In Cold Blood

It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. 

                                                                                                                  Truman Capote

We have all heard the story (we may have even seen the movie – true, there have been several, but only one stands out), yet in our jaded era, when news has devolved into a summary of the day's wickedest and corniest deeds, we may no longer think often about the Kansas night of November 15, 1959. We may no longer wonder what motivated two recent jailbirds to ignite a nationwide manhunt, or how close they were on numerous occasions to not fulfilling their evil scheme. We may also not remember the speedy trial and windy series of appeals, that these two men sat on death row, what was dubbed the Corner in Kansas, for four years before their hanging in 1965. And once all persons immediately involved in the Holcomb tragedy were deceased ("four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives"), one of America's finest prose works was finally printed to everlasting controversy and acclaim.

We begin in one of the westernmost regions of the Bible Belt, "that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces." The residents of these quiet nooks, like the two-hundred-seventy-odd inhabitants of Holcomb, Kansas, are the direct descendents of those courageous souls who decided once upon a time that a covered wagon on a straight path of destiny was superior to a restricted semi-urban community of property owners. The irony, of course, is that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these lonesome prairie doves are now some of the most prominent landowners in their fiefdoms. One such squire is the eminently respectable Herbert Clutter. Clutter is the father of four, getting his only son and heir on the last try. His children are successful – the two eldest daughters have already married well and the youngest and the son are promising high school students – and his marriage has held up despite his wife's chronic infirmity, what some nowadays may choose to characterize as a violent pendulum between two distant poles – but we need not belabor the matter. Perhaps the mild disappointment of the Clutters' matrimony can be best summarized by a typical vista from the lonesome cliff that was Herbert's wife, Bonnie:

She knew 'good days' and occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days, those days when she was otherwise her 'old self', the affectionate and charming Bonnie her friends cherished, she could not summon the social vitality her husband's pyramiding activities required. He was a 'joiner,' a 'born leader'; she was not, and stopped attempting to be. And so, along paths bordered by tender regard, by total fidelity, they began to go their semi-separate ways – his a public route, a march of satisfying conquests, and hers a private one that eventually wound through hospital corridors.

Until the night of November 15, 1959, this unbridgeable gap – and it most certainly is unbridgeable – was the worst thing ever to have happened to Herbert Clutter and his immediate family. Alas, almost no one picks up In Cold Blood to learn about Herbert and Bonnie Clutter, their youngest daughter Nancy, or their only son Kenyon. No, readers have flocked to the novel for the better part of five decades because of two deadbeat thirtysomethings: Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.

Four lives – thriving, prosperous lives, albeit undescribed to us in anything except careful bromides – were ended on an unwilled miscalculation; two others, we are shown and told in monumental detail, are the knotty sums of long years of frustration, exclusion, and defeat. The defeated are Smith, a half-Cherokee, half-Irish "dwarfish boy-man" who loves playing the guitar and lifting weights, and Hickock, the sex-crazed check bouncer. Smith's childhood was wanton, hungry, and streaked with cruelty and misfortune; Hickock, on the other hand, was loved and never poor, if restricted by Puritan mores and an unyielding paterfamilias. Smith will compensate for his pain in the most natural way possible: he will seek to educate himself on the books he was never given (his highest education was the third grade) and become a knower of life; Hickock will make up for what he viewed as an iron fence around his stifled adolescent urges by slipping into statutory rape and kleptomania. Keen observers of human nature will immediately note how commonly such an odd couple forges a bond of, if not friendship, then mutual need. Indeed, towards the end of our terrible tale, Smith and Hickock will be joined on Kansas's death row by a similar, if even younger duo, whose motives are somewhat different ("We hate the world," they declare, after massacring seven residents of it) but whose identical demises will come only ten weeks later. 

Of our pair of evildoers, Hickock has far less to offer, but he will also bring up an interesting twist in his case that makes his lot seem – at least to him and a few misguided partisans – quite unfair. Regardless of Hickock's machinations this is without a doubt the Perry Smith show. Smith has rage within him, rage that has accumulated over a lifetime of a drunken, cowardly mother, a wild, destitute, and criminal youth, and an appearance that has always generated scorn and distance. Two of his siblings committed suicide and he has mulled over such an exit on countless occasions with no small amount of relief. The plot to rob the Clutters was supposed, however, to bring him happiness and money – two things Smith has never really had, and certainly not at the same time. But happiness is not really the fate of Perry Smith. And so, aboard a Mexican boat with a German captain during the duo's brief but exotic flight from the Kansas killing fields, we get a rather haunting portrait:

When Perry sang, Otto sketched him in a notebook. It was a passable likeness, and the artist perceived one not very obvious aspect of the sitter's countenance – its mischief, an amused, babyish malice that suggested some unkind cupid aiming envenomed arrows. He was naked to the waist. (Perry was 'ashamed' to take off his trousers, 'ashamed' to wear swimming-trunks, for he was afraid that the sight of his injured legs would 'disgust people' and so, despite his underwater reveries, all the talk about skin-diving, he hadn't once gone in the water.)

