Revisiting an American Tragedy

Whatever got into me recently I’ll never know, but I decided there was nothing for it but to revisit Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel "In Cold Blood" as well as the two principal movies concerning the same topic: Richard Brooks’ 1967 "In Cold Blood" and 2005’s "Capote" with Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance as Capote during the book’s long gestation.

For those who might not be familiar with the story: late at night in mid-November 1959 the Herbert Clutter family farmhouse in western Kansas was invaded as the family slept. Four people—husband and wife, daughter and son—were tied up and murdered, each by a shotgun blast to the head. The father’s throat was cut.

A pair of binoculars and the son’s radio had gone missing. Clutter and his teenage son Kenyon had been murdered in the basement, Herb while lying on a mattress box and Kenyon on a couch. The killer, or killers, had put a pillow under Kenyon’s head. The two women, mother and daughter, had been tied up in their beds upstairs and dispatched—but the covers were pulled up snugly around high-school senior Nancy.

Prosperous and unpretentious, the Clutters represented America at its most ideal, community-minded people, 4-H Club and PTA members, stalwart Methodists who knew the value of hard work and generosity. And yet they were butchered in their home, for no apparent reason, as though they were victims of a thunderbolt slamming down from a clear blue sky.

Truman Capote, having recently finished his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was seeking ideas for his next book when the New York Times ran an article about the Clutter murder in far-off Holcomb, Kansas. On assignment for The New Yorker magazine, Capote and his friend/research assistant Harper Lee (soon to become a major author in her own right for To Kill a Mockingbird) travelled to Holcomb and began what turned out to be nearly six years of painstaking and heartbreaking research and first-hand experience.

The perpetrators were identified soon enough—a pair of losers named Dick Hickock and Perry Smith—but apprehending them took six weeks of detective work, near-misses, and a bit of luck. By early 1960 Hickock and Smith were locked up and the trial began. Their confessions, combined with ironclad physical evidence (such as Smith’s shoeprint in Herb Clutter’s blood), ensured that they would receive the death penalty. After a protracted series of appeals the two were sent to the gallows at the Kansas State Penitentiary on April 14, 1965.

And their reason for murdering a blameless family? Money, but the amount was appallingly low—just $40 or so. Smith and Hickock had been misinformed by a cellmate named Floyd Wells, a former employee of Clutter’s. Wells was convinced that Herb Clutter had a safe in his home office stocked with a minimum of $10,000 cash, that being the average payroll for Clutter’s sizable farm. But the house contained no safe, no pile of cash. Wells was right about the cash flow, but he was unaware that Herb Clutter handled all of his finances by check, even down to trifling everyday expenses.

Neither perpetrator was psychologically equipped to commit premeditated murder. Hickock was an immature braggart whose criminal repertory consisted mainly of petty shoplifting and check kiting. Smith was a beaten-down drifter with a poetic streak about him, sexually insecure and easily led. Alone neither man was particularly dangerous. But their psychological gears meshed, a weakness in one matching a strength in the other with almost machined precision. The net result was a third personality—sociopathic and deadly—that emerged in stressful conditions.

Capote was fascinated. The case itself was relatively unremarkable, a depressing tale of senseless crime and its remorseless aftermath. But it shined a spotlight on an America that many people preferred to believe didn’t exist—an America of losers and drifters, petty criminals who scrounged economic dumpsters for their sustenance, untalented and poorly educated young men who had nowhere to go except prison or a deadening unskilled job. The Clutters represented the America of cultural myth—an America of prosperity born of determination, brains and hard work (Herb Clutter had started out with no property of his own), community standing earned by good deeds, unquestioned achievement and quiet pride in a life well lived.

The two Americas, matter and antimatter, collided one night in that Kansas farmhouse, and when it was finally all over, both the victims and their attackers were dead.

In Cold Blood was a publishing phenomenon when it hit the stands in 1966. Everybody had a copy (we did.) Not only did it usher in the true-crime literary genre, it remains the best of breed, beautifully written in a sparse yet elegantly expressive style, focusing on the people involved rather than reveling in graphic violence.

