If Truman Capote were alive, September 30, 2024, would be his hundredth birthday. When he died, almost forty years ago on August 25, 1984, he seemed already to have lived a century. That’s because his tiresome publicity clanged and ding-donged like a morose centennial bell. After still another drunken collapse in his final years, the question was no doubt asked by those who didn’t read the Times or Vanity Fair, or watch the talk shows: “Wasn’t he a writer of some kind? Didn’t he write that book about…?”
Leigh W. Rutledge began almost immediately after Capote’s death to write this poignant appreciation for Mandate. It’s also an elegy for a burned-out legend. Unlike those writers who sink into immediate obscurity when they die, Capote lives on in his writings and, unfortunately, in the tawdry drug-and-booze notoriety of his later years. How, one wonders, could he have let himself become a public spectacle, a laughing stock, a pathetic bum desperate for attention from the surgically emaciated socialites of Park Avenue and the Hamptons, those walking spectres who petted him like an organ grinder’s monkey. He shrieked and danced when they tossed him a peanut, and he hated them so much that he tried to cram them all into a — what? He intended Answered Prayers, his final attempt, as revenge writing, one more nonfiction novel. The result was an enterprise as desolate as the leavings on a plate at La Côte Basque, where Truman often luncheoned with Jackie, or Lee, C.Z., “Babe,” “Slim,” or Marella. (That’s Principessa Marella, as Truman liked to point out.)
Was In Cold Blood his best book? It’s the one that countless readers literally couldn’t put down. The one that kept people awake at night, jumping up at three a.m. to make sure the doors were bolted and the windows locked.
His decline began soon after that book’s succès de scandale. If only he had followed the advice of Flaubert, a writer he admired: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” All too often, Truman Capote was violent and original in his life and regular, a bit too eager to please, in his work.