TO READERS OF INTERVIEW MAGAZINE56
[New York]
[May 1980]
Dear Friends—
Cecil Beaton died—not unexpectedly, as he had suffered a stroke some four years ago.57
We had travelled many places together. All over Europe, Africa, the Orient: He was the perfect travelling companion: I loathe sightseeing, which was his passion; so, while I lounged about, he diligently sought the sights, recording them on his camera for the both of us.
Over the years, he gave me hundreds of pictures; but the only one I have on view was taken one summer on the rocky shores of Tangiers.
Jane Bowles is in the picture, and that is why I especially like it. I have never understood why Jane, one of the most original and mysterious phenomenons ever to come from out of nowhere (actually, she was a Jewish girl from Ohio) never received the honors and audience her very unique writings deserved. She wrote only three works, Two Serious Ladies (a novel), In the Summer House (a play), and A Stick of Green Candy (short stories), but they were all brilliant, and utterly unlike the work of anyone else. She died ten years ago in a Spanish nunnery. A book of her Selected Writings has been published.58 Read it.
I want to thank all of you who suggested actresses to play Mary Sanchez, the cleaning woman who appeared in my Interview piece A Day’s Work. We are following all the leads. Many people suggested Esther Rolle. And she is good; but rather too professional. Remember: Mary is black, between fifty and sixty, maybe sixty-five. I have a hunch that when we find her she will be someone in the entertaining field, but not necessarily an actress. Perhaps a singer, a forgotten vaudeville personality, an actress with a regional group. Really, it is extraordinary the amount of talent, even genius, unused, undiscovered. Look at Jane Bowles! I’m sure there are many people who are not only greatly gifted but do not suspect the nature of their gift. I had an elderly cousin, the woman in my story A Christmas Memory, who was a genius; she certainly didn’t know it, nor did anyone else: most people thought she was an eccentric, simple-minded lady with an unusual talent for making scrapquilts.
I went to California again (how can anyone live there; it’s unendurable) to discuss the casting of Handcarved Coffins. The producers, Lester Persky and United Artists, have several rows of names. Row A reads: Jake Pepper—Robert Duvall; Mr. Quinn—Steve McQueen; Addie Mason—Ellen Burstyn. I admire all three of these performers. But personally I would prefer an all non-star cast.
Otherwise, I’ve been working on my book Answered Prayers.
The other day, a man stopped me on the street and asked if I knew how to get to Chinatown. I said: “It’s downtown. Just keep walking downtown.”
Then I remembered a childhood neighbor, a husky boy who spent one whole summer digging a huge deep hole in his backyard. At last I asked him what was the purpose of his labor.
“To get to China. See, the other side of this hole, that’s China.”
Well, he never got to China; and maybe I’ll never finish Answered Prayers; but I keep on digging!
All the best,
T.C.
TO JACK DUNPHY
[Telegram] [New York]
[25 February 1982]
jack dunphy
(1936) verbier
miss you need you cable when can i expect you Love Truman
[Collection Gerald Clarke]
1 Capote had visited Morocco with Lee Radziwill.
2 Capote’s house on Long Island had been burglarized shortly before Christmas 1967. Three men were later arrested and accused of the crime.
3 Actually, Donald Windham accompanied Capote to California.
4 Dunphy’s novel The Nightmovers had just been published.
5 He was doubtless referring to the war in Vietnam, the violence on college campuses and, most probably, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which occurred on April 4, 1968.
6 Answered Prayers.
7 Myrtle Bennett was his housekeeper in Palm Springs.
8 Despite his pleading, Dunphy refused to have a telephone installed in their Verbier condominium.
9 In October he was nearly killed when a new bulldog, Maggie, tried to jump out of his Jaguar convertible on a Long Island road. In his confusion, he stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake, crashed the car into a tree, and was propelled through the windshield. Knocked unconscious, he spent two days in Southampton Hospital. Maggie was unhurt; the car was demolished.
