Original subtitles

(wind blowing)

(soft music)

I was 16 years old when I met Tennessee.

He was 13 years older than I was.

We became great friends.

It really was a sort of intellectual friendship,

though people inevitably thought otherwise.

(fireworks)

Truman was magical and sweet

and ferociously curious when I first knew him.

Life was a wonderful basket of gifts

he loved digging through,

and he took and he shared.

He was adorable.

Tennessee had a remarkable laugh.

It wasn’t coarse or vulgar or even especially loud.

It just had an amazing sort of throaty,

Mississippi-riverman ring to it.

You could always tell when he walked into a room,

no matter how many people were there.

People to whom I first showed my writing

said I couldn’t write, shouldn’t write.

But I feel that if you are a writer,

you are going to be one

and absolutely nothing in the world will interfere.

Writing is a simple impulse,

at heart, a simple function.

It was never meant to be a profession,

perhaps not even a vocation.

It was simply meant to be a single man’s way

of calling out to others.

The only thing that really mattered

to Tennessee was writing.

He was a compulsive writer,

like some people are compulsive readers

or drinkers or whatever it is.

And of course he’d just go on writing and writing

and writing and writing.

Truman wanted more than any of us

to be famous and loved and envied.

It was not enough that he had been

a good friend to many of us.

He had to be a good friend to Greta Garbo, Albert Camus,

James Dean, and Jesus,

and anyone else who had newsprint that day.

All of us wanted to be noticed.

All of us.

The fantasy of affirmation begins

when you’re the teased queer

on schoolyards and in classrooms.

One day, you tell yourself,

I’ll be famous and powerful and beloved.

Will you welcome the man who’s that magnificent writer...

Will you welcome a great dramatist...

...Mr. Truman Capote.

...Mr. Tennessee Williams.

(applause)

(lively music)

(unintelligible chatter)

Come and sit down.

Come and sit down.

(applause continues)

You’re a star.

At what age did you realize

that you were a star writer personality?

A star?

I’ve gotta separate these two things...

(chuckles)

A personality or a writer?

Well, you’re sort of...

You’re a mixture of the two.

What was the spur that initially started

you writing, do you think?

Well, my mother bought me a typewriter

when I was 13.

And I think I’d already shown some interest in writing.

Probably around 11.

People say they can see you in your plays,

and they can see your family...

Oh, I’m very personal as a writer, yes,

I don’t mean to be, I just am...

unavoidably.

(soft music)

I think the only thing I’ve done that is,

what you would call an autobiographical work,

was The Glass Menagerie.

It was the first hit that I had.

The play is memory.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted.

It is sentimental.

It is not realistic.

I am the narrator of the play

and also a character in it.

Look Mother, I’ve got no thing,

no single thing in my life here

-that I can call my own! -Lower your voice.

Yesterday, you confiscated my books!

-You had to-- -Yes, I did, I did!

I took that horrible novel back to the library,

that awful book by that insane Mr. Lawrence.

(laughs)

I cannot control the output of a diseased mind

or people who cater to them.

I won’t allow such filth in my house!

No, no, no, no, no!

I automatically fall asleep

every time I go to The Glass Menagerie

despite marvelous performances.

I guess it’s the monotone of that woman’s voice.

It’s almost based on my mother.

(laughter)

The other characters are my mother, Amanda,

my sister, Laura,

and a gentleman caller who appears in the final scene.

There is a fifth character in the play who doesn’t appear

except in this larger-than-life size photograph.

This is our father who left us a long time ago.

See how he grins?

He’s been absent going on 16 years.

What do you think the themes are

of The Glass Menagerie then?

The necessity...

...to break...

...tender bonds, you know?

If you are to realize yourself,

it’s necessary to break certain strong but tender bonds.

You live in a dream!

You manufacture illusions!

Where you going? Where you going?

-Where you going? -I’m going to the movies.

Go to the moon, you selfish dreamer!

Writing was always an obsession with me,

quite simply something I had to do.

It was as if I were an oyster

and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell.

Then a pearl started forming around the grain,

and it irritated me, made me angry,

and tortured me sometimes.

But the oyster can’t help

becoming obsessed with the pearl.

(geese honking)

Other Voices, Other Rooms

was an attempt to exorcise demons,

an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt,

for I was not aware,

except for a few incidents and descriptions,

of it being in any serious degree autobiographical.

Rereading it now,

I find such self-deception unpardonable.

Our younger viewers may never have seen

an outrageous photograph of you

that appeared on a book cover...

It wasn’t outrageous, it was terrific.

(laughter)

It was just a casual picture, really.

And they put it on the back of the jacket and...

It received as much attention as the book itself.

-Oh, far more. -Yeah.

(laughs)

In fact, the reviewers reviewed the photograph.

(footsteps in grass)

In Other Voices, Other Rooms, Joel, your main character,

you said what Joel wanted was to be loved.

Has that been a problem with you as well?

I was loved by my mother and father,

but I never saw them.

Except for my cousin, Sookie,

there was a great absence of...

of love in my childhood.

In the end, I suppose everybody has to invent his own world,

and that’s truly what I did.

I invented myself,

and then I invented a world to fit me.

What would you say is the most memorable book

by somebody else that you’ve ever read?

Ah, let’s see...

The most memorable book by somebody else...

Hmm.

Um, well, I suppose, um...

Moby Dick.

I read it when I was about 14 years old,

and I suddenly for the first time

saw all the real possibilities of art and writing.

There are many things in world literature

that I consider better than Moby Dick,

but that was the first book that ever made

a really tremendously deep impression on me.

