44 / 52
vested in her career as a performer? More broadly, why was he
so invested in the rich, upper-class women he called his
“swans”? And why choose
Laura
, a mystery about a woman
who’s the subject of an æsthete’s murderous obsession, a man
who, if not gay, is certainly not straight? Pugh unearths fasci-
nating details, but I kept waiting for him to make some sense
of it all.
When he does offer some analysis, a different kind of ques-
tion arises. For example, he goes to great lengths to demon-
strate the inadequacy of Capote’s script for the 1974 film of
The Great Gatsby
, which was rejected in favor of one by Fran-
cis Ford Coppola. But the interesting question is why Capote
proved unequal to this assignment. He was considered to be
a reliable, hard worker by the studios, and Pugh documents
the success of his screenplays for
Beat the Devil
,
Indiscre-
tions of an American Wife,
and especially
The Innocents
. So
what happened?
Such questions do not detract from Pugh’s achievement in
unearthing a bounty of archival material, much of it ephemeral.
Movies and television were not the most important of Capote’s
concerns, but they were certainly more important than is com-
monly recognized. Pugh offers scholars a great gift by provid-
ing what he calls a “Cinema Capoteana,” a bibliography of all
of his screenplays and all adaptations of his work.
________________________________________________________
Jeff Solomon is a lecturer at the University of Southern California.
His book
Fabulous Potency: Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein
will
be published next year.
44
The Gay & Lesbian Review
/
WORLDWIDE
career as a screenwriter, an actor, and as a theatrical and cine-
matic character both in film and on television. The archival
work on Capote’s unproduced teleplays is especially interest-
ing and unexpected. Anyone seeking a handy guide to
Uncle
Sam’s Hard Luck Hotel
, Capote’s unproduced 1973 teleplay for
an NBC series about a halfway house for parolees, need look
no further.
Pugh is more interested in cataloguing Capote’s career than
in analyzing its contents. For instance, he records Capote’s
thoughts on his own and others’ fame and notes the unusual
prominence of his subject’s gay persona, but he doesn’t ask
how this celebrity came about, much less what it meant to his
public. In general, his critical apparatus is defined by noticing
how queerness creeps into adaptations of Capote’s work, de-
spite considerable censorship. Much of this is fascinating, es-
pecially in unusual cases such as the adaptation of Capote’s
campy, gruesome story “Children on Their Birthdays” into a
Christian family film. Pugh also makes some useful observa-
tions about Capote’s sustained interest in pre-adolescent gay
characters.
Too often, however, Pugh’s research raises questions and
leaves them unanswered. For example, he devotes a whole
chapter to Capote’s failed attempt to make Lee Bouvier Radzi-
will into a movie star by turning the classic 1944 noir film
Laura
into a TV movie in the late ’60s. Radziwill was the sis-
ter of Jackie Kennedy and the wife of a Polish prince, and
Capote seems to have thought that her glamour was sufficient
to compensate for her lack of talent. But why was he so in-
C
OURT
S
TROUD
“Y
OU A BITCH OR WHORE
?” asks
Jamie Brickhouse with a mis-
chievous grin from across the
lacquered coffee table in his trendy Chelsea
flat in New York City. With his copper hair,
black sweater, purple shirt, and indigo
plaid trousers, it’s clear the author of the
new book
Dangerous When Wet
(St. Mar-
tin’s Press) is accustomed to colorful ac-
cents, both on and off the page. As he pours
from the silver teapot, curlicues of steam
spill out of two china cups, each rimmed
with broad bands of emerald and embla-
zoned with campy epithets. With his back
against a velour throw, a zebra-patterned
pillow under one arm, and his tabby Lotte
Lenya at his side, we begin our interview
about the native Texan’s first book, a campy
yet touching memoir about his struggles
with the bottle, his sexuality, and his
mother, Mama Jean.
Court Stroud:
Was it difficult for you
to write so candidly about the three great
loves of your life: booze, sex, and your
mother?
Jamie Brickhouse:
Actually, I don’t love
booze anymore. But my mother—I think
about her every day. Was it hard? Sure, it’s
revealing my own bad behavior. I had to
come to terms with whether I was going to
tell everything. With the alcohol side of
things, I wasn’t so nervous. I had been
sober for some time so that wasn’t such
a hurdle. Talking about my mother,
though? For a while, I felt I might be be-
traying her.
CS:
Was there any pushback from family
members?
JB:
No, there wasn’t. My family was very
supportive about the book. My father gave
me carte blanche. But I had to overcome my
fear that I might betray her by writing about
our relationship or her behavior. The last
hurdle was revealing that I’m HIV-positive,
because I was still in the closet about that.
CS:
In the book, you mention your mother
died not knowing your status.
JB:
I never told her because I wanted to
protect her. I was also, quite frankly, afraid
that she’d say: “Goddammit! I told you so! I
knew this would happen to you!” However,
even if she’d had that reaction at first, she
would’ve gotten over it.
CS:
You struggled about whether to put
your HIV status in the book?
JB:
I had shame about it. I don’t, for the
most part, now. Although I didn’t write this
book as a form of therapy, it’s helped me
come to terms with being HIV-positive. It’s
a disease, a condition, like any other. I de-
cided, in the end, it’s crucial as a conse-
quence of my drinking.
CS:
If you didn’t write the book as a form
of therapy, why did you write
Dangerous
When Wet
?
JB:
Because I wanted to be a writer. I wrote
from the time I was young. I wrote in high
school. I wrote in college. I’ve always
wanted to express myself artistically—and
this was a story I had to tell. I started writ-
ing it in a workshop a year after my mother
died knowing that I wanted to tell this story.
In other words, I had the fire in me to write
this because I had to.
CS:
Your mother tells you to be a writer
during your freshman year of college. Why
Jamie Brickhouse Remembers Mama
ARTIST’S PROFILE