Name: Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman on Letterman, 1982, 2006
Uploaded: 2020-04-02T01:04:22.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman on Letterman, 1982, 2006' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman on Letterman, 1982, 2006' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-04-02. Transcript available.

Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman on Letterman, 1982, 2006

Thank you very much, Paul.
Welcome back to the show, ladies and gentlemen.
Comedian Richard Belzer will be joining us.
Also NBC News correspondent Edwin Newman.
And my first guest, Truman Capote,
is among a handful of authors who might be more famous
than their actual work. At 23, he wrote a novel
that established him as a first-rate American writer.
His most popular success was the non-fiction novel
In Cold Blood, of course, about a mass murder
that was later made into the motion picture.
He also wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's,
and currently he's finishing a much-awaited book,
Answered Prayers.
Would you please welcome Mr. Truman Capote?
Truman, how are you?
Nice to see you.
You look good. You look like you're feeling good.
Fine, thank you.
Good.
Last night, coincidentally, on, I believe, 60 Minutes,
of course, I know it was 60 Minutes,
they discussed Jack Henry Abbott, so on and so forth,
and Norman Mailer, who sponsored,
helped get him paroled and so on and so forth.
What was your reaction to that circumstance
after Jack Henry Abbott murdered the man downtown?
What was my reaction to his murdering him?
Well, not so much that, just the fact that he had been sponsored by Norman Mailer
and then brought back into society, and it didn't work.
Well, I wasn't a bit surprised.
You remember William Buckley did precisely the same thing
with another man who was in the prison in New Jersey
and death row for years and years for murdering a girl.
And Buckley, over and over, wrote these articles
about how this man should be let loose,
and he was really an extremely intelligent and responsible person.
And he had a discussion with Buckley about it,
and I told him that he was quite wrong
and that this man was guilty.
And he said, what do you base that on?
And I said, I base it on the book that he himself wrote.
The man, Buckley's prisoner, also wrote a book the same as Abbott did.
I said, just by reading his book, I can see that he's a psychopath.
I could see that by reading Abbott's book, too.
But, however, to go back to it,
the man that Buckley sponsored also got out of prison,
mainly due to Buckley's continuing pressuring the matter.
He got out, and within nine months, I believe,
he murdered another girl in precisely the same manner.
Now, Buckley, I will say for him,
then wrote an article for Life magazine.
That was when the new version of Life had just come out.
And the opening paragraph was it began,
I do want to apologize to Truman Capote
because he told me from the beginning, et cetera.
Well, when Norman Mailer started this whole thing about Jack Abbott
and publishing this book,
which was published by my own publisher, Random House, et cetera,
all of those people over there were telling me about it,
and they sent me huge advance galley proofs of it
and wanted me to quote, you know,
and probably didn't say something good about it.
And I said, the man's a psychopath.
He's obviously a homicidal criminal,
and I'm certainly not going to give you a blurb.
So I wasn't the least surprised when he got out
and what happened, happened.
Two things.
I believe there was a newspaper article
in one of the papers today
that said Norman Mailer's opinion was
right or wrong, guilty or innocent,
it's a shame to put away a man who has talent.
Now, do you go along with that?
I certainly do not.
Yeah.
Now, do you get mail like this?
Are people, prisoners, constantly writing you,
saying, I got an idea for a book
or a short story or a cartoon?
Can I get out?
Well, prior to the time of my publishing in Cold Blood,
I don't honestly remember ever receiving mail from prisoners.
After that, I began receiving hundreds of letters a week.
Now, it's up to, I get maybe a dozen or a half dozen a week,
continuously from prisoners all over the country,
all over the world who either A, want me to write a book about them
or to help them get out of prison
or to anyway assist them in some manner or another.
And so I've become quite familiar with this whole thing.
I mean, I can understand exactly how Norman Mailer got mixed up in this
by this prisoner writing him these letters.
They want you to get this correspondence going with them.
They never stop because they have nothing else to do.
I had, this is a man now who's on death row in Illinois for murdering 38 people,
the largest number in the history of the United States,
who never stops writing me.
He must write me every single day of his life.
He has nothing else to do.
His name is John Gacy.
I'm going to take a pause here
and hopefully switch the topic to a more pleasant activity.
You said it.
We'll be right back.
Tune in for today.
Thank you very much, Paul.
Welcome back to the show.
Truman Capote is here.
Richard Belzer will be joining us
and also Edwin Newman.
A book, Music for Chameleons.
Yes.
You've assembled a couple of lists.
Do you mind if I ask you,
you have a column I can and a column I can't.
And I'm going to just,
if we can cover a couple of these.
You say you can't recite the alphabet.
Is that correct?
Well, in Music for Chameleons,
this last published book,
I have to figure out what this means.
I mean, you didn't explain it to me.
I think it's an essay in the book
where there's a paragraph of things I can do and can't do.
Right.
So I'd have to look at that if you don't mind.
Well, sure.
If you want to take it backstage, look it over.
Come back at the end of the show
and try for the big money.
Let's just try that.
It says I can't recite the alphabet.
Is that true?
That's quite true.
I can't.
I never have been able to.
How far can you get?
I don't know.
We can start,
but I've never been able to get through it all the way.
I don't know why.
We've tried.
My family and the child
sent me over and over to different...
Best clinics in the world.
For some reason,
I cannot recite the alphabet.
Well, now, when you're writing,
do you type when you're writing?
I can't subtract either.
You can't subtract.
Okay, that's right.
That was the next one.
You can't do any math.
