IN describing the genesis of a successful work, a writer often will say that he stumbled across his idea, giving the impression that it was purely a matter of luck, like finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. The truth, as Henry James observed, is usually different: “His discoveries are, like those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than alert recognitions. He comes upon the interesting thing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in the right direction for it.”
So it was that Truman, who had been moving in the right direction for several years, came across his San Salvador, his interesting thing, in that brief account of cruel death in far-off Kansas: he had been looking for it, or something very much like it. For no apparent reason, four people had been slain: Herbert Clutter; his wife, Bonnie; and two of their four children, Nancy, sixteen, and Kenyon, fifteen. As he read and reread those spartan paragraphs, Truman realized that a crime of such horrifying dimensions was a subject that was indeed beyond him, a truth he could not change. Even the location, a part of the country as alien to him as the steppes of Russia, had a perverse appeal. “Everything would seem freshly minted,” he later explained, reconstructing his thinking at that time. “The people, their accents and attitude, the landscape, its contours, the weather. All this, it seemed to me, could only sharpen my eye and quicken my ear.” Finally he said to himself, “Well, why not this crime? The Clutter case. Why not pack up and go to Kansas and see what happens?”
When he appeared at The New Yorker to show Mr. Shawn the clipping, the identity of the killer, or killers, was still unknown, and might never be known. But that, as he made clear to Shawn, was beside the point, or at least the point he wanted to make. What excited his curiosity was not the murders, but their effect on that small and isolated community. “As he originally conceived it, the murders could have remained a mystery,” said Shawn, who once again gave his enthusiastic approval. “He was going to do a piece about the town and the family—what their lives had been. I thought that it could make some long and wonderful piece of writing.”
Truman asked Andrew Lyndon to go with him, but Andrew was otherwise engaged. Then he turned to Nelle Harper Lee. Nelle, whose own book, To Kill a Mockingbird, was finished but not yet published, agreed immediately. “He said it would be a tremendously involved job and would take two people,” she said. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.” Watching with some amusement as the two amateur sleuths nervously made their plans, Jack wrote his sister: “Did you read about the murder of the Clutter family out in Kansas? Truman’s going out there to write a piece on it. The murder is unsolved!! He’s taking Nelle Harper Lee, an old childhood friend, out with him to play his girl Friday, or his Delia Street (Perry Mason’s sec’t.). I hope he’ll be all right. I told him curiosity killed the cat, and he looked scared—till I added that satisfaction brought it back.”
He also enlisted the aid of Bennett Cerf, who, he correctly assumed, had well-placed acquaintances in every state of the union. “I don’t know a soul in the whole state of Kansas,” he told Bennett. “You’ve got to introduce me to some people out there.” By coincidence, Bennett had recently spoken at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, and had made a friend of its president, James McCain. By further coincidence, McCain had known the murdered Clutter family, as he did nearly everyone else in Finney County. He would give Truman all necessary introductions, he told Bennett, if, in exchange, Truman would stop first at the university to speak to the English faculty. “I accept for Truman right now,” Bennett responded. “Great!”
Thus assured, in mid-December Truman boarded a train for the Midwest, with Nelle at his side and a footlocker stuffed with provisions in his luggage. “He was afraid that there wouldn’t be anything to eat out there,” said Nelle. After a day and a night in Manhattan, where the Kansas State English faculty gave him a party, they rented a Chevrolet and drove the remaining 270 miles to Garden City, the Finney County seat. They arrived at twilight, a month to the day after he had come upon his interesting thing in the back pages of the Times. But if he had realized then what the future held, Truman said afterward, he never would have stopped. “I would have driven straight on. Like a bat out of hell.”
When people speak of Middle America or the American heart-land, they are talking about Garden City, or somewhere very much like it. Located at the western edge of the state, only sixty-six miles from the Colorado line, it sits on the semiarid high plains, at a point where the continent begins to stretch upward before making its great leap to the Rocky Mountains. “Pop. 11,811,” read a brochure of the Santa Fe Railroad, whose trains passed through there on their daily runs between Chicago and the West Coast. “Largest irrigation area in midwest with unlimited supply of underground water. World’s largest known gas field. Sugar beet factory. Largest zoo in Kansas, largest buffalo herd in midwest.” Although the pamphlet did not note it, in December, 1959, Garden City was also prosperous, mostly from wheat and natural gas, and staunchly Republican, a town of teetotalers and devout Christians who filled twenty-two churches every Sunday morning.
