Prayers in Cold Blood

Nearly a decade ago now, we discussed Truman Capote's controversial final book, Answered Prayers. It turns out that there may be a connection between that and his earlier success, In Cold Blood, which we'll discuss later this year. A December 2012 Vanity Fair article that was recently revisited in the magazine's "Cocktail Hour" newsletter for subscribers, "Capote's Swan Dive," explores that link in the course of documenting the fallout from "La Cote Basque 1965," the notorious story in the November 1975 Esquire that would later appear as a chapter in Answered Prayers. It cost Capote nearly all his social contacts, effectively ended his career and--writer Sam Kashner posits--drove him ever deeper into addiction to the drugs and alcohol that would cut his life short less than a decade later. 

Kashner says: "His impoverished past, Truman later confided, was borrowed from the life story of Perry Smith, the dark-haired, dark-eyed murderer Truman came to know intimately while writing In Cold Blood. In a sense, P.B. Jones [the literary hustler and bisexual prostitute who attends a scandalous society luncheon in "La Cote Basque 1965"] is both Truman and Perry, a figure who haunted Truman's last decade and whose execution by hanging--which Truman witnessed--would devastate him emotionally." 

You may not find Kashner's framing persuasive, but his profile of Capote is fascinating in its own right.