I think the most moving writer to me

that ever lived was Chekhov.

He’s almost been a fetish with me, Chekhov,

I read everything about him I can find.

I love his letters, his journals,

and of course his theater.

(chatter)

Do you think that your locale, the south,

is similar to Chekhov...?

Very much. Very much.

Like czarist Russia, yes.

(whistling)

Can I help you, ma’am?

Well, they--they told me to take a streetcar named Desire,

and then transfer to one called Cemeteries,

and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields.

There’s your car now.

I started Streetcar when Menagerie was playing

in Chicago.

Thank you.

And the only idea I had was of a--

a young woman waiting for a beau who doesn’t arrive.

You know?

That’s all I had to begin with,

but I began to weave around it.

(mellow music)

You must be Stanley.

I’m Blanche.

Oh, you’re Stella’s sister.

Yes.

Oh, hiyah.

Yeah, where’s the little woman?

In--in the bathroom.

Oh...

Well, where you from, Blanche?

Uh, I live in Oriole.

I...

Hey, you mind if I make myself comfortable?

My shirt is sticking.

Please, please do.

"Be comfortable," that’s my motto up where I come from.

It’s mine, too.

It’s hard to stay lookin’ fresh in hot weather...

Why, I haven’t washed or even powdered and here you are.

Well, you know, you gotta be careful,

you’re sitting around in a damp thing,

you catch a cold.

Especially when you’ve been exercising hard

like bowling is.

I think that Blanche and Stanley Kowalski

are the two sides of every human nature.

Stanley and Blanche were on a collision course

and one of them had to break,

and the one that broke was Blanche.

I feel that I am both Stanley and Blanche.

(typing)

Why did I write?

I think because I found life unsatisfactory.

I needed to create an imaginary life

in an imaginary world and, you know, imaginary characters.

(soft music)

I don’t think that what an artist uses as a subject

is as important as how he uses it.

A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary,

and through sheer artistry and willpower,

turn it into a work of art.

That occasionally, very rarely,

in sudden moments one feels in art

a state of grace,

where it’s as though a voice from a cloud

is speaking to you and dictating to you

what is transmitted through your hands.

I invariably have the illusion

that the whole play of a story,

its start and middle and finish,

occur in my mind simultaneously,

that I am seeing it in one flash.

But in the working out, the writing-out,

infinite surprises happen.

Thank God, because surprises, the twist,

the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere,

is the unexpected dividend,

that joyful little push that keeps a writer going.

Marilyn Monroe was my first choice

to play the girl, Holly Golightly.

Holly had to have something touching about her,

unfinished.

Marilyn had that.

At that age, she was exactly right for the part.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

(laughter)

But Paramount double-crossed me

and gave the part to Audrey Hepburn,

although she did a terrific job.

(soft music)

Don’t you just love it?

Love what?

Tiffany’s!

The book was really rather bitter,

and Holly Golightly was real.

A tough character,

not an Audrey Hepburn type at all.

A girl can do as well as that

on trips to the powder room.

I mean, any gentleman with the slightest chic

will give a girl a $50 bill for the powder room.

Now, always ask for cab fare too.

That’s another $50.

(mellow music)

Holly Golightly was not precisely a call girl.

She had no job but accompanied men

to the best restaurants and night clubs,

with the understanding that her escort

was obligated to give her some sort of gift.

Mag darling, what are you doing here?

The main reason I wrote about Holly,

outside of the fact that I liked her so much,

was that she was such a symbol

of all these girls who come to New York,

and spin in the sun for a moment,

like mayflies, and then disappear.

I wanted to rescue one girl from that anonymity,

and preserve her for posterity.

New York is like a city made out of modeling clay.

You can make it whatever you want.

It’s the only city in the world

in which you can have totally separate lives,

groups of friends that don’t know one another,

or anything about one another.

Although I can live for long stretches

in mountainous or seaside solitude,

primarily, I am a city fellow.

I like pavement.

The sound of my shoes on pavement.

Stuffed windows, all-night restaurants,

sirens in the night.

Sinister but alive!

Book and record shops that, on impulse,

you can visit at midnight.

And in that sense,

New York is the world’s only city city.

(mellow jazz music)

The insidious thing about New York

is that you play a little game of importance

and begin to believe it

because it is nurtured by others playing

their little games of importance, too.

It is all an artificial aura, created by New York.

Gore Vidal was a handsome kid

and I was quite taken by his wit

as well as his appearance.

We found that we had interests in common

and we spent a lot of time together.

Please don’t imagine that I am suggesting

that there was a romance.

We merely enjoyed conversation

and a lot of laughter together.

I rather liked Gore.

He was amusing, bright, and always very vinegary.

We were both terribly young, and at the same time,

very knowledgeable about what we were doing.

(energetic music)

(crowd chatter)

One evening after dinner at The Plaza,

Gore and I decided to visit Tennessee,

who was living nearby.

But Tennessee was not at home.

I had been out late one evening,

and when I returned to the apartment,

I heard the voice of Truman Capote,

shrill with agitation.

In the apartment were Truman, Gore,

and a female policeman.

They were called the "Bo-Peep Squad"

in those days.

The lady on the Bo-Peep Squad

had been passing along by patrol-car

as they were climbing through the transom.

She pursued them into the pad,

and she was now holding Gore and Truman

for breaking and entering.

"Whose house is this?" demanded the officer.

"It belongs to Tennessee Williams," I said.

"And I am Truman Capote."

She said, "Who?"

"Here’s a copy of Other Voices,

I want to prove to you that I am a writer."

When Tennessee showed up, she asked him,

"They broke into your house.

