Truman Capote - Celebrity

Celebrity

Capote was openly homosexual. One of his first serious lovers was Smith College literature professor Newton Arvin, who won the National Book Award for his Herman Melville biography in 1951. It was to Arvin that Capote dedicated Other Voices, Other Rooms. However, Capote spent the majority of his life until his death partnered to Jack Dunphy, a fellow writer. In his book, "Dear Genius..." A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote, Dunphy attempts both to explain the Capote he knew and loved within their relationship and the very success-driven and, eventually, drug and alcohol addicted person who existed outside of their relationship. It provides perhaps the most in-depth and intimate look at Capote's life, outside of his own works. Although Capote and Dunphy's relationship lasted the majority of Capote's life, it seems that they both lived, at times, different lives. Their sometimes separate living quarters allowed autonomy within the relationship and, as Dunphy admitted, "spared the anguish of watching Capote drink and take drugs."

Capote was well known for his distinctive, high-pitched voice and odd vocal mannerisms, his offbeat manner of dress and his fabrications. He often claimed to know intimately people whom he had in fact never met, such as Greta Garbo. He professed to have had numerous liaisons with men thought to be heterosexual, including, he claimed, Errol Flynn. He traveled in an eclectic array of social circles, hobnobbing with authors, critics, business tycoons, philanthropists, Hollywood and theatrical celebrities, royalty, and members of high society, both in the U.S. and abroad. Part of his public persona was a longstanding rivalry with writer Gore Vidal. Their rivalry prompted Tennessee Williams to complain: "You would think they were running neck-and-neck for some fabulous gold prize." Apart from his favorite authors (Willa Cather, Isak Dinesen, Marcel Proust), Capote had faint praise for other writers. However, one who did get his favorable endorsement was journalist Lacey Fosburgh, author of Closing Time: The True Story of the Goodbar Murder (1977). He also claimed an admiration for Andy Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B & Back Again.

Although Capote seemed to never really embrace the Gay Rights Movement, his own openness about homosexuality and his encouragement for openness in others makes him an important player in the realm of Gay Rights nonetheless. In his piece "Capote and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Midcentury," Jeff Solomon details an encounter between Capote and Lionel and Diana Trilling — two New York intellectuals and literary critics — in which Capote questioned the motives of Lionel, who had recently published a book on E.M. Forster but had ignored the author's homosexuality. Solomon argues that "when Capote confronts the Trillings on the train, he attacks their identity as literary and social critics committed to literature as a tool for social justice, capable of questioning both their own and their society's preconceptions, and sensitive to prejudice by virtue of their heritage and, in Diana's case, by her gender." By producing works on homosexuality before and after the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement and by living an openly gay lifestyle, Capote became an important representative of the gay community and a leading gay figure throughout the 20th century.