There was not much more to say. Unlike Dodge City, forty-six miles to the east, where Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp had dispatched a platoon of outlaws to Boot Hill—the real Boot Hill—Garden City had led a colorless and relatively placid existence. The terrible events in the outlying village of Holcomb, just six miles west on U.S. Route 50, were thus even more shocking than they might have been in many other places. As Truman had predicted, the murder of the Clutters had started an epidemic of fear. Robbery did not seem to be the motive, and the peculiar brutality of the killings—Herb Clutter’s throat had been cut before he was shot—led most people to believe that the killings were the doing of a vengeful psychopath, someone local who might well have other targets in mind. Lights burned all night; doors that had never been locked were bolted; loaded guns were placed next to beds.
It was into that atmosphere, darkened by fear and mistrust, that Truman and Nelle now came. A few people may have recognized his name; the Garden City public library owned two of his books, Other Voices and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But no one in those parts had ever seen anyone remotely like Truman. In their eyes, said Nelle, “he was like someone coming off the moon.” Inevitably he was greeted with derision. Asked what he had thought of Truman, one resident was most likely replying for the majority when he later drawled, “Well… I’d sure hate to tell you.” Jokes were made about his mannerisms and his height. “By God! Don’t he look like a little old banty rooster?” observed one farmer to everyone within earshot. At Christmas parties imitations of his voice were heard as often as “Jingle Bells.” Some people were openly hostile; a few suspected that someone so strange-looking might be the killer, returning to rejoice in the commotion he had caused. Truman did not look like a reporter, certainly, and it did him no good to say that he was on assignment for The New Yorker—the magazine had more readers in Moscow than in Finney County.
His ability to charm, which had overcome many other formidable obstacles, momentarily failed him, moreover. Soon after arriving, he and Nelle walked into the office of Alvin Dewey, who was supervising the investigation for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. He needed a long interview, Truman told Dewey. Telephones were ringing, other detectives were waiting to make their reports, and Dewey, a tall, good-looking man of forty-seven, was not at all impressed by the names Truman dropped. He refused to grant an interview. Truman would have to get his information from the daily press conferences, he said, just like all the other reporters. “But I’m not a newspaperman,” Truman objected. “I need to talk to you in depth. What I’m going to write will take months. What I am here for is to do a very special story on the family, up to and including the murders. It really doesn’t make any difference to me if the case is ever solved or not.”
“Well, he could have talked all day without saying that,” Dewey recalled. “Solving the case made one hell of a difference to me.” Truman was lucky, in fact, that the detective, who had lost twenty pounds in an almost round-the-clock search for leads, did not throw him out. Not only was he the agent in charge, but the Clutters had been family friends, fellow parishioners of Garden City’s United Methodist Church, people much-admired and much-liked. Time and again Dewey had looked at photographs of their bodies in hopes of discovering some hitherto hidden clue. Time and again he had seen nothing but horror. “Nancy’s forehead, where the shotgun blast exited, reminded me of the jagged peaks of a mountain range,” he remembered.
Under those circumstances, his reaction to Truman’s flippant remark was surprisingly indulgent. “I’d like to see your press card, Mr. Capote” was all he said. Truman meekly admitted that he had none, but offered to display his passport instead. Dewey was not interested and told him once again the time of his press conferences. At last Truman gave up, and the next morning he and Nelle took their places among the other reporters.
James McCain’s letters and calls opened a few important doors, but Nelle’s help proved more valuable during those difficult first days. Her roots were still in Monroeville, and she knew how farmers and the inhabitants of small towns thought and talked. She was the kind of woman people in Finney County were accustomed to; where he shocked, she soothed. “Nelle walked into the kitchen, and five minutes later I felt I had known her for a long time,” said Dolores Hope, a columnist for the Garden City Telegram.
