual degradation. Whereas Capote’s fictions mostly overlook the discrimination faced by his African American characters, many films adapted from his works expand these story lines to argue for the moral rightness of civil rights and integration. Unlike Zoo, who remains trapped at the Landing at the film’s conclusion, Joel eventually escapes, but at this point in the plot his attachment to Randolph deepens. When Randolph attempts to win the affections of the convalescent Joel, declaring “I have a gift for you,” he gives him a tiara. Such precious and exaggerated symbolism marks Randolph’s desire to remake Joel in his own queer image, as suggested by the elaborate gown in which Randolph dresses himself while reliving his past with his beloved Pepe.
As in the novel, Randolph hides Joel in the ruined Cloud Hotel when his Aunt Ellen comes to visit, an act of deception that reveals his predatory intentions toward Joel. For their journey to the hotel, they wear matching white linen clothes while riding a mule, with these costumes accentuating Joel’s mirroring of his mentor. Unlike in Capote’s novel (OV 225–26), the mule survives the trip to the Cloud Hotel, and as Randolph and Joel return to Skully’s Landing, Joel’s voice-over declares the perfect kinship between them: “I felt all through me a kind of balance, as though I understood Randolph absolutely.” What should be the emotional climax of the film, however, is oddly coupled with animal slapstick. Registering Joel’s growing realization of Randolph’s flaws, the voice-over continues, “I saw how helpless he was,” and so Joel leads the mule and further realizes “how like a child, how terribly alone,” as Randolph falls off the mule and drunkenly cries, “We’re losing the mule.” The emotional connection between them is severed when Joel perceives the limitations of Randolph’s worldview. Randolph proclaims, “Imagination is the key to life,” but Joel responds, “What good is imagination if you don’t have the guts to live it?” Back at Skully’s Landing, Joel finds his magnifying glass—a childhood toy indicative of his keen perception—and realizes that Aunt Ellen has come for him while they visited the Cloud Hotel. Outside the mansion, standing on its stairs, he rejects Randolph: “You’re a liar, Randolph. I hate you.” Then, in shots symbolizing his emotional maturation, he dumps his childhood toys in the river, hugs his catatonic father farewell, and leaves Skully’s Landing and Randolph forever.
Capote’s ending to Other Voices, Other Rooms, with its pederastic overtones, would present a challenge to any filmmaker, and so Rocksavage rewrites the conclusion to erase these allusions to Joel’s homoerotic maturation. In the novel, Joel sees Randolph in drag and enters Skully’s Landing, with Capote’s narration implying a sexual relationship will develop between them: “She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden’s edge where, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind” (OV 231). In contrast, the film depicts Joel walking away down a dark road as the voice-over proclaims starkly, “I never did come back.” These lines register Joel’s rejection of Randolph and possibly of his own homosexuality as well, although Rocksavage stages these final scenes with sufficient ambiguity that Joel’s sense of queerness might remain. Joel also acknowledges the influence of his experiences with Randolph: “But part of me did stay at the landing. And wherever I go, whatever I do, that voice never leaves me.” Separating Joel from Randolph, Rocksavage’s film cleanses Capote’s queer bildungsroman of its specter of pederasty, but in doing so it blanches Joel’s maturation into homosexuality as well.
The Grass HarpCapote’s The Grass Harp is in many ways a comic version of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Both narratives focus on an adolescent boy who loses his immediate family, moves in with eccentric relatives, and matures into adult sexuality, but whereas Other Voices, Other Rooms unfolds in a nightmare vision of the South, The Grass Harp inhabits a gentler setting, one where its queer characters seek communion with one another to escape the stifling conformity of their small-minded town. Furthermore, while Other Voices, Other Rooms can be seen as a queer bildungsroman, the story of Joel’s maturation into homosexuality, Collin’s queerness in The Grass Harp is muted, as he accedes to heterosexuality in the novella’s conclusion.
