Portraits and Observations Read online

  2013 Modern Library Edition

  Copyright © 2007 by Truman Capote Literary Trust

  Biographical note copyright © 1993 Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Elizabeth Taylor” was originally published in Ladies’ Home Journal, December 1974 issue. “Extreme Magic” was originally published in Vogue, April 1967 issue. “Remembering Tennessee” was originally published in Playboy magazine, January 1984 issue. “Music for Chameleons,” The Muses Are Heard (originally titled “Porgy and Bess in Russia”), and “The Duke in His Domain” were originally published in The New Yorker. Other selections were originally printed in the following periodicals: The Atlantic Monthly, Botteghe Oscure, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Holiday, Interview magazine, Junior Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, Mademoiselle, New York magazine, Redbook, Saturday Evening Post, Travel and Camera magazine, and Vogue. “Remembering Willa Cather” was originally published in Vanity Fair, November 2006.

  Most of these selections originally appeared in book form in the following collections: Other Voices, Other Rooms. Copyright 1948 by Truman Capote. Copyright renewed by Truman Capote in 1975. A Tree of Night and Other Stories. Copyright 1949 by Truman Capote. Copyright renewed 1976 by Truman Capote. Local Color. Copyright 1950 by Truman Capote. Copyright renewed 1977 by Truman Capote. The Grass Harp. Copyright 1951 by Truman Capote. Copyright renewed 1979 by Truman Capote. The Muses Are Heard. Copyright © 1956 by Truman Capote. Copyright renewed 1984 by Truman Capote. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Copyright © 1958 by Truman Capote. Copyright renewed 1986 by Alan U. Schwartz. Selected Writings. Copyright © 1963 by Random House, Inc. The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places. Copyright © 1973 by Truman Capote. Music for Chameleons. Copyright © 1980 by Truman Capote. A Capote Reader. Copyright 1987 by Alan U. Schwartz.

  eISBN: 978-0-8129-9512-1

  www.modernlibrary.com

  Jacket design: Eric White

  Art direction: Greg Mollica

  Jacket photograph: Harris & Ewing Collection

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Biographical Note

  NEW ORLEANS

  NEW YORK

  BROOKLYN

  HOLLYWOOD

  HAITI

  TO EUROPE

  ISCHIA

  TANGIER

  A RIDE THROUGH SPAIN

  FONTANA VECCHIA

  STYLE: AND THE JAPANESE

  THE MUSES ARE HEARD

  THE DUKE IN HIS DOMAIN

  FROM OBSERVATIONS:

  Richard Avedon

  John Huston

  Charlie Chaplin

  A Gathering of Swans

  Pablo Picasso

  Coco Chanel

  Marcel Duchamp

  Jean Cocteau and André Gide

  Mae West

  Louis Armstrong

  Humphrey Bogart

  Ezra Pound

  Somerset Maugham

  Isak Dinesen

  A HOUSE ON THE HEIGHTS

  LOLA

  JANE BOWLES

  EXTREME MAGIC

  GHOSTS IN SUNLIGHT: THE FILMING OF IN COLD BLOOD

  GREEK PARAGRAPHS

  A VOICE FROM A CLOUD

  CECIL BEATON

  THE WHITE ROSE

  SELF-PORTRAIT

  PREFACE TO THE DOGS BARK

  ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS

  THEN IT ALL CAME DOWN

  HANDCARVED COFFINS

  A DAY’S WORK

  DAZZLE

  HIDDEN GARDENS

  HELLO, STRANGER

  DERRING-DO

  NOCTURNAL TURNINGS

  A BEAUTIFUL CHILD

  MR. JONES

  A LAMP IN A WINDOW

  HOSPITALITY

  PREFACE TO MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS

  REMEMBERING TENNESSEE

  REMEMBERING WILLA CATHER

  Other Books by This Author

  TRUMAN CAPOTE

  Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans. His early years were affected by an unsettled family life. He was turned over to the care of his mother’s family in Monroeville, Alabama; his father was imprisoned for fraud; his parents divorced and then fought a bitter custody battle over Truman. Eventually he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, a Cuban businessman whose name he adopted. The young Capote got a job as a copyboy at The New Yorker in the early forties, but was fired for inadvertently offending Robert Frost. The publication of his early stories in Harper’s Bazaar established his literary reputation when he was in his twenties. His novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a Gothic coming-of-age story that Capote described as “an attempt to exorcise demons,” and his novella The Grass Harp (1951), a gentler fantasy rooted in his Alabama years, consolidated his precocious fame.