Do you want to press charges?"

I said, "Listen, Tennessee!

Don’t you do anything of the sort!"

I said, "Well, they weren’t here when I left, I know that."

At that time, I was considered way beyond the pale.

I was the only public character

who didn’t care what anybody said or thought.

You’re very frank about your homosexuality

in the memoirs.

It must have been an enormous pressure

on you as a boy in that sort of society.

I was aware of course,

for a long time before it ever surfaced,

that I had a homosexual tendency.

I was a very slight youth.

I don’t think I had effeminate mannerism

but somewhere deep in my nerves

there was imprisoned a young girl,

a sort of blushing school maiden,

much like the one described in a certain poem or song.

I didn’t feel as if I were imprisoned

in the wrong body.

I wasn’t transsexual.

I just felt things would be easier

if I were a girl.

My mother said to me,

"I’m taking you to Dr. Murphy.

I think you’re a homosexual,

and I want him to give you some male hormone shots."

In effect, she was saying,

"I think you’re a homosexual, you little monster."

(soft music)

(water trickling)

As time goes on,

you finally settle down on one side or another,

homosexual or heterosexual.

I was homosexual,

and I never had any guilt about it at all.

(chimes tinkling)

I ache with desires that never are quite satisfied.

This promiscuity is appalling really.

One night stands.

The cold and beautiful bodies of the young.

They spread themselves out like a banquet table,

you dine voraciously and afterwards,

it is like you had eaten nothing but air.

Animals have a season for it.

But for me, it was a round-the-calendar thing.

I was just terribly over-sexed, baby.

Did you find yourself being very, very guilty

about your homosexuality then?

-I must have, don’t you think? -Yes.

I must have had terrific sexual repressions

for sensuality to have permeated my work

as strongly as it has.

Shame, shame, shame on you

(shouting)

Baby Doll was condemned by Cardinal Spellman,

the Archbishop of New York,

as a "degrading picture

that stimulated immorality and crime."

I know about you, and you’re making me very nervous.

(threatening shout)

(screaming)

Hoo-hoo! Hiyah! I’ll get ya!

And he instructed those under his spiritual care

to stay away from it "under pain of sin."

(shouting)

Despite such condemnation,

Baby Doll received four Academy Award nominations,

including best screenplay.

(laughter)

I was very late in having a consummated--

I never even masturbated, you know,

till I was, um, let’s see, 26.

I never had a consummated love affair until I was 27.

I never had a consummated homosexual affair

until I was 28.

People would not pursue me.

I was always the one who pursued.

(chuckles)

But I did quite successfully.

(laughs)

And I had a 14-year love affair.

-With Frank? -Frank Merlo.

He was a great, great person.

He created a lovely life for me.

Everybody loved him.

(energetic music)

Tomorrow, Frank and I are going over to Ischia.

Truman and his new lover, Jack Dunphy,

whom he imported here from the United States,

are already there.

(laughter, chatter)

Ischia is a dream.

The water is still too cold for swimming,

but there is a long walk you can take among the hills

to some radioactive hot springs.

They are supposed to give you marvelous

and quite indiscriminate sexual energy.

I expect Truman’s lover

will be making frequent excursions there

if the affair is to be one of extended duration.

Jack is a very steady person,

a very good writer, a big student of languages,

a great outdoors person and a fabulous skier.

There’s never any competition between us.

He is the only person I trust one hundred percent.

He is everything to me.

He is not my shadow.

He is not my alter ego.

Jack is the only person I will love

until the day I die.

Truman has been wrapped around Jack

like a boa constrictor practically every minute

except when he was making little invisible pencil scratch

in a notebook that is supposed to be his next novel.

Merlo and Tenn latched onto us like barnacles.

Taken in tiny doses, I’m really very fond of them both,

but darling, I can’t tell you what it’s been like.

Frankie nags Tennessee all day and night

and Tennessee, I have discovered,

is a genuine paranoid.

I was with Jack for 30 years.

We’re still very great friends.

We didn’t break up at all.

I just stopped sleeping with him, that’s all.

Which is more powerful do you think,

friendship or love?

Friendship.

I mean, I actually-

I--I think friendship and love

are exactly the same thing.

How do you mean?

Well, obviously sex is not love.

I mean, it’s a temporary situation, isn’t it?

I mean, sex can lead to love, obviously,

but--but friendship,

real friendship inevitably leads to love.

There can’t be any friendship

unless there’s a real friendship.

But then one doesn’t have that many friends in a lifetime.

But if friendship leads to love, must it also,

does it normally lead to sex, too?

No.

Friendship lead to sex?

No, friendship, once it’s gone to love?

It ought to--

(chuckles)

In a--in a perfect world, it would, but the--

no, I mean, when friendship has gone to love,

does it always lead to sex?

Friendship has gone to love...

No.

You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of sex,

do you really?

Well, that’s not true either.

But, I mean, I just don’t see what--

what connection this really falls,

because, you see, I don’t think that sex

has anything to do with friendship.

I think that it’s very difficult

to have a sort of sexual relationship

with somebody who actually is a friend.

What is love?

Love is a feeling, isn’t it?

What sort of feeling?

Oh...

Ah, well, there’s sexual love.

I think sexual love is usually

the best introduction to love.

But I do think, uh, there is something beyond it.

How often have you felt that purification of love?

How often have you gone beyond that?

I--I’ve never enumerated the times.

I’ve never lived without feeling love though.

-Really? -Yeah.

I’m talking too intimately to you!

Let’s get on to something...

(laughs)

Let’s get on to something more general.

(laughs)

Have you ever been in love?

