The Press Box - The January Issue: ‘In Cold Blood’ and the Invention of True Crime

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Hello, media consumers! Welcome to the January Issue. This month, Bryan and David come together to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ being published by Random House. This episode is broken into four chapters, just like the non-fiction novel. Bryan and David start Chapter 1 by discussing Truman Capote himself, and how he was the podcast guest before there were podcast guests (03:20). They have a conversation about who is comparable to Capote in the modern age (09:09), why non-fiction with the style of fiction hits the reader the way it does (17:22), and why Capote wanted to combine these styles (21:04). In Chapter 2, the guys dive into the relationship between Capote and the killers of the Clutter family (26:41), Capote’s journalistic good luck (31:54), and his interviewing techniques (37:21). In Chapter 3, Bryan and David talk about what they made of ‘In Cold Blood’ after re-reading it (1:01:51), Truman Capote’s fabulism (1:05:48), and whether ‘In Cold Blood’ would have been as successful if Capote had said it was almost all true (1:12:14). In Chapter 4, Bryan and David take a look at the impact ‘In Cold Blood’ has had on the media (1:14:43). They discuss ‘In Cold Blood’ being the invention of true crime (1:16:06), and what the heirs of the book are (1:22:32). The January Issue ends with Bryan and David recommending other books you might like if you enjoyed reading ‘In Cold Blood’ (1:30:27). All that and more, here on The Press Box. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guests: Chip McGrath and Gerald Clarke Producers: Isaiah Blakely and Bruce Baldwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox. You've got Brian Curtis and producer Bruce Baldwin. David Shoemaker's going to be here in just one second. But first, I want to welcome you to the January issue of the press box, the latest in our monthly series where we take long looks into interesting corners of the media world. Now, back in December, you will remember, David and I talked about The New Yorker. This month, we're going to talk about a book that came out of the New Yorker.

pages and did an end run around its fact-checking department. The book is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which was published by Random House 60 years ago this month. Now, if you've seen the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie, you know the basics about how in cold blood was reported. In 1959, Truman Capote, a novelist who was famous for writing Breakfast at Tiffany's and other books, went to Kansas to investigate the murders of four members of the Clutter family. who were shotgunned in their home in the middle of the night.

Capote made friends with the Kansas locals. He even made friends with the murderers after they were caught. And then he took his reporting and wrote in cold blood as what he described as a new literary species, a non-fiction novel. As Capote said, it was a book that would read exactly like a novel, except that every word of it would be absolutely true. Capote's literary experiment was a hit as soon as it was published in 1966.

It made millions of dollars. And as Capote tried to position the book, he talked about in cold blood as the granddaddy of literary journalism, that high peak of nonfiction that just about every magazine writer has tried to reach in the years since. Here on the book's 60th anniversary, David and I want to think about in cold blood slightly differently. We want to call it the granddaddy of true crime. True Crime, that genre that now stretches from Dateline NBC to David Grand, from YouTube videos about random murders to podcasts like cereal. In In Cold Blood, Capote showed how a writer with a crime story could cut through the yellow police tape and achieve great literary things. So how did Truman Capote make us love to read and write about murder? Welcome to the January issue, in Cold Blood, and the invention of true crime.

My first guest, Truman Capote is among a handful of authors who might be more famous than their actual work. At 23, he wrote a novel that established him as a first-rate American writer. His most popular success was the non-fiction novel in Cold Blood, of course, about a mass murder that was later made into the motion picture. He also wrote Breakfast to Tiffany's, and currently he's finishing a much-awaited book, Answered Prayers. Would you please welcome, Mr. Truman Capote? David, in Cold Blood has four chapters. and I thought our podcast today should be divided the same way. Call Chapter 1, the podcast guest before there were podcast guests.

Yes. Let's start by introducing Truman Capote. Truman Capote was the kind of unique literary figure who was famous for being a writer, and he was also famous for being a character named Truman Capote. He was a southerner, so you and I are already. interested. Yeah. Spent much of his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, wrote his first novel in his 20s, as you heard David Letterman say. He cut an interesting figure Truman Capote did.

His height has been listed as being somewhere between 5 foot 2 and 5 foot 4. We'll never know for sure because Truman Capote was never measured at the senior bowl. I would have gone shorter, actually, but go ahead. Same here. Capote had a great quote too. He said, I'm about as tall as a shotgun and just as noisy. He spoke in this very distinctive voice

that Philip Seymour Hoffman later mimicked in the movie. Here's Truman Capote answering questions from a very young Barbara Walters. The most acute observer today. Are you ever bored? And if so, what boars you?

Do you always have this nourishing curiosity? I know, I'm terribly curious. I mean, it's very hard for me to get bored because even when somebody's being actively boring, I'm interested in how they are boring me. You know, exactly what it is, why is it that I'm so bored with them? What is it? I'm analyzing that, and so in a way that's a fine case me entertained. I can sit in like in a bus or a train and over, listen, you know, this over here conversations, listen to conversations, listen to conversations,

that are incredibly boring. But the fact that I'm eavesdropping on them, you know, makes it absolutely fascinating. I could listen all day long. For those who have never read a word of Capote, how would you describe his writing? Well, I mean, his famous, I mean, like early non-fiction, I mean, fiction work, Brex's, Tiffany's, other voices, other rooms. I mean, it's hard to read them from our vantage point, I think, because as as unique as his voice is,

it still feels a little bit of its moment. You know, it still feels like more categorically like old fashioned novel than it does something sort of breathtaking. But he really is a sort of immaculate stylist. And kind of surprisingly, a minimalist, if maybe you'd only seen his interviews, or for that matter, only read in cold blood.

But he's, he is a very, adept recorder of humanity as a prose stylist. I mean, as a fiction stylist. And we'll see how that butts up against in cold blood and, and, you know, the, the questions of veracity about that book. But he's the sort of writer that makes all in fiction, every line of dialogue seems entirely realistic. and in nonfiction,

it sometimes seems too good to be true. I had never read Capote's fiction before we started this project. And I read Breakfast at Tiffany's, and I read other voices, other rooms, and I was floored for exactly the reason you say, minimalism. The ability to achieve this effect

with very, very simple language, language that's not ornate, but the images it generates feel ornate, Yeah. I mean, he also just has his ability. I don't want to use the word propulsive because that feels like only in literary criticism. But I cannot tell you how easy it is to turn the pages of a Truman Capote novel. I mean, reading those books, I'm like, this is my favorite book because I am just turning and turning and turning. Even and not driven by plot either, purely by language. Yes. Just beguiling as another maybe only in literary criticism word I would use to describe his poster. Just something about it that's so inviting that it just makes you want to read and read and read.

Well, it said that the exit, the quote from the Barbara Walter's interview that you just played, I think is incredibly informative for a lot of reasons. But the idea of listening and of eavesdropping, I think is a compelling piece of the way that he works as an artist throughout his career, certainly in cold blood. But I think even in his novels, there's that feeling like, like, maybe you shouldn't be hearing this, you know, that it's not, it's not that the subject matter is important just as he says, but it's that it's being conveyed in this sort of, this sort of, I don't know, like, you know, it's like a spoonful of sugar. It just like, it just, it makes it, it makes it seem so important in the moment. The very best biography of Capote was written by a man named Gerald Clark, who spent lots of time with Capote, did. hours and hours of interviews. When I talked to Clark recently, he told me about just how famous Capote he was after in cold blood.

He and I would walk along the street in New York and Manhattan. And truck drivers would yell out of their cabs. Hey, Truman, how are you, buddy? With great affection. He had the fame of a movie star, really, at that point. I don't think any other writer in America, or perhaps the world was a famous with ordinary people as Truman was. Here's what I wanted to ask you.

Who's a comparable person today, a writer we know as much for who they are as for what they wrote? There's certainly people who are famous, like in New York literary circles, there's certainly people who, like, the hype is about them as a person before the novel comes out,

the sort of like Taffy, Burdessner Ackner, Ackner's of the world, you know, people that have some sort of reputation as a writer or otherwise. before the novel comes out. But I don't think that's really an exact comp. You know, what I kept thinking of when I would, after we had the first conversation about comparisons and I would watch the old Capote interviews,

I would, for some reason, kept thinking of Brian Williams when he would go on the Tonight Show and do his white guy rapping schick, you know? But there was also the thing of like Brian Williams in general because he would, but this is what got him into trouble, obviously, but just go and just kind of be like regaling. storyteller on late night shows while he was also not a writer, but he was the anchor of the evening news, right?

This sort of like, oh, I can't believe someone who does this straight lace thing is also this kind of raconteur, right? But I don't know. I mean, there's lots of writers, especially today. There are a lot of celebrity writers, right? It's more and more common that, like, you reach a certain level of fame and someone just, you know, offers you a contract for a children's book or whatever. But again, that's not exactly it.