Smith's injuries date back to a motorcycle "crackup" – but we are not concerned with his well-being, his constant knee-rubbing that begins to resemble a wringing of the hands, or his aspirin-popping that begins to resemble the drugs so typical of the loser and recidivist. When an incarcerated Smith sees from his window cats "hunting for dead birds caught in the vehicles' engine grilles" and recognizes that "most of my life I've done what they're doing; the equivalent," we nod at this soft moment of self-awareness. Even if it is one of the very few.

The years following the publication of In Cold Blood were not that kind to Capote, who began to investigate bottlenecks and tumblers with the same vigor he once devoted to his semi-fictitious creations. But what of the problem of content? Art is necessarily about life; it may, like life, conclude in some form of extinguishment, like the snuffing out of a candle or its gradual guttering into the thinnest glaze of wax. But Capote's masterpiece is about the opposite of life, what we generally know as physical death but which, in this context, may be best understood as a study in extinction. Still, even solely on the basis of one "non-fiction novel" Capote must rank among the twentieth century's foremost prose stylists. Consider the asides: "Dick's anger had soared past him and struck elsewhere"; "His confidence was like a kite that needed reeling in"; "Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, although a curious interpreter of it"; "Her [Nancy's] eyes ... darkly translucent, [were] like ale held to the light"; "It was as though [Dick's] head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center"; "Tomorrow the aged Chevrolet was expected to perform punishing feats"; "Maturity, it seemed, had reduced her [Bonnie's] voice to a single tone, that of apology." Then there was the time a wounded, enlisted Smith hit it off with his nurse:

Sexual episodes of a strange and stealthy nature had occurred, and love had been mentioned, and marriage too, but eventually, when his injuries had mended, he'd told her goodbye and given her, by way of explanation, a poem he pretended to have written.

This magnificent snippet contains more artistic insight than an entire harlequin romance, and just as much plot. At another instance Capote refers to the greenest of the Kansas prosecutors as "an ambitious, portly young man of twenty-eight who looks forty and sometimes fifty" – and I am hard pressed to find a more dazzling portrait of genius amidst a museum of extraordinary exhibits ("I walked miles, my nose bleeding like fifteen pigs" may be a close runner-up). In the end, we are encouraged by justice because the crimes are the most unpardonable and merciless that man can commit. Yet what knowledge could have been gained during the "ideal apple-eating" season? Perhaps simply that of disobedience, neither first nor last. As Nancy stated of her beloved father, "I just want to be his daughter and do as he wishes." If only we all took such words to heart. 

Master Misery

One woman was particularly relentless. Ordinarily, her face would have had a soft commonplace sweetness, but now, watching Sylvia, it was ugly with distrust, jealousy. As though trying to tame some creature which might suddenly spring full-fanged, she sat stroking a flea-bitten neck fur, her stare continuing its assault until the earthquake footstep of Miss Mozart was heard in the hall.  

An impersonal and cold city, that Big Apple. Impersonal precisely because there are so many persons roaming about; cold because skyscrapers and lonely streets tend to be windy and tree-starved, reminding us at every corner of our mortal path. An especially affecting environment for a young woman from Easton, a small town "north of Cincinnati," even if Easton and Cincinnati probably do not trammel their winters. So why then would someone from Easton come to New York? Perhaps because growing up in a place like Easton makes some people dream of its farthest attainable opposite. Why attainable? Perhaps because a young woman of Easton must never relinquish the opportunity to move back to Easton, even if that would signal utter defeat. A quandary plaguing the heroine of this famous story.