Oh yes, mm-hm.

-Often? -No. Twice.

(audience laughs)

And was it just like heightened friendship then?

Yes.

(audience laughs)

(chuckles)

Have you found you’ve had more sex relationships

than love relationships or less?

(audience laughs)

Let’s see, more sex...

No, I’ve had more love relationships

than sex relationships.

But you only had two love relationships?

Yes.

Oh, wait, then you’re trapping me--

you’re trapping me!

(audience laughs, claps)

You’re trapping me.

(laughs)

Pretty good, pretty good,

but you didn’t quite get away with it.

(laughs)

I love you, and that’s worth fightin’ for.

Not Skipper!

-Skipper was no good! -Maggie!

Maybe I’m no good either.

Nobody’s good.

But Brick, Skipper is dead!

-And I’m alive! -Maggie!

Maggie the Cat is alive!

I’m alive!

Why are you afraid of the truth?

You have an affinity for women characters

in your plays.

(gunshots)

And they’re more vivid somehow

and more striking than the men.

You almost never meet a dull, boring Southern woman.

No, you meet very difficult ones,

but they’re never dull or boring.

And they’re always eloquent.

And so therefore I’ve found them

ideal people as protagonists

for plays set in the south.

(soft music)

Tell us a funny little story, Stanley.

Something to help us out.

I didn’t think you liked my stories, Blanche.

I like them when they’re amusing,

but not indecent.

I don’t know any refined enough

for your taste.

In this style, every Sunday these families

get together with a huge table

with your 25 people sitting.

And so Aunt Edna says,

"Do you remember the time that George broke down the car?"

"Oh, you haven’t got that right?

That’s not what happened. Such and such happened."

Then, "No, no, no, Ed was the one that broke the car."

Well, the story goes on and on and on and on

and on and on for hours around the table,

and at the end of dinner you’ve got a novel.

(energetic music)

The Grass Harp is very real to me,

more real than anything I’ve ever written,

probably ever will.

It was a bittersweet recollection of my childhood.

It kept me in a painful emotional state.

Memories are always breaking my heart.

I cry.

It is very odd,

I seem to have no control over myself

or what I’m doing.

(leaves rustling)

Perhaps this is so.

But my own life has always seemed to me

more a series of closed circles,

rings that do not evolve with the freedom of a spiral.

For me to get from one to the other

has meant a leap, not a glide.

What weakens me is the lull between,

the wait before I know where to jump.

Truman Capote’s play, The Grass Harp,

opened in New York on Thursday.

I’ve only seen one notice in the Times,

which was a rave notice,

and I’m of course, insanely jealous.

How I do hate myself for it,

even though I had earned two Pulitzer Prizes,

two New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards,

and a Tony Award.

(birds chirping)

I was jealous of every other writer.

-Really? -Yes.

Did you hate it when Faulkner--

when a Faulkner novel got a great review?

Oh, when--great-- great writers like that,

I wasn’t jealous.

I was only jealous of those who happened to have shows

on the same block of Broadway as I had.

My whole life has been dominated by jealousy.

It is the one uncontrollable thing with me.

It’s the key to my character.

I’m jealous about everything.

If I pass a shop with an antique cup

in the window, for instance,

and I see someone else looking at it,

I’ll turn around and go back and buy it.

(soft music)

(water flowing)

Italy is the place of soft weather and golden light

and of great bunches of violets and carnations...

...with the Greek ideal surviving so tangibly

in the grace and beauty of the people

and of the antique sculptures.

In Rome, you rarely see a young man on the street

who does not have a slight erection.

Often they walk along Via Veneto

with their hands in their pockets,

caressing their genitals quite unconsciously,

and this regardless of whether or not

they’re hustling or cruising.

They are raised without any

of our puritanical reserves about sex.

Good-looking young Italians

never think of themselves as anything else.

And they are rarely mistaken.

(wind blowing)

You move so much, and you have homes in various places,

and you travel the world.

Are you rootless?

I am a gypsy, I’m a gypsy at heart.

For 30 years, I lived everywhere

and had houses all over the world.

Home is where your hat hangs.

Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes,

containers of riddles never to be solved,

nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors,

or, for that matter,

the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.

(water splashing)

I understand that Miss Capote is in Italy,

but we have not collided.

She is now reported to be at the fashionable resort

of Portofino,

which is much smarter than Capri.

Frank and I have a new member of the family,

an English bull puppy named Mr. Moon or Moony.

Truman has invited us to Portofino,

but will not extend his hospitality to Mr. Moon,

as he has a female dog

of approximately the same species.

Anyway, I’m not at all sure

I would like to share a house with that one,

as there would be more than one bitch

under the roof, that’s for sure.

Why do writers fall in and out

of friendship with each other?

Well, jealousy, don’t you think?

Writers are the most disagreeable,

unpleasant people in the world.

Most people think because somebody

is a painter or a writer

or somehow a creative individual

that they must be intelligent.

It is not so!

I mean, there are many writers who are...

(sighs)

...fantastically creative, and even a kind of a genius,

-like Tennessee Williams. -Mm-hm.

And Tennessee’s not intelligent.

Writers are paranoid

because they’re living two lives.

Their creative life,

which they are most protective of,

and their life as a human being.

They have to protect both lives.

I put a premium on the creative life.

Would you say you’re a happy person, in fact?

Gosh, uh, relatively.

I think so.

People are always saying, "Are you happy?"

I think it’s the most idiotic question I know.

I mean nobody is "happy."

There’s just no such thing, happiness is flashes.

Happiness is like orgasms, or sneezes.