It's someone who's established themselves as a writer, but we like them better as people. I think honestly, and I don't mean this is a disservice to his writing, but David Sedaris might be the number one person. Because he's got a performer. He's got a never-ending roadshow, you know? I mean, he's constantly out there reading and is just an immaculate writer. In some ways, similarly to Capote.

Obviously, Capote wasn't a humorist, but, like, they're both minimalists, you know, and our first and foremost storytellers. The off-the-wall idea I had, which is no more off-the-wall than Brian Williams, thank you very much, was Chuck Closterman? Do you see this whole bit Chuck Closterman did about how appearing on Bill's pod

gave him this identity completely outside his writing? Yeah. And almost in a way, because those pods are so amazing, competed with his writing. And again, it's really hard to like think about this from podcasting world because everybody is a guest. Yeah. Everybody is, you know, designed to not just give you five or ten great minutes like Capote was with David Letterman or Johnny Carson.

Mm-hmm. But to give you 30 great minutes or an hour. Yeah, it's true. But what we all do now is what he excelled at in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Yeah. He was that guy. And he was also just connected to everybody. I mean,

friends with Jackie Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy's sister. Yeah. He's the guy who fresh off the success of In Cold Blood, 1966, throws his famous black and white ball. Mm-hmm. It's all these famous people to come dressed like they are in the movie eyes wide shut. Like 500 people. It's amazing.

Yeah. During the research for this pot, I found out that he was present at the 1979 Super. That's great. Because of course. There was an interview we did on the tonight show with Johnny Carson, where the interview opens with Carson saying, basically tell the audience that story you told me at my apartment the other night, you know?

And people loved him because they had him at the dinner table. Yeah. And he was great entertainment. And then they would bring him on television. And he was great entertainment. Mm-hmm. I found this amazing interview Capote did in 1973 with Rolling Stones, Yon Winner, in which he explained why he was a serial talk show guest.

I'll read you the quote here. The truth of the matter is that I have a lot of things that amuse and interest me that I like to talk about, but I have no time or interest in writing about them. I just like to give my opinion on certain various things. I don't write about it because it's not worth writing about. I just want to talk about it. That is he is 100% a podcaster. I have opinions about stuff, but I don't want to bother to write a piece. That is the rallying cry of the podcast here.

Absolutely. So that's Capote as a fully formed celebrity writer. Let's go back in time to November of 1959. When Capote was on his way to this level of notoriety. Yeah. He'd published Breakfast at Tiffany's. And importantly for his bank account, he had sold breakfast at Tiffany's to Hollywood. Yeah.

The Audrey Hepburn movie would start filming the very next year. So he had a little bit of money. But Capote also had an idea about what he wanted to do next. He was going to take his novelist skills and apply them to journalism. Yeah. He was going to create an oxymoron, a nonfiction novel, which he admitted later was not exactly the best or smoothest coinage he could have come up with. Mm-hmm. A non-fiction novel.

Yeah. Here's how Capote explained the idea to the great documentarians Albert and David Maisels in 1966. My point is that factual writing can reach the altitudes of poetry that poetry does. And at the same time, it has this extraordinary extra dimension of being completely true. Here's something else I want to talk to you about. Put aside regular old literary journalists. We have a lot of those. Who are the bona fide non-fiction novelists of today?

Oh, man. I mean, I guess you would start with the, I mean, it's almost categorically the people that tell like a smaller unknown story in a nonfiction style, right? David Grant, Eric Larson. I mean, that's immediately where my mind goes. because once the subject, and I think this is important for Capote as well, once the subject is bigger than the style or than the writer or than whatever,

then the artistry of it, I don't know if it ceases to matter, but it sort of takes a back seat, right? You could write the most beautiful book on World War II ever written. Or to put it another way, like, you know, Jonathan Franzen could write a thousand page book on what fake novel on World War II or nonfiction books are in World War II nobody would call it a nonfiction novel you know like whatever

it's it's the subject's too big in some ways I don't know are there what are some other obvious names that I'm not thinking of well Patrick Radden-Keeve is probably dabbled in that world yeah yeah a little bit but I totally get your point because if you write it about Joe Biden to name a very unwell I was going to say Richard Ben Kramer, he might have actually gotten there. But let's say you write about President Joe Biden. Yeah.

You start having to put your journalist cape on a little bit. Yeah. You start having to kind of run things down and stop and pivot for facts and information. Yeah. And it's not an occasional stop and pivot for facts. Of course, when you're talking about something that's that big where the story is so well known because you become so preoccupied in making sure you're hitting the beats of the established history. that that sort of overwhelms the artistry of it.

Yeah. Also, if there was like a topic with a lot of traffic, you couldn't write as the New York Times once reported comma. That's not a sentence in a nonfiction novel. Yeah. Speaking about this combination of nonfiction and fiction, nonfiction with a fictional style. Yeah.

Why does that combination hit us the way it does? I think there's a lot of reasons. I think certainly at the time of in cold blood, which sort of coincided with the rise of new journalism, although Capote was weirdly dismissive of the new journalists, the early new journalists at the time. I think it was, well, part of it was the injection of the first person, which Capote famously didn't do and said that it should not be a part of any nonfiction novel.

I think part of it was, I don't know if it was competitive spirit or what, but it was just sort of like more of just missing them as writer. than really comparing the styles. But there was obviously an appetite for this, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's sort of, we take it for granted that like, that nonfiction writing was sort of stayed and unexciting prior to new journalism, prior to in cold blood. But it really was. I mean, even in places like the New York or some of them were literary outlets, the places

that we think of as literary, it could be pretty dry. Now, obviously, there's certain writers. who's writing sort of leaps off the page. And there's certain writers who I think history looks back more fondly on. You know, I mean, it's like, do you, their style was such that it just like, you know, whatever, the ring larders of the era, you know, whatever. People who just go back in their writing in such a distinct style that it almost feels fictional. Well, this probably was. But it, but it feels like something more than just dry prose.

So there was a real, I think, desire for it at the time. But I think now in the modern era, when we read things like that, I think that there is a, there's a couple of things at play. One is these are by and large some of our best writers. So it's sort of hard to separate one from the other. But I think that there is a, particularly in the modern era, a real value add to nonfiction because you feel like you're, like you feel like you're eating your vegetables a little bit or like you're doing something

that's like more significant or affirming or something at the same time as you're enjoying yourself right and i also think that there's a an element of well you the same can be the the the quote-unquote fiction side of it that the or the novel side of it the the the the artistry i mean it feels like that you are getting away with one when you're consuming the others, sort of. And there's a real kind of self-satisfaction, I think, that comes from that. Absolutely right.

Like, can you imagine, you can't imagine sitting down at a bar with a friend and being like, dude, let me tell you about the plot of this novel I just read, right? But like, if you're reading a great nonfiction book, everywhere you go, you're going to be like, have you heard the story of blah, blah, blah, I'm just reading this book, let me tell you, you know? I mean, there's a real,

sort of functional aspect to it. Totally agree. And I would say it comes back to very, very elementary things. One is when you're reading such a book, you're like, I can't believe this is real. Yes. I can't believe all these details, all these stories are things that really happen. Yeah. And one of the really important connective pieces of all those nonfiction novels that we just

mentioned is you don't know how it's going to end. If it's a, if it's a lesser known story, you don't know where the last where you're going to land on the last page. And that's really important for a propulsive reading experience. I'd also add a word that you used and the Capote used, which is eavesdropping. When you read books like this that are done really well, especially books that are contemporary, you can't believe that you are finding out the things you're finding out. It almost feels like, you know, peeping Tom voyeurism.

Yeah. I'm looking into these people's lives. lives and I'm seeing it with such novelistic fine grain that I'm almost knowing something I shouldn't know. Yeah. That's part of its power too. There's an interesting question as to why Capote wanted to do this. He was very grand.

