![]() Norman Mailer marvels at his literary gifts – “He wrote the best sentences of anyone of our generation” – and uniqueness: “He had a special life and he was going to live it in a special way.” The journalist Sally Quinn remembers his flair for generating gossip. We hear Lauren Bacall pointing out the contrast between Capote’s “little boy voice” and “deep male laugh”. Most fascinating, though, are the previously unheard audio recordings of Capote’s friends and contemporaries, drawn from interviews conducted by the late George Plimpton for his 1997 book, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. The scandal of Answered Prayers is central to The Capote Tapes, a new documentary that incorporates archive footage of the writer’s TV appearances alongside new interviews with confidantes and admirers, among them writers Jay McInerney and Colm Tóibín. Capote hadn’t bitten the hand that fed him. As soon as the socialites and wealthy wives with whom he had mingled happily for years – including Slim Keith, Babe Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt, whom he called his “swans” – saw how casually he had spilled their most intimate secrets, those friendships were dead. There was a cost to his social reputation as well as his literary one. ![]() “And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen – wham!” Having bragged about the book for years, all he had to do now was write it.Ī contract was signed in 1966, but advance chapters published in Esquire magazine nine years later proved to be far below the standard of his defining successes, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood. “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet,” he told People magazine. Answered Prayers, the story of a budding writer screwing his way through polite society, was intended to be Capote’s most explosive achievement. ![]() W hen Truman Capote died in 1984, he left the remains of a novel he had been hatching for nearly two decades, and talking about for almost as long.
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