Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

Yesterday, after waiting six months for the release, I could finally gorge like Pantagruel in a bookish streaming series about the one and only Truman Capote, directed by Gus Van Sant and produced with infinite prodigality by the actual king Midas of showbusiness, Ryan Murphy.

Two years ago, I wrote a post on this very writer’s platform about Truman’s swans, when Laurence Leamer’s book came up. But when I began from scratch last June to cut podcasts, that post went to the pile. So, it’s time to rescue my pedantic musings or inklings, as I used to call the deleted account. Because, make no mistake, before a fiction writer, I am an indefatigable reader, and as such I am fascinated by the rise and fall of this literary lion.

All began with a scene from the movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, where an abandoned child speaks almost hidden by a gigantic sprout. The acerbic Gore Vidal used this stinky vegetable to describe his high-pitched voice, that self-assured voice with the power to flip everybody, which was just an attention call he kept all his life because in fact, once he grew up, was a male baritone.

That child was abandoned by her mother, whose only ambition was to live on the Fifth Avenue of Manhattan at the expense of a rich man, and when the fortunes of that man changed, Lillie Mae Faulk killed herself at just 48 years old. It's a sad story, even though Truman left us an inverted mirror of Lillie Mae on that lively character Holly Golightly, performed with extreme elegance by Audrey Hepburn on Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

With this background and the bestseller In Cold Blood that he wrote about a brutal murder and could not send to print until the real assassins were hanged, so the greedy publishers could sell it as a non-fiction novel, an oxymoron per se, the promising career of Truman ran aground and he became an alcoholic, trying to emulate the masterwork of Marcel Proust.

However, when Marcel Proust wrote about French society, he was already a middle-aged recluse, and his models, ghosts of the turn of the century. In other words, Marcel was free of any non-disclosure agreement or the elemental discretion of an author to his beloved muses. In fact, the core of Proust’s work was the affaire Dreyfuss that divided French society in two, it was by then a forgotten issue.

I guess Truman Capote was heavily influenced by the gossip culture to choose his models between contemporaries, a poor choice that ruined his draft and by extension all the reputation he got after In Cold Blood.

Back to the bookish streaming series after this necessary digression, I would have started from the beginning because the actual audience surely has no idea of what could push a literary lion to ruin his promising career. Money? He cashed 20 million dollars of that time with that wicked bestseller and was the envy of his peers. Alcohol? As we can watch, people of that era were drinking liquor and chain smoking like the end of the world was near. Drugs? The scourge of cocaine was later when he became a fixture of Studio 54. My personal bet is hubris, that curse of the gods to keep mortals in line, born from immense success and endless adulation. And the poor confidence his mother gave him with that traumatic upbringing, which is sufficient enough to seek recognition beyond limits.

I have no idea about the next episodes, but with that intense pilot, everything is already told. In fact, the second episode is redundant for me. One of the reasons I cannot stand streaming series anymore is because that idiom of beating a dead horse always comes to my mind.

Wrapping up, the most satisfactory experience I had was the haunting music by Julia Newman, the daughter of American Beauty’s soundtrack composer, Thomas Newman. It has an idiosyncratic signature, especially on the oboe, that produces me always goosebumps.