Lisa Immordino Vreeland | Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation / 2020

a difference between laughs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lisa Immordino Vreeland (director) Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation / 2020

 

The last paragraph of Variety reviewer Peter Debruge pretty much sums up many of my reactions to the 2020 documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation:

 

“The experience of watching “Truman & Tennessee” will surely feel familiar to anyone who has ever purchased a shrink-wrapped coffee-table book about a beloved subject, only to take it home, open it and realize the treatment doesn’t quite measure up. It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.”

    What’s even more disturbing after you’re removed the plastic wrap is the sudden realization that although it certainly might be fun to follow along in the careers of these iconic gay 20th century writers, that first of all they actually didn’t have that much to say to each other, and although they maintained, apparently, a vague life-time relationship, they most certainly did not have anything even close to being described as “an intimate conversation,” unless you pretend that the numerous interviews that Capote and Williams had with David Frost, Dick Cavett, and others was a vicarious conversation between the two men.

      And finally, there’s the truth that isn’t ever spoken regarding the two writers. Unlike the argument of many that these two men were geniuses, that although they might both be described a gay literary pioneers—although even then I can think of many other men and women more deserving of that title—only one of these figures might be perceived as a literary genius, namely Tennessee Williams, the other being only a sometimes poetic wordsmith who touted his own works, particularly In Cold Blood, as being innovative and brilliant, without providing the evidence to me that his works were anything more some good examples of story-telling. I mean, can we really compare, as this film does, major works of theater such as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire with Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and even then using primarily clips from the movie version which Capote hated and which has little relationship to the actual novella? Movies, in fact, are not perhaps the best way to reveal the wonders of Williams’ dramas either, despite the remarkable performances of Marlon Brando, George C. Scott, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor.

      It’s a bit like if one were to attempt to trace a relationship between James Branch Cabell—a witty fantasist, long rumored to be gay, now nearly forgotten, but at the time much beloved by Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Van Vechten, and others—with William Faulkner, although Faulkner’s most important novels did indeed demonstrate the influences of Cabell, whereas I can detect no direct textual literary connections between Capote and Williams.

 

     Both Williams and Capote drank too much and pontificated endlessly, although Capote seemed always to believe the often silly words he spoke, while Williams shadowed everything he wrote and spoke with painful inner doubt. As Austin Chronicle critic Marc Savlov points out, perhaps the most similar viewpoints they shared were about the self-driven personal nature of being a writer, Capote noting early in the film: "People to whom I first showed my writing said I couldn’t write, shouldn’t write. But I feel that if you are a writer and are going to be one then absolutely nothing in the world will interfere.”

       Later in the documentary, Williams observes: “[Writing is] a simple function, never meant to be a profession, perhaps not even a vocation…simply meant to be single man’s calling out to others.” But even in these somewhat similar refrains, we see the vast difference between Capote’s determination to confront, please, and dazzle his audience, whereas Williams recognizes it as an almost desperate plea to possibly to heard and comprehended as a human being.

      Even after breaking into Williams’ apartment and about to be put under arrest, Capote hands the officer a copy of Other Voices, Other Rooms to prove to the female officer that he is a writer. The situation, when one thinks about it carefully, is absolutely ludicrous, Capote evidently carrying with him even on the late nights that he chooses to break into a friend’s apartment, a copy of his book as a kind of badge of self-importance. His character does a similar thing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, pulling Holly Golightly into The New York Public Library in order to show her his first and only publication.

     Despite his endlessly funny put downs and catty remarks, we realize that Capote was absolutely serious about the camp role he performed, while Williams’ plays almost always contained an enormous amount of truly ridiculous campy humor, particularly when Blanche falls into one of her Southern belle trances, muttering meaningless metaphors such as she and her sister Stella representing an instance of “The blind leading the blind” or her endless dependence upon “the kindness of strangers.” Even the mother’s shrill call for her children to greet each day with the blinding cheerfulness of “Rise and shine!” is a comic trope.

      There is no humor in the terrifyingly dark gay sub-text of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith’s torture and murder of the Clutter family. And, unlike the fatally naïve believers in Williams’ dramas, representations perhaps of own inner self, such figures in Capote’s works are generally simply eccentrics, not complex women and men with desperate needs. One senses in almost all of Williams’ comments the playwright’s true interest in the inner workings of the human heart, while, as my friend Sherry Bernstein—who spent many a night with Capote at Club 54—once whispered to me, almost as if it were a confession she had to get off her chest: “You know, Truman was not a very nice man.”

     It is true that both men’s careers took a nose-dive in their later lives, as their works in drama and fiction seemed to no longer fully represent the worlds from which they had come, challenged, and embraced—Williams from the angst and sexual frustrations of the 1940s and 1950s, and Capote from his isolated childhood in the South during the 1930s and 40s, and his later society-celebrity status of the 1960s.

 

    And in reaction to this a lifetime habits both men became alcoholics and patients of the notorious Dr. Feelgood, who prescribed various life-changing drugs for every mood that his patients encountered. And although both men had long-term relationships with other men, one gets the feeling that because Williams came so late to realize his homosexuality and because of Capote’s general appearance and stature that they felt they had missed out in the gay sexual revolutions which they each had helped to generate.

     Yet what Vreeland basically shows us is surely no “intimate” relationship between the two men and very little commonality, with probably no true literary influences. Other than the numerous TV interviews, often, particularly in David Frost’s case, somewhat snarky in his curiosity about their private sexual lives, they seldom shared the same space except occasionally in their Italian vacations to Capri and Ischia. The director fills in, unfortunately, with readings of their letters and other personal comments read, in the rather unconvincing pretense of their respective voices by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto.

     As their darker days began to move in upon them at same moment that death lurked on the horizon, we can still imagine Williams laughing, something even Capote, through Parsons’ reading, recognized was special about the man: “He had a remarkable laugh. It wasn’t coarse or vulgar or even especially loud. It just had an amazing sort of throaty Mississippi River man ring to it. You could always tell when he walked into a room, no matter how many people were there.”

      Despite Williams’ own evaluation of Capote’s sense of humor, I cannot quite imagine the ailing, alcoholic author of the never completed Unanswered Prayers taking Tennessee’s advice:     

“I care about you more than you know. Perhaps the thing most to help you right now is your incomparable sense of humor. Rest a bit and never, never stop laughing.” I hear a cackle perhaps, another venomous put-down, even a snarl, but no joyous ring of genuine pleasure emanating from his throat.

     Alas, Vreeland’s “intimate conversation” is one of her own making.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).