What if Truman Capote had grown up?

Meditations on art and aging and other things

by Adrienne So

On November 14, 1965, the four members of the Clutter family were shotgunned to death on their quiet farm in Holcomb, Kansas. On November 15, worlds away in New York City, a popular writer named Truman Capote noticed the news item and decided to write a story on it. The book he wrote, In Cold Blood, changed the way that people viewed journalism – it bridged the gap between stark journalistic writing and the horror of the events that journalists tried to write about. The book also destroyed Capote. It ate up six years of his life and led to his death by alcoholism.

I know this, not because I watched the movie – although I did that, also – but because I read the book. In Cold Blood was required reading in my high school, because a familiarity with bloody murder is a must-have in every high school education. It is a good book, insightful, compassionate, and a little maudlin – the final scene involves Nancy Clutter’s best friend skipping off into the sunset, with the speculation that life does, indeed, go on.

At the time, I didn’t think that such a book was capable of destroying anyone. But apparently, it did. In order to write with such insight, Capote needed to befriend the murderers. He was the only one to get a first-person account of what exactly happened that night in the Clutter house. At the same time, he needed his friends to die in order to get the appropriate ending for his book. The movie Capote is the portrait of a man who is at once entirely selfless – how could he be otherwise, to see humanity in two monsters? – and entirely selfish. “If they win this appeal,” he says, “I may have a complete nervous breakdown.” I can see why waiting six years for two people to die would take a toll on someone.

So many books and movies have been made about the Clutter murders, and all because Capote chose to write about them. The questions that they raise are usually about good and evil, and the flaws of the criminal justice system. What Perry Smith and Dick Hickock did was evil. Tying up four people and shotgunning them in the face is evil. But the murderers themselves weren’t. Perry Smith was twisted by fate, and manipulated by people like Capote, to become what he was – an essentially good person whose life never let him see the difference between right and wrong. He put a pillow under Kenyon Clutter’s head before he shot him. He tucked Nancy Clutter in her bed and protected her from being raped by Hickock before blasting her head open.

But Capote is a different movie, whose focus is on the creative process – something that all artists, writers, and musicians have to deal with, and is probably the reason so many of them turn to alcohol, sex and drugs. All artists channel pain. But pain is marketable, and perhaps the worst scene in the movie is when Capote’s publisher, Wallace Shawn, is scheduling the book’s publication around Perry Smith’s execution. Watching Capote, I was reminded of another movie that recently came out about artist’s self-destructing, amongst others – Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, about the collapse of Kurt Cobain. Or Sid & Nancy, or Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Or that retarded biographical mini that my friend in film school at the University of Miami made and then made me watch because he’s obsessed with Jeff Buckley.

All movies about musicians, and all of them with sad endings. Artists die so we don’t have to.

In light of this, is it so bad that some choose…not to? For a long time, I wondered why debut albums are always the best ones, until I realized that it was because: a) the artist had many more long, lonely years to compile his music, and b) he is usually depressed and haunted and starving, which makes for much better tunes. I’m a firm believer in the fact that security kills the creative impulse. Of course, many bands mature with age. But a lot more, don’t.

We, as an audience, are so demanding. The balance between commercial success and personal satisfaction with work is one that every artist has to struggle with, and sometimes they fail, and we hate them for that. Liz Phair is a classic – and my favorite – example. She needs to stop singing like she has a good voice, because she doesn’t, and she needs to stop writing lyrics that try to make sense, because she doesn’t. But no one can produce an album like Exile in Guyville every three years without going through a nervous breakdown. It’s crushing, and I don’t know how we feel we are justified in condemning someone for not being in that much pain, all the time. At least Liz Phair is still alive – and making appearances on vh1’s Top 20 Countdown, no less.

There’s been a big string of bands like that lately – Green Day, Weezer, every iconic band from my days as a ratty-haired sixth-grader that stopped singing about poop and started singing about Beverly Hills and other things that would make very visually appealing music videos. And everyone whines about them selling out – for example, my roommate John, who was an East Bay kid and remembers Green Day from their 924 Gilman days. But he’s not the same person he was when he was raving at thirteen, and Green Day isn’t, either. If my roommate is allowed to change – well, since he HAS to change – then other people are allowed to change, as well. I met a woman the other day whose children play on the same soccer team as Billie Joe Armstrong’s kids. Who can even imagine Sid & Nancy having kids? Isn’t building a family an accomplishment – and a worthy one – as well?