Before The Grass Harp was filmed, Capote adapted his novella for the Broadway stage. Under Robert Lewis’s direction, and with Saint Subber producing and Cecil Beaton designing sets and costumes, the play opened on March 27, 1952, at the Martin Beck Theatre. It closed one month later. The play featured Mildred Natwick in the lead role of Dolly Talbo, Ruth Nelson as her sister Verena, Johnny Stewart as Collin Talbo, Georgia Burke as Catherine Creek, and Russell Collins as Judge Charlie Cool.8 Of this theatrical version of The Grass Harp, Capote stated, “I thought Lillian and Dorothy Gish had just the right quality for the two sisters and I did The Grass Harp with them in mind. But Bobby Lewis, the director, didn’t want them; he was used to a different kind, an Actors’ Studio kind of acting.”9 Capote’s theatrical script strips his novella of some story lines, particularly that of Collin’s friend Riley Henderson, and he replaces Sister Ida, the mother of the child preacher Little Homer Honey, with the traveling cosmetics sales-woman Miss Baby Love Dallas. Also, the play ends with Dolly and Verena reconciling, as the proud Verena humbly requests her sister’s companionship—“May I . . . may I come with you, too? I would like to help . . . if you will let me”—in stark contrast to the novella’s melancholy resolution after Dolly dies.10
In 1960 National Telefilm Associates filmed Capote’s theatrical version of The Grass Harp in a black-and-white television production for the Play of the Week series. While it did not feature both Gish sisters as Capote wished, Lillian Gish stars as Dolly Talbo, with Carmen Mathews as Verena and Nick Hyams as Collin Talbo. Georgia Burke and Russell Collins reprise their roles from the Broadway production as Catherine Creek and Judge Charlie Cool, and Ed Asner, in one of his earliest parts, plays the sheriff. Word Baker and Hal Gerson directed the production, with David Susskind, with whom Capote later collaborated on Laura, producing. The teleplay adheres to Capote’s Broadway script, with its staging fortifying Capote’s themes of inclusivity to endorse the advances of the civil rights movement. Foremost, the relationship between Collin and the family’s African American maid Catherine Creek is performed with much affection and familial joviality, arguing for her equality to the white characters. When Judge Cool describes an interracial relationship, he regrets that the law would compel him to punish love: “Still, if he had succeeded in marrying her, it’d have been the sheriff’s duty to arrest and my duty to sentence him.” Also, when he compliments Dolly on her free spirit, telling her, “Spirits are accepters of life; they grant its differences, and consequently are usually on the right side,” he validates countercultural voices rebelling against the racial prejudices paralyzing the United States. Following the advances of the civil rights movement in the 1950s—the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and the integration of Central High School by the Little Rock Nine in 1957—Baker and Gerson’s telefilm expands on Capote’s themes to argue for the moral rightness of African American equality. Amid a favorable review, Jack Gould affirmed that the film “capture[s] beautifully and poetically the essence of the free human spirit that has enough sense to dream.”11
Thirty-five years later, when Charles Matthau directed a cinematic adaptation of The Grass Harp, he proclaimed that Capote’s story “made me laugh a lot and touched me in a way that was very uplifting. It is a beautiful, poignant story with great characters.”12 Matthau’s production boasts an impressive array of actors in its ensemble cast, including Piper Laurie and Sissy Spacek as sisters Dolly and Verena Talbo, Walter Matthau as Judge Charlie Cool, Edward Furlong as Collin Fenwick, Nell Carter as Catherine Creek, Jack Lemmon as Morris Ritz, Mary Steenburgen as Sister Ida, and Sean Patrick Flannery as Riley Henderson, with Roddy McDowall and Charles Durning playing the minor roles of the barber Amos Legrand and Reverend Buster. In one of cinema’s most horrific depictions of familial dysfunction, Laurie and Spacek teamed previously for Carrie (1976), playing a fanatical mother and her telekinetic daughter, and so Laurie expressed particular pleasure with the casting of The Grass Harp: “This time I would be the good, sweet one, and Sissy would be the horror. It was a deeply spiritual day for me, one of disbelief and thanksgiving.”13 The film also reunited the enduring partnership of Lemmon and Matthau, who costarred in numerous films over their careers. Several of the film’s actors were connected to Capote and/or his literature either personally or professionally. His longtime friend Carol Matthau née Marcus, a Swan whom he described as one of the “people I really like,” was the director Charles Matthau’s mother and Walter Matthau’s wife (although Charles Matthau recalls that his grandmother “thought [Truman] was a freak”).14 Doris Roberts, famous for her role as Marie Barone in the television show Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005), portrays the postmistress Mrs. Richards; in correspondence from 1975, Capote complimented her acting skills: “By the way I think you are a very fine actress.”15 Scott Wilson, who undertook the role of Dick Hickock in Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood, plays the small role of Collin’s father Eugene. The screenplay was written by Stirling Silliphant, most famous for his Oscar-winning adaptation of In the Heat of the Night—which beat Richard Brooks’s screenplay of In Cold Blood—and for penning successful disaster flicks in the 1970s including The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and The Swarm (1978).
