Capote is focused almost entirely on the six years during which In Cold Blood was being researched and written, and this deliberate sense of containment is a mostly inspired artistic decision. (I wish that the filmmakers had stuck entirely to their decision to keep the movie’s scope small and not tried for a run at a fuller biopic treatment by telescoping the facts of Capote’s eventual decline at the end.) Capote’s exhibitionism and narcissism are very much in evidence, and lest we somehow fail to recognize these traits, his pal Nelle (the writer Harper Lee, played with great pliancy and an unexpected softness by Catherine Keener) is always on hand to help underline them. Nelle, who accompanied Capote on his first trip to Kansas and helped ease his dialogue with the solid-citizen types who were initially put off by his flippant humor and sashaying ephebe manners, is especially impatient with her friend’s professions of having done everything he could to help the killers appeal the death penalty. (He did intervene on their behalf but eventually backed off.) When, for instance, we see Capote on the phone with Nelle toward the end of the film, trying to rustle up some sympathy after the long ordeal of writing the book and the more recent ordeal of having witnessed Perry’s and Dick’s execution, six years after their conviction, she crisply cuts into his self-absorbed reverie. “They’re dead, Truman,” she points out. “You’re alive.” (In Clarke’s biography, it is actually Truman’s lover, Jack Dunphy, who says this.)
Although some reviewers have charged the film with soft-pedaling Capote’s more egregious sides—his betrayal, for instance, of the bonds he forged with the killers, or his eagerness to see them hang so he could have a conclusion for his book—the filmmakers strike me as more than keen to highlight Capote’s moral compromises and deceitful journalistic methods. We see him telling Perry (played by Clifton Collins, Jr.) that he hasn’t written much of the book (when in fact it is practically finished) and insisting that the title, which rubs Perry’s aesthetic sensibilities and noble-misfit sense of himself the wrong way, won’t be In Cold Blood. But the dark and unscrupulous strands running through Capote’s character—the persistent suggestion that he cut his loyalties to suit his deadlines—strike me as much the least interesting part of the story. Capote could have been beset by these same flaws, the same powers of seduction and ambiguous affections, and not gone off and written a masterpiece in prose that Norman Mailer once judged to be “word for word, rhythm for rhythm” the best of his generation. Capote might have written a mediocre thriller, or a piece of competent journalism, instead of a book that transformed the workmanlike genre of true crime into a starkly realistic yet lyrical work of art that changed the way literary journalism was done, for better and for worse.
We surely all know by now that journalists are a bad bunch—a “morally indefensible” species of con artist always looking to sell someone out—if only because the best of them (Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion) are always ratting on themselves. The truth is that by today’s scoop-obsessed and elasticized journalistic standards, Capote comes off looking better than most. At least he had the decency to be sufficiently conflicted about the devil’s bargain he struck in pursuit of his story to still be summoning up the ghost of Perry Smith in an essay called “Self-Portrait,” which he wrote six years after In Cold Blood appeared: “A young man with black cowlicked hair. He is wearing a leather harness that keeps his arms strapped to his sides. He is trembling; but he is speaking to me, smiling. All I can hear is the roar of blood in my ears. Twenty minutes later he is dead, hanging from the end of a rope.”
In Conversations with Capote, a series of talks Lawrence Grobel recorded with the writer during the last two years of his life, Capote refers to the writing of In Cold Blood as “the most emotional experience of my creative life” and discusses his opposition to the death penalty. To say that he wasn’t genuinely attached to the killers (and deeply sympathetic toward, if not erotically attracted to, Perry Smith) or exercised over capital punishment, as Kenneth Tynan and others have, seems to me blatantly unfair. I am convinced that the case haunted him—and ultimately derailed him—until his death.
