He died in 1984 and they scattered his ashes 11 years ago into Crooked Pond, not far from his beloved Long Island home. But Truman Capote has risen, Bergdorf scarf aflutter, delicate fingers adjusting tinted glasses, ready to dish dirt about himself and his famous friends in that mosquito-pitched voice.
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| Philip Seymour Hoffman, left, as Truman Capote in "Capote."(Attila Dory) |
There he is -- floor-length coat and all -- in "Capote," which opens next weekend. Philip Seymour Hoffman has already attracted giddy reviews for his portrayal of the diminutive author, despite their obvious differences in stature. And if Hoffman's performance isn't enough for you, there's always British actor Toby Jones's turn in another Capote movie (previously known as "Have You Heard?," it's presently untitled) due next year. If comic books are your visual kick, there's Ande Parks and Chris Samnee's graphic novel "Capote in Kansas," which came out in July.
Another bit of harmonic convergence: An unpublished Capote novel, "Summer Crossing," which was discovered last year by the writer's former housesitter in a cache of papers she had been holding since 1966, will be published this month by Random House.
Neither of the films touches upon the young Capote, the angelic-haired scamp abandoned by his mother and father who learned the Southern art of storytelling on the porches of Monroeville, Ala., amid a world of aunts, cousins and his next-door neighbor, future "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Nelle Harper Lee. Nor do they explore the older Capote, that perpetually drunk fireplug who slurred out bons mots for Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson, and died in his sleep at 59. They focus instead on the bespectacled, ambitious young man who read about the murder of a Kansas family in 1959 and decided he would make literary history out of the tragedy.
With ex-neighbor Lee (played in "Capote" by Catherine Keener and in next year's production by Sandra Bullock) as his research partner, Capote took six grueling years to write "In Cold Blood," the "nonfiction novel" that reprised the gruesome murders and their effect on the small town of Holcomb. His efforts paid off. Although the book would incur criticism for some compressing of characters and its fabricated final scene, it reaped financial and critical success for Capote and became a watershed event in the overlapping worlds of journalism and literature. And in 1967, it inspired Richard Brooks's powerful movie, "In Cold Blood" (starring a young Robert Blake as Perry Smith), nominated for four Academy Awards.
Other writers, Rebecca West and Lillian Ross among them, had explored forms of narrative reportage, but Capote defined an entirely new genre. It was, as he told the New York Times in 1966, "a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual." You can find its parallel on the screen, from Errol Morris's assured 1988 documentary "The Thin Blue Line," which revisits and eerily reenacts the sequence of events that led to the false arrest and murder conviction of drifter Randall Adams, to the tackiest of made-for-cable crime docudramas.
So, what is it about this chapter in Capote's life, when he was in his late thirties?
"His ambition and his agenda," says Hoffman. "There was a kind of a ruthlessness, a driven-desire thing that was just exhausting for me to play. You could never kind of relax into a scene and just not care about what you wanted. He was always on point. He was driven."
That time of his life "was the pivot," says "Capote" screenwriter Dan Futterman. "He achieved everything he ever wanted, and the cost of that ruined him. It was something he never came to terms with. He never did finish another book. The drinking and drug abuse increased, and it was the beginning of his long demise."
Douglas McGrath, writer-director of the untitled Capote project (he also co-wrote Woody Allen's "Bullets Over Broadway" and directed Gwyneth Paltrow in "Emma"), says he remembers Capote's "sad, public decline when I moved to New York City in the '80s. He was always being delivered to his lobby by a cabdriver who'd find him drunk on the streets, then took him back to the U.N. Plaza," where his apartment was.
"One of the problems with most biopics," he continues, "is they don't pick a section, they try to cram in as much as possible. We tried not to make that mistake."
McGrath's $13 million movie centers on Capote's Kansas years because "this wedge of his life tells us everything in its own way. It gives you the emotional truth of his life . . . 'In Cold Blood' undid him," he says. "It was both his highest public moment and, in it all, the seeds of his undoing."