Matthau’s The Grass Harp faithfully adapts its source text in many ways. Its opening line asks in a voice-over dripping with southern drawl, “When was it I first heard of the grass harp?” thus alerting viewers that the film, like Capote’s novella, is told in flashback (cf. GH 9). As Capote’s narrations in Frank and Eleanor Perry’s A Christmas Memory and The Thanksgiving Visitor mark these films as stories of his own queer past, Boyd Gaines’s voice-over similarly emphasizes queer aspects of Collin’s character. When Collin (played as a young boy by Grayson Fricke) moves in with the Talbos, Gaines’s narration reminisces about his affection for Dolly: “It was a long time before I calmed down enough to notice Dolly Talbo. And when I did, I fell in love,” he declares as she is shown baking, costumed in pink sleeves and framed by pink curtains to accentuate her tenderheartedness. The voice also declares, “Classmates said that I was strange, that living in the Talbo house had turned me into an old man, but nothing was ever as much fun as the adventures I shared with Dolly. I dreamed up stories about us, and late at night wrote them down.” Alluding to Capote’s identity as a writer, the narration marks the story as Capote’s, embedding within the film the queer story line of a boy struggling to negotiate his nascent sense of sexuality.
Adhering to the novella’s thematic concern with nonnormative sexualities, Matthau’s film includes several scenes highlighting Collin’s discomfort with heterosexuality and his virtual imprisonment in his aunt Verena’s world of conformity. When Verena shepherds Collin into her home, escorting him as if she were his jailer rather than his aunt, Dolly whispers to her, “It isn’t right raising a boy in a house full of women.” The prison imagery is heightened when, during their engagement scene, Judge Cool tells Dolly that Verena would return her to their prison. Commenting on his camera strategies for portraying the incarceral nature of Verena’s home, in contrast to the liberty the characters enjoy when freed from the restraints of civilization, Charles Matthau emphasizes the importance of this theme: “In the Talbo house, I frequently kept the camera static, used long lenses and staged the scene with a minimum of movement. In the riverwoods, I did the opposite to convey the sense of freedom our characters experience.”16 With this contrast between civilization and nature, Matthau limns the ways in which the various characters’ desires are stifled when under the scrutiny of others.
FIG. 19 The Grass Harp (1996): Positioned before pink curtains and clothed in pink as well, Dolly Talbo (Piper Laurie) models a childlike femininity that enamors the boy Collin Fenwick (Grayson Fricke); to the right, Catherine Creek (Nell Carter) observes.
Part of the inhibiting control of civilization springs from its tendency to regulate sexuality, and several characters inform Collin of his failed masculinity. When he walks home from the movie theater with his classmates, Maude Riordan unfavorably compares him to another boy, unnamed but presumably Riley Henderson: “He’s romantic. He knows how to treat a lady. Not like you. All this time we’ve known each other, and not once have you invited me or Elizabeth over for a visit. What are you afraid of?” Elizabeth chimes in, “He’s worried about Dolly Talbo. . . . The whole world knows Dolly Talbo’s gone, and you’re gone, too.” Collin cries, “Shut up,” and, flouting the protocols of southern chivalry, pushes her to the ground. The young boy accompanying them, who is a head shorter than Collin, punches him in the jaw so that he too falls to the ground (cf. GH 14). In another scene, Verena’s business partner Morris Ritz attempts a man-to-man conversation with Collin: “Well, you’re sixteen, huh. Yeah. And throwing it around a little, I bet, huh?” With these words broaching Ritz’s interest in Collin’s sex life, Collin looks down uncomfortably, but Ritz, in Lemmon’s jauntily leering performance, continues: “Next time Verena goes to Chicago, make her bring you, because there’s a lot to throw it at there” (cf. GH 20). Even Amos the Barber, no model of normative masculinity himself in McDowell’s prissy performance, chides Collin for his effeminacy. With Collin shot from behind in the barber’s chair, Amos jokes, “About time you got this hair cut, honey. I was about to buy you a package of bobby pins.” Amos then wheels him around so that the audience can see that although Collin has aged from eleven to sixteen and is now played by Furlong rather than Fricke, his masculinity is still unfledged. Amos continues speculating about Collin’s romantic life—“A boy your age has to be careful about his appearance, especially when he has a rendezvous with Miss Maude Riordan tomorrow night”—before acknowledging Collin’s competition in achieving manhood in his home: “Grown up, courting, the man of the house. Well, if you don’t count Verena.” Gaines’s voice-over also acknowledges Collin’s veritable crush on Riley Henderson—“I longed to be his friend”—but when Riley requests Collin’s assistance in purchasing condoms, or “weasel wrappers,” Collin’s sexual ignorance is revealed: he understands neither the term nor its role in his friend’s sexual conquests. Even when Collin considers dating girls, Gaines’s narration implies that he is only deceiving himself—“It didn’t take a genius to see Maude was heart-set on Riley. Still, I imagined for a while that I was in love with her”—but when he moves to kiss her, she interrupts, “I don’t think that’s necessary, Collin, although it was cute of you to take me out.” In these scenes and others like them, Collin’s inability to assert his masculinity elicits concern or condemnation from other characters, and his trajectory from queerness to normative sexuality structures the ensuing narrative.
