One Federal hearing was twice as long as the original court trial. A huge assemblage of stuff. Every morning, Capote said, after nights of miserable dreams, he threw up. Custen, op. Privacy Policy — About Cookies. Skip to navigation — Site map. Contents - Previous document - Next document. Flirter avec la controverse : les biopics sur Truman Capote.
Delphine Letort. Index by keywords: biopic , writer , Capote Truman , celebrity , adaptation. Outline The celebrity writer. The man behind In Cold Blood. Full text PDF Send by e-mail. All my res Top of page. Introduction [Full text].
Full text issues vol. English-language Poetry and the Pictorial Vol. Follow us. To combat his loneliness and sense of displacement, he developed a flamboyant personality that played a significant role in establishing his celebrity status as an adult. Capote had begun secretly to write at an early age, and rather than attend college after completing high school, he pursued a literary apprenticeship that included various positions at The New Yorker and led to important social contacts in New York City.
Renowned for his cunning wit and penchant for gossip, Capote later became a popular guest on television talk shows as well as the frequent focus of feature articles. He befriended many members of high society and was as well known for his eccentric, sometimes scandalous behavior as he was for his writings. Capote's first short stories, published in national magazines when he was seventeen, eventually led to a contract to write his first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Set in the South, the novel centers on a young man's search for his father and his loss of innocence as he passes into manhood. The work displays many elements of the grotesque: the boy is introduced to the violence of murder and rape, he witnesses a homosexual encounter, and at the novel's end, his failure to initiate a heterosexual relationship with Idabel Thompkins, his tomboy companion, leads him to accept a homosexual arrangement with his elder cousin Randolph, a lecherous transvestite.
Each of these sinister scenes is distorted beyond reality, resulting in a surreal, nightmarish quality. Despite occasional critical complaints that the novel lacks reference to the real world, Other Voices, Other Rooms achieved immediate notoriety.
This success was partly due to its strange, lyrical evocation of life in a small Southern town as well as to the author's frank treatment of his thirteen-year-old protagonist's awakening homosexuality.
The book's dust jacket featured a photograph of Capote, who was then twenty-three, reclining on a couch. Many critics and readers found the picture erotically suggestive and inferred that the novel was autobiographical. Many of Capote's early stories, written when he was in his teens and early twenties, are collected in A Tree of Night and Other Stories. These pieces show the influence of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, all of whom are associated to some degree with a Gothic tradition in American literature.
Like these authors, as well as the Southern Gothic writers Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor, with whom critics most often compare him, Capote filled his stories with grotesque incidents and characters who suffer from mental and physical abnormalities. Yet Capote did not always use the South as a setting, and the Gothic elements in some of the tales are offset by Capote's humorous tone in others.
Critics often place his early fiction into two categories: light and sinister stories. It was a slow and painful suicide. Stas left me alone with them.
Finally, they left. But what really shattered their friendship was the lawsuit for libel brought against Truman by Gore Vidal. Truman entreated Liz Smith to persuade Vidal to drop his lawsuit, which he refused to do. When Truman asked me to do the deposition for him, I never knew anything about depositions. I was very upset that he lost. I felt it was my fault. The lawsuit lingered for seven years, until Alan Schwartz made a direct appeal to Vidal himself.
Truman had no recollection of what had occurred on The Stanley Siegel Show, but when he read the press accounts he was horrified. Truman was then bundled up and transported to Hazelden, the drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation center in Minnesota, accompanied by C.
Afraid he would back out, they flew with him to the clinic, where he spent the next month. He actually enjoyed his time there, but a few weeks after being discharged, he began drinking heavily again.
Exhausted and unwell, Truman foolishly agreed to a grueling, college lecture tour in the fall of He became so incoherent in Bozeman, Montana, that he had to be escorted offstage.
Back on Long Island, Truman continued to slide. But if the arrangement suited Truman psychologically—and sexually—it had become disastrous, even dangerous. The two men reconciled, then broke up, again and again. The man swung for more than 10 minutes before he was pronounced dead. After leaving the prison, Truman had to pull his car over to the side of the road, where he wept for two hours.
