There’s a terrific sequence midway through Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” which was called into question, recently, by a report in the Wall Street Journal. Nineteen days had passed since the ghastly murder of four members of the Clutter family, in their house on the high plains of western Kansas, and detectives still had no clue who might have done it. Then, quite suddenly, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation received a tip from a prison inmate who said that the murderer may have been his former cellmate, Richard Hickock—with possible assistance from an accomplice, Perry Smith.
Capote sets the scene: Alvin Dewey, the taciturn lead detective, returns home that night, flush with the knowledge that he finally has a break in the case. His wife, Marie, has no inkling of this development, so she greets him with a recitation of the household emergencies that have occupied her day: the family cat attacked a cocker spaniel; one of their boys fell from a tree.
“Dewey poured two cups of coffee,” Capote writes. Without a word, he passes his wife a manila envelope. “Her hands were wet; she dried them, sat down at the kitchen table, sipped her coffee [and] opened the envelope.”
Even as Marie pulls out mugshots of the killers, her husband has already sent one of his agents, Harold Nye, to Richard Hickock’s last known address. Approaching a humble, four-room farmhouse, Nye discovers that Hickock is not home—but his parents are. They invite Nye in for coffee. (The Kansans of “In Cold Blood” drink a lot of coffee.) Nye is crafty: he says nothing of the murders, maintaining instead that he is seeking Hickock for parole violations and check fraud. Unaware of the gravity of their son’s misdeeds, the Hickocks proceed to corroborate many of the details in the account of the jailhouse snitch.
“Nye shut his notebook and put his pen in his pocket, and both his hands as well,” Capote writes, “for his hands were shaking with excitement.”
It’s a captivating episode—tense, atmospheric, and grounded in the kind of filmic detail that makes “In Cold Blood” so memorable: Marie drying her hands, Nye pocketing his. The sequence is also, in most of its particulars, fiction. As the Journal revealed last month, a cache of long-lost records from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation depicts a starkly different version of events. Nye did not venture to the farmhouse alone, at night, or under false pretenses. In fact, three members of the K.B.I. made the trip. They did so during the day and spoke only with Hickock’s mother, and there was no ruse; they told her precisely why they were calling.
It’s hardly news that “In Cold Blood” was less “immaculately factual” than its author liked to boast. Capote’s grandiose pronouncements about how he had invented a new literary form, the “nonfiction novel,” amounted to a reckless dare: the book had scarcely hit the shelves before Esquire dispatched a native Kansan, Philip Tompkins, to retrace the author’s reportorial steps. Consulting locals whom Capote had interviewed, and records from the trial, Tompkins discovered inaccuracies in the book, and focussed, in particular, on the soulful portrayal of Perry Smith, who appeared to have been more conscious and deliberate in carrying out the murders than Capote made him out to be. Capote didn’t help matters by announcing that he found the presence of a tape recorder or notebook intrusive when conducting interviews, and preferred to rely on his own recollection of what his sources said. (“Sometimes he said he had ninety-six per cent total recall, and sometimes he said he had ninety-four per cent total recall,” George Plimpton joked, after his death. “He could recall everything, but he could never remember what percentage recall he had.”)
It was always Capote’s intention to write a work that would endure. (He told Plimpton that he selected a crime story because “murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time.”) But what is interesting, given that Capote omitted any mention of himself from the narrative, is the degree to which we remain fascinated not just by “In Cold Blood,” but by the process of its creation. Along with these periodic revelations about Capote’s novelistic license, two films in recent years were based not on the book, but on its making.
Some of this persistent interest in the backstory of “In Cold Blood” may simply be a product of its greatness: even detractors who would like to see it plucked from the True Crime section and reshelved permanently in Fiction still tend to concede that the book was a major literary achievement. But Capote’s infractions also raise enduring questions about the slippery boundary between truth and fiction in narrative journalism, and the relationships that develop between a reporter and his sources. Bennett Miller’s film “Capote” portrays its title character as a consummate seducer: before Capote can repurpose the narrative tricks of the novel to beguile the unsuspecting reader, he must first get the story, by persuading ornery, suspicious Kansans to open up to him through a kind of velvet sorcery. Miller delivers a particularly grim vision of Capote: he seduces Perry Smith and then betrays him, lying about the title of his book (which would reveal that he was less sympathetic with the killers than he might have seemed), and refusing to help the men find a new lawyer for their appeals (because only when they were finally executed would Capote have his ending).
In this respect, the film recalls another famous murder story that raised vexing questions about journalistic ethics: the slaughter of Colette MacDonald and her two daughters, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1970. Suspicion fell on her husband, the surgeon Jeffrey MacDonald, who claimed that the murders had been committed by a marauding band of hippies. As Janet Malcolm related in “The Journalist and the Murderer” (which, like “In Cold Blood,” began as a series in The New Yorker), during subsequent legal proceedings, the author Joe McGinnis ingratiated himself with MacDonald, implying that he believed the doctor was innocent, and received an astonishing degree of access. McGinnis then drew upon this access to write the bestseller, “Fatal Vision,” in which he depicted MacDonald as a remorseless killer. Malcolm argued that all journalism was a kind of confidence game—that McGinnis’s seduction and betrayal of MacDonald was just “a grotesquely magnified version of the normal journalistic encounter.”