The film’s treatment of Dolly likewise depicts her as a queer figure, one alienated from romance and courtship throughout her life. Like Collin, she too, despite her advanced years, registers as a child. Enhancing the character’s immaturity, Laurie imbued her vocal performance with a childlike register, casting her pitch to mimic a child’s: “I had deliberately pitched my voice in a higher register for the childlike Dolly, but because of my cold I had to speak even higher in order to get out any sound.”17 Dolly thus represents a child’s innocence, and she tells Judge Cool, “Well, no, I’ve never loved a gentleman. You might say, I never had the opportunity,” revealing her virginity and estrangement from romance. Indeed, Riley sees Dolly as in need of protection from the sexual immorality of others, taking offense at the prospect of Sister Ida joining their company and telling Collin: “A loose woman like that is no one to associate with Miss Dolly.” When Dolly naively asks Sister Ida, “What is it like, the love of a man?” Ida replies, “Why, honey, it’s anything you choose to make it. For me, there is nothing like the touch of a man’s hand.” Underscoring her ignorance of sex and reproduction, and in contrast to Ida’s fecundity, Dolly muses, “I suppose Collin is a close as I’ve come to having a baby.” As much as Dolly appears to mature into sexuality throughout the film, acknowledging and encouraging Judge Cool’s courtship, she rejects his marriage proposal when Verena pleads: “Let me live with you. I’m feeling old. I want my sister.” Dolly apologizes to Judge Cool, “Forgive me,” and embraces Verena, declaring, “I want my sister, too.” The voice-over summarizes, “The judge could not reach her—not with his arms, not with his heart. The sisters’ bond was too final,” as the judge turns around so that viewers see only his back, with the rain falling outside suggestive of his tears.
Within the events unfolding on-screen, Judge Cool seeks to win Dolly’s affections, yet his backstory offers a darker view of his sexual past because in his quest for emotional connection, he indulges in actions bordering on the pedophilic. He shares with his friends the story of his correspondence with an adolescent girl: “It’s a letter to a girl not much younger than you, Collin. Her name is Heather Fall. . . . Came across [her] in one of those children’s magazines that Amos keeps in the barbershop. On the back cover they have the addresses of children who want to correspond with other children.” Dolly, overlooking the discrepancy in the correspondents’ ages, commends the judge’s actions—“That’s very noble of you, keeping company with her”—and Judge Cool continues his tale by explaining how he represented himself as a teenager in their exchanges: “Well, I wrote her back as though I was still that fifteen-year-old boy.” He continues, “It was fun for an old man sitting alone, listening to the noise of a clock to be growing up again with a sweetheart in Alaska” (cf. GH 42). Judge Cool also reports that his son does not approve of his actions, but this hint of censure is the narrative’s only acknowledgement that Judge Cool’s actions carry a pedophilic taint. The film portrays his desires as a sincere effort to alleviate his and Heather Fall’s mutual loneliness, yet Capote forthrightly limns the pedophilic potential of such a liaison in his short story “Hello, Stranger.” In this quasi-biographical dialogue, Capote lunches with a former acquaintance, during which this friend confesses to encounters with young girls that resonate with pedophilic depravity, despite his denials to his wife and to Capote. It is a curious and unsettling thematic linkage in Capote’s canon, connecting stories with vastly different settings from different stages in his career, yet alike in depicting older men camouflaging their identities to flirt with adolescent girls. The staging of this scene in Matthau’s film, in which Judge Cool tells his story to his friends around the campfire with Dolly as his primary interlocutor, suggests that his courtship of the child Heather Fall parallels his courtship of the childlike Dolly Talbo. He then explains love to Riley: “First you got to learn to love a leaf. Then the rain. Then some day, if you’re lucky, the right person.” He looks to Dolly, who smiles gently and then shyly glances away. Judge Cool proposes to Dolly as they walk through the woods, asking her “to be the one person in the world” for him, as he lifts her veil, kisses her, and strokes her cheek. In wooing Dolly, Judge Cool finds an age-appropriate mate who cleanses him of the pedophilic specter of courting Heather Fall. Although Dolly rejects him in favor of Verena, he then moves into Miss Burch’s boardinghouse, where five women rush out to greet him, and so it appears that his erotic prospects brighten. Like Collin, Judge Cool needs to mature into adult sexuality and cleanse himself of the queer aspects of his character, which he presumably accomplishes in the film’s afterlife with one of these many women so anxious to dote on him.
