Truman Capote: The Most Perfect Writer

Norman Mailer called Truman Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation.” Perhaps he was. The simplicity of his prose is deceiving. Like Hemingway, there often seems to be another tale - one of greater importance – hidden behind the one you’re reading.  Such a skill cannot be learned. It flows from the deepest realms of the soul and often, it seems, bespeaks trouble.

Truman Capote at his peak 

Capote termed his great work, In Cold Blood, a non-fiction novel.  In my many ways, his life followed the precepts of this genre: fact was hidden as fiction, and fiction was presented as fact. In the end, no amount of drugs and alcohol could meld the fact/fiction parallax, and grief became too severe.

Party (and host) of the Century

He said: “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.”

Perhaps his greatest creation really was the Party of the Century. For the event, such as it was, came forth from Capote’s imagination, passion, and ambition.  Never before had there been anything like it. It’s as if The Party was a living, danse macabre of his psyche.

And after it ended and the last guests left, he was forever spent.

He was spent forever

Capote filled the ensuing years with sad, public displays of debauchery and rare, incomplete offerings of former brilliance, his talent eroded by pills, sophomoric disputes, mendacity, and disappointments.

The strange story of Truman Capote certainly wasn’t written by him. There’s an unimaginative coarseness to his declining years; a too-obvious narrative not found in his words; a hopeless, drunken weave toward darkness that engenders cliché. No, whoever wrote it has no talent at all.

Of Peripheral Celebrity and Collateral Damage: The ballad of Suki Potier

Suki Potier: Collateral
Damage

You’ve read the news, oh boy: December 18, 1966, Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, plows his Lotus into a van on Redcliffe Gardens, South Kensington. Dead. He is 21. John Lennon hears about it and writes A Day in the Life…something about a lucky man who made the grade but blew his mind out in a car.

Browne’s passenger that day? Model and all-around It Girl Suki Potier.

If ever someone walked under a rain cloud through the rarefied world of 1960s popism, it was poor Suki.

What to make of peripheral celebrities who suffer collateral damage? They appear as secondary characters, necessary to turn the pages of history.

Brian Jones. Suki. Tara Browne.
Bad karma

It wasn’t long after Browne’s death that Potier surfaced in the arms of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Given what we know now about Brian Jones and women, this wasn’t going to turn out well.

July 3, 1969: Potier leaves Jones’ country house just thirty minutes before he drowns. Not quite in the passenger seat this time, but close.

Jones/Potier: Blonde on Blonde

Then, after Jones’ death, she marries wealthy Hong Kong business man Robert Ho.

And it’s now that the rain cloud bursts. June 23, 1981: Suki and husband die in a car crash while on holiday in Portugal.

Fate can be cruel but rarely is it so aggressively personal.

Veruschka: An unwavering sense of purpose

1944, East Prussia. Along with a small group of fellow heroes, Heinrich Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler using explosives packed in a briefcase. The assassination fails and Hitler retaliates a few days later by having Heinrich — and his brethren — murdered.

Heinrich was Veruschka’s father.

That's our back story.

The ancient Greeks believed there are three aspects to beauty: symmetry, proportion, and harmony. But that analysis doesn't touch on the moment of inception. Can beauty be borne of tragedy? Could such circumstances hyper-inflate the Greek triad?

We all know that beauty is a lot more than strategic bone structure and straight teeth. We know that there’s a mystery to it, that it’s somehow intertwined with personality, with a particular attitude toward Life — and Death. We all know that.

And we know that Death and Sex are close friends. (That's the thin mystery of James Bond). They need each other. Perhaps the relationship seems abusive, at least while you’re hidden, memorizing their slow movements through a window. But they’re opposites and each finds the other bewitching and dark and dangerous.

Beauty and Life are what remains when Death and Sex leave the party. Beauty is dumb fun. Life lies, all the time, without exception, to every one.

When Death ends up with Beauty, you get fallen angels — such as Vera Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort, our Veruschka, one of the top 1960’s models.

After Heinrich’s murder, his daughters and wife passed the war in labor camps. They were lucky to survive.

By 1960, Veruschka was a full-time model.

Richard Avedon called her the most beautiful woman in the world…but you know those photographer types…By 1966, when she appeared in Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’ (in the most celebrated/imitated photographer – model sequence ever filmed) she had hit the big time.