Our heroine is Sylvia, who is young but likely not very beautiful – if she were, our story would have a very different arc of events. Having moved to America's most famous city "for whatever reason, and it was indeed becoming vague," she has been working a typist for an underwear company, which may not quite be the lowest rung of the career ladder although it may seem so. She lives with Henry and Estelle – they are very much a hendiadys for a single unit – a married couple with great aspirations once diligent Henry graduates law school. It is not strange to learn that one of Sylvia's motivations for quitting her hometown was "to rid herself of Henry and Estelle, or rather, their counterparts" (Estelle, in particular, is the type of blinkered narcissist who sincerely thinks she can encourage others by prattling on about her own successes); but it is strange to learn that Estelle, too, hails from Easton. In fact, Estelle and Sylvia's "childhood friendship" might explain why a married couple could endure a third residential wheel for more than rental purposes. Today, however, has been different: not only did Sylvia defy her roommates' daily advice and cross Central Park alone at dusk, she also knocked off work early and hastened to the offices of a certain Mr. Revercomb. His appearance may betray his formal education, although not to the degree that one could learn his motives, ulterior or otherwise:

Impeccable, exact as a scale, surrounded in a cologne of clinical odors; flat grey eyes planted like seed in the anonymity of his face and sealed within steel-dull lenses.

This remarkable passage makes far more sense as an echo of Sylvia's sentiments regarding New York City itself ("Anonymity, its virtuous terror; and the speaking drainpipe, all-night light, ceaseless footfall, subway corridor, numbered door"). Who could fail to see these "steel-dull lenses" as that famous image (from a mediocre poet) of a skyscraper? More remarkable still is that New Yorkers congregate like so many "patients" to spend time, valuable time, as it turns out, with Mr. Revercomb. And what does Mr. Revercomb seek from this anxious, motley crew, held in check by the "green-pale hands ... as strong as oak roots" of his secretary, Miss Mozart? Nothing, strange to say, that they couldn't dissemble or fabricate. Because for a tidy sum Mr. Revercomb will pay you to tell him your dreams.      

What Mr. Revercomb – a French valley of dreams – does with these recounted visions ("all typed and filed") is not ours to ponder. Sylvia also gives the matter little thought, which cannot be said of another frequent dreamer, Oreilly. Sylvia first lays eyes on Oreilly when Miss Mozart seizes him by the necktie and casts out of the offices of Mr. Revercomb, and not only because of the alcohol on his breath (all the other "applicants," save Sylvia, "laughed delicately, admiringly"). Oreilly does have a sad, drunk air about him, but he persists in his belief in the human soul, for dreams "are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us." His uncanny resemblance to a clown, if one whom spirits have long since mastered, makes the ridicule he suffers oddly fitting. Unhoused and ever on the lookout for his next drink, Oreilly befriends Sylvia by reminding her at once of childhood's innocence and the vices of the city that has rejected them. A desperate gambit towards the story's end reveals that neither one of them has been in close contact with reality for some time, a scene preceded by another, even more harrowing exchange between two childhood friends who have been living on the fumes of a distant past. But the best passage in Master Misery, Oreilly's term for the dream-filer, comes when Sylvia intrepidly takes Central Park in a very impractical pair of high heels:

The real trouble with Henry and Estelle was that they were so excruciatingly married .... Enough to drive you loony. 'Loony!' she said aloud, the quiet park erasing her voice. It was lovely now, and she was right to have walked here, with wind moving through the leaves, and globe lamps, freshly aglow, kindling the chalk drawings of children, pink birds, blue arrows, green hearts. But suddenly, like a pair of obscene words, there appeared on the path two boys: pimple-faced, grinning, they loomed in the dusk like menacing flames, and Sylvia, passing them, felt a burning all through her, quite as though she had brushed fire. They turned and followed her past a deserted playground, one of them bump-bumping a stick along an iron fence, the other whistling. These two sounds accumulated around her like the gathering roar of an oncoming engine, and when one of the boys, with a laugh, called, "Hey whatsa hurry?" her mouth twisted for breath. Don't, she thought, thinking to throw down her purse and run. At that moment, however, a man walking a dog came up a sidepath, and she followed at his heels to the exit.

