BOOKS

An unbuttoned cocktail party

Bevis Hillier

TRUMAN CAPOTE: IN WHICH VARIOUS FRIENDS, ENEMIES, ACQUAINTANCES RECALL HIS TURBULENT CAREER edited by George Plimpton Picador, £20, pp. 498 In 1969 I published a book on posters. In it I quoted directly from so many people that I thought it necessary to insert this apologia in the introduction: I want to defend what some might consider an exorbitant use of direct quotation. I have never been able to understand the historian's enthusiasm for converting perfectly clear original statements into a mish-mash of para- phrase — the arrogant insistence that his subjects should speak through the muzzle (sometimes the megaphone) of his own style.. .

Ten years later, when working on my book Young Betjeman, I was again made aware of the virtues of 'oral biography' when interviewing, with my trusty tape- recorder, a group of elderly people who had been schoolmates of the poet at his first school in 1912. 'Of course, our games in the playground were always "French against English" ', one of the old ladies said. Those few words suddenly brought home to me — with a flash of insight what a far-off stretch of history Betjeman had been born into. Germany was not yet the enemy: the Kaiser, after all, was Queen Victoria's grandson. Children still looked back to the Napoleonic wars and the old enemy, France.

Much as I value direct recollection, how- ever, I as biographer expect to remain the ringmaster. Or the concert conductor here bringing in the bassoons, there motioning to the piccolos to pipe down. George Plimpton's idea of oral biography is different: he just sets down, in roughly chronological order, raw chunks of differ- ent people's memories of Truman Capote, including his own. He plucks brands from the burning — or perhaps one might say, in the case of some of his contributors, fag- gots from the old flames. No real commen- tary, no footnotes, no twitch of the editorial reins. Those raw vegetables they serve with the aperitif in restaurants are called crudités, and there is a certain crude- ness in the Plimpton method. It reminds me of those television language pro- grammes for schools in which young French people, or Germans, Spaniards or Italians, just gas away in their native tongue, with no translations or subtitles. The naive idea is that, by this process, English kids will sort of imbibe the foreign language, rather as they absorbed their own, from scratch. Forget irregular verbs.

Oral biography is not a new genre, of course. Henry Mayhew practised it in London Labour and the London Poor (1851-62). Plimpton himself has given us An American Journey: The Life and Times of Robert F. Kennedy and Edie, a key book of Sixties lore, about a member of Andy Warhol's court. The technique works better with some subjects than with others. It worked supremely well in Savage Grace (edited by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, 1985), about Antony Baekeland, the plastics (Bakelite) heir who killed his mother. And for similar reasons it works pretty well with Truman Capote. In both cases, somebody very far from the norm is remembered by people much nearer the norm. By synthesis, you arrive at a balanced view of the unbalanced.

Capote was born in New Orleans in 1924 and spent much of his childhood in Monroeville, a small town in Alabama. He became a messenger at the New Yorker. In 1946 his short story 'Miriam' was selected for the 0. Henry Memorial Award volume. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), made his name. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) made him money as a suc- cessful film. His masterpiece was In Cold Blood (1966), a 'non-fiction novel' about two men who murdered a Kansas farmer and his family. An excellent conventional biography of Capote, by Gerald Clarke, was published in 1988. What I remember most from it is the indecent, cat-on-a-hot- tin-roof impatience with which Capote waited for the appeals of the two convicts whom he had befriended to be turned down. He needed them to be executed, for two reasons: first, to give his book a telling climax (he attended the hanging); and second, so the two men would not be able to protest at the inaccuracy of his account. By a nice twist of irony, Capote had to die for the present book to be published. In his lifetime, no one would have dared to talk about him with such candour — Gore Vidal, perhaps, excepted. Capote's venge- fulness was too well known and feared. One of his tricks, when he had a real vendetta, was to ring Johnny Carson and ask to go on his television show that night, to put the boot in. Capote died convenient- ly young, at 59, in 1984, so Plimpton has been able to conscript a large cast of peo- ple who remember him. He has found both fans and bad-mouthers, including the implacable Vidal.

In a short preface, Plimpton likens the book to 'a cocktail party, in this cave of Truman Capote's acquaintances'.

With a glass in hand (probably vodka) our reader moves from group to group and listens in on personal reminiscences, opin- ions, vitriol and anecdote.

It is a good analogy. As a whole, the book is extraordinarily entertaining. A 'redneck will find the company too camp..And, as at a cocktail party, the rest of us will occasion- ally encounter somebody on whom we feel compelled to use the old ploy, 'Excuse me a moment, I just want to freshen up my drink.' A large part of Capote's life was spent in the silliest sort of café society, so we meet one woman who indulges in this orgy of name-dropping as she describes how she dolled herself up for Capote's famous `black-and-white' masked ball in New York in 1966: At Kenneth's [hairdresser] I had my hair dyed black on one side and powdered white on the other. Talk about a skunk! I wore it sort of like Madame Pompadour. Then I had a mask left over from the masked ball for Sheila Rochambeau that her stepfather, the Duc de Talleyrand, gave for her just outside Paris, where we all wore opera capes. Saint- Laurent did it for me — little black sparkles in it, cat's eyes with a little red in the corners. For Truman's it went perfectly with a black-and-white crêpe evening dress I already had from Simonetta or Princess Marietta or Galici, I forget which.