Under their polished veneers, they are all users and hustlers, like P. It was to his dear friend Joanne Carson that Truman turned when he was in desperate straits, sick and exhausted, buying a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles on August 23, Two days later, Joanne entered the guest bedroom to find Truman struggling for breath, his pulse alarmingly weak. As for what happened to the rest of the manuscript, no one really knows. If it was stowed away in a Greyhound bus depot, possibly in Nebraska, where he had stopped during his college tour, as Joe Petrocik believes, or in a safe-deposit box somewhere, as Joanne Carson believes, it has never surfaced.
Yet, like them, it is substantial enough to be read, enjoyed and, to a limited degree, judged on its own merits. He joins a tradition. I still miss him. There are no major writers today that matter in the way that he mattered. Louise Grunwald agrees. There was a memory that Truman liked to relate, about a husky boy from his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, who spent an entire summer digging a hole in his backyard.
All the best, T. In Cold Ink. And in his imagination he put himself there, with some specific questions in mind:. Sir Winston, I am limited to three questions, which is the interview equivalent of a teaspoon of domestic champagne. Were there any moments after one of your famous speeches that you privately thought Great Britain was in greater peril than you let on?
Was that a humbling sign that the best days of the British Empire were in the past? You had a lifetime of cigars, brandy, wine and very little exercise. You were a prisoner of war and escaped. Your political career seemed to be over in the s, but your glory days were yet to come. You lived to Was it your indomitable will, or was it a higher being looking out for you?
Sir, your country has been an empire, a leading member of a western alliance and now has voted to go it alone. Is this wise? Scientists racing to develop a vaccine against Zika virus disease this summer may be hoping for results like those of Dr. Jonas Salk, creator of the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis. Salk died on this day in at the age of 80, decades after the polio vaccine he developed helped vanquish the deadly, paralyzing disease throughout much of the world.
Schmeck Jr. The discovery made Dr. Salk a hero. Schmeck wrote. In recent years, however, fears of rare, vaccine-preventable diseases have subsided. Albert B. Sabin, who developed a live polio virus vaccine that ultimately replaced the use of Dr. The live vaccine, given orally, is easier and cheaper to administer, and is particularly useful during epidemics because a vaccinated person temporarily sheds the vaccine virus and can passively immunize others. It was precisely because of this risk that, five years after Dr.
Children in America now exclusively receive the inactivated poliovirus vaccine , known as IPV, that resulted from Dr. Worldwide eradication of the disease has remained an elusive goal. This year and last, polio cases unrelated to the vaccine have occurred in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Earlier in the decade, children in Somalia, Nigeria, Syria and more than a dozen other countries were infected by wild polio virus. Vaccination campaigns have sometimes been thwarted by war and distrust of medical teams.
Even after she ascended to worldwide stardom, she constantly sought the love, adulation and acceptance that she felt had eluded her since childhood. The seeds of her discontent were sown when she was very young. She had a strained relationship with her mother, a fierce stage parent, and was devastated when her beloved father died of meningitis in Garland said she was on a lifelong quest for love.
She was married five times and was quoted as saying she longed for the sincere love of one man, rather than the applause of thousands of fans. Garland turned to drugs and alcohol to fill the void. She died from an apparently accidental barbiturate overdose. She was At least I hope she has. Her rosy complexion as a toddler gave her the nickname Pinky. She returned to the United States 16 years later, in , not as Pinky but as Benazir Bhutto, the new prime minister of Pakistan — the first woman elected to lead an Islamic country.
Her time in office would be as tumultuous as her childhood had been idyllic, ending in her assassination by the Pakistani Taliban on Dec. Bhutto was born on this day in to a wealthy family whose lands were once so extensive it took days to appraise them. In a country where families dominated business and politics in an almost feudal manner, the Bhuttos seemed destined to rule.
As Ms. He imparted lessons to her along the way. But her political education went into overdrive when a top army general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, overthrew her father and imprisoned him. Bhutto visited him often, absorbing one-on-one political seminars in the grimmest of settings.
Her father encouraged her to study other female leaders, including Indira Gandhi and Joan of Arc. Bhutto was hanged in , charged with orchestrating the murder of a political rival. Bhutto was forbidden to attend his funeral. But as the opposition to a military regime, Ms. Bhutto spent half her time in prison or under house arrest, sometimes in solitary confinement. She was elected twice, serving from December to August and again from October to November Bhutto could be imperial in bearing, charming and also ruthless.