Not once was he or Nelle seen taking notes: it was Truman’s theory that the sight of a notebook, or worse still, a tape recorder, inhibited candor. People would reveal themselves, he maintained, only in seemingly casual conversations. Unless they saw a pen or pencil flying across a page, they could not believe that their words were being recorded. “It wasn’t like he was interviewing you at all,” said Wilma Kidwell, the mother of Nancy Clutter’s best friend Susan. “He had a way of leading you into things without your knowing it.” Only when they had returned to the Warren Hotel did he and Nelle separate and commit to paper what they had learned. Each wrote a separate version of the day’s interviews; they then compared notes over drinks and dinner. “Together,” declared Nelle, “we would get it right.” Their method was time-consuming but productive. When their combined memory failed, as it sometimes did, they went back and asked their questions in a slightly different way. On occasion they talked to the same person three times in one day.
The farmers who plowed that flat and forbidding terrain did not work harder than the two who came to talk to them. “It was always bitter cold, really so incredibly cold on the plains,” said Truman. “We would drive out to some lonely ranch or farmhouse to interview the people who lived there, and almost invariably they had a television set on. They seemed to keep it on twenty-four hours a day. They would sit there talking—and never look at us! They would go on looking straight at the TV screen, even if there was just a station break or an advertisement. If the television wasn’t on, if the light wasn’t flickering, they began to get the shakes. I guess television has become an extension of people’s nervous systems.”
Nowhere else had he felt at such a loss. The Kansans spoke the same language, paid their bills in the same currency, and pledged allegiance to the same flag. Yet they seemed utterly different. If they thought that he had dropped from the moon, he may have wondered if that was where he had arrived. A CARE package from Babe Paley, a tin of delicious black caviar, reminded him how far he was from his friends and all the things he loved. At one particularly bleak point, he despaired, telling Nelle that he was thinking of giving up and going home. “I cannot get any rapport with these people,” he told her. “I can’t get a handle on them.” She bucked him up. “Hang on,” she said. “You will penetrate this place.”
So he did, on Christmas Day, appropriately enough. Dolores Hope had told her husband, Clifford, one of the town’s leading lawyers, that they ought to share their holiday dinner with someone who had no other place to go. The visitors from New York fitted that description and were invited to partake of the Hopes’ dinner of duck and twice-baked potatoes. “Of course, Truman dominated the conversation,” recalled Mrs. Hope. “Once you got over the high-pitched voice, why, you didn’t think about it, really. It was not your everyday Garden City talk. The things he said were from another world, and they were fascinating for us. It was a right pleasant day. People started calling me. Had I really had him to dinner? I said yes, and then things kind of started for him. Entertaining him became the in-thing to do. He was an attraction and people didn’t want to be left out.”
The switchboard at the Warren Hotel began buzzing with invitations from the local aristocracy. Instead of imitating his voice, people found themselves listening to the real thing and, for the most part, liking what they were hearing. Even Alvin Dewey, who attended one of those parties, melted when his wife, Marie, who had been born and bred in New Orleans, discovered another native of that city. Within a night or two, Truman and Nelle were at the Dewey house dining on grits, gumbo, and red beans and rice, a menu that few steak-and-potato Midwesterners could properly appreciate. Within a week the Deweys had become such good friends that Truman felt free to give Alvin a nickname, Foxy. “Foxy, you’re not telling me everything!” he would say, with an accusing wag of his finger. He and Nelle were at the Deweys’ the night of December 30, 1959, when Alvin received the phone call he had been praying for: two suspects in the Clutter murders had been arrested in Las Vegas. Elated, Alvin made plans to go get them. Truman asked if he could go along. “Not this time, partner,” Alvin replied.
But Truman and Nelle were part of the crowd shivering outside the Finney County courthouse a week later, when Alvin and his colleagues returned with their handcuffed quarry, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. All the theories about the murders had been wrong. The two killers—both had confessed—were not local men, but alumni of the Kansas State Penitentiary. Robbery had been their motive after all. They had erroneously heard that Herb Clutter kept large amounts of cash in an office safe, and they had made their plans with meticulous care. Nor had the killings been spontaneous. From the start they had decided to kill all witnesses—in cold blood.