He had a gift for self-promotion. He would often leave out the fact that the New Yorkers Lillian Ross or John Hersey had played in this sandbox before. He would also, when he talked about this, just slagged. everybody he would say novelists don't have the imagination that I do sure well there's a famous line I forgot where it was right was it Norman Maylor which one of the great old literary line said to him the only reason you're doing a nonfiction novel is because it was your failure of imagination and and Capote said no it's because of my

imagination that I am able to do this yes that right mailer yep yeah okay I mean and and and you can see the I mean you can see both sides of the argument there who by the way wrote some great nonfiction. I mean, like it's, but, Norman Mailer, you know,

is saying you couldn't think of another idea for a novel. That's what you're, you're out of ideas. As he, as I'm sure he saw so many other writers around him experiencing, right? And Capote's just like, no, no,

I think I can do something new and exciting. And Capote's, it's interesting, though, that even at the time, I mean, I know we'll get into this. It's not like, it's not exactly,

he didn't exactly invent a genre here. Right. There's many examples before you mentioned John Hersey. You know, this is, people have been doing this before. But it's sort of interesting at the time that there's very little, I saw very few quotes from people of the mailer generation who were like, dude, this has already been done. You know, like they did seem to sort of accept it as something new in the moment. It had never been on that scale before. And when you're a celebrity like Capote is and you can coin a term and then put out a book that,

everybody winds up buying. You wind up squatting on the land in a different way. I think that that's at the end. Like why it mattered to him maybe more than anything is that it was self-promotion. You know, like he got to be the guy who created this. And that, that I think in no small part led to the success of the novel. You're reading something totally different.

Self-promotion. He was not shy about that. No. And there are quotes out there from him that I find convincing where he says, I was a novelist. I could have kept writing novels, but I really wanted to get out of my own head. I felt trapped in my own head in a way.

So I wanted the challenge of saying, okay, don't just make up a character from scratch or basic character on something in your childhood, something that Capote was eager to do for his entire life, based characters on real people. Yeah. But here's a real person, and you have to render them as a novelist would.

Capote talked in these years as if nonfiction were calling to him, And he spent all the years before 1959 looking for a suitable nonfiction novel. Capote had been a copy boy in his teens at the New Yorker. There's a very funny story about basically how he got thrown out of the New Yorker because he accidentally insulted Robert Frost. That's something that really happened. When we do our Robert Frost issue, we can get into that. But when Capote became a professional writer, he goes,

back to the New Yorker and he starts writing nonfiction articles for them. He went to Russia with this troop that was performing Porgy and Best during the Cold War. It's an incredible piece, go. That turned into a piece and then a book called The Muses Are Heard.

He wrote a celebrity profile of Marlon Brando. The Duke in his domain. Was that with that one? The Duke in his domain. Very good. He went to Japan. Brando was filming a movie there. Capote met him in his hotel room and convinced Brando to unburden himself. of all these thoughts.

And he came back and wrote this profile that was very embarrassing to Brando. Yeah. Then he went back to Russia for the New Yorker. No one other than Tucker Carlson has been more interested in Russia. He goes back to Russia. He's going to write another piece. Maybe this is his big major nonfiction novel. He winds up not filing anything to the magazine.

And then on November 16th, 1959, a Monday, Capote opened the New York Times and found a wire story on page 39. The dateline was Holcomb, Kansas. I'll read you the first couple of paragraphs here. A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children, were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged. The father, 48-year-old Herbert W. Clutch,

was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon, 15. His wife, Bonnie, 45, and a daughter, Nancy 16, were in their beds. There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines have been cut. Chapter 2. Friends with the murderers. Okay. You're Truman Capote in 1959. You're reading your New York Times in your apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

you see this squib on page 39. What potential do you see in that story? Well, first of all, I mean, there's, I mean, the murder thing has to come first, right? The uncertainty of the end and also just the tragedy of it. There's a, there's a quote later on that says this is this, the detective or the policeman assigned to it said, this appears to be the work of a psychopathic killer or something like that, right? I mean, that sucks you right in. But also, I think particularly to Capote, and I think in a way this work,

on all of this is the is the minimalist the minimalism of it right if this had been you know 300 words or you know a thousand words if this had been a proper piece on it then maybe you would have felt like well that story's already been told or maybe you would have felt like all there is to know is already here even if I wrote it long more greater length and with more beauty but this is basically just like the jacket copy of you know an incredible an incredible book that's that that needs to be written um and I And also, I just think you're sitting in, like you said, you're sitting in Brooklyn Heights. This is a time where, I mean, certainly it's not a time where like murders are unheard of. But there's probably less coverage of murders of this sort in the mainstream news than we experienced today. And also there's like, you know, Kansas probably seems like an alien land to most people who are reading from New York. And certainly that was Capote's experience in a lot of ways until he got his footing there. I just feel like there's just so much possibility and that's in that piece.

Yes. I think it's murder plus Kansas, honestly, because I bet all the New York newspapers at the time made a real big deal out of every gruesome, strange murder that happened in the city. But when you can say Holcomb, Kansas, a place Capote would later say he knew nothing about, but it was also a small town. And as we said, he'd been raised in small town Alabama, right?

A place where you think that murder wouldn't touch maybe in the same way. Yeah, and you kind of have a sense of what the people are going to be like, even if you can't quite imagine the accent they're going to use or what they're going to wear. It had to intrigue him. He brings this idea to the New Yorker's editor, William Sean. This is 1959. Sean is about to embark on some of his greatest years as editor when he publishes Silent Spring and Eichmann in Jerusalem and James Baldwin.

And Sean says, go to Kansas. Yeah. Capote gets on a train. He brings Harper Lee with him as what he called his assistant researchist. Harper Lee, who had written to kill a mockingbird, it would be published in July of the following year. Yeah. Later, the photographer came to Kansas to take pictures of the killers was Richard Avidon. Yeah.

The most star-studded expedition to Western Kansas that you could possibly imagine. Yeah. And Harper League, I didn't get credit anywhere. Harper, he did co-edicate the book tour. Oh, that's right. That's in there. Alvin Dewey, who was the special agent investigating the murder, if you remember the movie, played by Chris Cooper, told George Plimpton that Capote showed up in Kansas wearing a, quote, large sheepskin coat and a very long, fairly narrow scarf that trailed plum to the floor. and then some kind of moccasins.

Before long, Capote would start dressing like the people in western Kansas wearing boots and a cowboy hat. Yeah. So he would fit in among the locals. Absolutely. He starts talking everybody. The clutters are a family of four

with two grown daughters who'd already left the house. One of the reasons this book is so powerful, I think, is the complicated picture he gives of that family. Mm-hmm. Bonnie clutter. who was the mom is suffering from something that today we would probably call mental illness.

Yeah. Spends lots and lots of time in her room. The dad, herb clutter is this big, upstanding figure of probity in Kansas. But he's upset that his daughter is dating a boy who's a Catholic. Yeah. They're a Methodist family and he doesn't see how anything is going to come with that. And it's almost like Capote does this opposite day thing where it's like,

I'm going to take the innocent family and I'm going to come. complicate that picture as much as I can. And then I'm going to take the two killers and I'm going to do the same thing with them. Yeah. I'm going to show you all these different sides of them that you might not have expected. Tell me what you're, tell me what you recall from your research. To me,

there is sort of conflicting reports about the earliest point of his reporting that whether or not the killers, whether, how much research had been done into the clutter family before the killers were identified. It's a good question. He's in Kansas for six weeks before. they get arrested.

Right. Which I think is his first bit of journalistic good luck. That he's able to come to Kansas before the crime is solved and talk to all those people. And at the time, the people have no idea who would murder this family. Yeah. As you said, they think it's a psychopath. There's a great line in the book where somebody says, all we've got out here is our friends. Oh, yeah.

The implication being, oh, my God, did somebody we know. do this. So he's able to just record all that in real time. But then he, right, the killers get arrested. And then I believe there's a pretty significant period of time before he starts interviewing them in earnest, right, before he becomes close to them, which is only to say that it seems like he was that he decamped to Europe to do the first phase of writing even before he had really gotten, before he got close with the killers.

Yes. I think that's right. which means he spent a lot of time with the clutter part of the book. And if you had everything at once, maybe you'd be more tempted to interweave it. But I think what makes it really powerful is the amount of time that he's sort of almost obligated to spend on the clutter separate from their tragedy, right? That you get to know them in this real way because he was left for a year with nothing else to write about, you know,

and already obsessed with the case. So I think that it ends up, I think the opposite day thing that you mentioned is right on the nose. And I think that was a happy accident as well. Capote was rejected, journalistically, when he first got to Kansas. He's got this great line to the investigator, Alvin Dewey, where he said, look, I'm not here for a quick story. It really doesn't make any difference to me if the case is solved. Yeah. And Dewey's reply was something along the lines of, well, it makes a hell of a lot of difference to me.

Yeah. Yeah. That was the first time he wanted to talk to the, to the killers, right? I don't remember exactly what that was, but you're right. It may have been the very first time he wanted to talk to Dewey. Oh, you're right. You're right there.

I was trying to get access, as we would say today. Yeah. The guy who was heading up the investigation there in Garden City. But Capote makes inroads. He starts getting invited to dinner parties. He brings along, and I love this detail, a bottle of J&B Scotch every time he goes to a dinner party. And suddenly he becomes the Truman Capote who is appearing on talk shows at these people's dinner table.

