In 1947, Truman Capote wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms, a Southern Gothic novel about familial estrangement and homosexuality, based on his experiences growing up in Monroeville, Alabama. To promote the book, cover artist Harold Halma took a photo of the then-23-year-old author reclining and gazing into the camera.
The photo was on the backcover of the novel, and instantly became the literary world’s pinup equivalent. Random House used it in “This is Truman Capote” ads, and large blowups were displayed in bookstore windows. The book made its debut at #9 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and gave Capote notoriety he yearned.
Although Capote publicly noted that it distracted readers from the book, he privately enjoyed the splash it had made, and delighted in retelling of an anecdote about Halma: walking on Fifth Avenue, the cover artist overheard two middle-aged women looking at a Capote blowup. One woman said, “I’m telling you: he’s just young,” to which the other responded, “And I’m telling you, if he isn’t young, he’s dangerous!”
The picture was reprinted along with reviews in magazines and newspapers, some readers were amused, but others were outraged and offended. The Los Angeles Times reported that Capote looked “as if he were dreamily contemplating some outrage against conventional morality.” The novelist Merle Miller issued a complaint about the picture at a publishing forum, and the photo of “Truman Remote” was satirized in the Mad (making him one of the first four celebrities to be spoofed in the magazine). The humorist Max Shulman struck an identical pose for the dustjacket photo on his collection, Max Shulman’s Large Economy Size (1948). The Broadway stage revue New Faces (and the subsequent film version) featured a skit in which Ronny Graham parodied Capote, deliberately copying his pose in the Halma photo.
In Capote: A Biography (1988), Gerald Clarke wrote, “The famous photograph: Harold Halma’s picture on the dustjacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms caused as much comment and controversy as the prose inside. Truman claimed that the camera had caught him off guard, but in fact he had posed himself and was responsible for both the picture and the publicity … [it gave Capote] not only the literary, but also the public personality he had always wanted.”
The photo made a huge impression on many artists. The 20-year-old Andy Warhol wrote fan letters to Capote, and when Warhol moved to New York in 1949, he made numerous attempts to meet Capote. His first New York one-man show was Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote (1952). In Paris, dying American prostitute, Denham Fouts (a literary muse and gay lover of European royals, writers and actors) sent a blank cheque to Truman Capote with only the word ‘come’ written on it after seeing the photo. Capote went to Fouts’ dark apartment on the Rue de Bac, and would later write a short-story, “Unspoiled Monsters”, based on Fouts’ life.
Busy was the Chinese Communist Party in the first few days after it brutally suppressed…
Four months after the massacre, as the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe also looking increasingly…
This was the third major story Picture Post published on the Holocaust, after the liberations…
When Nordhausen concentration camp in Thuringia was liberated by the 104th US Infantry Division on…
Six weeks after Mussolini's downfall, in September 1943, the British 8th Army liberated an Italian…
After the levees gave way in New Orleans, editors and photographers from Vanity Fair waded…
View Comments
Hi, I think your website might be having browser compatibility problems.
When I look at your website in Safari, it looks fine however when opening
in I.E., it's got some overlapping issues. I just wanted to provide you with a
quick heads up! Apart from that, great blog!
my homepage nordvpn special coupon code 2024
I do consider all the ideas you have presented in your post.
They're very convincing and will certainly work. Still, the posts are very short for
newbies. May just you please lengthen them a bit from subsequent time?
Thanks for the post.
Here is my blog post: eharmony special coupon code 2024
I constantly emailed this blog post page to all my associates,
because if like to read it after that my friends will too.
Feel free to surf to my blog :: facebook vs eharmony
Все вы тут обсуждаете политику,
а я между делом выигрываю в PinUp.
Кто-то читает комментарии, а кто-то запускает
слоты в PinUp и радуется жизни.
If some one desires to be updated with latest technologies after
that he must be pay a quick visit this website and be up to date everyday.
My web-site ... vpn special code
Hi there, just became alert to your blog through
Google, and found that it is really informative. I am gonna
watch out for brussels. I will appreciate if you continue this
in future. Lots of people will be benefited from your writing.
Cheers!
Feel free to visit my homepage vpn special coupon
interesting post - I love Capote :)
Excellent writer - his eloquence on paper still blows me away.
Good writer. I still believe his finest work is To Kill A Mockingbird.
I think your confusion is that Capote and Harper Lee were very good, life-long friends. She based the character (from To Kill A Mockingbird) of Scout on herself as a child. The character of Dill (the young boy who came each summer to visit the woman -his aunt-next door to Scout's home) was based on Truman Capote.
Not only that, but the character Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms is based on Nelle Harper Lee.
That's Harper Lee.