After accusing her government of corruption, her younger brother Murtaza, a member of the provincial legislature, was gunned down outside his home in a police ambush. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, whom she had named minister of investment, was indicted in the murder but exonerated. Witnesses were either arrested, intimidated or killed.
Each of her terms as prime minister ended when she was dismissed by the president on graft charges. When she and her husband left office in , they were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, though the source of their wealth was unclear.
Bhutto spent most of the last nine years of her life in self-imposed exile, much of it in a palatial estate in Dubai. After receiving amnesty on the pending charges, she returned in late to seek a third term. A close ally of the Afghan Taliban — which her government supported in its infancy in — killed her at a rally outside the capital. Pakistan still waits today for a real democracy to emerge, and an elected leader from outside the few feudal families that have ruled the country, alternating with the military, since its birth.
In New York City, Siegel was a core member of the infamous hit squad Murder Incorporated and implicated in many high-profile killings. But Siegel, who died in a hail of bullets 69 years ago today , was also something of a visionary. He eventually moved west and pioneered the development of Las Vegas as a casino capital, investing in it when it was little more than a sleepy desert town with a pliant City Council and lax gambling regulations.
In New York, Siegel, a product of the tough streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, was, like his associate Meyer Lansky, a kingpin in what was known as the Jewish mob.
Seeking to expand his empire, he left New York City in the s to set up bootlegging and gambling operations on the West Coast. But Siegel wanted more. When the casino struggled at first, Siegel used millions of dollars from mob investors to prop it up. Without him, the Flamingo would have folded. On June 20, , he was shot through the living room window of Ms. The casino he built in her name endured until , when the last of the original buildings were razed and replaced by Hilton.
He wrote about his father, Wyatt Cooper, a screenwriter and actor from Mississippi. The paper was lying on the kitchen counter, and I was startled to see his face staring up at me as I passed by. It was two days after his death. The article was short. What would happen to my family and me now? As a teenager I used to imagine that he had written me a letter, and every birthday I secretly hoped it would arrive.
After a while, no matter how much you love someone, no matter how hard you try to remember, you start to forget little details — the sound of their voice, the way they smell, the look in their eyes when they smile and laugh. If I could see my father just once more, sit down and talk with him, look into his crystal blue eyes, feel the safety of his arms around me, I would give anything for that. Is he proud of me?
What would he have done if he were me? I just turned 49, and my doctor assures me I have many years yet to live. What path forward should I take? How should I live out these years I never expected to have, these years he never lived to see?
For his confirmation gift, his parents gave him a telescope. His imagination was piqued as a student in Berlin when he read about a phantasmagorical journey to the moon.
When he died on June 16, , Wernher von Braun , the son of East Prussian aristocrats, had left an indelible, if ambiguous, legacy as a visionary space-travel pioneer.
They were scooped up in Operation Paperclip and transplanted in Alabama, where they formed the vanguard of an American space program that built the Saturn V rocket, which sent nine crews toward the moon.
He would say later that his chief goal was always space travel — eventually a permanent moon base and a mission to Mars — and that his V-2 rockets had worked perfectly, except that they landed on the wrong planet. As the satirist Tom Lehrer sang:. Unlike many of her jazz world contemporaries — the list is practically endless — she was abstemious.
When she was not onstage or on tour, where she spent most of her life, she preferred tranquil days at her Beverly Hills home and a placid social life with friends like Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee.
Yet her quiet, abstemious side probably contributed to her longevity; her career lasted six decades. Fitzgerald had a protean voice. She sang show tunes, swing, bebop, novelties, bossa nova and opera.
An inscrutable point in space, which contains all other points simultaneously, inspires a poet, and revenge. Despairing curators wander in a labyrinthine library stocked with innumerable, unintelligible books. A mild-mannered reader dreams of gauchos, knife fights and death. These and all other manner of the mystical, enigmatic and paradoxical imbued the writing of Jorge Luis Borges , an Argentine author whose concise, intricate work overflowed with wonder.
He penned densely philosophical short stories and poems of his own and literary hoaxes that intentionally blurred the line between reality and fiction. Borges was widely considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, but he never received it.
Some speculated that the Nobel committee overlooked Mr. Borges because of his reluctance to engage with the political violence that engulfed Argentina in the 20th Century. But Mr. Borges, an otherworldly figure himself, preferred the printed page to our unruly and unwelcoming reality. That reality grew more distant when he went blind in the s and was forced to rely on others to transcribe his words and read to him.
