Between literary genius and scandal

The story is as if it were invented by Truman Capote himself. A friend of Capote’s and the last hostess until his death, she received part of the American writer’s ashes as a posthumous present. Because she had promised Capote that she would always look after him, they carried his remains with them wherever they went. Until she died herself in 2015. In 2016, Capote’s name appeared in an irritating context. What was on the list of things to be auctioned at the Julien auction house in Los Angeles was not a manuscript, but the author himself, bottled in an urn. The bid of $43,750 exceeded the estimate by ten times. The buyer is unknown.

Capote’s ashes may stand on any mantelpiece in the world today, but in a strange way his fame remains immortal. As an author who was vain enough to want to penetrate the inner circle of the American super-rich in order to then dismantle them, Capote is both hero and devil: a stylist who has been accused of moral lack of style.

In November 1975, Capote published the story “La Côte Basque” in Esquire magazine. His girlfriends from high society appear in it. The setting is the chic New York restaurant after which the story is named. Capote had a warm metaphor for rich ladies: “swans.” And now he is wringing their necks, also metaphorically speaking. In his story he portrays them as stupid chickens and as brave Catholic housewives who put up with their husbands’ wildest escapades in order to maintain the appearance of bourgeois decency.

If anyone knew the true secrets of the inner circle, it was Truman Capote – the writer who, since the late 1940s, has been producing delicately dramatic novels such as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Grass Harp “In Cold Blood” had become famous. Capote’s charm, his wit and his sensitivity to human weakness made him the mascot of all those trying to carve out a place for themselves in the deception industry of booming America.

The writer became a confidant of women who had everything but were fundamentally unhappy. He knew their secrets and turned these secrets against them in the story “La Côte Basque”. It features Lee Radziwill, Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy’s younger sister, and rich heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Ann Woodward, widow of a banker and involved in an earlier murder case that Capote stirs up again in his story, commits suicide after the publication of Esquire.

First the scandal, then alcohol and drugs

The whole of America is trembling under the scandal, which is also evident in Europe. Marella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli, on whose yacht Capote spent his vacation, breaks away from him. The world into which the child, once unloved by his parents, has worked his way up, rejects him. Born on September 30, 1924 as Truman Streckfus in New Orleans and raised in rural Alabama, the author fell into an inner isolation from which he could no longer find his way out. He ends up with alcohol and drugs. Even if he is offered millions, the novel “Answered Prayers,” in which “La Côte Basque” was supposed to be a chapter, will never be finished.

Nelle Harper Lee, the childhood friend from the neighboring farm in Alabama and author of the famous novel “To Disturb the Nightingale,” will no longer have anything to do with Truman Capote. It actually all started with her. When the writer researches a quadruple murder in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, for his novel “In Cold Blood,” she is Capote’s right-hand woman – the comforter of an eccentric who believes the difference between truth and whole to know truth.

The author is convinced that the whole truth could only be found in literature. With his reportage-like novel, he became one of the co-founders of “New Journalism,” which would shape generations of more or less talented writers.

In 1959, a farm family in Holcomb was massacred in their home. The loot: $40. Truman Capote visits the two perpetrators Perry Edward Smith and Richard Eugene Hickock in their cells. There he organized real séances of psychological processing for his writing project. When asked about the motive, he comes particularly close to Perry Smith, who had a similar childhood fate as himself.

In the 2006 film “Cold Blood – On the Trail of Truman Capote,” young Daniel Craig plays his murderer and Toby Jones plays the obsessed author. An approach is choreographed down to the tiniest detail that, despite all empathy, always remains calculated. Smith gives everything, but for his book Capote also needs the very last. He is waiting for this with greater impatience. He needs a finale, a verdict, death by hanging.

After the two murderers are executed, a box is delivered to the book sales millionaire. It is the estate of Perry Smith. In the box are a few children’s drawings and a guitar.

The author celebrates himself

1966 is the big year of Truman Capote. The novel “In Cold Blood” is published and all of America learns how despicable acts can become great art. At the peak of his fame, the 1.65 meter tall, homosexual author with the fistula voice threw a party the likes of which New York had never seen before. 500 guests are invited to the “Black & White Ball” in the Plaza. The richest and most beautiful and a few less aristocratic friends of the writer.

He hadn’t been to a masked ball since he was a child and he wanted to fulfill this dream again, Capote told Vanity Fair at the time. After the lavish party comes the hangover, a writing crisis, during which he doesn’t do much other than leaf through the photo albums from the big party – until that fateful year in 1975, when he decides to publish “La Côte Basque”.

Truman Capote remains a myth. The writer is said to have given his girlfriend Joanne Carson a safe key shortly before his death. The remaining chapters of the book “Answered Prayers” could still be lying somewhere on a bench or in an American bus station. Although the master of deception and self-deception is quoted from the passages that were supposedly already written during his lifetime, very few connoisseurs actually believe that he ever existed.

Anuschka Roshani, editor of Capote’s works at the Kein & Aber publishing house, has chosen her new book “Truboy. My summer with Truman Capote” went on a search again, if you can call it that. Actually, the whole thing is more of a self-discovery trip. The American writer, the “Bübchen” or the “Golden Boy”, as she calls him, has to be seen through Roshani’s glasses, and that is a stylistic problem in many places.

If the author talks to the author’s contemporaries, it could be interesting if Roshani’s youthful excitement didn’t constantly interfere with the proceedings. She meets the journalist and writer Gordon Lish in a Starbucks on Madison Avenue in New York and writes: “Here I am, once again a shameful parasite on someone else’s past.” She wants him to tell me how he worked as Esquire in 1975. Fiction editor Capote recited a chapter from “Answered Prayers.”

They commented on Lish’s memories with sentences like: “Holymoly, what an announcement.” What one learns after using Roshani’s own lyre skills: Lish bribed Capote with a tailor-made gift. Through an extremely expensive carafe from Tiffany filled with pink peppered vodka. It was the time when the poet drank vodka by the bucketful.

Truman Capote was the sneak thief of New York society. He stole her hearts with his charm and almost lost her minds with his love for the truth. Was he able to understand what he was doing? “The artist is a dangerous person because he escapes all control.” “He is only controlled by his art,” he once said.

What was also obsessive about Truman Capote was the desire to become the American Proust. With the “Answered Prayers” project, he thought he was on the way there. But when the people he portrayed didn’t feel like they were in the world of the Guermantes and the Swanns, but only saw an uglier version of themselves, Truman Capote remained stubborn. “It’s Proust! It’s beautiful!” she wrote in the face of “Vogue” editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland during the interview.