Yeah. He tells them stories. He entertains him. He tells them about himself. And they start telling him about the clutters. They start telling him all these details about what it's like to live in this little part of the world. There does seem to be the sense that Capote is this sort of bizarre character, that there's something that, you know, the first reaction to him is always like he's different. There's we don't like there's some sort of initial aversion that comes from the people of Kansas and I think this probably happens.

It recurs over and over in his life. But then sort of quickly thereafter, he just sort of becomes absorbed into the world pretty easily because he's more odd than other if that makes any sense. Like it's easier for us to sort of make peace with an oddity than someone who just feels like he's from a totally different place from a totally different background. because we all know odd birds, right? We all, like, we're like, everyone has had this someone like Capote in our lives. And so he just immediately, not immediately, but in pretty short order, becomes an established part of their, of the town. Capote told David Letterman how he'd like to amuse himself while he was reporting in Kansas.

He had a time in Kansas when I was writing that book in called Blood. And there are these great, huge, flat planes that go up for miles and miles. And I get it very early in the morning, just as dawn is coming, no traffic, nothing anywhere. And just as a kind of relaxation, it's lacking attention. I used to get out there and drive maybe 50 miles, non-stop, going 100, 60, 170 miles an hour. And as you're doing it, the car, the road comes up like a wall in front of you. It's like you're driving straight into a wall. And there's something about a sort of this

unending tension of driving into a wall and the wall disappearing and just as you reach it that I found quite exhilarating but then I'm peculiar. Like to watch this to watch this video is something really spectacular because this is

obviously later stage Capote. He's being interviewed by David Letterman. And he's a as I said a million times. He's a storyteller right. I mean that's why he's on these shows. there doesn't seem to be any particular joy in his voice or on his face when he is telling the story. It's very matter of fact. And Letterman, for his part, is just sort of a gas.

Like, are you suggesting we all go drive at 160 miles an hour out there? Whatever. But it's very, there's an incredible just sort of matter of factness to the whole thing. And the point that he ends up making. And I'm sure this is this story he probably told since his, you know, 20s or 30s or whatever, of driving into a wall over. and over again is really profound. But again, he doesn't seem to be embracing the profanity of it. As professional media naval gazers, we have to talk about Truman Capote's interviewing

technique. Oh, yeah. So Truman Capote, when he was in Kansas, did not take notes. Nor did he use a tape recorder. Which it was cited in a couple of the sources. I actually don't know if it's true, but it said, you know, tape recorder. court is pretty rare at that point in time. Pretty rare, but I think not unheard of.

And Capote's idea was, no, no, that would make people squeamish. Yeah. Make them tense up. Especially when the subject is not a celebrity or someone who's used to being interviewed. What Capote did instead is he remembered his interviews. He would talk to somebody in Kansas, perhaps for hours. And then later on, he would go down to his hotel. and write what they had said, word for word.

Do you find that believable? I would weirdly find it more believable had it not, were it not for all the stories about how he gained this skill, not that they're contradictory, but that he felt the need to tell them at all. Now, again, storytelling, like, whatever. This could have just be, this is a novel thing to say at a dinner party.

But he said at some point, when he was a kid, he would memorize the phone book, you know, and his head of have a friend say, who's the 50th person on page 119, and you would have to tell him. There was another story about him, what, like memorizing a book and then repeating it back to his friend

while recording it much later in life. You know, like there's all these stories about how he honed this skill, which seem a little bit like, you know, you're protesting a little too much. Clearly, the alternative here is not just recorder, but as a notepad, right? And I think it's fair to question

like the the reliability of of note taking you know for in such in these situations in terms of being 100% accurate right um but capote obviously didn't even do that when he was working with harper lee i believe that the story was that they would that neither would record anything and they would both go back both write everything down compare their notes and the things they had in common were deemed to be the truth that actually seems fairly fairly functional to me But to do it solo, obviously, the odds of it being 100% accurate are zero, right? Even if you have a great memory, you're not taking in two hours of conversation. You'll probably remember a couple of good lines or at least pieces of them.

So, yeah, I mean, I don't think it's responsible to really assume that he's being completely honest when he says that. But I think over and over again, and I'm no expert in the history. journalism. But, you know, it seems like half of the great writers from the era before Capote, if you read them or if you read about them, there's some question about the veracity of the things that they wrote, you know, in terms of quotations, not necessarily like facts, right? And maybe the bar was just a little bit lower.

I mean, it does seem like for Capote deliberately or no, what was more important was the underlying truth than the surface level truth, right? And maybe that's a lot. I mean, certainly that's more subjective. But yeah, I don't think he was getting people's quotes down perfectly at all. You can read that you can read him. I mean, you read in cold blood and tell me there's one thing that, you know, cleaning, cleaning up quotes for readability is one thing.

I mean, his, like I said, breakfast at Tiffany's read more, read like more of human beings having conversations than a lot of in cold blood does. It's interesting too. You mentioned old quotes. I mean, you go back to any of those old books, and this is one of them, and you find just paragraph after paragraph of quotation, long paragraphs, all told in a row. There's no chance that somebody said that stuff. Yeah.

And there's even less chance that it was rendered correctly, even if they had. Right. So, you know, again, all that people don't speak in complete sentences, right? I mean, that's the number one tell. You and I, you and I included, pal. No, I know. But the way that you, the way that you, like, if we transcribe this podcast to run on the ringer.com, you would have to do so much editing just to make this, just to have the

sentence structure coherent, you know, and, but I, I, I find it hard to imagine that most people listening here are deeply confused by what we're talking about, right? Like, we're making sense in an oral way, you know, but, but, but yeah, it just doesn't work. You're right. The long paragraph. are probably the biggest tell. But, you know, I mean,

part of me thinks of the stories about how he learned about, he said he has the, he has the, what, oral version, the hearing version of a photographic memory. He said that in several interviews, that if he hears something, he'll remember it perfectly.

Part of me thinks that those stories are just sort of like the sort of affirmation, the sort of, the sort of, background that we need so that we can enjoy something that is so obviously farcical, you know. But, you know, it's good, it's good banter anyway. He certainly has a better memory than me. I mean, I don't have any doubt about that. I mentioned the one bit of journalistic good luck that he got to Kansas and was there for several weeks before the murders were apprehended. Well, the apprehension of the murders was his second

bit of good fortune. Yeah. They're captured on December 30th, Their names are Dick Hickok and Perry Smith. They were arrested in Las Vegas. The clutters were murdered in November 59. By March 1960, Hickok and Smith had been found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. So from the killing of the clutters to the conviction of the killers, only four and a half months had passed. Yeah. And this really, really changes Capote's entire idea of incolute.

of in cold blood. It was going to be a New Yorker story. Now it's different, right? It can be a book. And the book, as we mentioned earlier, is not just going to be about this family and the effect on the town. The book is going to be about the killers

as much as it is about the victims. Because Capote is going to befriend them just like you befriended the God-fearing people of Kansas. Yeah. His relationship with the killers is one of those fascinating relationships in the history of journalism. For sure.

Of the two, Capote was closer to Perry Smith, was 31 when he was apprehended. Perry Smith was short like Capote was. There's a great passage on this in the book. I have to read to you. We could read all of In Cold Blood here. In Cold Blood, yeah. But I'll just give you a little bit of this.

This is Perry Smith. He paid for the root beer and stood up. Sitting he had seemed a more than normal-sized man, and a powerful man with the shoulders, the arms, the thick, crouching torso of a weightlifter. Weightlifting 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 12-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. Yeah, I mean, their relationship certainly has a much better relationship between those two. And it'll be cited time and time again. And it's only kind of deliciously hinted at in cold blood. But, you know, everything else you read about it goes here immediately.

There's a sort of fun house mirror relationship between Capote. between Truman and Perry, right? That there's, that they're, they're both, not just they're both short guys, but they come from similar backgrounds, right? They had, there's a lot, they have a lot in common. At one point, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm not going to remember what the citation is,

but it's as if there were, you know, a road diverged and they both looked at each other and saw what might have been for them, right? Um, and that I think makes it one of the most just sort of like enthralling relationships, like you said in literary history. Here's how biographer Gerald Clark described Capote and Perry Smith's relationship. Harper Lee said when the two of them, the two killers were brought in for the arraignment in Garden City, Perry sat down and his feet didn't touch the floor. And Harper Lee said to herself, oh, boy, this is the beginning of the great love affair.

It was not a love affair. I get this all the time for people. Oh, they were having a love affair. No, it was not a love affair in the sense of sex. It was, they understood each other. Both had difficult childhoods. Paris was much, much worse than Truman's. But Truman had a hard time, too, difficult childhood too. Any question that Perry Smith's the most interesting character in Cold Blood? Oh, no, not at all.