He departed this world for good when he died of liver cancer on June 14, Toward the end of his life, however, Mr. Borges said he recognized himself in his most fantastical writing. Borges said. Clinton replied. In he asked president George W. Bush replied. A war of choice or a war of necessity? For almost 17 years as moderator Mr. The show regularly reached an audience of almost four million people. And he was working until the end. Below is a tribute episode that aired after his death.
Russert covered elections through the s and early s. In one memorable instance he brought comprehensible analysis to the confusing ballot tumult in Florida in the presidential election that ended with a Supreme Court decision and victory for Mr.
Russert was an unlikely candidate for broadcast stardom. The son of a garbage collector from Buffalo, N. Mario M. Cuomo of New York. He was meaty and sometimes cross-looking with his dramatically knitted eyebrows; he could be prosecutorial one moment and jovial the next. He joined NBC in as an executive. The show still draws a comparable number of viewers with Chuck Todd occupying Mr.
Today we have David H. Petraeus, a former C. Besides celebrating writers and those in the arts, the club, in Midtown Manhattan, has also recognized military and government leaders including the former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and me at its annual state dinners. Hosting Grant — a great writer as well as a great leader — at the Lotos Club would thus be very fitting.
He would feel welcome there. Coincidentally, the lovely old townhouse that houses the club, on East 66th Street just off Fifth Avenue, is next door to the address at which Grant lived the final years of his life. I have long admired Grant and felt that some historians were unduly critical of him at various points in the last century although more recent biographies have once again recognized his extraordinary qualities and how fortunate we were to have him in uniform during the Civil War, in particular.
In my view, Grant stands alone among American military leaders as hugely impressive at all three levels of war: tactically as shown in his capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee early in the war ; operationally the Vicksburg victory in , one of the greatest operational-level campaigns of all time ; and strategically devising and overseeing the first truly comprehensive strategy for the Union forces to defeat Robert E.
Especially impressive was his sheer fortitude in the face of congressional sniping, press criticism, political pressures, battlefield setbacks and terrible casualties. Most important, as the first Union commander to come up with a comprehensive strategy to defeat the Confederate forces, he was the first to give battle to Lee and not retreat back to Washington immediately afterward. And although as president he was tarnished by financial scandal after placing too much trust in some members of his cabinet, he sought to be compassionate during the Indian Wars and in the conduct of Reconstruction, and demonstrated integrity in guiding the nation through a host of financial crises.
And he was modest and unassuming in all that he did. They are still regarded as the most literate, forthright memoirs of any major American military figure. With the help of Mark Twain, the memoirs were an enormous commercial success when published after Grant died, on July 23, , at an Adirondacks retreat. Twain, by the way, was among the earliest members of the Lotos Club. For me, Grant was always captured best in the pithy response he offered to Gen. Sherman had emerged from the darkness to encounter Grant sitting under a tree with the rain dripping off his slouch hat.
A life of crime is usually lived in the shadows. But John Gotti, the longtime boss of the Gambino crime family, preferred the spotlight. He was a publicity hound long before social media and smartphones made oversharing ubiquitous.
Bruce Mouw, a former F. Gotti died on June 10, , in a federal prison in Springfield, Mo. Gotti took control of the Gambino family after engineering the assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, in He went on to make flagrant power moves , courting the press all the while.
He cut a dashing figure, draped in expensive double-breasted suits that might as well have been suits of armor, as far as prosecutors were concerned. Raab wrote. Gotti relished the attention. He knew his every move was being scrutinized but never let his observers feel that they had the upper hand. On April 2, , Gotti was convicted on 13 counts, among them a racketeering charge that cited him for five murders and other murder charges, conspiracy, gambling, obstruction of justice and tax fraud.
Yearning for the spotlight ran in the family. Nice looking. Not at all like her stamp. Wears her watch over the glove, though — tacky. Joan Rivers, the irrepressible and sharply acerbic comedian, would have been 83 today, and since her death almost two years ago , she has left a celebrity-skewering void that can still be felt during every major red carpet event, from the Oscars to the Grammys, where the glitterati were sitting ducks for her as she hosted the E!
