Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies
by Tison Pugh
Bantam Books. 497 pages, $28.95
Truman Capote attained the kind of fame associated with a movie star or television personality rather than a writer. His familiar TV persona was that of an effeminate, outrageous, and rather bitchy gay man. His ability to achieve such notoriety against the homophobic backdrop of the 1960s and ’70s makes him an important figure in modern gay history, apart from his literary merit. Capote has recently received a mini-revival as a subject of scholarly interest.
The great virtue of Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies is its comprehensiveness. Pugh, a medievalist who also writes on film, details the many cinematic and televised adaptations of Capote’s novels and short stories, several of which have been filmed two or three times. Pugh surveys Capote’s career as a screenwriter, an actor, and as a theatrical and cinematic character both in film and on television. The archival work on Capote’s unproduced teleplays is especially interesting and unexpected. Anyone seeking a handy guide to Uncle Sam’s Hard Luck Hotel, Capote’s unproduced 1973 teleplay for an NBC series about a halfway house for parolees, need look no further.
Pugh is more interested in cataloguing Capote’s career than in analyzing its contents. For instance, he records Capote’s thoughts on his own and others’ fame and notes the unusual prominence of his subject’s gay persona, but he doesn’t ask how this celebrity came about, much less what it meant to his public. In general, his critical apparatus is defined by noticing how queerness creeps into adaptations of Capote’s work, despite considerable censorship. Much of this is fascinating, especially in unusual cases such as the adaptation of Capote’s campy, gruesome story “Children on Their Birthdays” into a Christian family film. Pugh also makes some useful observations about Capote’s sustained interest in pre-adolescent gay characters.
Too often, however, Pugh’s research raises questions and leaves them unanswered. For example, he devotes a whole chapter to Capote’s failed attempt to make Lee Bouvier Radziwill into a movie star by turning the classic 1944 noir film Laura into a TV movie in the late ’60s. Radziwill was the sister of Jackie Kennedy and the wife of a Polish prince, and Capote seems to have thought that her glamour was sufficient to compensate for her lack of talent. But why was he so invested in her career as a performer? More broadly, why was he so invested in the rich, upper-class women he called his “swans”? And why choose Laura, a mystery about a woman who’s the subject of an æsthete’s murderous obsession, a man who, if not gay, is certainly not straight? Pugh unearths fascinating details, but I kept waiting for him to make some sense of it all.
When he does offer some analysis, a different kind of question arises. For example, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate the inadequacy of Capote’s script for the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby, which was rejected in favor of one by Francis Ford Coppola. But the interesting question is why Capote proved unequal to this assignment. He was considered to be a reliable, hard worker by the studios, and Pugh documents the success of his screenplays for Beat the Devil, Indiscretions of an American Wife, and especially The Innocents. So what happened?
Such questions do not detract from Pugh’s achievement in unearthing a bounty of archival material, much of it ephemeral. Movies and television were not the most important of Capote’s concerns, but they were certainly more important than is commonly recognized. Pugh offers scholars a great gift by providing what he calls a “Cinema Capoteana,” a bibliography of all of his screenplays and all adaptations of his work.
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Jeff Solomon is a lecturer at the University of Southern California. His book Fabulous Potency: Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein will be published next year.