Indeed, the insights of Capote have little to do with the cautionary tale aspect of the film. It seems to me that the film would have made a more compelling statement about the soul-scorching cost of the obsessionalism that fuels creative endeavor had it not, in fact, italicized the trade-offs and compromises that eased Capote’s path, making it easy for viewers to write him off as a manipulative egomaniac. The real revelation of Hoffman’s performance is that it shows Capote at the height of his astonishing powers, conscientiously plying his trade, looking, talking, brooding, wandering in his head, entering other people’s heads, brooding some more, imagining his way into an alien world. Something flits across Hoffman’s eyes early in the film, when he suddenly realizes he has made the wrong insouciant remark to Alvin Dewey, the lawman on the case, who was a close friend of Herb Clutter’s. Then, in a matter of seconds, internal adjustments are made, decisions are taken, and the two men forge an alliance.
Film has tended to present the unkinetic profession of writing in one of two stereotyped ways: as a precarious occupation that takes place in garreted isolation—think of a red-eyed, holed-up Jane Fonda wildly puffing at her cigarettes in Julia—or as a cushy desk job that resembles a less energetic form of interior decoration, which is what it looks like whenever Diane Keaton sits down at her laptop in Something’s Gotta Give. Capote enables us to grasp, more than any movie on the subject I have seen, what it is exactly that a writer does when he or she writes, how observation leads to perception leads to the crafting of sentences. In so doing, it gets far closer to the complicated, elusive heart of this strange calling—the way it is both an explicitly private and an implicitly public act, a means of rendezvousing with the self but also of showcasing the self—than any cinematic depiction until now.
During the film, Capote observes, almost as an aside, that he feels as though he and Perry had grown up in the same house, except that one left by the front door and one by the back. After paying a visit to Perry in his cell, Capote lies on his bed and watches bars of light move across the ceiling of his room, like a free-floating image of incarceration. That scene helps to establish the synaptic trick at the heart of great writing—the way it can cross over, on a dime, from envisioning unspeakable acts to recapturing a moment of unviolated innocence, from a restaurant in Great Bend where two drifters chow down on a steak dinner in preparation for their mayhem-producing scheme to a neat farmhouse a hundred miles away where the Clutters are sleeping unawares, under a full and impervious moon.
ENDLESS LOVE
(COURTNEY LOVE)
1998
Every age, or so it has been said, gets the icons it deserves. It’s an observation as cynical as it is astute, and this seems as good a time as any to ask whether we deserve the bundle of raw ambition and astonishing resilience known as Courtney Love. Less than ten years ago, she was still gyrating in a G-string and pasties at Jumbo’s Clown Room, a mini-mall strip joint on Hollywood Boulevard. Much like Madonna, whom she rivals in her attention seeking and whom she credits with paving the way for her dissy, fuck-all style, Love says she has always wanted to be famous, and now that she’s made it out of the shadows, she shows every sign of hanging on to the spotlight for longer than her allotted fifteen minutes.
But before we can even pose the question of whether she’s the right incarnation for our cultural moment, we have to define our terms—as in which Courtney Love, exactly, are we talking about? Is it the cleaned-up, surgically enhanced Hollywood celebrity, surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers, publicists, and assistants, who in the last two years has posed for Vogue, the cover of Harper’s Bazaar (as one of “America’s Most Stylish Women”), and a ten-page Versace spread shot by Richard Avedon that appeared in The New Yorker? Or are we referring to the bad, pre-1995 Courtney, whose degraded antics we thrilled to: the “riot grrrl” who specialized in rage, strutting around when she performed with her band, Hole, in decrepit party-
girl schmattes that she referred to as “kinderwhore” clothing, and fearlessly diving into the mosh pit, there to be pawed by the crowd? This Courtney openly took drugs, punched out people, harassed journalists she didn’t like with menacing phone calls, and stalked the Internet with graphic depictions of her inner state.
