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In official reports as well as documentation in the Capote archives, an abundance of professional and anecdotal observations makes clear that Herb Clutter’s wife Bonnie suffered for years from postpartum depression and physical malaise. It’s also apparent that she was unable to attend to her home or family in any normal fashion, and responsibility for domestic chores often fell to her children and the housekeeper, Mrs. Helm.
Mrs. Clutter’s physical and mental states are among the more controversial topics Capote had written about; conditions which, it’s important to note, have been repeatedly denied by family and friends of the Clutters. Of the acquaintances who knew Bonnie personally and have publicly challenged Capote’s treatment of her, it’s fair to assume most knew her in social settings when everyone puts on their best face. In Mrs. Clutter’s case, her husband was a man of high standing, and, in what should be no great revelation, housewives of that era knew the importance of a dignified appearance, one that masked any personal troubles that might embarrass their husbands.
Setting aside In Cold Blood’s perceived sins on the topic, however, official reports, physician’s statements, and many Garden Citians’ observations support Capote’s assertions, and do so quite specifically.
Mrs. Clutter’s psychiatrist, Dr. Austin J. Adams of the Wesley Clinic in Wichita, confirmed that he had been treating her twice monthly for “nervous muscular spasms” over a period of six to eight years up to her death. Family friend Kenneth Lyon reported to Agent Dewey that “...due to Bonnie Clutter’s condition she had to take a great deal of medicine, some of which were undoubtedly narcotics and barbiturates and that sometimes she would appear under the influence of this medicine.”[61] This was the 1950s, after all, when as many as 1-in-20 Americans, predominantly women, were prescribed Miltown, a trendy tranquilizer for treating the widespread “afflictions of anxiety” apparently seizing the country (as paid tribute by the Rolling Stones in their hit song, “Mother’s Little Helper”).[62]
Even The New York Times mentioned Mrs. Clutter’s condition in a 1954 article featuring her husband, noting that “...the teen-age daughters...are doing the housekeeping while the mother is away convalescing from a stay in the hospital...,”[63]—a three-month stay during which Mrs. Clutter had taken an apartment in Wichita while being treated by Dr. Adams.
In the years following World War II, as returning veterans married and reentered the workplace, housewives were relegated to homemaking, raising children, and coping with the mundane stresses of postwar America. Betty Friedan, the feminist author, famously termed this “the problem that has no name,”[64] referring to what sociologist Allan V. Horwitz described as “the ubiquitous malaise, tension, and anxiousness that results from the gap between the expectations of a fulfilling life and the realities of a stifling existence.”[65] According to many, this “gap” may be where Bonnie Clutter found herself.
Harper Lee’s research notes from interviews with Mrs. Polly Stringer, Nancy Clutter’s high school teacher, are filled with such intimate revelations. By Lee’s account, Mrs. Stringer cared deeply for Nancy, her star pupil, even taking on a stand-in role for the mother who, as Bonnie reportedly told her friend Wilma Kidwell,[66] was “a kind of ghost” to her own family.
According to Lee, Nancy was well aware that something was terribly wrong with her mother. Lacking the bond daughters typically have with their mothers, Nancy was happier when Bonnie was away, since she usually stayed in bed crying when she was home. Two other notes speak to Mrs. Clutter’s condition:[67]
✎ Nancy bewildered by mother’s insistence that there be twin beds in her room: “You’re married, aren’t you?” [To which Bonnie replied], “I’d go crazy if I had to sleep with your father.” Apparently for several years Nancy had assumed most of the responsibility for running the Clutter household. She cooked and kept her (and Kenyon’s?) clothes, and ran the house in general with aid of a maid who came in several times a week.
✎ [Stringer:] “Mrs. Clutter was a real mystery-like person. The sort of person you would think of as being kept in an attic."
Despite the bounty of contradictory evidence in his own research, Capote’s sympathetic portrait of the Clutter family “fit” the wholesome American midwestern image he sought to portray, a depiction of sanctity cut down in the prime of its normalcy.
But those who knew the Clutters well appear to have told their interviewers a much different story, and the intimate details recorded in Capote’s own hand, along with those of Lee, reflect potent opposition to what ultimately appeared in print.