  From the start of his career Capote associated himself with a wide range of writers and artists, high-society figures, and international celebrities, gaining frequent media attention for his exuberant social life. He collected his stories in A Tree of Night (1949) and published the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), but devoted his energies increasingly to the stage—adapting The Grass Harp into a play and writing the musical House of Flowers (1954)—and to journalism, of which the earliest examples are “Local Color” (1950) and “The Muses Are Heard” (1956). He made a brief foray into the movies to write the screenplay for John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1954).

  Capote’s interest in the murder of a family in Kansas led to the prolonged investigation that provided the basis for In Cold Blood (1966), his most successful and acclaimed book. By “treating a real event with fictional techniques,” Capote intended to create a new synthesis: something both “immaculately factual” and a work of art. However its genre was defined, from the moment it began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker the book exerted a fascination among a wider readership than Capote’s writing had ever attracted before. The abundantly publicized masked ball at the Plaza Hotel with which he celebrated the completion of In Cold Blood was an iconic event of the 1960s, and for a time Capote was a constant presence on television and in magazines, even trying his hand at movie acting in Murder by Death.

  He worked for many years on Answered Prayers, an ultimately unfinished novel that was intended to be the distillation of everything he had observed in his life among the rich and famous; an excerpt from it published in Esquire in 1975 appalled many of Capote’s wealthy friends for its revelation of intimate secrets, and he found himself excluded from the world he had once dominated. In his later years he published two collections of fiction and essays, The Dogs Bark (1973) and Music for Chameleons (1980). He died on August 25, 1984, after years of problems with drugs and alcohol.

  The Complete Stories of Truman Capote and Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote were published in 2004. In 2005, Summer Crossing, his long-lost first novel, was published for the first time around the world.

  NEW ORLEANS

  (1946)

  In the courtyard there was an angel of black stone, and its angel head rose above giant elephant leaves; the stark glass angel eyes, bright as the bleached blue of sailor eyes, stared upward. One observed the angel from an intricate green balcony—mine, this balcony, for I lived beyond in three old white rooms, rooms with elaborate wedding-cake ceilings, wide sliding doors, tall French windows. On warm
evenings, with these windows open, conversation was pleasant there, tuneful, for wind rustled the interior like fan-breeze made by ancient ladies. And on such warm evenings the town is quiet. Only voices: family talk weaving on an ivy-curtained porch; a barefoot woman humming as she rocks a sidewalk chair, lulling to sleep a baby she nurses quite publicly; the complaining foreign tongue of an irritated lady who, sitting on her balcony, plucks a fryer, the loosened feathers floating from her hands, slipping into air, sliding lazily downward.

  One morning—it was December, I think, a cold Sunday with a sad gray sun—I went up through the Quarter to the old market, where at that time of year there are exquisite winter fruits, sweet satsumas, twenty cents a dozen, and winter flowers, Christmas poinsettia and snow japonica. New Orleans streets have long, lonesome perspectives; in empty hours their atmosphere is like Chirico, and things innocent, ordinarily (a face behind the slanted light of shutters, nuns moving in the distance, a fat dark arm lolling lopsidedly out some window, a lonely black boy squatting in an alley, blowing soap bubbles and watching sadly as they rise to burst), acquire qualities of violence. Now, on that morning, I stopped still in the middle of a block, for I’d caught out of the corner of my eye a tunnel-passage, an overgrown courtyard. A crazy-looking white hound stood stiffly in the green fern light shining at the tunnel’s end, and compulsively I went toward it. Inside there was a fountain; water spilled delicately from a monkey-statue’s bronze mouth and made on pool pebbles desolate bell-like sounds. He was hanging from a willow, a bandit-faced man with kinky platinum hair; he hung so limply, like the willow itself. There was terror in that silent suffocated garden. Closed windows looked on blindly; snail tracks glittered silver on elephant ears, nothing moved except his shadow. It swung a little, back and forth, yet there was no wind. A rhinestone ring he wore winked in the sun, and on his arm was tattooed a name, “Francy.” The hound lowered its head to drink in the fountain, and I ran. Francy—was it for her he’d killed himself? I do not know. N.O. is a secret place.

