Finished!

A bit ago, I finshed reading Capote, a biography by Gerald Clarke. It is a 560-page book, so this is no mean accomplishment. I really have ripped through it - it falls into the "I couldn't put it down" category. This despite the fact that the last hundred pages or so - Truman Capote's final years - were very painful reading. I mentioned in an earlier blog post that after the publication of his finest work, In Cold Blood, his life went downhill. Well, I had no idea. In Cold Blood came out in 1966. He lived another 18 years. He accomplished some things during the next nine years or so, and there were days, maybe even weeks, when one could say that he enjoyed his life. But October, 1975, was a real turning-point. That was when a chapter of what he regarded as his true magnum opus, a book that he had titled Answered Prayers, a work he fervently believed would place him alongside Proust in the Olympiad of writers, was published in Esquire magazine. It was called La Cote Basque, 1965. In it, a society grand dame given the name "Lady Coolbirth," regales those at her table in a chic Manhattan restaurant named in the title, with an endless stream of very steamy gossip. It is spellbinding in the story, and it was spellbinding to the readers of Esquire. But not all readers. Some of them recognized themselves in the gossip. Truman Capote had packed into this story very intimate secrets of the lives of the rich and famous that had been shared with him in confidence, but were now revealed to the public. Even if the characters had been fictionalized, it was not difficult to identify the real culprits. Capote's high society friends, people like Bill and Babe Paley, Lee Radziwell and her sister, Jackie Kennedy, Gloria Vanderbilt, etc. - the list is long - were outraged and unforgiving. They had been betrayed. After that, Capote was ostracized, shunned, persecuted, even in some cases physically abused. Meanwhile, he was drinking way too much, popping scores of various drugs, dealing with one health crisis after another, constantly moving, making highly inappropriate sexual liaisons, eventually going in and out of treatments centers and hospitals with increasing frequency - it is unbelievable. He is unable to write; he never finishes Answered Prayers. He is increasingly alone and miserable. It does NOT leave one with a desire to be a great writer!

Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy outside La Cote Basque.