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2. Capote in the Queer House of Fame: Stars and Celebrity Personas
- University of Georgia Press
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19 Capote in the Queer House of Fame Stars and Celebrity Personas 2 In Music for Chameleons Capote famously declared: “I’m an alcoholic . I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius” (MC 261). This statement from the twilight of his career reflects his determination to live his life openly, as it also reveals his canny understanding of how to employ his celebrity to maintain his presence in the public eye. These apparently shocking “confessions” were well known to anyone paying him the slightest attention, and so Capote’s pronouncement of his troubled genius serves less as an expression of self-realization than as yet another illustration of his extraordinary ability to generate media coverage for himself. Surely, more than any other author of the twentieth century, Capote was recognized , if not lionized, as a celebrity, famous for being famous as much as he was revered as a remarkably talented writer. Moreover, he performed his celebrity queerly, living openly as a homosexual man in nonchalant defiance of American mores. In many ways, Capote enjoyed the role of the gay clown who minces to amuse his various audiences: “I’m this funny, sawed-off fellow with a high voice, and it’s hard for people to accept me. But if I come in and say, ‘I don’t want to sit with the boys, I want to sit with the girls,’ everybody giggles and everybody’s more comfortable. I do that on purpose to make it easier for people to be around me because then I’m easier and the whole thing works better.”1 As a homosexual man 2 20 CHAPTER TWO employing a stereotypical persona, Capote benefited from his astute recognition that acting gay would allow him more comfortably to be gay. Capote was a celebrity, not a Hollywood star, but it is nonetheless helpful to view his fame as analogous to that of stars. As Richard Dyer explains of Hollywood stardom: “The star phenomenon consists of everything that is publicly available about stars. A film star’s image is not just his or her films, but the promotion of those films and of the star through pin-ups, public appearances, studio hand-outs and so on, as well as interviews, biographies and coverage in the press of the star’s doings and ‘private’ life. Further, a star’s image is also what people say or write about him or her. . . . Star images are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual.”2 Although authors of literary fiction are rarely celebrities in the same manner as film actors, one could replace “film star” with “author” and “film” with “novel” in Dyer’s analysis and approximate Capote’s marketing of himself and his fictions. Furthermore, exposure and publicity often lead to larger sales and profits, whether of a Hollywood film or a bestselling novel. Celebrities who attend to their public personas carefully, protecting or exaggerating their images while maintaining their presence in the public eye, are often rewarded with financial success due to the echo effect of their celebrity, a dynamic that Capote exploited throughout his career. Capote clearly understood the demands and payoffs of Hollywood’s star system. In discussing the careers of Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, he observed, “They were real stars created by the studios for a very specific purpose who were continuously promoted.”3 Indeed, his definition of a movie star parallels (and predates) Dyer’s: “Defined practically , a movie star is any performer who can account for a box-office profit regardless of the quality of the enterprise in which he appears” (DB 319). In this blunt assessment of the economics underlying Hollywood stardom, in which he distills celebrity as irrelevant to a film’s aesthetic success but crucial to its financial prospects, Capote also summarizes the conundrum of celebrity for his own career, for his celebrity often eclipsed his writing. Capote and the Stars As a result of his fame and literary achievements, Capote circulated in the same social networks as many movie stars, and his nonfiction writings frequently address his personal reactions to them, commenting on the tension [44.197.114.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:07 GMT) CAPOTE IN THE QUEER HOUSE OF FAME 21 between their star personas and their personalities as he perceived them firsthand. During his childhood Capote revered Hollywood actors, particularly the young celebrities of his generation. In a...