You know, they happen intermittently.

(chuckles)

Well, I still do think the greatest happiness

is felt in, um...

...moments of great, um...

...tenderness between two people.

We all have a great desire to escape from ourselves

and to feel joined to another human being

because to be alone is to be lonely.

Are you, yourself, lonely, ever lonely?

Well, for one thing,

the very way that my work goes

necessitates my spending weeks and weeks

and months virtually alone.

And I don’t really, basically mind being alone.

But nevertheless, I mean, um,

as Virginia Woolf says,

"Here is one room and there is another."

And I’m always quite conscious of the fact

that all of us are really in separate rooms.

I don’t like being alone.

But your best work, your best writing,

has come from Tennessee Williams alone?

Oh, that?

You’re not alone, you’re with your characters,

with the people you’re creating.

And they--they are very good company.

Mendacity!

Look at all the lies that I gotta put up with!

Pretenses! Hypocrisy!

Pretending like I care for Big Mama.

I haven’t been able to stand that woman in 40 years!

Church!

It bores me, but I go...

And all those swindling lodges and social clubs

and money-grabbing auxiliaries

that’s--that’s got me on the number one sucker list.

Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity.

Now why can’t you live with it?

Big Daddy is one of the great characters.

Big Daddy talked like my father talked.

He was at first with the telephone company,

in the capacity of a lawyer for them.

Then he was a traveling salesman.

I saw very little of him then.

And then he was made sales manager

of a branch of the International Shoe Company.

And he began to see more of me,

and he didn’t like what he saw.

And we didn’t get along well.

I wanted you to love me.

-Didn’t I do? -No.

Not me. And not Gooper.

And not even Mama.

That’s a lie. I did love her.

I’d give her anything, everything she wants...

Things!

Things, Papa, you gave her things,

a house, a trip to Europe, all this junk!

Some jewelry, things, you gave her things, Papa,

not love!

I wonder what he didn’t like about you.

Did he have any idea you were going to be

-a world-famous playwright? -Well, I didn’t live up

to his concept of the ideal young man,

I don’t think.

(soft music)

Off and on, my father would make

abortive attempts to show affection.

He would ask me to go downtown to the movies with him.

I would go, but would be frozen stiff with fear of him,

and being defeated repeatedly, he gave up.

I think he loved me.

My grandparents had together been

the greatest support and kindness to me all my life.

They brought calm and order to me

in my usually chaotic state.

(mellow piano music)

Do you remember the young boy in Other Voices, Other Rooms

who goes to a crumbling mansion in search of his father

and finds an old man who is crippled and can’t speak

and can only communicate by bouncing red tennis balls

down the stairs?

Well, I suddenly understood that, of course,

this represented the search for my own father,

who I seldom saw.

And the fact that the old man is crippled,

and it was my way of transferring

my own inability to communicate with my father.

I was not only the boy in the story,

but also the old man.

You sometimes have to perform a little lobotomy

and cut people out of your mind or they will drag you down.

I cut my father out long ago.

I grew up with my stepfather, Joe Capote,

my mother’s second husband.

(soft music)

(applause)

(cheering)

Once you were a success, did he like you a lot more?

Well, yes, I think he was inclined to.

The last picture I remember of my father

was standing under the marquee

of a movie theater in Knoxville

that was showing Baby Doll.

And the caption said, "Tennessee’s dad says,

’I see nothing wrong with this picture.’"

(laughing)

I guess he was associating Baby Doll with mother.

I won’t get into that.

(chuckling)

(dog whining)

What do you feel about your plays

being turned into films?

Were you always disappointed or--

Nearly always very disappointed.

You see, most of my films were made

during the heavy censorship period in America.

And endings had to be changed

which almost contradicted the meanings of the play.

And unless you’ve seen the play,

you wouldn’t know from the films

what it was about.

It often affected only the last few minutes

of the films.

So I advise all people who see my films

to leave the cinema

about five minutes before the end.

Blanche!

-Come on, honey. -Don’t you touch me!

Don’t you ever touch me again.

In Streetcar, it had to be intimated

that Stella would never again sleep or live with Stanley.

And of course, the point is she would,

because that’s how life is.

Even though he might have raped her sister?

Yes, that’s how life is.

Films are more lasting than play productions,

and I’m afraid that my plays will be remembered mostly

by the films made of them.

And for that reason it is terribly important to me

that I should get as much artistic control as possible.

When you were writing plays,

were you writing for particular actors,

or were you thinking--

I’ve only written for particular actors

in the cases of Brando

and of Anna Magnani.

Why do you say these things...

to me tonight?

Because nobody ever gets to know anybody.

We’re all...

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement

inside our own lonely skins

for as long as we live on this earth.

Not to me.

I’m not a big optimist.

But I can’t agree with-- with something so sad.

I’ll go up

and get some clean linen to make up your bed.

(solemn music)

Are you superstitious like most southerners?

Very, very superstitious.

I believe in astrology, tarot cards,

I won’t walk under ladders, that whole bit.

I had a great fight once with Tennessee Williams

because we went to...

to Capri together.

This was a long time ago.

Fifteen years ago.

And we went to this hotel,

and when they brought the keys with the numbers to them,

I looked at my number and I didn’t like it.

And I said to Tennessee, "Would you mind

if I had your room and you give me your key?"

And he said, "Well, no, all right."

And so he did, and I went upstairs

and then I came down,

we were having a drink, and he walked into the bar

with this terrible look on his face.

He says, because he’s even more superstitious than I am,

"I just figured out why you wanted me

to have that number instead of you,

because it adds up to 13."

