I have a confession to make. A friend of mine who still lives in Lausanne taught me a long time ago the only attractive thing about the internet, something that has brought me infinite joy over the years, to wit: being a ruthless pirate of content in the form of the many films, books, and series I couldn’t afford while I was a digital nomad living on the road without two cents to rub. Certainly, I admit it was against the law and looked awful for an author. Where were the principles to protect the sacred copyright? I tell you where... In the dustbin of history! Now that I have money again, the copies I order on Amazon are the ones of my revered Maestros, always in the original language because I’m fed up with cheap translations. One must learn from the best; Goethe learned Spanish to read Calderón and Cervantes, for instance.
The curious thing was that my friend inherited a fortune. And yet, he was a monumental cheapskate. But with me, while we were inseparable best friends, he was splendid beyond measure. Nonetheless, we parted ways due to his annoying habits and countless shenanigans that subsequently made me lose my temper and good nature. Most of the time, I miss that rogue. I still have in my drawer a hot manuscript about his iconic mother–Paule Rizzo, a Parisian mannequin of Coco Chanel from the late fifties–that someday I shall top it off with a proper epilogue.
Among all the satisfaction that being a ruthless pirate brought about, I have to write up a delightful surprise. As if I would do in a logbook while sailing in the middle of nowhere with my eccentric friend, when we used to cast off with the fair weather, and during the warm nights, we slept with the sails jibed, battered for the breeze into the deep, while glowing ship cruisers were setting their bow to the island of Minorca.
It’s about how Gus Van Sant’s Feud series about Truman Capote ended. My peers didn’t upload the season finale because, in the penultimate episode, he died in the arms of Joanne Carson, and they thought the story was already told. For two days, I was clicking over and over to no avail at the Pirate’s Bay, and the season finale wasn’t there. I read the recap in the New York magazine media column Vulture where the praise of the line-up of actresses went to Demi Moore, and I quote, “Her Ann Woodward may have been the swan we spent the least amount of time with, but my God, did she make every gesture and every scathing line feel like an event.”
This morning some pirate uploaded the long-awaited season finale, and while it was supposed to be a bland posthumous fantasy, it instead struck me as a moving work of art, one that put me on the verge of tears. Am I getting old? Or maybe I’m still mourning my late father, my own private black swan. If he could read me without any further consideration would dispatch me with the same derogatory adjective that Truman’s mom did. Frilly. Oh yeah, all of us have something to forgive and to be forgiven. No doubt about that.
I live very close to Palamós, at that time a small fishing town where Truman–always accompanied by his partner-in-life Jack Dunphy–sought for three semesters, alternated with their cottage in Verbier, near to Lausanne, at the top of the Swiss Alps, the necessary peace to write his most accomplished manuscript, In Cold Blood.
On April of 1962, they tried Corsica for a change but in the very hotel they stayed at, they were robbed of $500, the equivalent of over five grand in today’s money. And quickly they went back to Spain. Local oldtimers who treated him, remember Truman with a bottle of gin under his arm yelling “My lady friend died!” at the newsstand the day headlines screamed that Marilyn Monroe had fatally overdosed.
And if this series of setbacks were not enough, a frightening wildfire just outside the villa they had rented almost cost them their lives, because, in that rocky Mediterranean shore, the pine groves always have been used as parasols and windshields as well, regardless of the blaze risk involved. Truman only had time to grab his precious manuscript and flee, hoping that a fishing sloop rescue him from that hell.
In late September, the furies of the equinox unleashed a deadly flood in Catalonia that further terrorized them, and they changed their minds, putting an end to that productive stay on October 1st when they left for Switzerland.
At the French border, however, the Gendarmerie stopped them because the car documentation was outdated. They spent two hellish days in the border town Perpignan going from office to office to no avail; Truman blew his top and called his friend the French Minister of Industry. Three hours later, they drove the car into France with everybody bowing and scraping like mad. The cynical moral of that adventure was: never bother with petty officials–go to the top (if you can).
Despite his efforts, he was unable to finish the manuscript until the Cluttler’s killers were hanged, due to his decision to sell the future book as a nonfiction novel. Hickock and Smith were on death row from 1960 to 1965, five long years. “No one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me,” Capote said. “It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones.”
Assuming that was an inescapable part of the author's fieldwork, Smith asked Truman to be present when he and Hickock went to the gallows on April 14, 1965. After that grim episode, Capote could top it off the manuscript on June 10 and began to reap the financial benefits by running installments in The New Yorker on September, before the publishing date with Random House on January 17, 1966. And selling In Cold Blood movie rights to Hollywood was extremely lucrative. After that, Truman Capote left his modest apartment in Brooklyn Heights for the 870 United Nations Plaza, with sweeping views of the New York skyline and East River.
But instead of getting back to work with the same stern and unsmiling discipline that was a constant since the beginning of his career, he dilapidated that rare gift from the gods trying to revenge Nina Capote, throwing epic parties for the privileged ones like the Black and White Ball, and showboating in talk show television about his Proustian adventure –a manuscript called Answered Prayers.
Many readers I know speak glowingly about the scintillating Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his short stories, and with each passing year, I can relate to that. In Cold Blood and society’s fascination for true crime has aged badly because television and modern media have been beating that dead horse ad nauseam. But adoration for Breakfast at Tiffany’s continues unabated.
What kind of emotional imbalance could have led a very gifted author to become a walker of rich white women–the so-called swans–a fat gossip hack, a hapless alcoholic, a cocaine snorter, and a talk show buffoon who passed out on live TV to the delight of the idiots? Look no further, it’s all about that Southern belle called Lillie Mae Faulk, also known as Nina Capote. A black swan that Gus Van Sant brought to life like a disturbing phantasmagoria, a never-ending regret that fueled his genius. And perhaps the only similitude that kept with his revered Marcel Proust. As the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi wrote, “Pain and sorrow. Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”