But if the MacDonald/McGinnis dynamic is one of betrayal, it is not clear to me that the same could be said of Capote and the people he wrote about. Surely, Malcolm is correct that an implied transaction occasionally exists between journalist and subject—and the journalist occasionally breaks that deal. But just as often (indeed, probably much more often) the truth of a story is obscured in ways large and small because the journalist elects not to break that implicit compact—but to honor it.
In his recent book, “Truman Capote and the Legacy of ‘In Cold Blood,’” Ralph Voss agrees with Tompkins that, if anything, Capote went easy on Perry Smith, making him out to be more literate and philosophical than he was. Malcolm suggests that subjects often feel “impelled by something stronger than reason” to talk to reporters. But reporters, too, may find that as a relationship with a source develops, their ability to deliver a coldly rational appraisal is compromised by a sense of compassion, or attachment.
Nor is it always so irrational for a source to coöperate. If you are a public official or a small-town resident and you realize that some writer is preparing a narrative account of events in which you were directly involved, a certain game theory may influence your decision about whether (and how freely) to talk. The access-for-depiction dynamic is at least as prevalent a tendency in journalism as the seduction-and-betrayal routine. Just ask the generations of White House officials who have made the discreet trek to Georgetown for an audience with Bob Woodward.
One person who seems to have been aware of this dynamic was Detective Alvin Dewey. We know now that the plainspoken investigator was remarkably forthcoming with Capote. He opened his case files to the visiting writer, and gave him access to the diary of Nancy Clutter, which included an entry written on the very night of her death. When locals were reluctant to speak with Capote, Dewey intervened on the writer’s behalf. Nancy’s boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, who was the last person to see the Clutters alive, gave an interview “because Al Dewey advised me to.” From New York, Capote wrote letters to the detective, calling him “Foxy” and “Dearhearts,” then demanding one document after another.
As a consequence, according to the Journal, Dewey was rewarded with a slight but significant exaggeration of his investigative prowess. The most glaring discrepancy between Capote’s account of the big break in the case and the reality captured in the K.B.I. files comes down to timing: in Capote’s telling, Dewey sent his investigator to the Hickock house on the night he received the tip. But, in reality, he waited five days. According to the Journal’s investigation, even after the jailhouse informant identified Hickock as the killer, Dewey obstinately clung to an erroneous theory of his own: that the murderer was some local with a grudge.
But there may be another reason that Capote would gloss over this evidence of Dewey’s delay, a reason that has less to do with the relationship between a reporter and his source than with the mechanics of narrative journalism. In the bleak moral landscape of “In Cold Blood,” Dewey plays a role that is heroic and comfortingly archetypal. He is the lawman, modest but tenacious, “a lean and handsome, fourth generation Kansan,” a solid sort. Capote never fully copped to his liberties and inventions, insisting that “In Cold Blood” was completely factual, and claiming that interview subjects who later disputed his account were either lying or mistaken. But in a journal entry included in Voss’s book he draws a telling distinction. Describing the experience of seeing the actor Robert Blake play Perry Smith in the 1967 adaptation of his book, Capote writes:
This is an evasive bit of self-delusion—Capote wasn’t just “distilling” reality, he was composing accounts that diverged from his own notes and conjuring whole scenes. In his 1988 biography of Capote, Gerald Clarke reveals that the redemptive coda at the end of the book, in which Dewey encounters a friend of Nancy Clutter’s in a cemetery, was fiction: their conversation, which Capote relates in direct quotes, never happened.
Even so, Capote is right to suggest that any narrative representation of events is an accumulation of “selected” details, and that the process of selection and arrangement through which a writer converts disparate facts into an absorbing story entails an inevitable measure of artifice. Even in the most scrupulously factual (and fact-checked) piece of narrative journalism, the writer uses some details and discards others, focusses on some characters and ignores others altogether, withholds information, and then metes it out as it suits him. If Dewey feels, at times, like a hero in a movie, that’s because Capote rendered him that way, with a degree of careful embroidery. So while “In Cold Blood” breaches the signal prohibition of nonfiction writing, it does so in service of a narrative agenda—to arrange chaotic reality into a story that is orderly and emotionally engaging and suspenseful—that more responsible journalists would surely recognize.
Dewey, also, may have understood that agenda, and known, from the moment Capote arrived in town, that a hero was what the author needed. We’ll never know for sure. The Journal reveals that Capote arranged for Dewey’s wife, Marie, to receive a contract from Columbia Pictures as a consultant on the film adaptation. But more telling, I think, is a letter that Voss cites in his book, which Capote wrote on August 16, 1961:
Perhaps Marie Dewey had photographic recall and an exceptional eye for detail. Maybe she remembered that night some eight months earlier as if no time had passed. Perhaps the cat really did claw the cocker spaniel on that particular day.
But I doubt it. It is hardly unusual for a reporter to appeal to a source for help in reconstructing an event. I’ve done it myself. But when you make those requests of a source, you put yourself at the mercy of her memory, and her candor. It is hard not to read, in that final parenthetical—“(not that I mind inventing details, as you will see!)”—a privileging of story over truth, and as such, an invitation to embellish. And if that was the tenor in which he described his project, it seems that Capote the seducer may have enlisted both Deweys as collaborators in an enterprise that was explicitly creative.
For years, Alvin Dewey insisted that “In Cold Blood” was factual, and the humble lawman’s stamp of approval was evinced, by those who were inclined to believe the book, as a badge of its accuracy. He had furnished Capote with the access and materials to tell the true parts of his story, and had permitted the author to stretch the truth, in making, of Dewey, a hero. He was, in this subtle sense, a co-conspirator.