Not at all. There's a deeper reading that you might say Capote himself, but even though he doesn't inject himself into the book at all, Well, but no, of course. In terms of what's on the page, Perry Smith is by far the most interesting person, especially right down to confessing to the third and fourth murders, you know? Oh, my God.

He's got this line where he's talking about killing Herb Clutter. And Perry Smith says, I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman, saw spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat. Perhaps the most famous line in the entire book. It's interesting, too, to think about.

about power and journalistic relationships. Smith and Hickokker convicted. They go to death row. Their appeals go on for years and years and years. And during this period, Capote is one of their only friends. Yeah. Their only access to the outside world, they would say, I think. He would visit them.

He would give them magazines, send them magazines, send them books that they wanted to read. He's exchanging tons and tons of letters with them. as you point out that enriches his reporting because he can go back and figure out all these things Hickok has an absolutely photographic memory Capote would say throughout his life and that helped him He leaned on Hickok for fact I mean for you know the timeline of events

and then went out and kind of checked it out himself kind of like fact checked Hickok stuff and it turned out he just he decided he could trust him implicitly When we talk about journalistic luck we should note that too there's a version of this story where Hickok and Smith commit the murder and are hiding out two towns over in Kansas, maybe that would be compelling. But in fact,

what happened is that Hickok and Smith went on this international road trip after the murders. They went to Mexico City. They went to Acapulco. They went to Miami Beach. They wound up in Las Vegas at the end. And so Capote all of a sudden has this book that has just scope to it. And when you're reading those passages, of them riding around Mexico and the United States,

you kind of forget that they're murderers for a second and that they're on the lamb because it has this appeal of a book about a trip. I mean, that's part of the power of the book. And I think that's what makes, I'll come back to it later, but that's part of what makes Capote's narrative so compelling

is that it's one thing to like breathe life into the characters. But you really haven't breathed enough life into a killer's character until the audience is sympathetic, right? Until you're able to see them as something other than just a killer. And I think he does that really well. Earlier when you said we got to talk about his journalistic techniques, there's a second one. It's not just the memorization technique.

The second one, which is kind of widely discussed, is his is the way that he shares personal information about himself to get his subjects to open up, right? There's like rather than just go in, asking questions. This is basically a cocktail party trick that he takes into the prison, that he takes into his interviews. And he famously used it with Marlon Brando in that hotel room that you mentioned earlier. Or he starts, he starts gossiping about himself, basically. He reveals a little bit too much because there's an implicit tradeoff. If someone says something revealing about

themselves, you feel that you need to be revealing about yourself. And that's a way that he, that's a technique that he uses over and over again to sort of achieve this sort of. of whether or not I mean I think with it with I think with with with Perry Smith he achieved a real level of of personal relationship But even separate from that you can achieve the illusion of that sort of closeness because you're exchanging these very intimate details about each other It's one of the most reliable clubs in the journalist golf bag You don't want to open up well I'm gonna start opening up yeah and either you're gonna feel like there's a reciprocal tradeoff here and you have to tell me something because I've told you

something revealing about myself or you're just going to feel like I created a permission structure where you can be revealing. Yeah. Because this is a relationship between journalists and subject where that happens. And he said in interviews, you know, he told them about his sex life and his romantic life. Like he would just tell them anything. Yeah. And eventually you get all this detail from Smith and Hickok about their childhoods, about their

relationship with each other, which is another fascinating part of the book. Yeah. And how this friendship, not friendship, not only leads them to the clutter house, but leads them to kill the clutters. Mm-hmm. Leads them ultimately not to get along when they're on the lamp. That part is some of the best writing in the book. Yeah, for sure.

Of course, when they're sitting on death row, they start to get concerned. Partly they get concerned because they learn that the title of the book is in cold blood. Yes. their appeals are dragging on and on. Again, the time between the murders and their conviction is only a couple of months. The time between their conviction and their actual execution in Kansas is five years. Sure. Five years.

And during this period, Compote, as you mentioned, is in Spain. He's in Switzerland. He's living this amazing lifestyle pouring his heart and soul into in cold blood. He knows it's going to be good. In one of his letters, he used. the term masterpiece to describe it. Yeah. But he also knew that the book needed an ending.

Mm-hmm. An ending he did not have while Smith and Hickok were in legal limbo on death row in Kansas. Yeah. Here's Gerald Clark. It took about four years before they were executed and then they were on death row all that time. And Truman was talking to them and they were writing letters back and forth. And it was nerve-wracking for them. I'm, to dare say, but it was also nerve-wracking for him.

He had finished most of the book, except for the last chapter. But he, and he knew he had a bestseller. He knew it would be an important book, but he couldn't put it out until they were killed. And how would you feel if you were writing to people saying, how are you doing? And in your heart, you want them dead. It's another absolutely fascinating part of In Cold Blood. Yeah, he lived with it for so long. You know, there's the famous quote that's attributed, I think, to Michelangelo, that art is never completed, only abandoned.

And it's a slight tweak on that in the, in the literary world or in the journalism world, where you don't get to get out from underneath the weight of a piece you've written until it's published. It might not be done, but that's the, you know, that's, that's when you can actually, like, feel some measure of relief, right? You feel some measure of accomplishment. Otherwise, it's just living in the drawer of your desk, like, you know, staring whole. through you all the time. But yeah, I mean, it certainly wasn't, I mean, listen, he could have published the book without that ending. But I think the timeline made it sort of impractical, right?

It did seem like it was looming and that that was the appropriate end of the book. And it would be interesting to go back and see because I'm sure it wasn't a huge financial, there wasn't a lot of financial motivation in it for him, I would assume, because he'd already even paid out a lot of his advance money or all of his advance money at this point in time, right? But there would have been a financial motivation from the publishers. You know, we've paid you this money. Where's our book?

You know, but maybe they're the ones that said the book's not done until the book's done, you know, until the execution takes place. I mean, and then also you're getting further and further away from the moment in time that the murders took place. Mm-hmm. This is one way in which it being in Kansas. is, I think, helpful. And being sort of as primeval

as just like a story about a murder is helpful. I think if this were a more notorious case or a bigger story or something with more recognition, you would want to publish it as quickly as possible, regardless of the ending, right? But because you have, because you're kind of the only one telling this story,

you can take time with it. The moral dimension that I think also needs to be discussed is that Inco blood is, about six people who are dead. Four members of the clutter family. And then finally the two killers after they're executed. Yeah.

And that is interesting to me because dead people can't object to their portrayals and books. Mm-hmm. There'd be various people who'd come forward and say, oh, you know, I didn't, you know, say things about Capote's portrayal. We'll get to that in just a moment. But, you know, essentially he's, think of that passage. I just read to you about Perry Smith. What would Perry Smith have thought about that if he'd read that while he was alive? Cuppet did show them parts of the book.

But the idea that like, you know, what Capote's doing is essentially they die. And then all of a sudden here comes my book. It's all finished and they will never see it in its final form. Yeah. That's just fascinating to me too. Smith and Hickok were executed on April 14, 1965 in a shed at the prison where they were that was called the corner. Capote was in attendance. Here's what Capote told Johnny Carson he remembered about that night. That was a double execution that night. It took all about an hour

and a half from the time that the thing started until it was over. And they were on the gallows, each one of them, for over 20 minutes before their heart stopped eating. I mean, it's a really and are unbelievably horrendous thing to watch. It must be. Especially, you know, I mean, despite what they did or anything, I had known those two boys really intimately over a period of five years, and it was just excruciating to...

It would have been whether I'd ever seen them or not. That's not the point. But for somebody that you knew that well to watch them be executed in that way, It was very difficult. Chapter 3. Fictional, nonfiction. So the hanging is April 1965. On September 25th of 1965,

in Cold Blood was published in four consecutive issues of the New Yorker. Under the heading, Annals of Crime. There were no double issues of the New Yorker that you had to sweat your way through back then, David. So four straight issues of the New Yorker. There was a bartender on the cuff. of the very first issue that contained in Cold Blood. Typical New Yorker

that told you nothing about what was inside the magazine. Yep. Those issues became the biggest selling issues in the history of the magazine. Yeah. If you want to go spend some really serious money, get on eBay and try to buy one of them now. Mm-hmm.

So that's 1965. The following January, 1966, the book in Cold Blood was published by Random House, with a cover price of $5.00, 95 cents. And a year after that, the movie version of In Cold Blood was in theaters. It's worth noting here,

the book was a critical and commercial monster. New York Times reported that Capote made $2 million from the paperback sale, foreign rights sale, and movie rights. That sounds like pretty damn good money for a writer.

