Literary Rogues (24 page)

“I got this idea of doing
a really serious big work
,” he said. “It would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: every word of it would be true from beginning to end.” Many wondered whether Capote was capable of telling the truth—few believed his stories about sleeping with Camus, for instance.

To celebrate the success of
In Cold Blood
, Capote threw a masked ball for five hundred of his “
very closest friends
” at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966. Capote worked all summer cultivating his exclusive guest list, which included celebrities such as Frank Sinatra and actress Candice Bergen. Capote liked to brag that he made fifteen thousand enemies that night by leaving so many people off his guest list. For all the fanfare, the evening itself was pretty sedate—except for a drunk Norman Mailer, who asked Lyndon B. Johnson's national security adviser to go outside to settle an argument about the Vietnam War.

Mailer ran for mayor of New York three years later on a platform of banning private automobiles from the city and admitting it as the fifty-first state. (He was originally going to announce his candidacy at the November 1960 party thrown with his wife at their Manhattan loft, before things got out of hand and he stabbed her.) Unsurprisingly, Mailer lost handily in the Democratic primary.

Undistracted by his foray into politics, Mailer moved right along with his publishing career. He would go on to publish more than thirty books, including
The Executioner's Song
, a “nonfiction novel” about a condemned murderer. It won both the 1979 National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The book was similar in some respects to Capote's defining work, and Capote believed that Mailer had ripped him off, causing a rift in the friendship. “
We were a little chilly
toward the end,” Mailer later said.

While Mailer chugged right along, Capote dilly-dallied, stretching out the fifteen minutes of fame that
Breakfast at Tiffany's
and
In Cold Blood
had bought him. “
He accelerated the speed
of his journey to celebrity, appearing on television talk shows and, in his languid accent, which retained its Southern intonation, indulged a gift for purveying viperish wit and scandalous gossip. He continued to cultivate scores of the famous as his friends and confidants, all the while publishing little,” according to the
New York Times
.

Capote made a tentative foray into screenwriting, which culminated with his (unproduced) screenplay for F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
. “
This is just like the book
,” a Paramount executive who read Capote's screenplay said. Capote replied that he was under the impression that they had asked him to adapt the book. The studio, however, remained unimpressed with Capote's workmanlike script and wanted a more visual adaptation.

Fitzgerald was one of the few writers Capote respected. “He
spoke badly of other writers
,” Kurt Vonnegut said. “I assume he must have done the same about me. Almost any name I brought up he would dismiss.”

Capote was especially dismissive of the Beats. William S. Burroughs, he claimed, didn't have an ounce of talent. He also called out Jack Kerouac during a television interview. “
This isn't writing
—it's typing,” he said of
On the Road
. (Capote was a fan of Gustave Flaubert and believed one needed time to find the right word.) Years later, Kerouac and Capote finally met face-to-face in a Manhattan studio taping a television program. “Hello,
you queer bastard
,” Kerouac said, shaking Capote's hand. “You've been saying bad things about me, but I have nothing against you.”

Capote had been sitting on the title for his next novel,
Answered Prayers
, but the book refused to write itself. He went to at least four different psychiatrists to treat his inability to put words on the page. Nothing worked. “
Finishing a book is just
like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it,” he allegedly said. He couldn't bring himself to load the gun, let alone pull the trigger.

Capote finally pulled the trigger on himself, committing social suicide by publishing a series of vignettes meant for
Answered Prayers
in
Esquire
magazine in 1976. In the excerpt from his work-in-progress, he parodied many of his New York socialite friends. When someone asked if he was worried they would recognize themselves, he said, “Nah,
they're too dumb
. They won't know who they are.”

He couldn't have been more wrong. The wealthy society friends he had been cultivating over the years quickly saw themselves in Capote's thinly veiled caricatures, and many of them stopped speaking to him. One wealthy heiress committed suicide days before the magazine's publication. It was rumored that she read an advance copy and couldn't handle Capote airing her dirty laundry. “
Writers don't have to destroy
their friendships with people in order to write,” William Styron said. “It seemed to me an act of willful destruction.”

Capote didn't mind. He had new friends: cocaine, prescription pills, and alcohol.

His substance abuse further exacerbated his writer's block. In 1978, he appeared as a frequent guest on a short-lived television game show on CBS called
The Cheap Show
. Capote would show up at tapings with a milk carton filled with vodka and orange juice and fall asleep in his chair, sleeping through entire episodes as the cameras rolled. No one bothered trying to wake him up. “
He's Truman. What can you do
?” producer Chris Bearde said. “Do you think he'll be brilliantly funny if I wake him up? He'll probably tell us to all go and fuck ourselves. I'd rather have him stay asleep.”

In the early 1980s, Capote suffered from epilepsy and hallucinations, results of his substance abuse. “
When God hands you a gift
, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely,” he said. Alan Schwartz, a friend, tried to help him dry out. Capote refused, saying, “
Let me go. I want to go
.”