I used to be fantastically superstitious,

I mean to the point of mania.

I’ve tried to break myself of it,

but I still do practically nothing

on the 13th.

A hat on a bed drives me into a frenzy.

And I can’t allow three cigarette butts

in the same ashtray.

And I won’t travel on a plane with two nuns.

(soft music)

What are you most frightened of?

I am claustrophobic to a terrible extent

and I’m frightened of being penned in,

being caught in a small space, and not able to get out.

What are you scared of?

I’m not afraid of the things that most people are afraid of.

I’m not afraid of murderers.

I didn’t choose that subject

because of any great interest in it.

It was because I wanted to write a--

what I call, a "nonfiction novel,"

a book that would read exactly as though it were a novel,

except that every word of it would be absolutely true.

And finally I settled on an obscure crime

in this remote part of Kansas

because I felt if I followed this

from beginning to end,

it would provide me with the material

to really accomplish what was a technical feat.

All a truck gets us is from here to there.

We wanna score.

One guy with a fat wallet.

And a fast car with a back seat.

I sit beside him, you get in the back,

I feed him a few jokes.

I say, "Hey, Perry, pass me a match."

That’s your signal.

Fast, hard, snap, I grab the wheel.

The great accomplishment of In Cold Blood

is that I never appear once.

There’s never an "I" in it at all.

Dick, I thought, was just a small-time crook

who got into water way over his head,

and was really responsible for this whole murder

which Perry actually committed.

I believe Perry did what he did

for the reasons he himself states,

that his life was a constant accumulation

of disillusionments and reverses,

and he suddenly found himself

in the Clutter house that night

in a psychological cul-de-sac.

The Clutters were such a perfect set of symbols

for every frustration in his life.

As Perry himself said,

"I didn’t have anything against them,

and they never did anything wrong to me,

the way other people have in my life.

Maybe they’re just the ones who had to pay for it."

(soft dramatic music)

(pencil scratching)

(thumping)

(clattering)

The subject matter and the loneliness

led to a kind of, what you’d call,

a definite darkness.

I mean, I’ve never been so nervous and so agitated.

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.

Before I began it, I was a stable person,

comparatively speaking.

Afterward, something happened to me.

I just can’t forget it.

The experience served to heighten my feeling

of the tragic view of life,

which accounts for the side of me

that appears extremely frivolous.

That part of me is always standing

in the darkened hallway,

mocking tragedy and death.

That’s why I love champagne and stay at the Ritz.

(upbeat music)

As a little boy from New Orleans,

I had always dreamed of giving the biggest

and the best goddamned party

that anybody had ever heard of.

I wanted to see important people

from every walk of life.

(mixed chatter)

It was a nice party, wasn’t it?

There was something warm and cozy about it,

quite the opposite of all the publicity.

The thing I resented most about some of the write-ups

was the idea the party was intended

to promote me or my books.

I was invited to the party of the year,

but chose not to attend.

People are never so unattractive

as when they think you are worth impressing.

Being feted and lionized on a small scale

has convinced me,

or rather confirmed my suspicion,

that success is a bore.

The struggle for me is creation.

Luxury is the wolf at the door,

and its fangs are the vanities

and conceits germinated by success.

When an artist learns this,

he knows where the dangers lie.

I really think you’ve written a masterpiece here.

Why, thank you.

You’ll get a much better dedication!

(laughing)

I was trained always

to do exactly what it is that I’m doing,

and part of that is to be able to accept success

without it, you know, knocking you out.

Just take it for what it is and ride with it.

You said once the only thing

you hate reading about yourself in the papers

-is the truth. -That’s it!

The lies are fine.

I don’t care what anybody says about me

as long as it isn’t true.

Do you like yourself or not?

Or do you adore yourself?

I don’t adore myself, no.

No, no.

Do you find yourself good company?

I, uh...

I never stopped to think about that very much.

I’m always saddled with myself,

I can’t do much about it.

-Right. -Do I like myself?

No, I don’t like myself very much.

I’m terribly moody, subject to awful depressions.

Are you in fact a despairing person?

Oh, no, I’m not despairing.

I wouldn’t remain alive if I were despairing.

I recognize a great deal

of darkness in life, it’s true.

Why is it that the plays are so full

of the less cheerful topics, like...

cancer and lobotomies and rape and adultery

and incest and nymphomania and homosexuality...

-All those things... -...and castrations?

Don’t you know that those are the things

that we all are obliged to live with?

We procured for him!

She used to do it in the smart,

fashionable places they went to before last summer.

Sebastian was shy with people.

She wasn’t.

Neither was I.

But we both did the same thing for him.

We both made contacts for him.

I can’t listen to this obscenity!

Stop her, Doctor.

Cut the truth out of my brain?

Is that what you want, Aunt Vi?

Well, you can’t!

Not even God can change the truth,

that we were nothing but a pair of--

-Doctor! -It’s the truth!

See how she destroys us with her tongue for a hatchet!

You’ve got to cut this hideous story out of her brain!

What put that subject into your mind?

Some person that I had known well

that had a cerebral lobotomy.

Your sister?

Rose had a great inner resentment towards mother

because she had imposed a monolithic Puritanism on her

during adolescence.

Rose loved to shock Mother.

My sister, she said, "Oh, Mother,

when I was at All Saints College,

you know, the girls used to abuse themselves

with altar candles

which they stole from the chapel."

And my mother screamed, and threw her arms in the air

and said, "Oh, doctor, doctor!

Do anything, anything at all

to stop her talking like this!"

(laughing)

(chair creaking)

(laughing continues)

In addition to the lobotomy, Rose underwent

65 electroconvulsive shock treatments.