But if you do the adjustment for inflation, Capote made $20 million. Yeah. in today's month. $20 million. And again, that was the initial calculation. The book sold over and over again for years. The New York Times also calculated that Capote made $14.80 per word for in cold blood.

All told. Back when we still had magazines, those were Michael Lewis rates. I seen to hear a rumor one time that Michael Lewis literally made $14 a word from Vanity Fair. That's so funny. But again, we must adjust for inflation. and when we do we find out that Capote made $140 a word in today's money for writing in Cold Blum. I mean, the publishing market was different back then. It was not at all unusual for your big check to come from the paperback rights sale as opposed to now how it's kind of all in with the hardcover right sale.

Like the hardcover publisher maintains has the paperback rights. And they can sub license it out to another publisher if they wish. There's just a much smaller market for hardcover books and then this enormous market for paperbacks that. And I think, you know, if you wait a year to put out the paperback, that passage of time seems like a lot less than it probably does today. The film rates are also big. The trailer for the movie is really something because it's a pure distillation or Hollywood distillation of the Capote ethos here. It's entirely about how real, how how how is close to reality this movie is compared to, I mean, in comparison to the actual crime. Capote says that this was at his insistence.

He refused to sell the movie rights unless they made it just the way they did it. He wanted it in black and white because it had that film noir element of like gravity and reality. It was filmed on the farm, like in the actual location of the murders, like in the farmhouse, in the, in the courthouse where their convictions took place. And the actors. The murders were filmed in the actual rooms where the actual clutters were murdered. Correct. and the actors were cast to because they looked like the characters they were playing

which is just an incredible thing and Coppoti in one interview says oh but it actually turns out their wonderful actors you know I think he realizes he's sort of digging a hole for himself but it's just but the the the trailer itself is just a thing of beauty because it's this just like the real like the earnest voice over voice is just like in the actual basement where Mr. Clutter was killed.

You know, like it's just incredible stuff. I love the way Capote spent his bounty from In Cold Blood. He moved from Brooklyn and Manhattan. Yeah, as one does. He took cooking lessons from James Beard. One also does. You and I had not read this book in years and years before we started this project. Would you make of In Cold Blood on a reread?

Well, it's funny because I never really thought about it in the in terms of like it's journalistic integrity or anything that deeply. That's what you talk about in, you know, the MFA program or whatever when you study it. But to me, it was just a piece of Southern literature, you know, and one that spoke to me, I think differently than a lot of other pieces do because of this level of reality that's such a important part of it. you know, I'm a huge fan of a lot of nonfiction books by Southern writers. And particularly some of the old ones, walk the line between reality and unreality quite liberally. You know, I mean, that's just, I think, a nature of storytelling in a certain set of the South. And so it didn't seem like that separate for me.

But rereading it now, it really just seems like, I think he was kind of full of it when he was branding himself. of a nonfiction, branding this a nonfiction novel and a revelatory work of, of literature. But rereading it at the same time, I kind of feel like it's just incredibly unique and uniquely powerful for whatever it is. You know, his other stuff, as we said before, is much shorter than this. I think he has a quote where he says he always knew that he could, well, what's the line? I always knew that I could write endlessly if given the opportunity to just look at the way I talk or whatever.

And there is a, I mean, there's an incredible sense that like, right, that, that, that despite the length, there's no part of this book that feels like a slog. You know, I mean, it's just, it's, it's such, just like a vibrant conversation, almost with the reader the entire time. And I probably, when I read it previously, hadn't internalized a degree to which these are real people, you know, that are, that are kind of being conveyed here. knew they were no people, but the degree to which this is an act of journalism, this conveyance is an act of journalism. And it's, I don't know, I think it's, it's really, it's, it's really,

really impressive. I think a lot of his other stuff has, as, as, as, as wonderful as it is, has just, like, has, um, lessened an importance to me over the years. But rereading this, it's clear this is just like, I think one of the most central books to me. The level of writing sentence to sense is just gobsmacking. Yeah. Absolutely gobsmacking. And I reread this after Christmas when my wife and kids had headed off to my mother-in-law's house. So just picture this scene. And I am not making this up.

I'm sitting in our living room at night. The Christmas tree is still up and lit up like it always is. I am reading that line about Perry Smith cutting herb clutter's throat. and it scared the living hell out of me. I mean, just that moment looking around an empty house, it was unbelievable. The power of that book. And, you know, there's so many things about it.

Like, he starts a book essentially rotating sections. Okay, here's the clutter family. Here's the killers. Here are the clutters. Here are the killers getting closer to the house. That is a very simple A, B structure that you'd expect. like a rookie magazine writer to submit. Yeah.

Or use in a piece. It really works. Yeah. It works unbelievably well. And just as a pure, you know, turn the page. I love the, it, it, the book, the book to me holds up marvelously well. But of course, David, as professional media navel gazers, we must also talk about Capote's fabulous.

Oh, yeah. As soon as InCult Blood came out, Capote made a big deal. out of the truthfulness of the book. He called it immaculately factual. Yeah. He told George Plimpton, one doesn't spend almost six years on a book, the point of which is factual accuracy,

and then give way to minor distortions. But then he did give way to distortions. Yeah, he did. He made up the last scene of the book, Gerald Clark notes, which takes place in a cemetery. It has this beautiful chance meeting between Alvin Dewey, the investigator,

and the best friend of Nancy Clutter, the murdered girl. A story in Esquire came out in June 1966, so just five months after the book came out called In Cold Fact. Pause to appreciate the pun headline in Esquire, 1966. And it outlined all these discrepancies that the author found. I'll give you a couple here. After the clutters are killed, all their possessions were sold at a public auction.

It's a great heart-rending scene in the book. Yeah. And Capote had Nancy Clutter's beloved horse, babe, selling for $75 to a Mennonite farmer. In fact, the horse was bought by a local man, not a Mennonite farmer, for more than $180. Now, possible that that's an honest mistake, maybe, but it sure did inject a note of pathos into the story.

Yeah. Here's another one. How Capote quoted Perry Smith's final words right before he was hanged. Newsmen had Perry Smith saying this, any apology for what I have done would be meaningless at this time. I don't have any animosities toward anyone involved in this matter. I think that is all.

Capote quoted Perry Smith like this. It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did, even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize. Now, is it just coincidental that Capote? Woody misquoted Perry Smith in a way that gave him extra dimensions and made him seem more interesting than your garden variety murderer. No, probably not. What's also interesting is that William Sean, the New Yorker's editor, was worried about this.

Ben Yagode in his history of the magazine found that Sean had actually marked the page proofs. Oh, yeah. Asking, how do we know this? Yeah, how no, right? It wasn't up the no question mark. Yeah. But there was a big rush to put the book out. And so the New Yorker needed to publish its version so that then the hardback could come out a couple of months later.

I recently talked to Charles McGrath, Chip McGrath. When you and I got into this business, we knew Chip McGrath is the editor of the New York Times book review. Yeah. Before that, he worked at the New Yorker from 1973 to 1995. he was deputy editor at the end of his tenure there. Here's Chip McGrath on the afterlife of In Cold Blood. What I remember most vividly is one day I was having lunch with the famously eccentric editor of the magazine, William Sean. And he said that publishing In Cold Blood was the thing he most regretted.

I was quite taken aback by that because it had been a huge at the time. It had become a huge success. And I pressed him on it. And he was kind of evasive. And I remember thinking at the time, and this would have been typical of him, that he was bothered by that it was too sensational. Sean was sort of squeamish. And I think it's very success may have bothered him.

Sean sometimes thought if something was too popular, there must be something wrong with it. I now think, in retrospect, I now think that what he regretted was that he knew or sensed that parts of it were made up. That sounds right to me, right? that like to say that that was his biggest mistake you're right just seems like an impossible thing to say i think most at least most modern editors would happily take that win even if they knew for sure that there was some falsehood in it right you know just like your worst mistake is not the best-selling thing you've ever done right i mean that just seems like implausible but if you really did have that suspicion and you feel like you were that you betrayed yourself by letting it go out in that form then i can

imagine how that would stick with you, right? It would hit William Sean in a different way, I think. Mm-hmm. Then guy who owns a website today. It also raises the second question. How did these inventions make it past the New Yorkers vaunted, only in journalism, fact-checking system? Here's Charles McGrath. Years later, this, I began to trouble me, and I began to wonder, well, how did in Cold Blood ever get by the New Yorker's famous fact-checking system? And the answer is that the fact-checking system at the time that In Cold Blood came out was actually fairly primitive. It consisted of basically stuff that you could look up, spelling and historical facts and so on. There was no effort made to check that somebody had actually said what he or she was reported to say.

