One non-journalistic observer who arrived within a week, New Yorker
contributor Truman Capote, initially startled the community—including the
case’s investigators—with his high-pitched, almost squeaky, whine, a scarf that
nearly trailed to the floor, and visits to big-city gay and lesbian bars that
shocked straitlaced area residents.
Six years later, after gaining the confidence of these
locals—along with the two ex-cons eventually apprehended and executed for the
Clutter murders—Capote would publish a classic of the true-crime genre and a
pioneering example of “The New Journalism” combining fact with fiction, In Cold Blood.
Over the course of more than half a century, this
so-called “nonfiction novel” on the crime and punishment of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith (who, ironically, killed the Clutters for a safe full of cash that
didn’t exist) retains its gruesome fascination.
The events were also recounted in a 1967 movie and 1996
TV miniseries based on Capote’s book, two biopics (Capote and Infamous)
on how the author wrote his account, and a four-part Sundance TV documentary that
tracked the case in more in-depth detail.
When the book came out, there was some low-level buzz
of curiosity about how Capote could remember so much dialogue and so many
details with such seeming accuracy.
He did have a good deal of solid documentation: the
transcript of the killers’ trial; boxes of letters and newspaper clippings in
his home; notebooks filled with on-scene descriptions; and interviews that
either he or his childhood friend, To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper
Lee, conducted.
But especially after Capote’s death in 1984, more
questions have been raised about the book’s accuracy—everything from the relative
importance of key figures to scenes and dialogue entirely invented.
The first person I knew who disputed Capote’s claim that
he didn’t take notes during interviews because of his great memory was Norman
Mailer, at a winter 1981 talk to writing graduate students at Columbia
University’s School of the Arts that I covered for the college newspaper.
"I love Truman Capote in 82 ways, but he's a
terrible liar," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner said, provoking laughter
from the class. "I know he doesn't remember conversations we've had two or
three days ago."
Interviewees for George Plimpton’s 1997 oral history
biography, Truman Capote, differed with the subject’s account on several
details, including that Hickock intended to rape teenage victim Nancy Clutter; that
Capote exaggerated the role of lead detective Alvin Dewey in tracking down the killers;
and that Dewey closed his eyes during one of the executions.
Nearly two decades later, Ben Yagoda’s Slate
article, using contemporaneous notes by an initial fact-checker from The
New Yorker, thoroughly deconstructed the masterful publicity claims that, “despite
having the stylistic and thematic attributes of great literature, the account
of four brutal murders in Kansas was completely true.”
Among the outright departures from truth taken by
Capote were:
*a poignant final scene between Dewey and a teenage
friend of Nancy Clutter, completely invented to provide closure for the
narrative;
* describing the actions of someone who was alone, and
later killed in the multiple murders;
*claiming that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had
immediately acted upon a crucial lead, when in fact its five-day wait gave Hickoff
and Smith time to reach Florida;
*interior monologues to which neither Capote nor
anyone else could be privy.
A few years after Yagoda’s article, in focusing on the
Clutters rather than their killers, the Sundance TV documentary Cold-Blooded
highlighted how Capote had sensationalized the crime and split the community of
Holcomb in half over his account.
In Cold Blood
represented a problematic literary triumph. Its commercial and critical success
encouraged other writers to follow Capote’s departures from accuracy in service
to a more novelistic approach—all of which makes readers mistrustful of the basic
facts of journalism.
That is a shame, because, as a painstaking stylist,
Capote created a haunting meditation on lives blighted and snuffed out—that of upstanding
local businessman Herbert Clutter and his family, of course, as well as Smith,
who suffered through a nearly Dickensian childhood before his descent into
darkness.
Capote fully achieved his intention of depicting what
he called, in an interview with The New York Times, “this collision
between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and
the other, which is insular and safe.”
(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1967
film adaptation of In Cold Blood, with Scott Wilson and Robert Blake as,
respectively, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith.)
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