Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies

3. Scriptwriter for the Stars: Capote’s Screen Adaptations of Indiscretion of an American Wife, Beat the Devil, and The Innocents

43 Scriptwriter for the Stars  Capote’s Screen Adaptations of Indiscretion of an American Wife, Beat the Devil, and The Innocents 3 3 Long before he penned his first screenplay, Capote rewrote films spontaneously and exuberantly, employing his quick wit and ear for dialogue to amuse his friends when they found themselves bored with a picture playing on the screen. As many dissatisfied filmgoers have discovered, a tedious film can produce ready pleasures if one rewrites and redubs it while viewing it, and Capote enjoyed such pastimes throughout his teen years. His friend Phoebe Pierce Vreeland reminisced about their high school excursions to the cinema : “As we sat there, we would rewrite the movies at the top of our voices, screaming with laughter: ‘She should have said . . .’ ‘He should have said . . .’ ‘Well, he’s hopeless anyway, but if he had only said . . .’ It was awful, I mean, from the point of view of the Pickwick [Theater]. ‘Out!’ We were thrown out of the Pickwick more often than the dust.”1 Such an inauspicious beginning could not foretell the depth of screenwriting’s influence on Capote’s career, yet even at the beginning of his literary endeavors he aligned himself with the film industry, proclaiming on his application for a fellowship to the artists’ colony Yaddo to have “read manuscripts for a motion-picture office.”2 Along with the pseudobiographical tidbits suggesting that he had “written speeches for a third-rate politician, danced on a river boat, [and] made a small fortune painting flowers on glass,” the authorial blurb for Other Voices, Other Rooms reiterates this claim of script reading to create a Bohemian image of 44 CHAPTER THREE Capote in which the cinematic world serves as yet another sign of his precocious talents and varied interests.3 Furthermore, as explored in chapter 1, Capote’s writing is often cinematic in its vision, which explains why filmmakers turned to him at various stages throughout his career. Despite the cinematic sympathies evident in his writing and the screenplays he penned throughout his career, Capote on several occasions expressed his dissatisfaction with the screenwriter’s art in particular and filmmaking in general. Primarily he rejected the cooperative nature of such endeavors, finding that he lost the “true gratification of writing” throughout the process: “The only obligation any artist can have is to himself. . . . That’s why it’s so absolutely boring to write a film script. The great sense of selfobligation doesn’t enter into it because too many people are involved. . . . I must admit that in a peculiar way I enjoyed [writing film scripts], but the true gratification of writing was completely absent; the obligation was to producers and the actors . . . and not to myself.”4 As Capote and countless other screenwriters have learned, directors often sacrifice writers’ artistic visions to their own. Indeed, in Observations Capote quotes John Huston as saying, “I became a director because I couldn’t watch any longer how my work as a writer was ruined,” acknowledging that, to be in control of one’s story in the cinematic world, one must sit in the director’s chair (O 10). Capote, although he did not aspire to directing, voiced a sentiment similar to Huston’s in a 1957 interview: “I don’t think a writer stands much chance of imposing himself on film unless he works in the warmest rapport with the director or is himself the director.”5 Beyond the ways in which virtually any writer’s vision can be overshadowed by the director’s, midcentury Hollywood severely restricted films that might evince a queer sensibility, further crimping Capote’s style. Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin explain these circumstances: “queer writers, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Truman Capote, came to Hollywood to oversee or collaborate on films adapted from their plays and novels, but . . . their input was still hampered by the Production Code and Hollywood’s formulaic heterocentrism.”6 Capote, who so daringly portrayed homosexuality in Other Voices, Other Rooms, was hampered in his freedom to write film scripts by the corporate and moral concerns of Hollywood and its censors. Queer themes nonetheless emerge in his screenplays, but in a more submerged fashion than in his fiction. As much as Capote braved the challenges of screenwriting throughout his career, he repeatedly privileged his literary endeavors over his cinematic SCRIPTWRITER FOR THE STARS 45 ones. Quite simply...