In 1984, a month away from his sixtieth birthday, Capote died of liver cancer. Author Gore Vidal, with whom Capote had a long-running rivalry, called his death “
a good career move
.” Capote's legacy totaled thirteen books, “
most of them slim
collections,” according to the
New York Times
obituary. “He failed to join the ranks of the truly great American writers because he squandered his time, talent and health on the pursuit of celebrity, riches and pleasure.”

“
One's eventual reputation
has very little to do with one's talent,” Mailer said. “History determines it, not the order of your words.”

In the 1980s, Mailer wed his sixth wife, former model Norris Church, and settled down. “There are
two sides to Norman Mailer
, and the good side has won,” his Random House editor, Jason Epstein, said of Mailer's relatively quiet twilight years. Though his output slowed, it never stopped—he published more than thirty books in all. Curiously, he never wrote about stabbing his wife, a dark moment that forever haunted him. Mailer died in 2007 at age eighty-four of acute renal failure.

“
I do not advocate
the use of dangerous drugs, wild amounts of alcohol, violence and weirdness—but they've always worked for me.”

—
HUNTER S. THOMPSON

T
oward the end of the 1960s, times, as Bob Dylan sang, were a-changing. To cover these new and exciting times, a new breed of journalist emerged. These new journalists included figures who often loomed as large as the subjects they covered—both in real life and in their nonfiction.

Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and others launched a full-frontal assault on the staid profession of journalism in the pages of
Rolling Stone
,
The Atlantic Monthly
,
The New Yorker
,
Esquire
, and
Harper's
. They injected themselves into their stories, blurring the line between fact and fiction, writer and subject. And why not? The Western world was changing at a faster pace than ever before. There was a man on the moon! The world was on the brink of nuclear destruction! Mass hysteria! As Ken Kesey said, “
To hell with facts
! We need stories!”

Before
Hunter S. Thompson
(1937–2005) became one of the most recognizable writers of the twentieth century thanks to his signature costume (sunglasses and a cigarette holder, essentially), he was a wayward youth from Louisville, Kentucky, one of three sons being raised by a widowed librarian in relative poverty. During adolescence, Thompson had frequent run-ins with law enforcement, culminating in an arrest for underage drinking during his senior year of high school. When he should have been walking for his high school graduation, he was instead sitting in a Kentucky jail cell. It was not his first, or last, brush with the law.

Thompson learned to write by typing
The Great Gatsby
over and over. “
Hunter identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald
more than any other writer,” his biographer and editor, Douglas Brinkley, said. “The difference was, Fitzgerald would look in on the storefronts of the rich; Hunter wanted to smash the windows.”

After he was released from his jail stint for underage drinking, Thompson entered the U.S. Air Force. He got his first taste of publication writing for the base newspaper. He didn't need a high school diploma; all he needed was a typewriter and the words in his own head. After he left the service, he wrote for magazines such as
Rolling Stone
and
Harper's
, infamously riding with the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang for a year and a half for a story that was expanded into a book. “In
a nation of frightened dullards
, there's always a shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome,” he wrote. Although he was talking about the Hell's Angels, he could very well have been talking about himself.

Although Thompson aspired to be a “
great writer
” (i.e., a novelist), he felt that if Hemingway could write journalism to pay the bills, so could he. His Fear and Loathing books, including
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
, were ostensibly works of nonfiction that read like novels. Or were they novels that Thompson passed off as works of nonfiction? Any other writer would have been crucified for such flagrant abuse of the very concept of “journalism.” Thompson not only got away with it, but was celebrated for it by critics, peers, and his legions of fans.

Blurring the line between fact and fiction was only one of the many transgressions Thompson got away with. He became almost as infamous for his outrageous drug use as for his writing. “
A bird flies
, a fish swims, I drink,” he once said. The drugs he allegedly loaded into his convertible for one weekend in Vegas included “
two bags of grass
, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyl nitrates.”

Thompson loved guns almost as much as he loved drugs: handguns, shotguns, machine guns—any gun would do. It seems only natural that he sought out a job that would allow him to carry a gun. In 1969 he ran for sheriff of his adopted hometown, Aspen, Colorado, on the Freak Party Power Ticket. The self-proclaimed “freak” may never have had a real chance, but his campaign was more about spreading his countercultural message, he explained in
Rolling Stone
. His opponent, who feared an influx of hippies would destroy Aspen, pulled out all the stops to beat the drug-using, gun-toting writer. Thompson came closer to winning than his skeptics expected, but lost nonetheless. “
I unfortunately proved
what I set out to prove. It was more a political point than a local election. The American dream is really fucked,” he said to an assemblage of reporters.

Thompson's high-profile stunts (running for sheriff, raucous appearances on college campuses) captured the attention of even nonreading Americans. “
In today's culture
, the writer is not on a lot of people's radars,” film critic Leonard Maltin said. “Thompson built a reputation so that people who didn't necessarily read him knew about him.”

Thompson considered himself a throwback to an earlier era, a romance junkie addicted to love and adventure like Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge. “
I wasn't trying to be an outlaw
writer,” he said toward the end of his life, referring to his place in the twentieth-century literary canon. “But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey. I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.”