You might feel you could do without her; but one merit of oral biography is that the authentic 'flavour' of a person comes through in these monologues. If Proust had written it as satire, just think how we would savour that masterstroke of dropping three names at once with an forget which'.

The book is packed with funny stories, often on the bitchy side. There is the one about how Capote met the media mogul William Paley and his wife 'Babe'. The David Selznicks, invited to the Paleys' estate in Jamaica, asked if they could bring `Truman' along. The Paleys, thinking they meant Harry Truman, said, 'Absolutely. It would be our honour.' Expecting the for- mer president to walk through the door, they were astonished when the elfin, squeaky-voiced Capote appeared, trailing a ground-length Bronzini scarf.

There is Capote's later meeting with Peggy Lee, a singer he idolised. 'Peggy hadn't been too well; she moved slow because she had her oxygen tent with her.' She told him she had been reincarnated several times. She had been a princess, an Abyssinian queen and a prostitute in Jerusalem in the time of Christ. Capote pressed her on this last claim.

`Oh,' she said, 'I remember the Crucifix- ion very well.' He says, 'Oh?' She says, `Yes, I'll never forget picking up the Jerusalem Times and seeing the headline "Jesus Christ Crucified".' One of the best stories is told by a woman friend called Jan Cushing. She was going to a psychiatrist. Capote said, 'Oh, I know him well. Let's play a trick on him It was arranged that when she next visited the shrink, she should tell him, at 11 o'clock, `Doctor, I've found the man of my dreams. I don't need you any more.' She did so. The doctor said, 'I'm so happy, Mrs Cushing, that you have. I'm so happy that you have listened.' At which point an ashen-faced nurse entered with the news: `Doctor, Mrs Cushing's fiancé has arrived.' In pranced Capote in a cape and screamed, `Darling, you snuck out of bed without waking me. I'm so unhappy. I miss you so!' The doctor dropped his pencil. She never saw him again.

Capote was not all camp. Norman Mailer, who is as generous about him as Gore Vidal is ungenerous, calls him 'a ballsy little guy' and thinks his dealings with the Kansas police toughened him up. Others describe him as 'a bulldog' and a `bantam cock'. Less flatteringly, he was 'a prince who turned into a frog'. The black- and-white ball was the apogee of his fame; but when, in 1976, he published in Esquire extracts from his never completed roman a clef, Answered Prayers, the friends he betrayed virtually struck him off the social register. Where in 1966 everyone was ask- ing, 'Have you been invited to Truman's party?', ten years later the question was, `Are you speaking to Truman?' The novel- ist John Knowles says:

He imagined that these ladies were going to sit round and say, 'Oh, that little rascal, look what he's done this time! Isn't he too much!' Then they'd invite him to the yacht . . . They dropped him like a hot potato.

Others persuasively suggest that Capote knew he was committing social suicide. He had realised that he did not have it in him to be the American Proust, and was just bowing out. He went into a steep drink- and-drugs decline.

One of the few people who stuck by him was Kate Harrington, a young woman who had a room in his New York apartment. Her contribution — one of the coups of this book — begins, 'Truman was my father's lover.' Her father, John O'Shea, was one of the straight men Capote took pride in seducing. Capote hustled his friends into giving her a career as a model; but by her account she rebelled when he tried to make a Hollywood star of her. (Gerald Clarke's Capote biography sug- gests she tried but failed.) She is tender about Capote and does not feel she was manipulated. Something else this book adds to Clarke's is the claim by Harold Nye, a Kansas law enforcement official, that Capote and the more handsome of the two murderers 'became lovers in the peni- tentiary'.

Some Capote friends and enemies are missing from the symposium. Plimpton has failed to nobble (though not for want of trying) Harper Lee, who grew up with Capote in Monroeville. Capote is alleged to have helped her write To Kill a Mocking- bird. Then again, as passages from Capote's writings are included, why not pickings from other dead authors? I do not have Tennessee Williams's memoirs to hand, but would be surprised if they do not have pithy, if not pungent, things to say about Capote. Cecil Beaton, in Tangier in 1949, writes pages about him (The Strenuous Years: Diaries 1948-55, 1973), beginning: When first I became friends with Truman two years ago, he was fluttery and wraith- like, enjoying many affectations and frivolities. Now he has developed consider- ably; he doesn't think of himself as a pretty little kitten any more . . .

In the same year, Greta Garbo (whom Capote always wanted to play him in the biopic) wrote to Beaton (as quoted in Hugo Vickers's biography of the photogra- pher): Truman Capote isn't first-class, believe me. He wouldn't say the things he does if he were and he's so outrageous, such silly behaviour. He's not a person in the round . . .

The American critic Edmund Wilson, who had the rare distinction of turning down an invitation to the 1966 ball, described Capote (The Sixties, 1993) as 'a not unpleasant little monster, like a foetus with a big head', and wrote in his diary: Roger [Straus, publisher] says that the ball- room of the Plaza will be turned into one huge 'camp', and that when the moment of unmasking comes, the squeals will be heard all over New York.

The book could have done with sharper editing. For example, not all readers can be expected to know that `Ros Brisson' is the film star Rosalind Russell. One special danger of oral biography is the phonetic transcribing of tapes, with inadequate checking. So we get this from Diana Trilling: I . was very angry. I . . . wrote a long response and sent it off to the Observer. David Avsder did not print any responses.

I know the Honourable Astors sound like a Japanese flower arrangement, but they do have American roots. Remind me, next time I'm in New York, to check into the Waldorf-Avsderia.