Their arrest fundamentally altered the nature of Truman’s project. By the time Alvin heard the good news from Las Vegas, Truman and Nelle had completed most of their reporting for the relatively short piece he had initially conceived: the reaction of a small town to a hideous crime. But now, with the men who had committed the crime behind bars on the fourth floor of the courthouse, his story had expanded far beyond his original conception. He had done only half his reporting; and a worthless half at that unless he could reconstruct the lives of the killers as precisely and minutely as he had those of their victims.
He received his first close look at them only when they were arraigned in Garden City. Hickock was twenty-eight, blond and slightly above average in height, five feet, ten inches. A car collision had disfigured his face. His eyes were at different levels, and his head appeared, as Truman phrased it, to have been “halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center.” Appearances aside, he was in no way unusual or interesting—just a “two-bit crook” in Alvin’s words. His parents were poor but honest, and he had grown up on their small farm in eastern Kansas. Instead of going to college, as he had hoped, he had become an auto mechanic, forced to scratch for every dollar. Twice married, he had also been twice divorced. He was a braggart, consumed with envy of all those who had had it easier, and he had a mean spirit: his notion of fun was to run down dogs on the highway. He was easy to talk to, however, and he had an extraordinarily accurate memory, which was to prove invaluable to the biographer of his short and shabby life.
Except for the blood on his hands, Perry Smith was Dick’s exact opposite. From his mother, a Cherokee Indian, Perry had inherited his black hair and sad, droopy eyes; his almost pixielike features came from his Irish father. “A changeling’s face,” Truman called it, which meant that he could alter it at will, making it seem gentle or savage, vulnerable or ferocious. He too had been in a near-fatal accident, a mishap with a skidding motorcycle that had so deformed and shortened his legs that he was only an inch taller than Truman himself.
His parents had been rodeo performers—“Tex & Flo,” they had billed their riding act—who fell apart because of hard times and Flo’s weakness for alcohol and other men. She became a messy, hopeless drunk, and Tex went off into the Alaskan wilderness to earn a meager living as a trapper and prospector. After Flo died, choking on her own vomit, her four children were sent to various homes and orphanages. Perry fared worst. His habit of wetting his bed made him a target of scorn and abuse. Nuns beat him; an attendant rubbed a burning ointment on his penis; another held him in a tub of ice water until he developed pneumonia. In a recurring dream, a parrot, “taller than Jesus,” swooped down to rescue him from his enemies, pecking out their eyes and carrying him to paradise. But no such miraculous bird appeared, and he ran away to live in the wilds with his father until he was old enough to join the Merchant Marine. His life after that had been, as Truman was to observe, “an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another.” Convinced, obviously with good reason, that the world had not given him a fair chance, Perry bathed himself in self-pity. “Oh,” he exclaimed, “the man I could have been!”
Yet he never gave up hope of becoming that man, devouring self-help learning books, making lists of vocabulary-broadening words, and nursing adolescent fantasies of finding gold in Mexico; he had sat through The Treasure of the Sierra Madre eight times. Unlike Dick, he considered himself to be kind and considerate, and by his own mingle-mangled logic, he was. Worried that Herb Clutter would be uncomfortable on his cold basement floor, for instance, he gently lifted his bound body onto a mattress—and then butchered him with as little emotion as he might have a hog. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he said. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”
Such a kaleidoscope of contradictory emotions fascinated Truman and all those who were to read his narrative. Norman Mailer went so far as to call Perry one of the great characters in American literature, and there is a pathetic irony in the fact that the twisted little man who hungered for education, who constantly corrected Dick’s grammar and who peppered his speech with large and ungainly words, has achieved a kind of immortality as a literary darkling. But there he stands, alongside such other native Iagos as Roger Chillingworth in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd, and Flem Snopes in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga.
