Wednesday, July 13, 2005

David Carr- In Cold Print: The Genre Capote Started

July 13, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR

It would please Truman Capote no end that there will be not one, but two, movies memorializing his life this year and next. Not only do "Capote" and "Have You Heard?" pivot around his favorite topic - Truman Capote - but the films' convergence, with the promise of conflict, adds a promise of deliciousness that he would have happily tied on a napkin for.

Fame and all of its discontents were persistent obsessions for Capote, which might explain why he seemed willing to do almost anything to obtain them. While reporting "In Cold Blood," the masterwork that serves as the frame for both films, Capote told some lies to tell a truth. As such, he became an object lesson in how journalistic truth is told and obtained. It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives.

In the five years Capote worked on the project, which detailed the 1959 murders in Holcomb, Kan., of four members of a farm family by a pair of drifters, he developed an emotional attachment to both killers, especially Perry Smith, another tiny man who craved recognition. But that relationship did not prevent him from developing a rooting interest in their deaths, without which he would have no end for his most important work.

"Capote" pivots around Philip Seymour Hoffman's inhabitation of the Capote persona: the author was, as Mr. Hoffman demonstrates, his own darn thing, but came to embody larger issues. A novelist turned journalist, Capote knew that some eggs needed to be dropped to make his soufflé. "In Cold Blood," published in 1965, was reported and told with its own remorselessness: he won over two killers, convincing them to tell their story, and then sold them out, a motif that the writer Joan Didion has since suggested is the fundamental transaction of journalism.

"Capote is one of those people who represents something larger than himself," said Bennett Miller, the director of "Capote," which is to be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. "I think that his ambition, his kind of success, and the downfall that followed are very contemporary."

It was apparently contemporary and resonant enough to interest two filmmakers. "Capote" is based on the Gerald Clarke biography of the same title (Random House, 1990), while "Have You Heard?" draws on George Plimpton's interviews in his book "Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career" (Nan A. Talese, 1997). But the basic differences end there. Each movie is framed by the reporting and writing of "In Cold Blood" and takes as its chief concerns Capote's motivation and methodology in telling that dark story.

"Capote," all but finished, is set for release on Sept. 30 (Capote's birthday), while "Have You Heard?," which stars Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sigourney Weaver, among others, is still being edited and has been pushed back to fall 2006 by its distributor, Warner Independent Pictures. While there may or may not be a market for both films - see "Valmont" and "Dangerous Liaisons," movies that depict a similar, albeit less charming, figure - there is plenty to turn over with a stick.

Both movies begin as Capote, a gay novelist from New York, drops improbably into rural Kansas to begin work on his story and watch as he sets about his spider-to-the-fly seduction. And both depict a talented but toxic storyteller, not a fabulist like Stephen Glass or a fabulist/plagiarist like Jayson Blair, but a writer who came up with a nonfiction novel that set the standard, for good or ill, for what came after it. It could easily be argued that there would be no "Armies of the Night," by Norman Mailer, or Bob Woodward's fly-on-the-wall series of contemporary historical books, without "In Cold Blood."

Most anyone who types today owes something to Capote. A novelist who developed a passing interest in real events, he transformed the hackwork of journalism into something far more literary and substantial.

"There was no one ever in American life who was remotely like Truman Capote," said Mr. Mailer, who once suggested that Capote was the best sentence writer alive. "Small wonder, then, if people are still fascinated by him."

From the beginning, Capote had an ambient neediness, a desire to be validated by anyone and almost everyone. Most journalists arrive at their profession with a similar bent - why take the gamble of making mistakes in public if not for the reward of recognition? But the profession requires cooperation: The subject must be enrolled in the enterprise, even though it is rarely in his or her express interest. Capote vividly demonstrated the faux footwork required - what is good for the writer is sold as good for the subject.

In doing so, he began a book genre, "literary journalism," which is built on intimacy. At its best, the author and, in turn, his readers learn what a subject thinks, feels, and fears. But the intimacy often requires a specific deceit: the journalist sits before the subject, all ears, endlessly sympathetic, determined to help the subject tell "his" (or "her") story. But it is never "his" story that is told, it is the one of the writer's choosing.

And once the pen hits the paper, all hell frequently breaks lose.

Jeffrey R. MacDonald, a former surgeon and captain in the Green Berets who was accused of murdering his family, found a seemingly sympathetic ear in Joe McGinniss, a nonfiction novelist who had written "The Selling of the President." He allowed Mr. McGinniss to sit in on his meetings with his defense team. But a funny thing happened on the way to the printing press with "Fatal Vision," Mr. McGinniss's account of the case - he came to believe that Mr. MacDonald had done precisely what he was accused of.

Janet Malcolm wrote an account of the journalistic seduction gone wrong in The New Yorker, suggesting that "the journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced moral anarchy." Ms. Malcolm herself was later sued by a disappointed and enraged source.
There are dozens of other examples, but Capote's primary sources were at the wrong end of the rope to do much litigating. In the film "Capote," Perry Smith hears that Capote has given a much-heralded reading in New York of a story he has called "In Cold Blood." Capote tells Smith that it is a mistake, that his book will be called no such thing.

"In order to tell the story he told, it requires a crafty and quick-thinking person who is not above manipulating the other person's hopes and dreams," said Douglas McGrath, director of "Have You Heard?"

The public has a well-established mistrust for the press. It is the people who endure journalism, in all of its blunt and wily manifestations, who hold it in the lowest esteem. They have learned, often painfully, that a fraud is embedded not so much in the telling, but in the finding out.

Although Capote's journalistic output was slim, there were other travails, including an accusation from Marlon Brando that he had taken a long off-the-record interview in Japan and used it for a searing profile. Lillian Ross, a contemporary of Capote's at The New Yorker, said in an e-mail message that William Shawn, then editor of the magazine, viewed Capote's work as suspect.
Shawn, she wrote, "not only had his doubts and regrets about having published Capote's work, especially the Brando piece, but also 'In Cold Blood.' "

"His influence was not a literary one," she added. "He demonstrated pragmatically to many journalists how to make money."

Capote's success or methods - take your pick - offended many people, including critics and some of his competitors. Tom Wolfe, who took the fictional narrative approach to new heights with "The Bonfire of the Vanities," is not among them.

"I always thought that he was much underrated by the lit-ry world," Mr. Wolfe said, using the pronunciation for effect. "Because he was so universally popular, it did not endear him to writers who can't stand people making a living on their writing."

Capote's success came at significant consequence. His planned follow-up to "In Cold Blood," "Answered Prayers," became a taunt, a novel that he never managed to finish, partly because it predicted that achieving what you desire can be crippling, according to Mr. Clarke's biography.
Reluctantly, after much prodding, Capote witnessed the executions of his two "In Cold Blood" protagonists, but in doing so, he built his own gallows. He was apparently unable to reconcile the needs of his story with the fate of the men involved.

"Before 'In Cold Blood,' Truman was a normal, if ambitious, person," Mr. Clarke said in an interview. "He said at the time that the book scraped him down to the marrow of his bones. It changed him."

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