Capote on Perry Smith’s physical appearance:

Sitting, he had seemed a more than normal-sized man, a powerful man, with the shoulders, the arms, the thick, crouching torso of a weight lifter—weight lifting was, in fact, his hobby. But some sections of him were not in proportion to others. His tiny feet, encased in short black boots with steel buckles, would have neatly fitted into a delicate lady’s dancing slippers; when he stood up, he was no taller than a twelve-year-old child, and suddenly looked, strutting on stunted legs that seemed grotesquely inadequate to the grown-up bulk they supported, not like a well-built truck driver but like a retired jockey, overblown and muscle-bound.

3 sentences, 107 words total, a verbal sketch worthy of Dickens but expressed in the lingo of contemporary American journalism.

Richard Brooks made his film version right on the heels of the book’s publication, taking full advantage of the original locations and even casting some of the people of Holcomb. The Clutter house, the Finney County Courthouse, even the little diner/filling station in Holcomb and the village post office were brought before the cameras. Not only Holcomb, but the look of the Midwest circa 1960 was perfectly captured by some of the finest black & white widescreen cinematography in movie history. Nothing has been gussied up or prettified; even the sterility of a middle-class men’s clothing store is documented with a clear, unsentimental eye. America of 1960, as seen by Perry and Dick, was a land of highways (still mostly two-lane affairs lined by telephone poles), cheap motels, filling stations, drive-in hamburger joints, truck horns and train whistles, neon lights, and endless expanses of flat grassy land.

Although the scenes with the Clutters are relatively warm (including a somewhat unsettling neo-Copland-y background score), the look of the frame house on the Kansas prairie, with its quonsett outbuildings and tree-lined drive, mixes warm homey comfort with an unsettling bleak austerity. Holcomb is attractive in a nostalgic Norman-Rockwell manner, but at the same time one is always aware of the wind, the dust, the cold, the utter lack of anything beyond the most fundamental amenities.

Robert Blake made his career playing Perry Smith, the character who elicited the most sympathy from Capote. Certainly in the 2005 film Capote the author’s attraction to him is presented without question, as is Smith’s reciprocity. Each man was using the other—Capote needed Smith’s unvarnished memories in order to flesh out his evolving book, while Smith was able to play on Capote’s sympathy (and attraction) to acquire a much finer set of lawyers than he could have done otherwise, thus stretching out the appeals process. As a result, the relationship portrayed in Capote is complex; you get the feeling that it was a love affair being carried out largely in the privacy of each man’s mind. To some extent their personalities were geared to each other, much as Smith’s and Hickock’s had been, but the attraction was flavored by repulsion as well—Capote for Smith’s intellectual childishness and pretension, Smith for Capote’s twee persona and baffling shifts of mood.

While the 2005 film focuses primarily on Capote himself and his evolving relationship with Perry Smith, the 1967 is all about the crime and its aftermath. Alas, the 1967 film concocts a fictionalized Truman Capote in the form of a gravelly-voiced reporter (played by the guy who was the butler in Citizen Kane) who oozes masculinity and is prone to pontifical statements. I suppose 1967 wasn’t ready for the real Truman flitting about with his girly voice, fancy clothes, and fey mannerisms. One wonders why not: by 1967 Capote was already becoming a fixture on the TV talk-show circuit and would be a pop-culture icon within a few years. In retrospect, the "fake" Truman of 1967 seems much more jarring to the film than the real Capote would ever have been. And Capote could have played himself without the slightest difficulty, as he was to continue doing until his death from alcohol-related problems in 1984.

No matter. In Cold Blood has become a part of the American cultural landscape, even as the story it tells has morphed gradually into myth as fewer and fewer people remain who were actually there.

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

Truman Capote never completed another book.


Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, photographed by Richard Avedon


Scott Wilson (Hickock), Truman Capote, and Robert Blake (Smith) in a promo shot for the 1967 film


Clifton Collins, Jr. (Smith) and Mark Pellegrino (Hickock) in the 2005 film
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