When Perry sat down in front of the judge to be arraigned, Truman nudged Nelle. “Look, his feet don’t touch the floor!” Nelle said nothing, but thought, “Oh, oh! This is the beginning of a great love affair.” In fact, their relationship was more complicated than a love affair: each looked at the other and saw, or thought he saw, the man he might have been.
Their shortness was only one of many unsettling similarities. They both had suffered from alcoholic mothers, absent fathers, and foster homes. At the orphanages he had been sent to, Perry had been a target of scorn because he was half-Indian and wet his bed; Truman had been ridiculed because he was effeminate. A psychiatrist could have been speaking about both of them when he said of Perry: “He seems to have grown up without direction, without love.” Finally, both had turned to art to compensate for what had been denied them. Perry was convinced that with a little encouragement, he could have made his mark as a painter, a singer, a songwriter.
In Joel Knox, the thirteen-year-old hero of Other Voices, Truman had projected his fictional alter ego. In Perry, it is not too much to suggest, he recognized his shadow, his dark side, the embodiment of his own accumulated angers and hurts. When he looked into those unhappy eyes, he was looking into a tormented region of his own unconscious, resurrecting the nightmares and fears that had found form and body in such early stories as “Miriam” and “The Headless Hawk.” Reversing the coin, Perry perceived in Truman the successful artist he might have been. “He saw Truman as someone like himself,” said Donald Cullivan, an Army buddy who visited him in jail. “He thought Truman also had been kicked around, and he thought Truman had spunk.”
Like the good folk of Garden City, Perry had never encountered anyone like Truman. He was fascinated by him and quizzed him endlessly. “After I had known him a couple of years, he wanted to know whether I was homosexual,” Truman said, “which seemed to me to be quite ludicrous—it should have been perfectly clear to him by that time. He was a very sophisticated boy on that level, and I don’t know what he thought. I think somewhere in the back of his mind he thought I was living with Harper Lee. He was one of those people who think if you’re living with a girl, you can’t be homosexual, and if you’re living with a guy, you can’t be heterosexual. Everything has to be black and white. He wanted to know who I lived with and whether I was promiscuous, and I was very frank with him.”
From the beginning, theirs was a confused, uneasy, but unremittingly intense relationship. Although Truman knew he needed Perry’s trust and goodwill, he could not restrain himself from objecting to Perry’s ever-moist self-pity. When Perry blamed his unhappy background for all that he had done, Truman indignantly interjected: “I had one of the worst childhoods in the world, and I’m a pretty decent, law-abiding citizen.” Perry answered with a shrug.
Perry was in only slightly less need of Truman, who listened to him and gave him books, magazines, and small amounts of money—items worth more than all the treasure of the Sierra Madre to a man behind bars. Nonetheless, Perry was often sulky and quick to take offense. “He was suspicious, like many people in prison, and uncertain as to whether Truman was using him,” said Cullivan. “He waffled back and forth.” Flexing his weight lifter’s muscles during one interview, he pointed out to Truman that he could kill him in a minute, before a guard could come to his rescue. “I’ve half a mind to do it,” he said. “It would give me pleasure. What do I have to lose?”
Perry was deeply offended by Truman’s inscription in a gift copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “For Perry, from Truman who wishes you well,” Truman had scrawled in his small and distinctive hand. But in Perry’s outraged opinion, those few words were cold and unfeeling. “Is that all!” he had exploded when Truman handed it to him. On the opposite page, in the beautifully formed script he had learned from a book on handwriting, he later wrote: “Capote, you little bastard! I wanted to call you a name at the time, I was getting angered. It’s not to [sic] late yet—‘You little Piss Pot!’”
By the middle of January, 1960, Truman had spent hours with both Dick and Perry, and he felt that he had done all he could for the moment in Kansas. In a driving snowstorm he and Nelle boarded a Santa Fe sleeper for the trip home. “An extraordinary experience, in many ways the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me,” he wrote Cecil a few days later from Brooklyn Heights. How had he been greeted on the lone prairie? asked Glenway Wescott, who met him at a Manhattan party. How had those hardy Kansans reacted to such an exotic species as a Truman Capote? “At first it was hard,” said Truman. “But now I’m practically the mayor!”