Beyond Collin’s, Dolly’s, and Judge Cool’s difficulties with normative sexuality, many of Capote’s other characters express queer desires, whether privately hidden or publicly evident, but Matthau’s film overwrites these aspects of their personalities. In particular, Verena Talbo’s lesbianism is alluded to throughout the novella. Collin’s father Eugene asserts that she is a “morphodyte” (GH 10), and Collin observes, “Men were afraid of her, and she herself seemed to be afraid of women” (GH 12). Collin also reports that Verena “had been greatly attached to a blonde jolly girl called Maudie Laura Murphy” (GH 12) many years ago and would cry while looking over photographs of her lost friend and that “she was too like a lone man in a house full of women and children” (GH 15). In the film, however, Verena’s meanness results from her disappointment in a teen romance, as Gaines’s narration reveals: “No one had seen a man on Verena’s arm since she had danced as a debutante with Maiself Talsap, but he took up with Verena’s best friend. Verena never recovered.” She also confesses her love for Morris Ritz to Dolly when they discuss their prospects in the kitchen: “I loved him, I did. Oh, I admit it, we were kindred spirits.” More recognizable as a lesbian in Capote’s novella, Verena transforms in Matthau’s film into a woman haunted by heterosexual disappointments, with Spacek’s performance accentuating the pinched nature of this woman’s life and her many unfulfilled desires.
Capote’s novella closes as Collin leaves town to become a lawyer, thus aligning himself occupationally with Judge Cool, a queer character marked by his pedophilic desires and unsuccessful pursuit of romance. In the film, however, Collin’s heterosexuality is more clearly limned, as he reports in voice-over that “Riley and Maude were married the following fall,” and as the screen depicts the newlyweds exiting the church, he realizes that his future must unfold away from the town of his upbringing: “What weakened me was the wait before I knew where to jump. If ever I was going to make the leap, that was the time.” In depicting Collin’s emotional maturation, the film builds on Riley’s recuperation into normative masculinity through marriage. While sitting around the campfire, he earlier confessed to his new friends, “Well, I ain’t no good with women”—a surprising statement, given that he purchased condoms to facilitate a sexual encounter with an apparently willing companion in his car—to which Collin added morosely, “Yeah, well, me neither.” Now, as the film concludes, Collin and Riley’s sister Elizabeth serve as best man and maid of honor in Riley and Maude’s wedding, and after Elizabeth kisses him farewell, Judge Cool admonishes him, “You write to Elizabeth. She’s a good girl.” Counterbalancing these nods to heterosexuality, the film also links Collin back to Capote. Mrs. Richards remarks on his vocational ambitions, “A writer is what you’re going to be, eh?” thereby reminding viewers of the queer source of the film they are watching. Gaines’s elegiac voice-over reinforces the connection between Collin and Capote: “So little, once it has changed, changes back. Their memory fades with each passing year. Yet the precious moments we shared, that unforgettable autumn of my youth, forever shaped my life as a storyteller.” This shift in Collin’s vocation underscores the autobiographical elements in Capote’s story, inviting the audience to see Collin’s story as the story of Capote’s maturation into authorship but also, and conversely, to see Capote as heterosexual.
Despite its impressive roster of actors, The Grass Harp sinks into tendentiousness and maudlin musings, and the film was poorly received by critics such as Adrian Martin, who lamented that “every key point of the story is laboriously spelt out and reiterated.”18 The film’s hokey depictions of southern life also sparked negative reactions. George Meyer complained that “Hollywood can’t seem to convey the South without adding cornpone,” and Jami Bernard agreed that the film is “a dishwasher-safe movie full of wacky Southern characters.”19 These criticisms are warranted, as witnessed to by the folksy depiction of the town’s sheriff constantly accompanied by his pet rooster Ralph. Still, some critics praised Matthau’s film for its relaxed pace and the genial unfolding of its story. Peter Stack appreciated the film’s tempo—“Sometimes good things come in slow packages”—and Lawrence Van Gelder applauded it as “a sweet, wise, funny, poignant film that rides on a first-rate cast.”20 A faithful yet sterile adaptation, Matthau’s The Grass Harp sentimentalizes Capote’s vision of childhood as depicted in the story of Collin’s formative years with Dolly Talbo and other queer and comic figures alienated from southern views of social and sexual propriety.