Love, who has been demonized as passionately as she has been embraced—and is in for a fresh round of name-calling with the release, this week, of Nick Broomfield’s chilling documentary Kurt & Courtney—has described herself as “a cockroach.” She survived a harrowing, unconventional background: a childhood spent in hippie communes while her heiress mother tried to find herself, followed by brief periods in foster homes and boarding schools; and an adolescence spent first in reform school and then as a stripper in Alaska, Taiwan, and parts in between. Love has said that her mother, who became a therapist, was “detached”; she had an even more sporadic relationship with her father, who calls himself “the Jane Goodall of rock and roll” (he has self-published a three-volume history of the Grateful Dead) and whom she calls “insane,” claiming that he beat her and that he gave her LSD when she was a toddler. At thirty-two, Love has been an erotic dancer, a druggie, a groupie, a bit actress (Sid and Nancy), a punk rocker, a wife, a mother, a widow, and a movie star (The People vs. Larry Flynt), all in the amount of time it takes other young people to decide what they want to be—doctor, lawyer, Indian chief—let alone get there. She seems to be precisely the sort of person for whom the quintessentially 1990s term “morphing” was coined.
Some might argue that Love’s most infamous transformation occurred on the day in early April 1994 when Kurt Cobain, her husband of two years, committed suicide, at the age of twenty-seven, by injecting himself with enough heroin to kill three people and then shooting himself in the mouth. Cobain, of course, was the lead singer of Nirvana, the enormously successful grunge group out of Seattle; he also wrote the group’s songs, with their oblique lyrics, gigantic beat, and unexpectedly melodic hooks. The spectacular sales (eventually totaling ten million copies) of Nirvana’s second album, Nevermind, turned the band into superstars overnight and their songs—especially “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—into slacker anthems. But, for the perennially disconsolate Cobain, success brought more anguish than happiness; he disdained the “yuppies in their BMWs” among his fans and escaped further into his heroin habit. Marriage to Love—Cobain once described their relationship as a mixture of “Evian water and battery acid,” while she quipped that “we bonded over pharmaceuticals”—and fatherhood seemed for a while to calm his demons. (Their daughter, Frances Bean, was born less than six months after the couple got hitched in Hawaii, with Kurt wearing green pajamas and Courtney wearing a dress that had once belonged to Frances Farmer, the Seattle-born actress with whom Cobain was obsessed.) But at the time of his suicide Kurt was rumored to be deeply unhappy in the marriage and talking of divorce.
If Cobain’s image—the unkempt-choirboy good looks and moody, antimaterialist style—had lent itself to idealization during his lifetime, it was ripe for sanctification once he was gone. The fact that Cobain, as several of his biographers have pointed out, had a youthful reputation as a bully—and, his disclaimers notwithstanding, was as driven to succeed as any other young rock hopeful—had been conveniently ignored while he was alive; in death, he was canonized as the noble prince of the streets. Courtney, brash and outspoken, became the vilified widow, the one who had dragged him out of his purist daydreams into the sewer of money and stardom: she was seen as the craven Yoko to his artistic John.
Love, whose acclaimed second album (titled, with retroactive irony, Live Through This) came out within days of Cobain’s death, raucously mourned her husband and, some said, brilliantly exploited the tragedy. She didn’t help matters by granting an interview to MTV the day after the suicide. She continued to talk about him every chance she got—when she wasn’t going on shopping sprees (Love and her daughter were the sole heirs to Cobain’s estate), checking into health spas with ex-flames (Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins), attending the MTV Movie Awards with Michael Stipe of R.E.M., or having her image reupholstered by the publicity firm PMK, which she had hired at fifteen thousand dollars a month, and through cosmetic surgery. Love’s original feelings about her physical appearance were summed up in the half-forlorn, half-sardonic title of Hole’s first album, Pretty on the Inside. Over the years she has had her nose bobbed and rebobbed, her teeth done, and her breasts enlarged and lifted; she has dropped forty pounds and redesigned her once chunky body with the help of trainers and liposuction. The one thing that hasn’t changed is her striking green eyes, which remain her best feature.