  My rock angel’s glass eyes were like sundials, for they told, by the amount of light focused on them, time: white at noon, they grew gradually dimmer, dark at dusk, black—nightfall eyes in a nightfall head.

  The torn lips of golden-haired girls leer luridly on faded leaning house fronts: Drink Dr. Nutt, Dr. Pepper, NEHI, Grapeade, 7-Up, Koke, Coca-Cola. N.O., like every Southern town, is a city of soft-drink signs; the streets of forlorn neighborhoods are paved with Coca-Cola caps, and after rain, they glint in the dust like lost dimes. Posters peel away, lie mangled until storm wind blows them along the street, like desert sage—and there are those who think them beautiful; there are those who paper their walls with Dr. Nutt and Dr. Pepper, with Coca-Cola beauties who, smiling above tenement beds, are night guardians and saints of the morning. Signs everywhere, chalked, printed, painted: Madame Ortega—Readings, Love-potions, Magic Literature, C Me; If You Haven’t Anything To Do … Don’t Do It Here; Are You Ready To Meet Your Maker?; B Ware, Bad Dog; Pity The Poor Little Orphans; I Am A Deaf & Dumb Widow With 2 Mouths To Feed; Attention; Blue Wing Singers At Our Church Tonight (signed) The Reverend.

  There was once this notice on a door in the Irish Channel district, “Come In And See Where Jesus Stood.”

  “And so?” said a woman who answered when I rang the bell. “I’d like to see where Jesus stood,” I told her, and for a moment she looked blank; her face, cut in razorlike lines, was marshmallow-white; she had no eyebrows, no lashes, and she wore a calico kimono. “You too little, honey,” she said, a jerky laugh bouncing her breasts, “you too damn little for to see where Jesus stood.”

  In my neighborhood there was a certain café no fun whatever, for it was the emptiest café around N.O., a regular funeral place. The proprietress, Mrs. Morris Otto Kunze, did not, however, seem to mind; she sat all day behind her bar, cooling herself with a palmetto fan, and seldom stirred except to swat flies. Now glued over an old cracked mirror backing the bar were seven little signs all alike: Don’t Worry About Life … You’ll Never Get Out Of It Alive.

  July 3. An “at home” card last week from Miss Y., so I made a call this afternoon. She is delightful in her archaic way, amusing, too, though not by intent. The first time we met, I thought: Edna May Oliver; and there is a resemblance most certainly. Miss Y. speaks in premeditated tones but what she says is haphazard, and her sherry-colored eyes are forever searching the surroundings. Her posture is military, and she carries a man’s Malacca cane, one of her legs being shorter than the other, a condition which gives her walk a penguin-like lilt. “It made me unhappy when I was your age; yes, I must say it did, for Papa had to squire me to all the balls, and there we sat on such pretty little gold chairs, and there we sat. None of the gentlemen ever asked Miss Y. to dance, indeed no, though a young man from Baltimore, a Mr. Jones, came here one winter, and gracious!—poor Mr. Jones—fell off a ladder, you know—broke his neck—died instantly.”

  My interest in Miss Y. is rather clinical, and I am not, I embarrassedly confess, quite the friend she believes, for one cannot feel close to Miss Y.: she is too much a fairy tale, someone real—and improbable. She is like the piano in her parlor—elegant, but a little out of tune. Her house, old even for N.O., is guarded by a black broken iron fence; it is a poor neighborhood she lives in, one sprayed with room-for-rent signs, gasoline stations, jukebox cafés. And yet, in the days when her family first lived here—that, of course, was long ago—there was in all N.O. no finer place. The house, smothered by slanting trees, has a graying exterior; but inside, the fantasy of Miss Y.’s heritage is everywhere visible: the tapping of her cane as she descends birdwing stairs trembles crystal; her face, a heart of wrinkled silk, reflects fumelike on ceiling-high mirrors; she lowers herself (notice, as this happens, how carefully she preserves the comfort of her bones) into father’s father’s father’s chair, a wickedly severe receptacle with lion-head hand-rests. She is beautiful here in the cool dark of her house, and safe. These are the walls, the fence, the furniture of her childhood. “Some people are born to be old; I, for instance, was an atrocious child lacking any quality whatever. But I like being old. It makes me feel somehow more”—she paused, indicated with a gesture the dim parlor—“more suitable.”

