The lies that go into truth

In "Capote," the title character protests (too much) that he tells only the truth. It's a wonderful movie, the tale of screaming queen and auteur Truman, a five-foot-three elf believably played by the giant Philip Seymour Hoffman, even down to speaking in a "baby voice as if a bee sting had swollen his tongue" (thank you Denis Brian).

Capote is a scheming bastard, worming his way into the confidence of two killers whose story he tells "In Cold Blood." The pair slaughtered a family of four when they were unable to find a reputed stash of cash under the floorboards.

As reporter Janet Malcolm once famously wrote (in "The Journalist and the Murderer"): "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns -- when the article or book appears -- his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about making a living."

Capote, at least, did have talent, despite bleating about "art."

Malcolm continued: "[T]he journalist -- who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his [the interviewee's] vision of things -- never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own."

Indeed, Capote was even creepier than in the movie, if you can believe it. "To induce the two caged killers to confide in him, Capote used his breakdown... technique" as portrayed in the flick, in which he tells sad stories about his own life in order to evoke similar confessions. But he also gave the two killers mondo cash -- "fifty dollars each for a start." At least, according to Denis Brian in his 1994 book "Fair Game: What Biographers Don't Tell You," a look at lies in journalism.

A decade after the executions, Brian noted that Capote could barely talk to him when asked about the state-sanctioned death of the killers. One of the murderers, Perry Smith, wrote Capote a 100-page good-bye letter. "All the time they had been prison," said Capote, "all those years, they were only allowed to have a certain amount of money, and I always gave them each whatever it was they were allowed to have. Anyway the thing was in the letter there was a cheque for the money. Perry had never spent a penny of it and he was, you know, giving it back to me.

"I don't know why, but that one thing upset me more than any other thing. It just tore me up. Because, I mean.... Oh, God.... It was touching, as though all along.... I can't go into it."