There was no going back in checking dialogue. So at the time, New Yorker fact checkers would have been very keen on making sure that Capote correctly listed the number of miles between Holcomb, Kansas, and the Colorado border. But they would not have been particularly keen on going back and saying, did you say this? Yeah. Was this the way the confession happened? Elements of the book like that. Those would have been very much on author. Yeah.

And part of the lore is obviously that the New Yorker's fact checking desk, which has long been like the best in the universe. verse was was largely shaped by in cold blood by the by the reaction to it right or by the changes that were made post in cold blood well it's interesting i mean when i was talking to mcgrath he said that honestly the new yorkers fact checking system really didn't get ramped up until tina brown was the editor oh wow because she's publishing pieces that are a little more adversarial that really need to be fact checked to that level yeah and that's when we get the modern new yorker fact checking system do you think in cold blood would have been a similar hit if Capote had said,

it's almost all true, but I rounded the corners here and there. No, and I think that's part of the problem in the discourse, right? That, like, he couldn't say that. You would avoid the subject, basically, rather than say what, I mean,

if you were determined not to say it's 100% true. I think that the alternative, instead of saying, I rounded the corners would just be, to avoid it entirely, just kind of go the based on a true story route, right? Or just to be like,

or maybe even lean into is this, you know, is this fiction or is this journalism, you decide, you know, like you could, you might be able to get more of a spike out of something like that. I certainly think we would be talking about it less now if he said he rounded the corns a little bit. I just think it would be more difficult in the time. I mean, there would be less people doing deep dives on its truthfulness now is what I mean to say. I don't know. What do you think? Do you think it would have been helpful for him to, to, I mean, obviously he,

the quote that you read just a minute ago about how it was immaculate, I think is more problematic than anything else. What do you think? I think he knew the power of nonfiction. Yeah. I think he knew that people would receive the book, that it would hit them differently if they thought every word didn't were true. They would not be able to believe it. It goes back to that disbelief we talked about at the beginning of the podcast. You know like oh my god I can't believe what I'm reading is real and as soon as you start to say

Well, it's mostly real or it's largely real Then I think that switch in our minds Turns off a little bit and we start to regard things differently and maybe we don't put away a book like in cold blood entirely and be like oh that's a bunch of crap But once you lose that sense of belief in the material, I don't think you look at the book the same way. You're right. There's an incredible tension that exists on the line of like, I can't believe this is real. And once that, without that tension, some of it, it starts to lose all meaning almost. Chapter 4, afterlife. The success of in Cold Blood almost certainly hastened Truman Capote's

demise. He had tons of money. He could do pretty much whatever he wanted. What he wound up doing was drinking a lot, doing a lot of drugs, having a lot of disastrous relationships. He wrote nothing for the New Yorker for more than a decade after the book. Chip McGrath told me that when he returned to the magazine in the 70s, literally returned to the hallways there at West 43rd Street.

It was one of two times when people who worked in the New Yorker actually peaked out of their offices to see somebody walking through the halls of the New Yorker. The other time was when Jackie Kennedy showed up. Wow. Capote died in 1984. It's only 59 years old. Gerald Clark told me this about how Capote elevated nonfiction. In my opinion, he had as much influence on nonfiction as him when he did nonfiction. Before Truman, writers of nonfiction were considered.

kind of lower class compared to fiction writers, novelists. In other words, people thought if you were really a good writer, you'd have enough imagination to write a novel. And Truman changed all that. I want to talk to you about Capote inventing true crime. It's a word I heard David Remnick say in the New Yorker documentary, inventing, which is a good word since Capote invented things. But I think he also helped create a genre.

Yeah. How did this book do you think invent true crime? How did it show that there was this literary potential in this and these really gruesome subjects? I think that Truman Capote, in choosing this story, if he doesn't invent a genre, be it, you know, the nonfiction novel or true crime, identifies something very significant in the subject matter. and the choice in and of itself is incredibly significant and coming from, I mean, certainly there were people writing about murders,

but as Clark just pointed out, you know, nonfiction writing was seen as a sort of lower class of writer. And I think what Capote did was see, and maybe it took someone as like particularly sort of like of the world and also like of the sentence as him to see

this, that there was something that something that's so incredibly compelling outside of literature, which is like stories about murders, can work neatly with a more literary point of view and sort of become the best of both worlds in a certain way. I mean, I think what we see both in terms of, what we talked about, the way that you identify with the murderers earlier and how important that is to, to the book, I think that's really it. And I think that the sort of, I think what is the really like lasting contributions of in cold blood in a lot of ways, despite the fact that he waited for the hangings of the two killers is the sort of lack of conclusion to it all. Because I think

outside of a literary realm, we're more compelled to see murder stories as a morality tale, right? That there's like a really definitive end to it. There was a, great Norman Mailer quote where he said, um, like he was complaining about how, uh, there, you know, this was a story about murders that didn't like,

they didn't give answers to any of the deeper questions or whatever. The exact quote was, what the hell's in cold blood finally? Um, which is a beautifully ter sentence. But I think that that's almost in some ways exactly the point of its power, right? That like to give an answer to hit that question,

eliminates the reader from the proceeding to some extent, right? It's like we want to be left wondering about it ourselves. And in some ways, we want to be left identifying with not just the victims, but with the killers. Because that makes us more vulnerable, right? It's not, we're not just vulnerable to potentially being murdered. We're vulnerable to potentially being the murderer.

And I think that there's an incredible power there. There's like a little bit of it that you're like, it's not just there, but for the grace of God, go I, as the clutters. Yeah. It's Smith and Hickok, too. Yeah, absolutely. That something would have happened in my life that would have pushed me down that path. Mm-hmm. Which is we, as we said, is what Capote himself thought of in some way of Smith.

Yeah. I'm always been fascinated by the way that writing about murder allows a nonfiction writer to level up. Absolutely. or to feel as if they're leveling up, that that is a gateway somehow to achieving greater literary things. I've never totally understood it myself. I always, when we look at our friends and our friends who are magazine writers have probably written at least one murder story in their lives.

And it just feels like chasing such a funny dragon to me. Because I'm like, is this really more? important material is this really material that has so much more potential than just a magazine story? Yeah. A story that doesn't involve a crime. And I don't know if it's just like the shocking nature of it that you're, you know, playing with questions of morality and you're getting into the big feelings. But that's just such a funny thing to me. Well, it also goes back to what you're what you were saying sometime earlier about the sort of about the genre.

you know, a story that doesn't need to be written, right? And in the need to column, you put obviously like world events, you also can put, you know, with celebrity profiles. They got a movie coming out. Like, whatever. Like, these are things that are sort of necessary. A murder story often doesn't need to be written. And that gives it a sort of extra specialness, right?

That you're reading something that almost implicitly, the power of this is going to be in the retelling. You know, it's going to be in the writing. and not strictly in its necessity, and also in the subject matter, you know. It is true. I think that there's something, it's very, I mean, in some sense, it's very clear on its face.

You get into these big questions about life and death, just very straightforwardly in writing about a murder, right? And you get into almost immediately questions about, about compulsion and humanity and everything else. you know, these are questions that are sort of necessary to ask in the course of writing a piece about that. And I think that sometimes these are subjects that just seem ham-fisted if they come in fiction, right? But they're like they seem mandatory in true crime reporting. And I think that there's a real value to that.

The irony, of course, is Capote didn't seem all that interested in murder as a subject. He said during his life, I was just looking for a nonfiction novel. Yeah. And I was looking for something that would not. date. Yes. That when I finished this book years and years later, you wouldn't say, I already know all that.

Yeah. Because people didn't know about it. And that's what led him to the clutter killing, rather than any interest in the subject. Yeah. I was thinking of errors to end cold blood. There was this woman named Ann Rule. Of course, yeah.

Dude, if you were young Brian and David, you went to the bookstore and there was a whole Anne Rule true crime section. Absolutely. Yeah, true crime at the time. I mean, true crime sections, by and large aren't great even now because it's just a sort of mishmash category in bookstores. You have to have something really well curated to, I mean, the flip side is that the section is not very big, so you can go spine by spine if you want. But yeah, Anne Rule was the true

crime section back then. It was like Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood and Ann Rule books. Like, that was it. Helter Skelter was there forever. That was, Helter Skelter was the book, the guy you knew in high school was reading. A very well-worn paperback topic. I believe the, I believe it's the only True Crime book that is sold more copies than In Cold Blood, by the way. Other heirs to Capote, Keith Morrison's Dateline segments, YouTube videos, tons of magazine stories. So many of them. Jay Kang had a line recently and said, everyone you've ever met is working on a nine-episode narrative true crime podcast. Yeah. That's absolutely true.