Along with this protracted physical makeover has come—or so we’ve been led to believe—a kinder, gentler Courtney Love. The woman who just nanoseconds ago cultivated a snarling, bad-girl persona both in her lyrics (“I don’t do the dishes / I throw them in the crib”) and in her life gradually began to reshape the public’s perception of her. A writer for the London Independent noted last year that Love, in the presence of a publicist who was there to see that she didn’t run off at the mouth as in days of yore, “looked fantastically attractive” and wasn’t at all bothered by the prospect of becoming “mainstream.” “How long do you have to be cool?” she asked. “How long do you want not to be married and not have kids and not have a family and not be grounded?” Four months before that, she had told a Los Angeles Times reporter that she thought of herself as “very conservative, a real traditionalist.”
It’s hard to reconcile these Tipper Gore–like sentiments with Love’s thuggish endorsement of acting as a profession just a year and a half earlier—she described it as “a whole new way to kick ass,” according to Melissa Rossi in her unauthorized biography, Courtney Love: Queen of Noise—or with her general reputation as a bully. “I punched some bitch in the mouth and her teeth got in the way,” was how she explained a bandaged hand to a crowd in the summer of 1995, when she was playing Lollapalooza, the roving musical tour. Even if you grant that people can change, there’s something unconvincing about the way Love has gone from pugilism to politesse—from the kind of person who gets booked on Jerry Springer to the kind you see on Charlie Rose. Although Love, who once described her persona as “ugly and gross and psychotic,” has been able to shed baggage from her past the way other people discard worn-out running shoes, she has had trouble outdistancing some rumors of seriously disturbed behavior. A 1992 Vanity Fair profile of her suggested that Love had continued to take heroin while she was pregnant; this not only enraged Kurt and Courtney but attracted the attention of the Los Angeles child services, who put the two-week-old Frances Bean in the custody of Courtney’s half sister for two months. Love responded by railing against the writer, who, she said, had taken remarks of hers out of context. She also issued threats to any other reporters who might follow suit (“Remember, if you write anything nasty about me, I’ll come round and blow up your toilet”), and she tightened her control over journalistic access. “With Pat [Kingsley] as her publicist, she was more than media-savvy,” Rossi writes. “She was the press princess, able to place, kill, or at least tone down stories more effectively than the government or the mob.”
* * *
There is one story that persists in dogging Love—and has now surfaced again, just when she’s arrived at the glistening, neon-lit place she dreamed about as an unhappy, angry child. It sprang up a month after Cobain’s death, as the result of an article in The Seattle Times, and it has been floating around the Internet and various outlets of the alternative media ever since. According to this account, the circumstances of Cobain’s end were murky enough to suggest that it might have been a murder rather than a suicide. In case you haven’t already guessed, it stars Courtney Love as a diabolical Black Widow—a tackily dishabille version of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice—scheming to dispose of the hubby and grab the dough.
It sounds like the stuff of di
e-hard conspiracy theorists—the kind of exotic, vaguely plausible scenario that the schizoid types who haunt the Internet entertain themselves with. And these speculations would probably have remained out there on the fringes, if it weren’t for Broomfield’s documentary, which follows the recent publication of Who Killed Kurt Cobain? The Mysterious Death of an Icon, by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace. The book is a mostly judicious presentation of explosive material and, as its title implies, the authors’ four years of research has led to more questions than answers. They point to a number of unresolved issues concerning Cobain’s death: the lack of fingerprints on the gun and the high level of heroin in his blood, which some say would have incapacitated him from using a gun; the fact that the singer’s credit card (which Love had canceled) was used after his death; the alleged existence of an unfinished will excluding Love; and the evidence that there were two sets of handwriting on Cobain’s so-called suicide note, indicating that it might have been a statement of his wish to resign from the music industry rather than a declaration of his intent to kill himself.
The Fame Lunches Page 9