I visited the sanatorium

and saw my dear little Rose.

She is like a person half-asleep now,

quiet, gentle,

not in any way revolting like so many of the others.

Sometimes her eyes filled with tears.

Be brave, dear little girl.

Why should you be there, little Rose?

And me, here?

Again and again, your plays do come out

of your personal life, don’t they? Tremendously.

Out of everybody’s personal life.

I think we all live with rape.

My god, we’re all victims of rape,

symbolically, aren’t we?

How?

Society rapes the individual.

What else do we all-- do we all live with cannibalism

-in the same symbolic way? -Cannibalism.

Yes, we live with that, too, in a symbolic way.

We all devour each other

in our fashion.

I don’t think my nerves can take it much more.

I am a writer of serious aim and intention

who has happened to be commercial in,

well, maybe half of his plays.

But you must remember that the other half

have been crashing failures.

All my life I’ve been on the outside,

and time is running out.

Look around you, boy, they got places

for the old and the sick and the homeless,

but there is no place at all for the failures.

And failure is a highly contagious disease.

The tensions of Broadway were getting to me,

and I needed something to lower the tension level.

And whiskey did it.

Why are you so restless?

You got ants in your britches?

-Yes, sir. -Why?

-Something hasn’t happened yet. -What’s that?

A click in my head.

-Did you say "click"? -Yes, sir,

that click in my head.

It makes me feel peaceful.

Boy, sometimes you worry me.

It’s like a...

switch clicking off in my head.

It turns the hot light off and the cool one on,

and all of a sudden, there’s peace.

Boy, you’re a real alcoholic.

That is the truth.

Yes, sir, I am an alcoholic.

(solemn music)

My father told me that he had been a slave

to drink all his life,

that all the Williamses had been terrible drinkers,

and he hoped I wouldn’t marry a drunken woman.

All during the talk,

he was drinking continually himself

and getting more and more like a maudlin old buzzard.

It was shocking and pitiful.

Mother was the cause of all my anxiety.

She was a wonderful person when she was not drinking,

impossible when she was.

She was Jekyll and Hyde,

much more neurotic and difficult

than anybody realized.

At this very moment, I can see those rooms

in St. Louis and New Orleans.

That’s when my claustrophobia and fear of abandonment began.

She locked me in, and I still can’t get out.

I live with it constantly.

I’m never ever free from it.

(soft music)

She died in 1954

from an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol.

Nothing could be worse

for a girl in your unstable condition

to be mixed up with a man in my unstable condition,

because two people in unstable conditions

are like two countries facing each other.

in unstable conditions.

The destructive potential

could blow the whole world to bits.

(somber music)

My professional decline began after Night of the Iguana.

As a matter of fact, I never got a good review

after 1961.

I was broken as much

by repeated failures in the theater

as by Frank’s death.

Frank died from lung cancer in 1963.

I not only missed him,

but the life he had created for me.

Everything went wrong.

My life, private and professional,

and ultimately my mind, broke.

You know what I need to get me

over this depression this summer,

what would do more good than all the shots and pills

in the pharmaceutical kingdom?

I need myself a lover.

(solemn music)

The more consequential occurrence in the mid ’60s

was my becoming a patient of a doctor

sometimes called Dr. Feelgood.

I was a patient of the original Dr. Feelgood.

-Dr. Feelgood, right, yeah. -But I really at that point,

although I had a lot of friends who were going to him,

I did not know that it was other than

a mixture of all kinds of vitamins.

At first, I only went to Dr. Feelgood for injections,

but soon he was also providing me with vials,

which I injected when I got up in the mornings.

They kept me going.

They kept me working.

Being an artist, it does separate you.

I mean, one’s mind is working at a faster, sensitive,

more rapid, eye-batting level

than most people.

I think that that’s honestly the reason

why so many writers drink or take pills,

or this, that, or the other, is to calm themselves down,

to quiet this continuous rapid-running machine.

(soft music)

But I know that that’s why

Tennessee Williams does, you know?

He has to take sedatives and things like that,

because he’s got one of the most rapid-running,

perceptive minds.

Have you passed the dependency now?

One can never say that.

You never know.

It’s the sort of thing that nobody ever

completely recovers from.

What you do is you, uh...

...arrest it.

And you keep it in a state of arrest, or remission,

just like somebody who has cancer.

It’s in a state of remission.

You know, there’s only one real trouble in life,

and that is to be in trouble with yourself.

(upbeat music)

I’ve been to an awful lot of nightclubs,

and this is the best I have ever seen.

Isn’t it too bad Proust didn’t have

something like this?

Sometimes, when I am there,

I think about all the dead people

who would have loved 54.

It’s shame they’re not around.

People like Toulouse-Lautrec or Baudelaire

or Oscar Wilde or Carl Van Vechten.

Cole Porter would have loved it.

Somebody asked me about a year ago

what I am famous for,

and I said, "I’m famous for being famous."

Is there anything else that you’re not

that you’ve toyed with the thought of being?

-Yes. -What?

Invisible.

(laughing)

Would you like to have had it any other way?

Would you have liked to be anything else?

Yes, now this is going to shock you.

I would like to have been very good-looking.

(laughing)

I’ve been working my whole life

and the only literary prize I received

was back in 1947

with a short story I wrote called "Miriam."

I said to myself, I am going to write a book

that will make you all ashamed of yourselves.

You’re going to find out

what a really, really gifted writer

with great determination can do.

I’m going to call it a novel,

but in actual fact, it’s a roman à clef.

Almost everything in it is true.