You are a one of a one. Rivers died undergoing a routine procedure in New York City. A settlement in a malpractice lawsuit filed by Ms. But beyond the red carpet, we remember Ms. She paved the way for generations of comedians, distinguishing herself with slashing style and biting self-deprecation, even about her death. But she was fired after she got her own show. Then her husband committed suicide.
Driven by despair and desperation, she reinvented herself as a writer, producer and entrepreneur. No one was spared. A contributor and critic for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and a founding member of the informal gathering of literati known as the Algonquin Round Table, she delivered withering, seemingly effortless bons mots.
She died of a heart attack on June 7, Parker dispensed caustic humor in prose and verse as well as over drinks. Her observations and remarks were very much of their time, but they still induce winces in an era when cutting snark has become practically de rigueur. Over the years many couplets and witticisms have been attributed to Parker, some apocryphally.
Here are just a few:. The suggestion was taken. Kennedy, had just claimed victory in the California presidential primary in a rally at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when he, like his brother four and a half years earlier, was felled by an assassin.
He died 20 hours later, the first assassination of an American presidential candidate. His death, just two months after the Rev. Anthony Lukas wrote in The Times. Kennedy had been revered by many as a political savior in a turbulent time and despised by others as ruthless and opportunistic. In his eulogy, Senator Edward M.
Kennedy urged that his brother be judged at face value. Californians, 48 years later, go to the polls Tuesday. When Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic in Iran, was buried in , three days after his death on June 3, all international phone lines in the country were cut and international flights halted.
His obituary in The New York Times was almost 3, words but quick to encapsulate the man, a Shiite Muslim cleric, and his importance to Iran and the world:. Anderson began. Ayatollah Khomeini felt a holy mission to rid Iran of what he saw as Western corruption and degeneracy and to return the country, under an Islamic theocracy, to religious purity. Today he is remembered as the Shiite Muslim cleric who, on Feb. In Iran he was better known as the Imam Khomeini, an honorific denoting the near-holy status that he continues to have in many parts of Iranian society.
And such a man, his former revolutionary compatriots thought, deserved a pilgrimage site all his own. Today, 27 years after his death, the sprawling, golden-domed Imam Khomeini shrine is one of the largest religious complexes in the world. The crowds thin out the rest of the year, but Iranians, mostly families on vacation, continue to flock to the shrine.
Children run around in their socks — shoes are forbidden there — while mothers and fathers sit hunched over a carpet, picnicking, close to their beloved imam. Asked in a telephone interview on Wednesday to choose a dinner companion, Mr. Booker said he keeps a statue of Tubman and a picture of Douglass in his office. Booker said.
An honored guest, Douglass was escorted to the platform by the suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Anna H. Shaw, The Times reported. Shortly after the meeting, on Feb. He was Douglass, who had escaped from slavery and taught himself to read, became a leading abolitionist in the North and an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln.
Booker said that Douglass had been a hero of his since childhood, when his parents taught him about great Americans. As a vegan, Mr. Booker acknowledged that choosing the dinner menu might be problematic. But he said he thought Douglass might enjoy the cuisine found at some of his favorite vegan restaurants in New Jersey.
Better known as Lou, he was nicknamed the Iron Horse for his streak of 2, consecutive games played, a record that stood until Cal Ripken broke it in Gehrig did not make it into the Baseball Hall of Fame for reliability alone. He set a plethora of records, some of which have never been broken.
His record of 23 career grand slams lasted 75 years before it was broken in by another Yankee, Alex Rodriguez. He was a consummate first baseman and hitter who stood out on Yankees dynasty teams with Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey and Babe Ruth, who preceded him in the batting order.
He batted at least. But Gehrig was not just synonymous with baseball prowess. He retired from the Yankees at 36 because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease. Gehrig delivered a farewell speech to a crowd of 61, at Yankee Stadium on July 4, , during a sweltering break between games in a doubleheader with the Washington Senators. Then Gehrig, who was still a team captain, returned to the dugout to watch the final game of the day.
The Yankees won, Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing 18 months after she was born. But by the time Ms. Keller died at 87, on June 1, , she had persevered. Keller learned to communicate with the help of Anne Sullivan Macy, a teacher who virtually transformed her from a near-feral child into a Radcliffe graduate.
Keller became a captivating writer, chronicling her life in memoirs, and a kind of motivational speaker, aided by Ms. Sullivan onstage. She also was an advocate for the blind and toured the country with Ms.
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