I was on the set one morning when a chandelier fell and crashed a foot away from Truman. He chuckled. He said, “I guess Gore Vidal is in the wings!”

george christy on murder by death

Whatever your opinion of Truman Capote, you have to admit there was something inspiring about his passionate (and famously mutual) hatred of Gore Vidal. That is partly because, no matter your opinion of Gore Vidal, you have to admit that he was one of the premier trolls of the pre-Internet age. He out-Weeved Weev just by waking up each day.

If you want to read about the myriad ways in which Capote and Vidal were assholes, or the terrible things they said about each other, you could probably spend a few hours devouring articles with titles like “Gore Vidal, No Greater a Hater Than He” and “Gore Vidal’s Bitter Feuds” and each might contain a few insults that are new to you.

One of my own favorite anecdotes never seems to make the cut, and so I’m reproducing it here as a public service. Like the George Christy tale above, it’s recounted in George Plimpton’s engrossing Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, and it’s beautiful.

DOTSON RADER: Truman kept up his interest in the gay life when he was in LA making these films. LA is always about fifteen years behind New York in terms of sex. In New York you got used to the back-room bars with a separate room or two, very dark, where men had sex. Everything was wide open. In LA it wasn’t — still a risky place for gay people, because Davis who was chief of police, was very anti-homosexual and they still raided bars. So you had to be careful. The gay porn theaters — there were two or three of them in LA — weren’t any fun because you’d sit there and they kept the lights on. Ushers would walk up and down. You never knew if the guy next to you was a plainclothes cop.

Back-room bars were just coming in then. In LA there weren’t any back room bars that I knew of, but I heard of one they opened up, I think on Santa Monica. So we went there. Three of us. Truman was in his hat, his usual costume, and we came up to the cashier’s window. To keep the police out, you had to join the club in order to get into the bar; the legal pretense was that it was a private club. Five bucks. Truman was handed a membership card to fill out and he said, “What if it gets raided and they find out I’m a member? It’ll get into the newspaper.” The cashier said, “Well, we can’t do anything about that, Truman.” He’d recognized him. So he said, “Just put down any name.” So Truman put down Gore Vidal and gave his Los Angeles address. Truman debated the next day whether he should secretly call the police and initiate a raid.

Is it true? Who knows. Rader’s a character himself, one whose unusual relationship with Ruth Ford in the 1970s is also a topic worth reading about. But does it sound plausible? If nothing else, it sounds like something Truman would have wanted people to believe happened, and that is why I love it.