It was hard to see why the late Jacqueline Susann, author of the no-qual best seller Valley of the Dolls, got so upset. All Truman Capote had done was to mention to Johnny Carson, on the Tonight show, that Susann looked "like a truck driver in drag." No offense there. "Bitchy, yes; malicious, no," Capote explained in a letter to Susann's attorney, Louis Nizer, after she filed suit. Capote went on to praise Nizer's own letter to him as well written: "If only your client . . . had your sense of style!" Susann took this badly and caricatured Capote in her novel Dolores as Horatio Capon, a gossipy painter who resembled a "blondish pig."
Heavens! Is Gerald Clarke's biography of the Tiny Terror, as the 5-ft. 3-in. novelist and journalist was accurately known, a recounting of such scurrilities? The answer is a joyous and admirably unedifying yes. Capote, who died in 1984 "of everything . . . of living," as Bandleader Artie Shaw said at his funeral, was always his own best character. He lived an outrageous life, mostly against society's grain, and invented gaudy lies to pad out the occasional dull spots (an early dust-jacket blurb had him dancing on a Mississippi riverboat). Author Clarke, a TIME contributor, sorts out the nonsense, the brilliance and the bitchiness of Capote's life in what is the liveliest and rowdiest literary biography in recent memory.
Scandal was the sea in which Capote swam. Clarke quotes Capote's story, for instance, of his not-very-electric sexual fling with Errol Flynn, and of a tender interlude with John Garfield ("one of the nicest people I've ever known. My mother saw him just once and tried to get him into bed with her"). Capote used such shockers to draw corresponding admissions from subjects he interviewed. Clarke's breezy and sympathetic account inevitably teems with them and is sure to keep tongues wagging busily through the summer.
Capote's father, Clarke relates, was a charming con man named Arch Persons, a bad-check artist who worked, when he worked, as a promoter for a carnival performer called the Great Pasha, whose specialty was being buried alive. His mother was a small-town Alabama beauty named Lillie Mae Faulk, who eventually chucked the shiftless Arch, headed for New York City and changed her name to Nina because it sounded more sophisticated. Little Truman was parked for much of his childhood in a Southern-gothic household of eccentric cousins in Monroeville, Ala. But Clarke stresses that his most agonizing early memory was of being locked in a hotel room by his mother when she went out on the town. "That's when my claustrophobia and fear of abandonment began," Capote said. "She locked me in and I still can't get out." Much of his character -- he played the endearing, clever child till late in life and spoke in a high, childish voice -- can be read as a vain attempt to please his mother so much that she would not leave him again, in the hotel room or with his cousins.