When she was 13, Kate Harrington picked up the phone and dialed Truman Capote—the brilliant Breakfast at Tiffany’s author and ill-fated gossip whom she had met under stranger-than-fiction circumstances. Harrington’s father, a former bank manager, had invited Capote to the family home on Long Island for dinner one night—not telling his wife or daughter that he and Capote were actually lovers. When Harrington’s dad, an alcoholic, eventually abandoned the family, Harrington found the phone number of her father’s high-pitched friend to see whether he could help her find a job.
Rather than waving off Harrington, or passing her over to his high-society friends for employ, Capote invited the teenager to come into Manhattan. He gave her careful instructions on how to take the Long Island Rail Road and hail a taxi, and met her for lunch.
“Truman treated me like an adult,” Harrington tells Ebs Burnough in his documentary The Capote Tapes, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend. “He said, ‘The only thing you can do at your age to make a good bit of money is model.’ I thought that was a crazy idea, because I had never thought of myself in that way...[but] he took me to Richard Avedon’s studio.” After that meeting, explains Harrington, “Slowly, slowly, slowly my whole world began to change...because he opened up the doors of literature, dance, art, music, fashion, and meeting all kinds of accomplished people.”
As Harrington began working more frequently in New York, Capote invited her to move in with him in his Manhattan apartment. He had one rule for his new roommate: that she keep a diary. Harrington asked why. “He said, ‘Because your life is about to change. And it’s the only way you hold on to who you really are,’” she recalls tenderly in the film. “I always think of that.”
Harrington looks back on those early days with Capote fondly: When she inquired where Capote kept his television, the author guided her to his red-lacquered library, and told her, “This is your television.” Capote would start his day either writing or rolling phone calls to gossip columnists, laughing hysterically over coffee. Harrington remembers their domestic life then as being “incredibly calm and pleasant.... He was very nurturing. We didn’t have too many groceries,” she laughs in the documentary. “We ate out all the time. He had canned soup, raw shrimp, and Tab soda. And a lot of vodka in the freezer.”
Capote took Harrington along with him to lunches and dinners, introducing her as his protégé. The In Cold Blood author also gave her a crash course in socializing, passing along etiquette lessons he had learned from the likes of Jackie Kennedy. The trick to conversations, for example, was simply to listen and ask questions. An inquisitive listener makes the most enjoyable of party guests. When Harrington confided in Capote that she was actually bored by some of the lunch conversations, he put her to work: “He told me...that what I should do is sit in the booth and listen to the conversation next to us. And on the way home, I could tell him everything they talked about. It was sort of fun for him [because he usually knew who sat next to us].” Nearly five decades later, Harrington still finds herself in restaurants drifting out of conversations to listen to what is happening at the table over.
Harrington’s surprisingly sweet memories of Capote were a revelation for director Burnough, a political consultant whose twin interests in storytelling and the author led him to making The Capote Tapes. After his fascination with Capote was reignited several years back, Burnough reached out to Sarah Whitehead Dudley, whose late husband, George Plimpton, wrote the 1997 book Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. She offered Burnough access to the audio tapes Plimpton had amassed during his research for the book, which form the framework of the documentary.
“George Plimpton was a genius,” Burnough told Vanity Fair last month.“He spent 10 years interviewing people, beginning the year that Truman died. You get a little glimpse at the rawness of love and hate for [Capote].... A lot of people really didn’t like Truman off the bat. They didn’t question his brilliance, but they thought of him as being mean, like a tiny terror.” With Harrington’s help—sharing her extensive memories of Capote for the first time—the filmmaker set out to scrub away some of the scandal and sad decline that overshadowed the author’s literary genius when he died in 1984.
By that year, Capote had been excommunicated from his social circle after spilling their secrets in the thinly veiled “La Côte Basque, 1965.” Lonely and haunted by the suicide of his mother—who never accepted him or his sexuality—Capote descended into addiction, drinking, popping pills, and spending long hours at clubs like Studio 54.
“There are two things I really wanted to [tackle] in the film,” said Burnough. “[Capote’s] courage, in being out and this gay men in 1958.... The other thing that I think was important for me in the film was that he was an addict. It was important for me to talk about drugs and alcohol, and the huge effect they were on this person. And the psychology of that, and how it fueled him, and how it emptied him.”
For Harrington, Capote’s trajectory was doubly heartbreaking—not simply because she cared so deeply about the man who had taken her under his wing, but also because it mirrored the painful trajectory she had witnessed years earlier with her own father. Harrington, who was living with Capote, was unable to stop his decline—which, unlike her father’s, played out publicly via boozy talk show segments and gossipy accounts of his drug-fueled exploits. Speaking to Vanity Fair, Harrington recalled one tear-filled argument she had with the author in his final years. Pleading with Capote to try to get healthier, she told him, “I love you. Isn’t that enough?” The author replied, “Oh darling, if only it were.”
Capote’s chief heartbreak was that his mother—who herself had aspired to infiltrate the New York elite—never accepted her openly gay son, in spite of his literary success and the rarified social circles he joined. Burnough and Capote’s colleagues, interviewed by Plimpton, use a psychological lens to analyze why Capote acted as the gossipy society jester he did with influential friends like Slim Keith, Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, and Marella Agnelli. “I think the fee for admission into that world was: He had to be fun,” said Burnough. “Truman had to perform.... I think there was an expectation on him.... And I do think that inevitably he got tired of it.”
Living with Capote, Harrington noticed that the calm protector she knew—quick to kibosh an older movie star’s flirtations with Harrington at a Beverly Hills party, for example—wound himself into a catty caricature at social events. But he took such good care of her—and watched out for her in a way her father never had—that, when Capote began his downward spiral, Harrington loyally stuck by her mentor. She wanted to protect him like he had done for her, but—with Capote ambling onto talk show stages after hours of drinking and drugging at night clubs—the task was impossible.
Though Harrington has processed the relationship through a “lot of therapy,” she still feels a bit like the author’s lone guardian—even 35 years after his death. Toward the end of Vanity Fair’s conversation with Harrington, she paused to ask a question of her own: how Capote comes off in the documentary, which she has not yet seen. Her love for Capote was palpable both in our conversation and onscreen, in The Capote Tapes; beyond any memory Harrington shares—and she has many touching ones—Burnough considers her to be the best evidence of a softer side to Capote.
“Kate demonstrates Truman’s humanity,” said Burnough. “She loved him. And he loved her.... He was a gay man sleeping with this girl’s father. He could not be a parent in any legal traditional way, but he saw something in this child...and he became a parent to this child in many ways.... You meet Kate, and she’s an extraordinary parent who’s an extraordinary human, and super brilliant and creative. So regardless of what Gore Vidal says about Capote, regardless of what Norman Mailer says about him, regardless of people thinking of him as this tiny terror...you meet Kate, and you think, Well, he couldn’t have been so horrible if he raised her. That was a turning point for me...if she considers him her father. And [if] he really put in the hard work of taking in this child and molding her, then there has to be some really extraordinary part of him.”
Years after Capote’s death, Harrington gave birth to a daughter she named Truman. Harrington said that her daughter, while growing up, would ask why she was named after the man whose photos were framed around the house. “Because he was an important person in my life,” Harrington explained. Her daughter became a voracious reader and promptly tore through her namesake’s books. And Harrington still had her journals—detailing those lovely days in Manhattan with Capote. Harrington and her daughter read through those early entries together.
Harrington still gets sad thinking about how her daughter will never get to meet the man who was so influential to her. But Truman has amassed enough knowledge of Capote that, when Harrington shares a new story about Capote’s adventures, her daughter will knowingly reply, “That sounds like him.”