I think just, I mean, so many of the investigation discovery style like crime TV shows. which I think for a lot of people, I know it's true of me, have sort of like, it was something I was very aware of at the end of my, uh, cable subscribing days and, but then suddenly came rushing back in the,

in the streaming era because they got sort of adopted into or absorbed into the HBO Maxes and Disney pluses and whatever else. And certainly Netflix, Netflix is of the world. There's all of these just a very basic dateline NBC type shows that are now, that will kind of auto play after or something. than you deliberately watched. And a lot of the time, they work better.

They seem more earnest or they seem more, like, serious on a streaming platform than they ever did on TV. And maybe that's just the absence of commercials or, or the fact that so much just crime documentary style stuff is not that much higher level than them, you know, so it doesn't seem like there's some great chasm. I think all of those in some ways are subject-wise, even more direct errors because they are just sort of obscure murders that are sort of painted up to be more significant things. Of course, when you watch like 30 episodes, the significant sort of wanes a little bit.

But, yeah, I think that there's some in, you know, every time you open up Netflix and there's like, the column pops up that it's like, because you watched whatever, you know, like long form murder documentary, crime documentary, that whole because you watched column is an air of in cold blood, right i mean that's the existence of this stuff the way that it matters to us i think spins out directly from the sort of realization that that capote afforded all of us the cheapo streaming doc is truly the air to truman capote i mean my god we are surrounded by those things for writers i was thinking of a few people texas monthly skip hollonsworth he's absolutely the best he is the best true crime writer in the whole wide world.

Well, and it certainly is someone who like made a career of it, right? He didn't just write the one book. I mean, he was writing twice a year in Texas Monthly about, and every piece was just top notch. So many great murder stories that he wrote. Norman Mailer's the executioner song when we talk about books. Funny that Mailer keeps coming up, especially from the first quote, from his very sort of derogatory quotes. But executioner's song is really great. He won the Pulitzer for that, which apparently pissed off Capote.

Yeah, sure. Cody did not win the Pulitzer. For modern ones, here's a book that was, I think, the first serious nonfiction book that I ever read that wasn't about sports. John Barron's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Yeah, 100%. And very similar to Capote in the sense that he was in Savannah and was present around a lot of the events of the book, not just somebody coming in weeks or days or years later and trying to write about things. Yeah. I just remember still remember being at our old high school and reading Newsweek, which was there, and it had a review of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and I convinced my mom to let me go buy it.

I think if anything, it's a fantastic book. I think if anything, it is sort of, I mean, I don't know, maybe not to everybody else. It seems to have sort of disappeared some with time. And I think it goes to what Capote said about he didn't want something that would age. That book is timeless in a lot of ways. But I think the fact that it's so associated with the movie, which is so associated with the, And the moment in time is, has dated the book, you know, and I think, I think that's, but the book is definitely worth rereading. You mentioned Eric Larson, Devil in the White City and a number of his books, certainly walk in Capote's footsteps.

Before we go, let's do a Capote bibliography. Okay. We've mentioned Clark's biography Capote published in 1988, exquisitely reported and exquisitely written. Cannot recommend that more. George Plimpton published an oral history of Truman Capote in 1997. Yeah, it's really good. Very good and very informative. Lawrence Grabelle's Conversations with Capote was a fun book for me to read.

Ben Yagoda's book about town is the Essential New Yorker History. And that's where I found the mention of Sean's regrets about in cold blood. Movies, David. In Cold Blood, the movie, directed by Richard Brooks, came out in. 1967. We mentioned the unbelievable veritee of filming the murders in the room where the actual murders happened. Perry Smith was played by Robert Blake, who was later found liable for murdering his wife.

Yeah. Capote, Bennett Miller's movie starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, came out in 2005. I watched that recently. It really holds up. Yep. You might not have known that like there were two talking pig movies that came out at the same time there were also two movies about Truman Capote reporting in cold blood. So we had Capote in 2005 and then infamous in 2006.

Yes. In which Sandra Bullock played Harper Lee and Daniel Craig played Perry Smith. Oh, I remember that. Yep. For completists only. And this is really for completest. Did you remember a 1996 CBS miniseries? I absolutely did not.

came upon it in my research. This is almost worth just like us doing like a live watch along or something for this one. I just saw that. I just saw publicity still with, uh, with, um, the killers being played by Eric Roberts and ER's Anthony Edwards, which is just an incredible, incredible thing. Did you catch who played Alvin Dewey in that miniseries? No, who was it?

It was Sam Neal. He was this. 96 would have been. post Jurassic Park. Yeah, a few years later. Unbelievable. So wild. The Maisels brothers who made the great documentaries,

great gardens and Gimmie's Shelter, made a documentary about Truman Capote in 1969, which you can find in its entirety on YouTube, and it's a fantastic watch. Capote just talking their ear off about everything. The clutter home, David, still stands against all odds in Holcomb, Kansas. It's not open to the public though, is it?

It is not, though lots of looky-lose have showed up over the years. Local agent told Realtor.com that it's worth about $200,000 today. Still standing in Kansas. And finally, let's try to be the Netflix algorithm here. If you like in cold blood, you'll like what true crime book? Oh, man. Wait, you go first. I got to think about this for a minute.

I think midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is the right answer. Oh, yeah. I thought we weren't allowed to pick the same ones. That's obviously the closest one, I think, for me. I think so, too. And I think it's one that, as you say, has just kind of fallen out of sight in recent years after being this like monster year after year bestseller when we were in high school. Every one of your parents' friends had read.

Yeah. And the writing is just exquisite. And you can go visit those homes and some. which I've done. I mean, it kind of depends. I was going to say like Killers of the flower moon. Definitely on the list. David Grant obviously leans into the potential of nonfiction in a way that Truman Capote doesn't. Like he kind of is an expansive nonfiction writer that does do some, you know, that does have a lot of literary tendencies. Um, uh, I mean, it kind of depends on what you love in cold blood for, right? I mean, there's a piece.

where it's like if what you if you like this sort of like electric in terms of his involvement in it electric sort of obsessive you know murder investigation then i don't even know like what are the big like like oh michel mcnamara's book like i'll be gone in the dark obviously that's hyper first person right i mean there's so much of her in that book but i think that some people would draw that connection i mean for me i think the whole non-fiction novel thing sort of comes down a very basic level of writing is writing a long piece of nonfiction that a reader would really want to read that you enjoy reading it from page to page and there's a lot of examples of that but I think it comes down to personal taste but for me I mean in terms of and when I think of a nonfiction novel separate from this book I mean I think that there's a couple of writers that come to mind but to me the number one is always Lucy Sond right I mean that like low life isn't a murder a book about a murder, but there's a lot of dead bodies in it, right?

I mean, and that and, um, the devil and sunny list. And there's like, there's, there's, maybe an even more artistic liberty being taken, taken with truth in those books, you know, but, but they're regarded as, as, you know, or they're well regarded. I don't even know how they're, what category they're regarded as. Execution or song is another good one in terms of like, if you like this, you'll always like. Dude, I don't know.

I don't know. What's on your list? I think you hit a lot of them there. I think if I were playing Netflix algorithm or David working at politics and pros back in the old days, I'd probably just point people to more, you know, this is a great read. Yeah, exactly. This is a nonfiction novel kind of books rather than leaving them in true crime because I'm still not convinced that true crime takes you anywhere. So Patrick Raddenkief. Yeah, Gran.

It's got to be other New Yorker writers, you know. Oh, there's so many. I mean, there's also this sort of crime, the Dominic Dunn, Jeffrey Tubin sort of separate category of the world, you know, that could write the great book about the thing you're interested in reading,

but I think that's a, that's a separate category. But yeah, I mean, there's, there are many of these books. Weirdly, not enough, though. I mean, I think it takes a real specific, I think there are a lot of books published,

but not a lot of books really hit any kind of level of acclaim. And I think that's meaningful. Lawrence writes, remembering Satan would be a book I'd put in this larger category. Yeah. That's a great book. All right, David, that's the January issue. Can we tease the February issue?

Sure. February issue is going to come up mid-February. Amanda Dobbins has been kind enough to agree to do it with me. shoemaker that means you and I got to get into the newspaper office or the magazine office and work on the next cover because these shoemaker covers are just fantastic by the way can I say how much fun it is to cosplay as a magazine person with you and David sends me something goes here here's here's the first draft I'm still fudcing and it's course just fantastic I'm like yeah here's one minor suggestion and David comes back with something's even way better than that and I mean this is just this is just this is the dream. here in the internet era, making magazine covers. So look for the February issue in the middle of the month. We'll reveal the topic pretty soon.

David, I will see you soon with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you later, Brian.