If you ever had any reason to doubt Capote's genius, this paragraph would immediately dispel such foolishness (with the children's chalk drawings being one of his most unforgettable images). Yet there are many other instances of this brilliance: "You could hear the tough afternoon voices of desperate running boys"; "Her head fell back, and her laughter rose and carried over the street like an abandoned, wildly colored kite"; "She put her arm through Oreilly's, and together they moved down the street, but it was as if they were friends pacing a platform waiting for the other's train"; "There was an enormous commotion in the hall, capsizing the room into a fury of sound: a bull-deep voice, vulgar as red, roared out"; "His voice trailed to a mere moth of sound." It is no wonder, then, that of all his stories, Capote named the tragic tale of Sylvia the dreamer his favorite. And what of the Master himself? Why does Oreilly claim the dream collector is the same being who "lives in the hollows of trees" and whose step "you can hear ... in the attic"? Perhaps because there are so few trees and attics in the Argus-eyed city.                     

Shut a Final Door

'I was in a bookshop, and a man was standing there and we began talking: a middle-aged man, rather nice, very intelligent.  When I went outside he followed, a little ways behind: I crossed the street, he crossed the street, I walked fast, he walked fast.  This kept up six or seven blocks, and when I finally figured out what was going on I felt tickled, I felt like kidding him on.  So I stopped at the corner and hailed a cab; then I turned around and gave this guy a long, long look, and he came rushing up, all smiles.  And I jumped in the cab, and slammed the door and leaned out the window and laughed out loud: the look on his face, it was awful, it was like Christ.  I can't forget it.  And tell me, Anna, why did I do this crazy thing?  It was like paying back all the people who've ever hurt me, but it was something else, too.'  [Walter] would tell Anna these stories, go home and go to sleep.  His dreams were clear blue.  

"What was the use of having friends," muses the protagonist of this story, "if you couldn't discuss them objectively?"  Perhaps because in so doing you no longer have humans but merely objects, as if you were friends with a lamp or a sunset.  I suppose there are only two ways to get on in the world: on your own strengths or on the backs of others.  I also suppose that the very notion of getting on in the world admits the likelihood that so many struggle, collapse, fail, and die a thousand times before actual corporal extinction.  And those who get on, are they truly happy?  Material wealth can never sustain happiness, because you will inevitably discover someone happier in this same way and because money is always relative, and we are not.  We are absolute beings, related to one another surely and often inexorably, but we are not simply values on a scale to be seen from an indefinite number of perspectives.  In all of us there is something individual and unrepeatable; most souls, sadly, are all too willing to conform because conformity means human relations and acceptance and peace, and also because, we are told, failure is very much a certainty, and "there is always peace in certainties."  But if those who get on do not fail, or do not fail quite as much, what is their destination?   That may be a question for which the upwardly mobile Walter Ranney does not have an answer.

We meet Ranney in the throes of blame, his target a woman called Anna, whom we will encounter much later on.  To Anna he will ultimately attribute "every vice but stupidity" – exactly, we note, what he thinks of himself – yet Anna's "malice" will be one of the last doors slammed in Walter's face.  The first, we learn, may have been in his family as a youth, where his "churchly mother" and a monstrous father conspired to tear him asunder, each attempting an upbringing in his own way (his sister Cecile manages her own escape by marrying "a man forty years her senior," an "excuse" Walter found "reasonable enough").  From this purgatory Walter emerges in New York, where he meets Irving, "a sweet little Jewish boy," and Margaret, who is Irving's girlfriend as far as Irving is concerned.  The problem, of course, is that Irving is indeed concerned, while Walter and Margaret, an uncomely girl redeemed only by a certain "hectic brightness," are not, not at all.  Betrayal taints every fiber of their lecherous shapes, invisible only to Irving, because anyone else would never let his girlfriend spend more than a few polite and distant moments with Walter Ranney.  At length, there is a showdown:

Irving was sitting at the bar, his cheeks quite pink, his eyes rather glazed.  He looked like a little boy playing grown-up, for his legs were too short to reach the stool's footrest; they dangled doll-like.  The instant Margaret recognized him she tried to turn around and walk out, but Walter wouldn't let her.  And anyway, Irving had seen them: never taking his eyes from them, he put down his whiskey, slowly climbed off the stool, and, with a sad, ersatz toughness, strutted forward.    

