America bouffe

Larry Adler

The Dogs Bark Truman Capote (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.90) "Jack Kerouac? That isn't writing, that's typewriting!" The remark made Capote the most quoted writer of the year, uttered, during a television chat show in that strange highpitched whine that made another writer re mark, "It's not Truman's fault — they always

Play him at the wrong speed." In 1948 he achieved instant celebrity with the publication bf. Other Voices, Other Rooms. If memory doesn't fail me, the celebrity wasn't hurt a bit by the photo on the dust jacket of young Truman, lying in a hammock, his hair cut in What I permit myself to call a lunatic fringe. He lists the American writers who influenced him; James, Twain, Poe, Cather Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett (not the Sarah Orne je.wett?), but fails to list another who I'm

'tiling to bet was a very strong influence

indeed. I mean Lillian Ross, who made the lucrative discovery that you can make a horse's ass out of anybody simply by quoting him directly. Miss Ross gave the full treatment to John ciluston, Louis B. Mayer and others in her famous Picture, an account of the making of The Red Badge of Courage. She made a pathetic slob out of Ernest Hemingway in her New Yorker account of a few days spent with him during his visit to Manhattan. (To be fair, Writing _

v‘. ming 'ay defended her against the critics by a forevvord when the piece was maije into a book.) But were she ever once to see Shelley plain, God help Percy Byshe. Capote uses that technique with equally

devastating effect in two pieces, both reproduced in the book. One is 'The Muses are _Heard', an account of a Russian tour by the Porgy and Bess company, and the other, 'The Duke in his Domain', is about neither Ellington nor John Wayne but rather Marlon Brando, in KYoto for location work on the Warner Brothers production of James Michener's novel, Sayonara. "Of all my sitters," writes CaP°te, in a preface, "the one most distressed was the subject of 'The Duke in His Domain', Marlon Brando." Capote, baby, you can say that again, but since you're not likely to, I'll say it for You. Marlon Brando was indeed distressed, and _with reason, since even Capote admits that Brando considered it "an unsympathetic, even treacherous intrusion . . ." Capote felt that rePortage cquld be made into an art and felt that the movie star "interview" (Capote's qu°tes) was the rock bottom of reportage, hence the greatest challenge. "After selecting Brando as the specimen for the experiment ." Brother! Did he, I wonder, ever tell Mr Brando that he considered him a specimen for an experiment? And was there ever a more highly talented, albeit unsuspecting guinea pig?

Capote believes that taking notes is death to

sPontaneity and as for using a tape recorder, the very thought of it causes him to italicise the hated words and add an exclamation point, thus -7"tape recorder!" He has, he claims, as his best piece of equipment, "a talent for mentally recording lengthy conversations, an ability I had worked to achieve while researching 'The Muses Are Heard'." Well, maybe he has and maybe Lillian Ross has too but if so, need it be used with such brutality? Who among us, were we to be reported verbatim, would emerge Other than as incoherent idiots? We all remember the tortured prose, the sentences strangled at birth, of an Eisenhower press Conference; what a shock it was to find that

J. F. Kennedy, in similar circumstances, fared no better. No, what we need from those who quote us is not justice — heaven forbid — but mercy. In fact Capote is merciful by allowing a pseudonym to a young man, given the name of Murray, who is there to help Brando write a film script, but whom he treats as a stooge. One feels sorry for Murray and glad that Capote did not use his real name. But I would have thought Capote above the device of using Japanese speaking English for comedy effects. The Ja panese have no letter "L" in their alphabet; we all know that. "Marron Brando, aporogies, derivery, preased, rike," is okay in a music-hall sketch, I suppose, but one expects better from a writer of Capote's stature.

He quotes Brando as commenting, with some contempt, on Josh Logan's directing technique. Logan, a man with one of the best track records in show business, as witness Mister Roberts, South Pacific, Picnic, is put down both by Capote and Brando, especially when Capote

quotes Brando as saying "I made an experiment. In this scene, I tried to do everything wrong I could think of. Grimaced and rolled my eyes, put in all kinds of gestures and expressions that had no relation to the part . What did Logan say? He just said, 'It's wonderful! Print it!'" But Josh Logan is simply too experienced a pro to be taken by any actor's tricks, even Brando's. He says this: "It was a scene where Brando is walking across a bridge and he sees some Japanese children. He makes faces for them, puts on an act for them. It is quite spontaneous on his part but it works wonderfully. Of course I said 'print it'. When you see the scene in the film — we used it, of course — you'll see how well it works."

Probably Capote's most famous work is the book In Cold Blood, about the murder of the

Clutter family by two young men, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. Capote won the trust and confidence of these two men, worked extreme ly hard for several years and produced this best-seller, about which I have always had mixed emotions. One cannot fault its profes sionalism — Capote, the former novelist, has learned how to be a first-rate journalist and has succeeded in making reportage into an art, as he said he would do. My doubt comes in the nature of the project. What did Smith and Hickock think they would _get out of all these talks with the writer from New York. They were condemned to death; did they, perhaps, hope that he, Truman Capote, could do something for them? I seem to remember Kenneth Tynan damning the book as an act of treachery. The book is not quoted in this collection but

there is an article. in Sunlight; The Filming of In Cold Blood'. And in it he manages a put-down of Perry Smith. When the police brought Smith and Hickock in to Garden City, Kansas, Capote was there, already at work on the book about the murders. After a long talk,

with Perry Smith, Smith says, "What I wanted to know is — were they any representatives from the cinema there?". I find the question unbearably sad but Capote manages to make fun of what he calls Smith's "pathetic linguistic pretensions (the careful insertion of words like 'cinema'), and of the kind of vanity that made him welcome 'recognition'." But Smith and Hickock were a meal ticket to Capote. Out of their murders (and their own deaths by hanging) he made a fortune. I felt queasy within myself about this posthumous betrayal. The other pieces in the book are neither as readable nor as interesting as the ones quoted above. Short pieces on Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound and so on, seem too trivial to merit a place between hard covers. The final piece is called 'Self-Portrait', in which Truman Capote interviews Truman Capote and how's that for the epitome of self-indulgence? Let us close with Capote on Capote.

Q: Are you cruel?

A: Occasionally. In conversation. Let's put it this way; I'd rather be a friend of mine than an enemy.

Well, er, yes.