Children on Their BirthdaysIn the late 1970s Capote considered filming his short story “Children on Their Birthdays,” hoping to cast Tatum O’Neal in the role of Lily Jane Bobbit.21 He collaborated on this project with his lover John O’Shea, but the antagonistic dissolution of their affair effectively ended its development, despite O’Shea’s attempts to persuade Capote to proceed: “I welcome a joint-venture with you in the matter of ‘Children on Their Birthdays.’ I see no reason that joint-venture could not eventuate in money and credits for both of us.”22 Capote later collaborated on a television script for “Children on Their Birthdays” with Robert MacBride in which his transgressive heroine Miss Bobbit survives the six o’clock bus that kills her in the story, with the narrator Jim affirming in voice-over: “Like I said. Nobody in this town will ever forget her. She arrived with a lot of dreams, and some she took with her, and some she left for us.”23 The story remained unfilmed until Mark Medoff’s 2002 production, which stars Tania Raymonde as Miss Bobbit, Joe Pichler as Billy Bob Murphy, Sheryl Lee as Billy Bob’s mother El, Christopher McDonald as El’s suitor Speedy, and Tom Arnold as the con man Lionel Quince.
Capote’s short story “Children on Their Birthdays” is not a parable, yet it becomes one in Medoff’s film. Crusader Entertainment, a Christian production company, developed the film, and Howard Baldwin, the film’s executive producer, avows, “We feel movies can be extremely commercial but at the same time very family friendly.”24 The film was successful in this regard, winning the Worldfest-Houston Platinum Award for Family and Children’s Films. Capote’s story has children as its main characters, yet it is difficult to see why it was deemed suitable for adaptation into a “family friendly” film. The tale’s first-person narrator begins by recalling the premature demise of his town’s most fascinating citizen, Miss Lily Jane Bobbit—“Yesterday afternoon the six-o’clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit. I’m not sure what there is to be said about it; after all, she was only ten years old” (GH 119). The tale unfolds in flashback, with the narrator describing this amoral heroine and her exploits in his small and dusty hometown, concluding at the moment of her death: “Miss Bobbit, running toward those moons of roses, did not seem to hear. That is when the six o’clock bus ran over her” (GH 135). Notwithstanding that it is bookended by the misfortune of a child’s untimely demise, Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays” is a lighthearted comic narrative. It proffers no readily discernible moral, other than the cautionary note of a child’s Hollywood fantasy life ending tragically, and does not moralize on her transgressions or other shortcomings.
Miss Bobbit herself, like the story in which she appears, provides unlikely fodder for a Christian family film. In Capote’s story, she proclaims that the “odors of a church are so offensive” and rhapsodizes over her relationship with the devil: “But the way to tame the Devil is not to go down there to church and listen to what a sinful mean fool he is. No, love the Devil like you do Jesus: because he is a powerful man, and will do you a good turn if he knows you trust him. . . . I always called in the Devil to help me get the biggest part in our annual show. That is common sense: you see, I knew Jesus wouldn’t have any truck with dancing” (GH 127). Later Miss Bobbit wins the town’s sham talent show, arranged by a con man, by singing, “If you don’t like my peaches, stay away from my can, o-ho, o-ho!” and concluding her act “with a bump [that] upended her skirt to display blue-lace underwear” (GH 132). In the film, however, Miss Bobbit sings a torch song, “I Have to Dream” (which plays again during the closing credits, as sung by Celine Dion with her trademark emotionality), with long close-ups accentuating the heart-felt devotion behind her words. Whereas in the short story Miss Bobbit demands that the townspeople bankroll her dreams of Hollywood glory as a reward for bringing the grifter to justice, in the film Billy Bob and Preacher, her two adolescent admirers, anonymously throw the necessary funds into her room with a note attached: “Dear Lily Jane, We give this note in hopes it will help you achieve your dream of making it to Hollywood. We ask for nothing in return but to remain your devoted and anonymous admirers.” Miss Bobbit’s cinematic ambitions carry over between the story’s two incarnations, as in her declaration in the film: “Of course, my final destination has always been, and will remain, Hollywood, California. You see, my plan is to appear someday in motion pictures.” The short story ends abruptly, with her dreams and her life literally crushed by a bus, but in a brazen rewriting of its source narrative, the film concludes with Miss Bobbit safely boarding the vehicle that will carry her to California.