Watch that sequence today. She had been sick and was too skinny and weak. Are those eyes dead or disengaged, jaded beyond salvation or in hiding? Maybe beauty gets its strength from the soul: it’s a direct current wired straight through the eyes. You rarely see Veruschka with sunglasses.

That’s her quality, deep-cave inscrutability that finds light even under coats of body paint, an art form she developed long before it was an art form. (Inscrutable for sure: What's she doing at James Bond's gambling table in 'Casino Royale'?) Veruschka was the first to understand that models need background a lot more than background needs models…so she became the background, disguised and melding her thin form, naked and still, a child resting, pushed out of its cloudy nest.

1965

Perhaps it was her defiance, born of that Death-Sex alchemy, so different from the daffodil-swinging marianne-faithfuls of Carnaby Street, a toughness that somehow redefined obvious vulnerability, that lightly lampooned Beauty, that
made Sex seem more of a challenge than a pastime.

Her father was brave, not a transferable quality, but one that can be attained through a deliberate, unwavering sense of purpose, be it facing death… or the cold dead glass of a camera.

Jayne Mansfield...Never let a God fall in love with you

Assuming the titular throne

It takes a little skill and a lot of luck for a career to span pop movements. Most celebrities get creamed trying to jump the cultural chasm, especially if they’re B-level.

By the mid 1960s, Jayne Mansfield was an odd anachronism. Her pneumatic proportions had no place beside the incipient sophistication of slim new girls like Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Mia Farrow and Faye Dunaway. Her voice was an audible cartoon, a breathless Marilyn Monroe underpinned with rinky-dink Betty Boop, made sad with aimless, self-destructive irony.

With Monroe’s death in 1962, it was assumed Mansfield would assume the Titular Throne, but it never happened. That throne remains forever empty, Titularless.

In 1956, she signed a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. But they dropped her five years later. Like many entertainers with calcified careers, Jayne headed to Las Vegas, commanding $8,000-$25,000 per week for her nightclub act. Unfortunately, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and once off the Strip she was reduced to playing dinner theatres. In June 1967, following a dinner theatre gig in Biloxi, Mississippi, she died at night on a highway in an automobile crash. She was thirty-four.

She remains. It's a mystery.

Mansfield was a pro and needed little provocation to expose her assets, staging a series of wardrobe malfunctions. Critics often dismissed her as more exhibitionist than actress.

During the length of her career, there were many women hip-rolling around Hollywood who were far prettier, had more alluring bodies, and displayed at least rudimentary acting skills, but none succeeded like Jayne Mansfield. They're all gone. She remains. It's a mystery.

The ancient Greeks believed those whom the gods love die young... with no time to gasp final wisdom on a Mississippi highway at midnight; no chance to suffer the crushing shame of silence where there once roared applause. 

Maybe the mystery staggers lost down that thousand-year-old rainy neon Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Lesson: Never let a God fall in love with you.

Bobby Kennedy near the Vanishing Point



Bobby: near the vanishing point

Shortly before he died, Bobby Kennedy was photographed (May 24, 1968) alone on an Oregon beach with his dog close by. The photograph was taken by Bill Eppridge. It made the cover of Life magazine the following month.

Kennedy has his back to us in full flight. He’s neither running to something nor away. He’s cradled in ghostly aspic, protected for the moment.

Already he is outdistancing Freckles the dog, who will soon weary of the sun and sea and sit and watch as the man thins into the blue surf and sky.

Notice that Kennedy’s feet no longer touch the ground: they no longer need the ground. The tide has already buried his footprints.

The next time we see him (June 6, 1968), once again through the lens of Bill Eppridge, he is in a coma on the floor of a kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel, a bullet in his brain, and he’s struggling to lift his head but already he's alone.

It’s obvious to me that the two photographs are out of order.

Somehow Bill’s camera has slipped a sprocket and the last image we should see, that we must remember, is that of a spirit ascending. So that’s the way I play it.



Reverse the order...

Time can be so arrogant. It remains for us to make patterns that make sense to the soul. Einstein said that hours and minutes are more flexible than warm rubber. In the Big House, there are no clocks.


For Bobby Kennedy is still on the beach, but it's far from Oregon, near the Vanishing Point, where clouds sail.