Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (142 page)

The most painful attack on Truman was delivered by critic Kenneth Tynan, whom Truman had regarded as a friend.

After a reunion with Truman over dinner in New York back in 1960, Tynan claimed, “Capote regaled us with a dazzling account of the crime and his friendship with the criminals. I said they seemed obviously insane, and he agreed that they were ‘nuts.’ I asked him what will happen to the killers. ‘They’ll swing, I guess,’ he told me.”

Tynan also claimed that he later met with Truman during the spring of 1965, after the court had ruled to hang Smith and Hickock. “He hopped up and down with glee, clapping his hands, saying, ‘I’m beside myself! Beside myself! Beside myself with joy!”

Tynan also claimed that Truman could have saved Smith and Hickock from the gallows had he spent money hiring specialists to prove their insanity. “For the sake of millions of dollars in book sales, he let them hang. It seems to me that the blood in which the book is written is as cold as any in recent literature.”

Tynan concluded, “No piece of praise, however deathless, is worth a human life. It’s sort of like letting the
Titanic
sink for literature’s sake.”

Stung by the criticism and the revelations, Truman shot back. He charged Tynan of “having the morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly.”

But very privately, to Jack Dunphy one night, he confided that, “I wanted them to die so that my book could live.”

In the aftermath of the publication of
In Cold Blood
, Truman was furious when literary prizes were awarded. He believed that he was “candidate
numero uno”
in line for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

He’d heard that
Newsweek’s
Saul Maloff had been the judge who had nullified his chance of winning, asserting that
In Cold Blood
“was too commercial.”

Truman responded with an scathing attack on Maloff’s novel,
Happy Families
. “This novel is just what Frank Sinatra needs,” he wrote. “Sinatra suffers from a bad case of insomnia, and this numbing little novel, an anthology of every
chichi
literary cliché, would tranquilize a kangaroo revved to the rafters on speed.”

He was also outraged when Norman Mailer won the National Book Award for his
Armies of the Night
, a book about his participation in the protests against the Vietnam War. Truman claimed that Mailer’s nonfiction book was “just a ripoff of my own literary style in
In Cold Blood.”

He also attacked prizes awarded to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for
All the President’s Men
, their Watergate exposé of the Nixon administration. “I created the literary format for them,” he claimed. “Mailer, Woodward, and Bernstein got the prizes, and I got nothing. Here’s my answer to the judges: ‘Fuck you! All of you!’”

***

Finally, Columbia Pictures paid $500,000 for the movie rights to
In Cold Blood [released late in 1967]
, a near record figure at the time. Having been impressed with
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
The Blackboard Jungle
, Truman approved the studio’s designation of Richard Brooks as director of the film adaptation.

Both Brooks and Truman opposed having the film shot in color, and both of them opposed the casting of Paul Newman as Hickock and Steve McQueen as Smith. Finally, Brooks won out, wrangled an agreement from the studio to shoot the film in stark black and white with two relative unknowns cast as the leads.

A Georgia native, actor Scott Wilson was cast as Hickock, with Robert Blake starring as Perry Wilson.

Wilson had made his screen debut that year in the role of a suspected murderer in the 1967
In the Heat of the Night
, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. Both Wilson and Blake, along with Truman, would appear on the cover of
Life
magazine on May 12, 1967, standing on a barren highway in the flat-lands of Kansas.

When Truman was introduced to Blake and Wilson, he was stunned by how closely they resembled Hickock and Smith, especially Blake.

“The first time I saw Blake, I thought I’d seen a ghost of Perry sauntering in out of the sunshine, with his slippery hair and sleepy eyes. I couldn’t accept the idea that this was someone pretending to be Perry—and not Perry himself. It was as if Perry had been resurrected, but was suffering from amnesia and remembered me not at all.”

Ironically, Smith had told Truman that his all time favorite movie had been
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(1948), starring Humphrey Bogart. As a child actor, Blake had been cast in that film as the little Mexican boy.

In another touch of irony, years later, Blake would be tried for the murder of his third wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, but would be acquitted. Subsequently, in a civil case brought by Bakley’s three children, the verdict would go against Blake, and he’d be found guilty of her wrongful death and ordered to pay $30 million. In February of 2006, he’d file for bankruptcy.

Paul Stewart, a veteran
film noir
actor, was cast by Brooks to fulfill the role that Capote played in real life with the two murderers.

The film adaptation of
In Cold Blood
would be nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director.

***

Truman’s researching and writing of
In Cold Blood
were depicted in the 2005 film
Capote
, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, which won him an Oscar as Best Actor for his portrayal of Truman. A year later,
Infamous
, another film about Truman, starred Toby Jones. The book was also adapted for a 1996 TV miniseries, starring Anthony Edwards as Hickock, Eric Roberts as Smith, and Sam Neill as Dewey.

Harper Lee was portrayed by Catherine Keener in the film
Capote
(2005); and by Sandra Bullock in
Infamous
(2006).

Chapter Forty-Three

Howard Austen
, Gore Vidal’s longtime companion, once claimed that the inspiration for his controversial novel,
Myra Breckinridge
, actually came after Gore had sat through a 1949 movie,
Siren of Atlantis
, a frothy romance co-starring Maria Montez, the sultry actress from the Dominican Republic and her French husband-at-the-time, Jean-Pierre Aumont.

To Gore, the so-called “Queen of Techni-color” represented all that was campy and false about Golden Age Hollywood. His iconoclastic novel, published amid the social turmoil of 1968, was his attempt to satirize it, although his published attack on the motion picture industry was long in its gestation period.

Written in the form of a diary, the novel, according to Gore, was inspired by “the megalomania of the Anaïs Nin diaries.”

In
Myra Breckinridge
, Gore’s most outrageous fictional endeavor, he satirized such themes as transsexuality, deviant sexual practices, and feminism—each of them filtered through the lens of an aggressively campy sensibility.

His character of Myra was a re-creation of the ultimate Hollywood
femme fatale
from the Golden Age.

Even though Myra is a fantasy invention of silicone and hormone injections, Gore claimed that her laugh is better than Carole Lombard’s, she has more warmth than June Allyson, she’s sweeter than Irene Dunne, she whispers better than Phyllis Thaxter, and her smile is more winning than Ann Sothern.