In the film’s translation of Capote’s short story into a cinematic parable, these shifts in Miss Bobbit’s character and Capote’s story line are coupled with an increased interest in religious themes. As Miss Bobbit readies herself for the bus ride that results in her death in the story’s closing scene, Capote has her looking “as though she were going to Communion, dressed in white and with a white parasol” (GH 135). Yet Miss Bobbit is primarily an amoral creature, self-aggrandizing in her Hollywood dreams that she conscripts others to support. Capote’s slight gesture toward Christian symbolism in Miss Bobbit’s religiously identified attire is magnified in the film to the point that she becomes the town’s savior. In this regard the film imposes upon Capote’s comic story a religious theme concerning the necessity of atoning for one’s transgressions. After Billy Bob and Preacher cut down some roses for their town’s bewitching newcomer, Miss Bobbit explains to Billy Bob that he must atone for his sin: “You must make moral restitution, Billy Bob. . . . You have to do something right to cancel out the wrong.” The innocent recipient of these unsought roses, Miss Bobbit seeks to compensate El, the roses’ owner and Billy Bob’s mother, for their loss, and so she and her mother, a talented but mute seamstress, sew the roses back onto the bushes. In lines laden with Christological import, Miss Bobbit declares: “It’s moral restitution. A symbol . . . to cancel out the wrong. It is the view of my late lamented father that, whenever possible, we must balance what we ought not to do with what we ought.” With her deceased father symbolizing her spiritual Father, her example proves morally infectious. As the film concludes, Billy Bob asks Preacher, “So why’d you send that whole ominous [a childish mispronunciation of anonymous] note thing, anyway?” and Preacher replies, “Well, I didn’t figure that I could do that whole moral restitution deal alone.” The boys move to pinky shake in a gesture symbolizing their renewed friendship, but they handshake instead, in a sign of their maturation.
In addition to this lesson on moral restitution, Children on Their Birthdays also tackles a story line of racial integration in the pre-civil-rights South. In his short story, Capote portrays Miss Bobbit’s friendship with Rosalba Cat, an African American girl, to the initial surprise of the townspeople: “Miss Bobbit told everyone that Rosalba was her sister, which caused a good many jokes; but like most of her ideas, it gradually seemed natural, and when we would overhear them calling each other Sister Rosalba and Sister Bobbit, none us of cracked a smile” (GH 126). The film elevates this subplot, which tacitly argues for racial integration, into a major plotline in which Miss Bobbit desegregates the community. When Preacher cruelly mistreats Rosalba, Miss Bobbit shames him: “Don’t you know that gentlemen are put on the face of this Earth for the protection of ladies?” El, in righteous anger, likewise castigates Billy Bob, not realizing that he attempted to stop Preacher from harassing Rosalba: “Lord knows this town has been witness to every kind of yours and Preacher’s mischief. But cruelty is another thing entirely. I am so afraid you’ll grow up to be someone I will not care to know.” The appearance of this theme in the film is somewhat surprising, for it is never expressed in Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays.” It nonetheless appears in other of Capote’s fictions, notably “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” as voiced by his cousin Miss Sook (cf. CS 264–65). The film transposes Capote’s moral from one story to another, without paying attention to the stark difference in tone evident between the comic excess of starstruck Miss Bobbit and Capote’s nostalgic view of his beloved Miss Sook.
The film’s Miss Bobbit is not content merely to chastise two boys for their rudeness to Rosalba; she improves on this by integrating the community’s church when she brings Rosalba to a service. While the rest of the African American townspeople sit sequestered in the choir loft—an image that in itself blanches the severity of racial segregation in the South—Rosalba joins the white members of the congregation in the pews. Several shots register the surprise and discomfort of the parishioners, and Pastor Williams then addresses his congregation: “Perhaps many of you are wondering whether God or Satan moves among us this morning; whether that clever deceiver Lucifer is leading us toward the darkness.” With these ambiguous words, it is as yet unclear whether the pastor supports Miss Bobbit’s efforts to integrate his congregation, and Miss Bobbit interrupts him before his position is clearly defined: “Pastor Williams, I’m sorry to interrupt, but like Jesus, I’ve been sorely tempted of the devil and can perhaps add some insight to your sermon.” A congregant angrily departs, and Pastor Williams sternly commands, “If anybody else wants to go, please do so now,” thereby proving his full commitment to racial justice, if only after witnessing the example of a young girl. Miss Bobbit continues her sermon: “First of all, sir, it’s easy to sit here on a Sunday morning and talk about being righteous, yet let the devil whisper his meanness in your ear. And it is another thing entirely to resist the devil and be truly compassionate. If merely one person invites him around, the devil can whisper through a whole town. And suddenly everyone’s lost their sense of decency.” The film’s Christian themes blossom further as the local sheriff and mechanic Speedy, who is in love with El, adds: “Jesus also tells us to love the outcast among us. That we may become the true children of our father.” Speedy’s reference to serving as the “true children of our father” builds upon Capote’s title to resignify children’s birthdays as a Christian rebirth, and the film’s rewriting of Capote’s narrative into a Christian parable casts all of the characters, both adults and children, as innocents on the path to salvation.