Now, but when you're typing,
I mean, when you're writing,
do you type?
Yes.
Well, you almost need to know the alphabet to type, don't you?
No.
Okay.
Let's go over to the I can side.
It's a far more interesting list.
I can ice skate.
Yes.
Well?
Very well.
Do you?
Uh-huh.
Ski.
Yes.
Frequently?
I ought to have a house in Switzerland
and I didn't get it for any other reason.
Yeah.
Um...
Here's something interesting,
and tell me if this comes up much.
You can read upside down.
I used to be able to know.
I had a peculiar reason for doing it,
but that's another story.
No, no.
What was the peculiar reason?
Why do you need to develop that skill?
You mean if I were to just turn the material upside down,
you read it, right?
Uh-huh.
And you can't tell us the reason.
Well, I had the reason was that I was...
I had a relative who was living with,
who was about my age,
who, I mean, this is when I was a teenager,
who was receiving these very intimate letters
all the time from somebody
that they were determined that I wasn't going to see them.
I see.
And as she would be reading them at the coffee table,
I learned to read them upside down.
Okay.
Now, this one, this is...
I don't think there's any great skill involved with this.
In fact, Virginia Graham just shot a crossbow.
You can shoot a .38.
.38 revolver.
Yeah.
But, yeah, but I can do it good.
Yeah.
Now, this one I'm interested in.
Ride or drive?
I think it should be drive a Maserati
at 170 miles an hour.
Drive, mm-hmm.
Now, you have done that?
Often, yes.
Here in town?
Not this town.
Uh, that's, that's awfully fast to be going.
I've driven a little faster than that.
Really?
Mm-hmm.
But for the purpose of what?
Well, uh, I enjoy, I used to, I used to enjoy, uh, driving fast and just
driving period.
It was sort of the thing that was most relaxing for me.
Mm-hmm.
And I spent a long period of time in Kansas when I was writing that book in
Cold Blood.
And there are these great, huge, flat plains that go up for miles and miles.
Mm-hmm.
And I get it very early in the morning, and just as dawn is coming, no traffic,
nothing anywhere.
And just as I kind of, with relaxation, it's a lackening of tension, I used to
get out there
and drive maybe 50 miles nonstop, going 100, 60, 170 miles an hour.
And as you're doing it, the car, the wall, the road comes up like a wall in
front of you.
It's like you're driving straight into a wall.
And there's something about it, sort of this unending tension of driving into a
wall and
the wall disappearing, just as you reach it, that I found quite exhilarating.
But then I'm peculiar.
But that's speeding.
Sure is.
Boy, you know, I mean, you make a little mistake at 170, and they're peeling
you off of a Stucky's
somewhere, you know?
There weren't any Stucky's out there.
Let's see.
What else?
Now, this other one here, I know we're going to have to break away for station
identification.
I'll just save this and ask you this one when we get back, okay?
All right, we're going to do that.
We'll be right back.
Thank you.
Truman Capote.
Thank you.
We're back, of course.
Truman Capote is here.
We were just going over a couple of lists, things that you can do.
And this, of course, is not all the things you can and cannot do.
The last item on the I can list is tap dance.
Yes, I can tap dance.
Then I was a child.
I'm from New Orleans.
And in New Orleans, we had these big riverboats.
And they go from New Orleans to St. Louis.
And some relatives of Vine owned the two biggest ship lines that went back and
forth.
And they had Louis Armstrong's band on one of them.
And when I was about seven, eight years old, my idea of great fun was to spend
the weekend going from New Orleans to St. Louis
and spend all night tap dancing with Louis Armstrong's band.
Yeah.
Have you done it recently?
No, he's gone and I'm spared him here.
I mean, do you tap dance at all anymore?
Now, you're not going to trick me into that.
No, no, we're not going to.
No.
When you go to New Orleans, you go back there occasionally.
That's where you're from?
I go there all the time.
Yeah.
What do you do down there?
What on, this is vacation, I guess.
No, I have a lot of relatives there.
I have a lot of relatives there and in Alabama.
You visit them?
Yes, I visit them.
You know, even as I said it, I realized it was a dumb question.
So, you have relatives in Alabama, huh?
Nice one.
Nice folks.
Answered prayers.
Now, this is a new work of yours.
Tell us when it's coming out and then a little about it.
Well, the title, Answered Prayers, comes from St. Teresa.
St. Teresa said, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
And the book is about a group of people who receive, in the course of their
life, what they believe to be an answered prayer.
And the interpretation of theirs, you can decide whether they did or they didn't.
And they don't really know themselves.
As to when it is coming out, I'm not sure.
I've been working on it about seven years, off and on.
Because I work on things for a year and a half, then I don't for a half a year.
Then I go back.
I always work that way.
And now I'm pretty near the end, though.
Is the book about people that you have known?
You better believe it.
Now, this is, this, this, this is, the people are getting, they're getting,
people are getting nervous about this, huh?
They seem to be getting extremely nervous, yes.
Is there any real reason for them to be concerned?
Well, you know the French writer, Albert Camus?
I know of him.
In the beginning of my book, I have a quote on the diary, the page.
You know, I usually have a little quote before the beginning of a book.
I have a quote that I've taken from a diary of his, that Camus had written in
his diary about a book that he himself was in the process of publishing
chapters of it in different magazines,
which is exactly what has happened to me.
I've been publishing chapters of this book in magazines and creating a great
deal of a ruckus as a result.
Well, Camus had written in his diary, he said,
here I have, I'