Irving, you see, is "everyone's little brother," and Walter Ranney would gladly stab his own brother for the opportunity to make something of himself, even if he is not altogether sure what that something might involve.  Margaret in her bright and hectic way sees Walter as a natural in retail sales, perhaps because she intuits that his great strength is making other people believe they need something from him.  As such, she obtains for him an interview with her employer, Kurt Kurnhardt Advertising:  

The K.K.A., so-called, was a middle-sized agency, but, as such things go, very good, the best.  Kurt Kurnhardt, who'd founded it in 1925, was a curious man with a curious reputation: a lean, fastidious German, a bachelor, he lived in an elegant black house on Sutton Place, a house interestingly furnished with, among other things, three Picassos, a superb music box, South Sea Island mask and a burly Danish youngster, the houseboy.  He invited occasionally some one of his staff in to dinner; whoever was favorite at the moment, for he was continually selecting protégés.  It was a dangerous position, these alliances being, as they were, whimsical and uncertain: the protégé found himself checking the want ads when, just the evening previous, he'd dined most enjoyably with his benefactor.  During his second week at the K.K.A., Walter, who had been hired as Margaret's assistant, received a memorandum from Mr. Kuhnhardt asking him to lunch, and this, of course, excited him unspeakably.

Unspeakable actions do ensue, predominantly on Walter's part, but since ours is a story of doors slammed, doors to a father who mocks his child much like Walter teases an admirer in the passage that begins this review, we already understand this to be a tale of comeuppance.  So when he meets Anna, a tall woman who wore "black suits, affected a monocle, a walking cane, and pounds of jingling Mexican silver," we should not be surprised that it is Anna who puts him in his rightful and despicable place (her quip, "you're a man in only one respect, sweetie," precedes a similar line in this famous novel by a few years).  And although Walter has "clear blue" dreams most nights, he will occasionally be subject to a nightmare.  Or a phone call or two –  and we must end our revelations right here. 

Many of his countrymen know Capote only by reputation, not having actually read this magnificent work of genius, but instead absorbed one of its cinematic adaptations (the best of which remains this film).  His wit and impeccable style are an oddity of American literature, which has so valued tales of survival and superation to those which simply explore the artistic dividends of emotional truth.  You will always recognize Capote by his ingenious but hardly conspicuous use of the comma, as well as by the details only visible to a gifted mind: "The look on the boy's face was good for his digestion"; "A small gratifying flurry among the typists preceded him"; "After a pleasant hour of doing nothing but feel exhilarated"; "I love you, he said, running after her, I love you, he said, saying nothing"; "It was as if his brain were made of glass, and all the whiskey he'd drunk had turned into a hammer; he could feel the shattered pieces rattling in his head, distorting focus, falsifying shape"; "A dozen or so people whose names cast a considerable glare in his address book."  Yet the most remembered quote from Shut a Final Door remains its most hackneyed, All our acts are acts of fear, allegedly a last line to a poem, if one that no self-respecting poet would ever have composed.  I personally prefer the very apposite observation that "darlings are rarely serious."  Because that rare and serious darling, if scorned, will learn hate just as fluently as she learned love.  

Capote

A famous critic once said that any work described as being based on a true story usually denotes misery and tragedy, a statement from which a cynic might conclude that most people would prefer to see suffering and empathize than witness happiness that cannot be theirs.  Despite the prevalence of Schadenfreude, this is not quite the reason.  What is contained in our soul is a sense of tragedy because conventional wisdom tells us we cannot live forever.  And even before conventional wisdom became louder and uglier, every person of faith would occasionally walk the path of doubt and despair, and every person still wonders what is the worth of an existence in which we are destined to wither and fade.  Those who are artistically inclined are beset by some of the most acute fears because their works will often not gain full recognition before their death.  Instead, they must trust in the taste and acknowledgement of souls and minds that conventional wisdom informs them they can never know, which is a little like building a palace in the middle of a desert then forsaking that remote land forever.  Artists will hesitate as to how much living and how much creating they should do – the line is entirely at the discretion of the individual who may put down a book to go out to a restaurant with company or simply decide yet again that his library is company enough.  Some would even go so far as to aver that friends, people, other lives, can be mined and plagarized as brutally as any text.  Which brings us to this film about other people's tragedies.