As Miss Bobbit catalyzes the moral growth of the town, she also catalyzes the preteen Billy Bob into manhood and thereby erases from the film the short story’s queer depiction of adolescence. In this coming-of-age love story, Billy Bob must free himself from his Oedipal attachment to his mother El, as evident in a scene in which he spies her dancing alone while reminiscing about the husband she lost in World War II. She then teaches her son to dance and admonishes him to enjoy his youth and to eschew his nascent erotic interest in girls: “There’ll be plenty of time for proper courting when you’re older. You’re too young to be going so crazy over one little girl.” His head rests on her shoulder, and this physical cue emphasizes that he is still a boy, his mother’s son, rather than a man. Billy Bob responds angrily, “To hell with it! I’d pick all the roses in China for that girl. And there’s nothing you can say that’ll change my mind,” with his words underscoring his determination to free himself from his youth. Beyond Billy Bob’s Oedipal complex that complicates his pursuit of Miss Bobbit, his best friend Preacher also falls in love with her, and their shared affections for her test their friendship. Preacher prudently warns Billy Bob, “It’s plain to see we both can’t court Miss Bobbit. I know you’ve been thinking about it, just like I have.” The two boys therefore decide that, in their position as Miss Bobbit’s magazine subscription agents, “Whoever sells the most, the other guy backs off.” Preacher realizes that their crushes on Miss Bobbit threaten their friendship—“She’s a hard one, Billy Bob. She don’t want nothing but to make trouble between friends”—but Billy Bob cannot free himself from his love for her. In the short story (and initially in the film), Miss Bobbit rejects the boys’ amorous overtures. Preacher pleads with Miss Bobbit, “You’ve got to decide who’s your real, true sweetheart,” but she imperiously replies: “Sweetheart? I should have known better than to get involved with a lot of country bumpkins” (cf. GH 129).
FIG. 20 Children on Their Birthdays: Miss Bobbit (Tania Raymonde) boards the bus that will take her to Hollywood, and thus escapes the untimely demise visited on her in Capote’s short story of “Children on Their Birthdays.”
Later in the film it is clear that Billy Bob does win her favor: she dances with him in one of the closing scenes, replacing his mother as a suitable romantic partner, and she places her hand on his in a tender gesture. The short story’s narrator explains, however, that Billy Bob’s love for Miss Bobbit paradoxically sparks his sense of queerness and alienation from traditional masculinity: “It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit’s going. Because she’d meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else” (GH 134). In a masterful subversion of sexual normativity, Capote limns the emergence of heterosexual desire within a queer subtext of estrangement from the self and from prevailing cultural mores. In the film, however, Miss Bobbit enables both racial integration and heterosexual maturation. The closing shots assure viewers that Billy Bob and Preacher value their newfound friendship with Rosalba, and the boys are respectively paired off with Cora Mae and Janice, the girls whom they earlier tormented with their childish pranks. In this manner, Billy Bob and Preacher mature from teen lasciviousness into an adult recognition of the emotional cathexis available through love. In one of the film’s opening sequences, Billy Bob witnessed a man caressing a woman’s cheek in the general store, while Preacher showed him a magazine featuring scantily clad women. Billy Bob asked Preacher, “You really don’t care what God sees when he looks down on you, do you?” but by the film’s close, and within its Christian themes, it is evident that God would be proud of the young Christian hero who has metamorphosed from Capote’s queer boy into a Christian film’s heterosexual man.
Capote’s depictions of children ask readers to ponder the sexuality of childhood, to probe the challenges of asserting one’s sexual identity in small towns inhospitable to otherness. Whether growing into homosexuality like Joel in Other Voices, Other Rooms or into heterosexuality like Collin in The Grass Harp and Billy Bob in “Children on Their Birthdays,” the discombobulating experience of adolescence challenges these young boys to develop a sense of identity by determining the nature of their sexual attractions. For Capote, then, the experience of adolescence involves jarring dislocations between self and society, yet in these cinematic adaptations, to various degrees, the vagaries of adolescent sexual attraction are whitewashed. Joel removes himself from Randolph’s amorous attentions in Rocksavage’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Collin merges the queerness of a Capotean voice-over with heterosexual attraction to Elizabeth (with whom he shares precious little screen time) in Matthau’s The Grass Harp, and Billy Bob ascends to normative erotic desires and Christian manhood by courting a young girl likewise stripped of her transgressive spirit in Medoff’s Children on Their Birthdays. Writing these narratives in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Capote tackled the subject of adolescent sexuality with more honesty and complexity than these filmmakers some fifty years later.
