Episode
Truman's Swans
- Published
- Aug 3, 2024
- Duration seconds
- 343
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://javiertruben.substack.com/p/trumans-swans
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Summary
Yesterday, after waiting six months for the release, I could finally gorge like Pantagruel in a bookish streaming series about the one and only Truman Capote, directed by Gus Van Sant and produced with infinite prodigality by the actual king Midas of showbusiness, Ryan Murphy. Two years ago, I wrote a post on this very writer’s platform about Truman’s swans, when Laurence Leamer’s book came up. But when I began from scratch last June to cut podcasts, that post went to the pile. So, it’s time to rescue my pedantic musings or inklings, as I used to call the deleted account. Because, make no mistake, before a fiction writer, I am an indefatigable reader, and as such I am fascinated by the rise and fall of this literary lion. All began with a scene from the movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, where an abandoned child speaks almost hidden by a gigantic sprout. The acerbic Gore Vidal used this stinky vegetable to describe his high-pitched voice, that self-assured voice with the power to flip everybody, which was just an attention call he kept all his life because in fact, once he grew up, was a male baritone. That child was abandoned by her mother, whose only ambition was to live on the Fifth Avenue of Manhattan at the expense of a rich man, and when the fortunes of that man changed, Lillie Mae Faulk killed herself at just 48 years old. It's a sad story, even though Truman left us an inverted mirror of Lillie Mae on that lively character Holly Golightly, performed with extreme elegance by Audrey Hepburn on Breakfast at Tiffany’s. With this background and the bestseller In Cold Blood that he wrote about a brutal murder and could not send to print until the real assassins were hanged, so the greedy publishers could sell it as a non-fiction novel, an oxymoron per se, the promising ca…