10 Dunphy was in Verbier.
11 He had interviewed a convicted California killer for a television documentary. When the conviction was overturned on a technicality, Capote was subpoenaed to testify in a new trial. Believing that the interview had been confidential, he ignored the subpoena and fled the state. Cited for contempt of court, he surrendered in October 1970 and was fined five hundred dollars and sentenced to three days in jail, of which he was forced to serve only eighteen hours. In the fall of 1967, Twentieth Century–Fox bought movie rights to his projected novel, Answered Prayers, for $350,000. As the deadline, January 1, 1971, approached, Capote had still not written the novel, however, and Fox was demanding return of its first installment of $200,000, a sum he was, in fact, forced to pay.
12 Dunphy’s birthday was August 22. He was born in 1914.
13 The Radziwills lived in London.
14 Gloria Dunphy was Dunphy’s favorite sister.
15 He was presumably referring to a work by William Hazlitt (1778–1830), the English essayist and critic.
16 Capote was involved in several literary feuds. The most amusing was the one with Jacqueline Susann, the author of such bestselling potboilers as Valley of the Dolls. Capote began the fight in 1969 by slighting her literary abilities in an appearance on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. She later retaliated on the same show, ridiculing his effeminate mannerisms, imitating his high-pitched, baby-like voice and all but pronouncing him a homosexual. His turn came again when he next appeared on Carson’s show. Susann, he told Carson and his millions of viewers, looked “like a truck driver in drag.” That wounded her—she did indeed have heavy, somewhat mannish features—and she and her husband marched into the office of her lawyer, the eminent Louis Nizer, and demanded that Nizer draw up a suit for libel. “Words are like chemicals,” Nizer later wrote. “Some combinations fizzle. Others explode. The laughter which burst across the nation drove her and Irving Mansfield, her husband and gifted partner in the dissemination of her works, right into my office.” Though Nizer believed that Capote had in fact committed a libel, he advised Susann against a suit. He changed his mind, however, when, a few years later, Capote bragged to an interviewer that the reason Susann failed to sue him was that Nizer had informed her that she would lose any such lawsuit. All Capote’s lawyer had to do, Nizer had supposedly told his client, was to dress a dozen real truck drivers in women’s clothes and to parade them in front of a jury, which would thereupon conclude that Capote was right: she did look like a truck driver in drag. Nizer never told Susann any such thing, of course—Capote had invented his exchange with his client—and he wrote Capote a letter in which he demanded an apology. Capote’s reply—this letter—appeased both him and Susann, and the matter was dropped.
17 After Dark was the magazine in which Capotes interview appeared, detailing his fictitious account of Nizer’s advice to Susann.
18 Capote had been hospitalized at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California.
19 Capote’s illness allowed him to get out of his contract with The Washington Post to report on a sensational Houston murder trial involving sex and torture.
20 This was a form letter, sent to several of Capote’s friends, formally announcing John O’Shea’s entrance into his life as business manager—and just about everything else. The address is O’Shea’s small suburban house in Wantagh, Long Island, not far from New York City. Capote’s friends were appalled by the letter, which they viewed as his surrender to O’Shea’s demands for control over his affairs. The letter was almost certainly written by O’Shea, and parts of it make no sense. This one is addressed to Lerman, for instance, but the second paragraph, which begins “as many of you are aware,” addresses several people.
21 Doris Roberts, William Goyen’s wife, had written Capote asking for comments to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of her husband’s novel The House of Breath.
22 Goyen had written an unfavorable review of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (“That Old Valentine Maker,” The New York Times Book Review, November 2, 1958), deriding what he regarded as Capote’s whimsy, excess, want of seriousness, and lack of “full imaginative control.”
23 Roberts was highly regarded as an actress.
24 In 1965, following the success of In Cold Blood, Capote had moved from Brooklyn Heights to an apartment overlooking the East River at 870 United Nations Plaza in Manhattan.
25 Dunphy, who spent winters in Verbier, usually stopped off in Paris on his way home to NewYork.
26 Capote and Dunphy had small, neighboring houses on Long Island. Both homes were prone to leaks after a severe, snowy winter.
27 Capote had rented a house at 9421 Lloyd Crest Drive in Beverly Hills, and he was living there with John O’Shea.
28 “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a chapter from Capote’s novel in progress, Answered Prayers, had appeared in the November 1975 issue of Esquire.
29 He is referring to his house on Long Island.
30 The chapter, titled “Unspoiled Monsters,” was actually about 24,000 words. Capitalizing on the
