Norman Mailer once told one of the author’s biographers the story of having drinks in an Irish pub in Brooklyn with Truman Capote. It was in the 1950s, when the area was still a working-class haven, not the playground of those with disposable incomes that it is today, and the place attracted a crowd of ordinary people.
But Capote made no effort to hide his feminine mannerisms or deepen the high Southern drawl that made his voice so distinctive. No, he was clearly and unabashedly gay at a time when being gay could have landed you in jail or, in this case, the wrong end of someone’s fist. As the diners looked on angrily, Mailer recalled, he “admired very much what it cost me to live like that.”
Tom Hollander, whose monumental task was to delve into the shells of psychic abilities that existed in the author's life for FX's “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” says the story helped him get to Capote's steely, vulnerable core.
“How brave he was,” says Hollander, calling me from a train station in Italy, his voice rising above the ringing of a distant bell. “He was like a warrior, and the difficulty and loneliness of revealing himself must have worn him down.”
To transform into Capote, Hollander spent two months with movement coach Polly Bennett, “walking up and down church halls” in London. “I needed to find my center of gravity and get used to it, so I didn’t think too much,” he says.
Hollander worked with voice expert Jerome Butler to capture Capote’s sinister, slightly nasally speaking style. On set, Hollander obsessively listened to interviews with the writer to pinpoint the right notes. “It’s like learning a dance step—you have to repeat it over and over until it becomes natural,” Hollander says. “When you analyze it, it becomes all quite technical. Eventually, it stops being technical because it’s inside you and you can express the emotion through it. You can’t do that if all your energy is focused on perfecting the accent.”
In Capote vs. the Pelican, Hollander is asked to conjure up a variety of emotions. The show chronicles the writer’s high points in both his career and personal life—the publication of In Cold Blood and his legendary Black and White party—as well as his punishing lows, namely Capote’s descent into alcoholism and social ostracism that followed the publication of excerpts from Answered Prayers. This (never-finished) novel committed the unforgivable sin of pulling back the curtain on high society to reveal their betrayals, rivalries, and dirty secrets. The loss of his friendships with the likes of Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) and Slim Keith (Diane Lane) helped accelerate Capote’s drinking. He never published another novel.
“Somehow, the performance he gave as a great storyteller, who was so smart and witty and charming, became exhausting,” Hollander says. “He began to lose the discipline that is required to really write, where you are alone at your desk with your typewriter. It can be a lonely life.”
“Feud” was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, and Hollander received some of the best reviews of his career. But he sympathizes with the anxiety Capote must have felt as his powers faded and his fear of failure mounted.
“As actors, you realize how fragile everything is,” Hollander says. “And you keep going because you need affirmation. You need to keep impressing people, but you know how hard that is to do.”
But playing this literary icon for decades was one of the two or three best experiences of Hollander's career, and when he finished filming, he had a hard time letting go of Capote.
“He became my friend,” Hollander says. “You spend every day for six months walking this road together and then you have to wave goodbye. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but when you act, you’re greeting these people, and it’s a great honor to be someone who’s a lot smarter than you.”