The story is well-known: on November 15, 1959, the Clutters, an affluent farming couple and their teenage son and daughter are found murdered in their Kansas home, all apparently shot at very close range.  The news garners a modest backpage notice in the New York Times, but one that captures the attention and imagination of a thirty-five-year-old novelist by the name of Truman Capote (a spellbinding Philip Seymour Hoffman).  A polished, squeaky ball of overdone gestures, ambition, and almost ruthless intelligence, Capote had written prolifically in the last decade, capped off by the 1958 publication of this novel which gained him a certain amount of fame and economic ease.  Yet he had never been so inspired until he read the 300-word blurb on "a tragedy in Holcomb."  He enlists his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) to trek out to Kansas, a place clearly antithetical to his big city mores and desires to learn how such an event has affected the local population.  Since the victims and the criminal investigation do not interest him as much as the emotions wafting through Holcomb, Capote does not make the best of first impressions on the policeman in charge, Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper).  Not that, of course, he cares what someone who has no literary taste thinks of him.  When he visits the Clutter residence at sunset, it resembles a grim pagan temple, the coffins laid out like a shrine; then he decides to open one of the coffins and finds something so hideous it remains covered by a sheet.  Such gore does not bother him as much as justify the eventfulness of what just occurred ("To see something so horrifying, it comforts me.  Normal life falls away.  But then again, I was never much for normal life").  Yet in time his culture and innate ability to sense what other people want to hear – regardless of his sincerity – grant him access to a host of details about what happened that dark day in November.  And about half an hour into our film two suspects, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino), are marched in silence into the local police station.

The primary downside of every true story, I suppose, is that its dénouement has little in the way of suspense.  After the utilitarian prologue to the arrests, the film liberates itself from the austere plotting of a police procedural to focus on the mind that will transform the intended robbery and last-minute butchery of the Clutters into one of the more famous crimes in twentieth-century America.  We are duly aware – from the openly homosexual Capote's gay-bashing and racist anecdote at a socialite gathering at the beginning of the film – that he will stop at nothing to become either the center of attention or the most famous writer in America.  Ideally, of course, he would become both.   A southerner by birth, Capote is nothing if a New York socialite by disposition: predatory, superficial, quick-witted, and more than occasionally nasty ("Nancy was your best friend?" Harper and Capote ask Laura Kinney, the teenager who found the bodies, as if interviewing her for her qualifications to report on the tragedy).  Capote sets every scene with name-dropping, and the name he drops most frequently is his own.  In an effort to prove his proximity to mere mortals, he relates that his mother died during the filming of Breakfast at Tiffany's, although the event is secondary to his long description of a bar where this actor and this director would go boozing every night.  Like many a novelist he relishes the feelings of others, which he then challenges himself to describe.  When Dewey shows pain at the death of his friend, Capote becomes alive with wondering what lies behind that pain, imagining the whole relationship from start to bloody end.  Were Capote just even remotely sincere about his pleas for humaneness, we would be more likely to believe that he cared about something outside of his own diminutive frame.  But he is never sincere.  Even when he is about to read from his new book to an adoring New York audience, he states his name and then snickers as if he were a clever joke only understood by himself, his intellect realizing that while a talented man with almost total recall and a suppleness to his prose, as a human being he is an insufferable fraud.  And he is most egregiously fraudulent with the half-Cherokee prisoner called Perry Smith.

You may smile at the political convenience of having Smith be half-Indian although, we recall, this is no conceit of fiction but a true story.  Smith is young, lean, and well-read; he is also deranged in ways that only become evident towards the end of the film.  Capote investigates Smith, his missing parents, his orphanage, the suicides of his siblings, his tendency to use big words, his jealousy of Hickock's non-existent relationship with the effeminate writer, his journals, his self-portrait in charcoal, his mother who when alive was a Cherokee alcoholic.  In Capote's case, his mother was a slut and in this troubled killer he sees himself, as well as an excuse for the irreverence and spite of his own life.  "If I don't understand you," he tells Smith, "the world will see you as a monster and I don't want that."  He finds Smith attractive and has him and Hickock pose for a top fashion photographer, sometimes with himself on the side as if he were a scientist with his two prize specimens.  He pontificates by claiming that this book was the one he was always meant to write, supporting his grandeur with truisms such as "there are two worlds: the quiet, conservative life and the world of those two men."  Yet we see through his guise and so does everyone else, so why does he become a star?  The real Capote's desire was to be the best, which is the desire perhaps of every writer worth his salt; it is how this desire manifests itself that will reflect the author's character.  Some authors see themselves as victims or outsiders, and Capote was in every possible facet of his true self an outsider, and his alleged revolution, the "nonfiction novel," was intended to restart time with him as the almighty creator.  But the nonfiction novel is essentially how we deal with everyone: we take the basic facts and extrapolate their hidden meanings.  We guess at gestures, words, and sensations and try to picture what motivates human decisions.  So when Capote tells Dewey his book about the Kansas killers will be titled In Cold Blood, Dewey responds: "Does that refer to the crime or the fact you're still talking to them?"  And for once Capote seems as if he has not considered that particular reading.