  Miss Y. does not believe in the world beyond N.O.; at times her insularity results, as it did today, in rather chilling remarks. I had mentioned a recent trip to New York, whereupon she, arching an eyebrow, replied gently, “Oh? And how are things in the country?”

  1. Why is it, I wonder, that all N.O. cabdrivers sound as though they were imported from Brooklyn?

  2. One hears so much about food here, and it is probably true that such restaurants as Arnaud’s and Kolb’s are the best in America. There is an attractive, lazy atmosphere about these restaurants: the slow-wheeling fans, the enormous tables and lack of crowding, the silence, the casual but expert waiters who all look as though they were sons of the management. A friend of mine, discussing N.O. and New York, once pointed out that comparable meals in the East, aside from being considerably more expensive, would arrive elaborate with some chef’s mannerisms, with all kinds of froufrou and false accessories. Like most good things, the quality of N.O. cookery derived, he thought, from its essential simplicity.

  3. I am more or less disgusted by that persistent phrase “old charm.” You will find it, I suppose, in the architecture here, and in the antique shops (where it rightly belongs), or in the minglings of dialect one hears around the French Market. But N.O. is no more charming than any other Southern city—less so, in fact, for it is the largest. The main portion of this city is made up of spiritual bottomland, streets and sections rather outside the tourist belt.

  (From a letter to R.R.) There are new people in the apartment below, the third tenants in the last year; a transient place, this Quarter, hello and good-bye. A real bona-fide scoundrel lived there when I first came. He was unscrupulous, unclean and crooked—a kind of dissipated satyr. Mr. Buddy, the one-man band. More than l
ikely you have seen him—not here of course, but in some other city, for he keeps on the move, he and his old banjo, drum, harmonica. I used to come across him banging away on various street corners, a gang of loafers gathered round. Realizing he was my neighbor, these meetings always gave me rather a turn. Now, to tell the truth, he was not a bad musician—an extraordinary one, in fact, when, late of an afternoon, and for his own pleasure, he sang to his guitar, sang ghostly ballads in a grieving whiskey voice: how terrible it was for those in love.

  “Hey, boy, you! You up there …” I was you, for he never knew my name, and never showed much interest in finding it out. “Come on down and help me kill a couple.”

  His balcony, smaller than mine, was screened with sweet-smelling wisteria; as there was no furniture to speak of, we would sit on the floor in the green shade, drinking a brand of gin close kin to rubbing alcohol, and he would finger his guitar, its steady plaintive whine emphasizing the deep roll of his voice. “Been all over, been in and out, all around; sixty-five, and any woman takes up with me ain’t got no use for nobody else; yessir, had myself a lota wives and a lota kids, but christamighty if I know what come of any of ’em—and don’t give a hoot in hell—’cept maybe about Rhonda Kay. There was a woman, man, sweet as swamp honey, and was she hot on me! On fire all the time, and her married to a Baptist preacher, too, and her got four kids—five, countin’ mine. Always kinda wondered what it was—boy or girl—boy, I spec. I always give ’em boys … Now that’s all a long time ago, and it happened in Memphis, Tennessee. Yessir, been everywhere, been to the penitentiary, been in big fine houses like the Rockefellers’ houses, been in and out, been all around.”

  And he could carry on this way until moonrise, his voice growing froggy, his words locking together to make a chant.

  His face, stained and wrinkled, had a certain deceptive kindness, a childish twinkle, but his eyes slanted in an Oriental manner, and he kept his fingernails long, knife-sharp and polished as a Chinaman’s. “Good for scratching, and handy in a fight, too.”