For a couple years, we’ve been waiting

for Answered Prayers.

Have you turned it over to the publisher yet?

Nah.

I refer to it now as my "posthumous novel."

Because either I’m going to kill it

or it’s going to kill me.

(dramatic music)

Four chapters from Answered Prayers,

were published in Esquire.

After reading my story, Unspoiled Monsters,

Tennessee was furious with my model for Mr. Wallace,

one of the clients of a call-boy service.

He is not so much interested in sex

as he is in hiring someone to walk his English bulldog.

Wallace is described as "a chunky,

paunchy, booze-puffed runt

with a play moustache glued above laconic lips,

who has a corn-pone voice.

Here’s a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who,

like one of his own adrift heroines,

seeks attention and sympathy by serving up

half-believed lies to total strangers."

Capote’s a liar, and everyone knows he is.

I am inclined to alter and overelaborate.

Myself, I just call it "making something come alive."

In other words, a form of art.

Art and truth are not necessarily

compatible bedfellows.

Well, there is a sense

in which all creative work, all fiction, is imagination.

But that imagination is not the same

as bitchery and lying.

I can’t find any excuse for it.

My entire book is gossip.

I don’t deny that for an instant.

All literature is gossip.

What in God’s green earth is Anna Karenina

or War and Peace or Madame Bovary if not gossip?

Or Proust?

Marcel Proust, for instance.

All his characters were taken from life,

but I don’t think any of them were drawn maliciously.

I don’t think bitchery is the most attractive element

in human character,

but bitchery is beginning to be

a very strong selling commodity in writing.

I am not Proust.

I am not as intelligent or as educated as he was.

I am not as sensitive in various ways.

But my eye is every bit as good as his.

Every bit!

I see everything,

and I only wrote half of what I saw.

I can’t think of anything

except a great unhappiness in a man’s nature

could make him try to inflict wounds of that sort

upon other people.

One must try to go forward in this world

without trampling on other beings as we go,

if we can help it.

(playful music)

Speaking of friends, there’s some question

as to whether you have any now, as you know.

You published a thing in Esquire,

it’s a work of fiction...

-No, it’s not. -Well, it’s not, is it?

(laughing)

-Actually I published... -It’s a work of friction,

is what it turned out to be.

The truth is I only lost three friends

as a result of as much of the book

has been published so far,

I don’t guarantee what’s going to happen later.

Are you willing to go for 10?

First of all, I always told everybody

that I was writing this book.

But you must have realized you were taking

-a calculated risk that... -Sure.

...you might lose some friends,

and so the question becomes

is your writing more important to you

than your friends?

Well, look, it’s this simple.

All a writer has for material is what he knows.

That’s all you’ve got.

At least that’s all I’ve got.

The whole meaning of all my work

is that there is no such thing

as complete right, complete wrong,

complete black, complete white,

that--that we’re all in the same boat.

And really, the boat is the world.

You might even say it’s the universe,

it’s all creation is the boat.

It’s like an unfinished poem.

Maybe the poem will suddenly turn to a limerick.

Or maybe it will turn to an epic poem.

But it’s for all of us to try to complete this poem.

And the way to complete it

is through understanding and patience,

and tolerance among ourselves.

Really, I wouldn’t have chosen this life for myself.

I swear it.

Because there’s just nothing that can be so difficult,

I can’t imagine anything more difficult

than to sustain over...

decades and decades and decades,

sustaining, refreshing,

keep your work moving and always at a certain level,

and always trying and always trying.

I mean, look at Tennessee Williams.

I dedicated my book to Tennessee, by the way.

I noticed that, I was going to ask you why.

Well, I’m going to tell you why.

Not that he doesn’t deserve it.

I’ll tell you why.

I’ve known Tennessee a long time.

Our friendship has had its ups and downs.

I did it because...

Here is a man who has devoted his whole life to art,

has always tried, tried, and is a genius,

and has done fantastically original

and marvelous things.

And his last play comes on,

and the critics just tear into him, zoof!

And they’ve been doing this to Tennessee for 20 years.

Is it important to you what history thinks of you

50, 100 years from now?

If it is, it’s unconsciously.

You don’t write for history,

you write to express yourself now,

in the moment of your life.

And in your person, would you like to be remembered

as someone who was loved by other people

or somebody who loved other people?

Oh, I think it’s much more important

to love other people than to be loved by them.

The last time I saw Tennessee

was a few weeks before he died.

We had dinner together at a very private little place

called Le Club.

He said he had no friends anymore,

and that I was one of the few people in his life

who really knew him.

I said to Truman,

"This might be an appropriate time

to say something to you that you once said to me.

I care about you more than you know.

Perhaps the thing most to help you right now

is your incomparable sense of humor.

Rest a bit.

And never, never stop laughing."

Tennessee asked me when we will meet again.

I told him, "In Paradise."

(mellow music)

Time has taught me

that a man must face an onslaught

without turning his back on it,

whether it comes from the press

or from poor Truman Capote.

God rest his tortured soul in heaven or on earth.

Please observe that I said, "God rest his soul

either in heaven or earth."

There was no mention of inferno.

He is an artist.

All writing, all art, is an act of faith.

Any work of art, provided it springs

from a sincere motivation

to further understanding between people,

is an act of faith,

and therefore, is an act of love.

What is it like being a writer?

I would say it is like being free.

It means to be a voyager here and there,

sad or happy,

without much regret.

It means the freedom of being.

As someone has wisely observed,

if you can’t be yourself,

what’s the point of being anything at all?

(soft dramatic music)

(soft piano music)

(lively string music)

(music ends)