“It’s hard to think of a person [these days] with the social media aggressiveness of Kim Kardashian, the outrageousness of Donald Trump, who would have been as clever as Fran Liebowitz – on anything – with the lyricism of Colm Tóibín and be someone who spends all their time on private planes and yachts,” laughs Ebs Burnough of Truman Capote, the subject of the first-time director’s eagerly awaited documentary, The Capote Tapes. “As Lauren Bacall, would say, ‘He was one of a kind,’” he concludes.
Burnough should know. A life-long appreciator of Capote’s literary works, the release of The Capote Tapes in the UK marks the culmination of his five-year research, interview and production journey that delivers the most thorough insight into the life and work of the infamous Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood and Answered Prayers author via the people who knew him the best.
The journalist George Plimpton, playwright Dotson Rader, TV host Dick Cavett, actor John Richardson and Capote’s long-term partner Jack Dunphy are just a few of Capote’s inner circle assisting Burnough in recording Truman’s fractured childhood, his quest for acceptance as an openly gay man in ’50s America, his famously acerbic wit and his scandalous tenacity. Later, they explore his debilitating drug and alcohol addiction, how he relished his fought-for social-butterfly status and why, at the height of his success, he hit the self-destruct button with the part-publication of Answered Prayers.
It was in this, his infamous unfinished work (which was published in excerpts via Esquire magazine in 1975), that he betrayed, in graphic detail, the most personal secrets confided in him by Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith, C Z Guest, Marella Agnelli and Gloria Guinness – New York’s untouchable glitterati who had provided him with his passport to the Big Apple’s exclusive high-society circles, AKA Capote’s Swans.
“I had seen both the films Capote, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Infamous, with Toby Jones, but I didn’t feel either film did justice to [Capote’s] life in total; there was nothing that spoke to the totality of who he was,” says Burnough over the phone. “As I started to read more, I thought, ‘Gosh, this is someone who has been underexamined.’”
For one of the 20th century’s most lauded literary icons, it was something of an extraordinary realisation, says Burnough. “I think it goes back to how famous he was; people felt like they knew him and thought what you see is what you get, but there was a public persona, and then there was the reality of who he was at home with his friends, his lovers and Kate.”
The Kate he is referring to is Kate Harrington, Capote’s adoptive daughter, who was introduced to Capote after he seduced her father and set up home with him. For the first time, Harrington reveals to Burnough how the author took her under his wing. The director describes her as “the heart and soul of the film”.
“Truman poured so much of the good he had into her,” he explains. “I told her I wanted to do him justice and enough time had passed [since Capote’s death in 1984] for her to feel ready to speak about it.”
Capturing the tender and vulnerable, as well as salacious and oft-times wicked, ways of Capote, Burnough’s film paints the portrait of a man many will be unfamiliar with. For his part, Burnough arrived at the project feeling intentionally indifferent to who Capote was as a person.
“I didn’t have an opinion on him and I wanted to keep it that way!” he says. His production team, on the other hand, was less objective. “When I started the project, my entire production team hated Truman! They couldn’t understand how he could be so horrible to his friends and write Answered Prayers – they thought him a tiny terror!”
Burnough found himself warming to Capote as he “uncovered more and pulled the layers back”, liking him more and more as he started to understand who he was.
“He was an LGBTQ pioneer, he was a generous author, a heck of a personality, and he was definitely bitchy!” he laughs. “But he was also this insecure, physically challenged person, who just wanted to be loved and have a family in an era when, for an LGBTQ person, that wasn’t even a remote possibility,” he says. “To this day, Kate considers Truman closer to her than her own father. When I look at someone like her, who is incredibly kind and warm and generous, that didn’t come from nowhere… I think he was an incredibly complex person but fundamentally I walk away feeling charmed by him.” (By the end of the process, he adds, “The production team was madly in love with Truman [too]. It was a journey.”)
As Burnough’s documentary tragically depicts, Capote became a deft hand at handling the rampant discrimination that was frequently levelled at him. “He was up against a tremendous amount,” says Burnough. “It’s difficult for us today in many ways, especially young people, to grasp. That’s why I wanted to keep uncomfortable moments in the film.” Burnough is referring to the inclusion of a tape recording where Norman Mailer describes the moment Capote walked into a testosterone-fuelled Irish pub as “a beautiful little faggot prince”.
“That language just rolled off people’s tongues,” says Burnough. “The ease with which people were derogatory about people, anyone who was ‘different’, whether they were Black, Jewish or gay, was so prevalent. Truman, coming from the South and becoming an international superstar, allowed him entry into a world where people said things, but it was behind his back.”
Does Burnough ever think Capote found happiness? “No,” he says slowly. “I think he certainly had happy moments, but the elusive happiness – as in internal contentment or joy – I don’t think he ever found that.”
Burnough realised the weight of the responsibility and urgency to document Capote early on in his research when one of his first interviewees, the legendary columnist and personal friend of Capote, Liz Smith, passed away before he could film their chat. “I was really angry with myself for missing what she had to say and getting it on camera.” From then on, he says, “I felt a bit like someone putting things into a time capsule.” His interview with John Richardson is, Burnough believes, the last before the actor died earlier this year following Covid-19 complications.
One of the key things Burnough wanted to portray in the film was the “devastation of addiction”. He thinks that the reason Answered Prayers was received so badly, and perhaps why Capote was disowned by his Swans as a result, was because unlike his previous hits, it was “messy”, written under the influence of narcotics and therefore not as strong as his prior works.
“That’s one of the really sad parts of the story, because I wonder if the book would have been received differently had he been clear-headed when writing it,” laughs Burnough, pointing out that Capote had already experienced great success with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which, contrary to the romanticised film adaptation, zeroed in on the exploits of a fashionable escort and was devoid of a romantic narrative. “The writing was so extraordinary, you had a lot of prominent women at the time boasting, ‘Oh, you know it was based on me?!’ The problem with Answered Prayers is that the writing wasn’t as strong, so people didn’t want to say, ‘Oh, that’s the story of my cheating husband!’”
The process of filmmaking came naturally to 40-year-old, Florida-born Burnough, who prior to making his directorial debut was deputy social secretary at the White House under the Obama administration and political director to Michelle Obama. After leaving Washington DC, he worked as Aerin Lauder’s communications director, helping her establish her beauty and lifestyle brand, Aerin, and became president of his own marketing consultation firm, EBSI Communications.
“I was used to asking questions and had done plenty of interviews in my life, but the technique of asking a question in four different ways to make sure you’re getting your subject to make something clear so you don’t [end up] losing great footage on the cutting room floor, that was a learning curve – and I loved it!”
After such a long investigative process, Burnough is perfectly placed to offer his hot take on the question that has surrounded Capote since his death: did he finish Answered Prayers and if so, where is it?
“I definitely think he did it, as there were too many people who saw it in one form or another,” says Burnough. “But while I could see him being cheeky and hiding it away somewhere, my own personal belief is that something probably happened to it after the excerpts came out. I could see him having a crazy, lonely night and tossing it into the fire in a drug-infused rage. It goes back to addiction… These things can happen in a moment when someone is out of control.”
He adds: “I can’t imagine the writer he was and with the ego he had not just saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to publish the rest.’ The deed was done.”
‘The Capote Tapes’ is available at altitude.film and on all digital platforms across the UK and Ireland now.
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