Deliberate Cruelty

 

Truman Capote is a fascinating man. I've read almost everything he's written, and "In Cold Blood" was an exceptional book (it's fiction, not true crime, just so we're clear). Montillo weaved together the story of Capote's life with that of Ann Woodward. Ann was born poor and grew up in Kansas, raised by her single mother who, quite frankly, deserves to be held up in the highest regard. This woman worked her butt off in a time when it wasn't easy to be a woman, let along a single mother. She went to school and earned degrees and moved to try to make a better life for herself and her daughter. She started her own taxi service, only to have the employees screw her over and she had to start all over again from scratch. Ann looked at her hardworking mother with contempt, vowing to become an actress and lead a glamorous life. 

She moved to New York and moved her way up the social ladder, eventually marrying Billy Woodward, Jr., the only son of William Woodward Sr. She and Billy got along well at first, but the thing that attracted Billy to Ann was her lack of refinement and polish. Billy had a mother and four older sisters who were graceful and charming and classy, and he'd had his fill. He wanted authentic and spontaneous, which Ann was initially. But *she* wanted to be like Billy's mother and older sisters, and started taking lessons to become more refined. Their marriage unraveled. 

Billy made a trip out to Kansas to buy an airplane, and ended up getting quite an earful from the townsfolk where Ann grew up. He learned that she had lied to him (most notably, her father wasn't dead) and was thrilled with the information he gathered, essentially wanting to use it to blackmail Ann into giving him the divorce he craved. Not long after his trip to Kansas, Ann accidentally shot and killed Billy one night at their Long Island home. Her story was that she was spooked by the burglar making the rounds in the neighborhood, and when she was awakened in the middle of the night by a strange noise, groggy from the sleeping pills she took, she grabbed her shotgun and went into the hallway, saw a shadow, and fired. Tragically, it was her husband, not the burglar. 

The crime scene was all kinds of sketchy, and Ann was accused of deliberately murdering her husband, but a Grand Jury wouldn't indict her. Billy's mother, Elise, suggested she take an extended vacation in Europe, which Ann did. There she had a run in with Truman Capote. Heated words were exchanged, and while Ann forgot all about the weird little writer, Capote did not. Twenty years after their public fight, he wrote a short story based on Billy's murder, and the scandal was front page news again. Ann ended up committing suicide, she was so embarrassed to be dragged through the mud again. Capote, as we know, ended up making enemies out of his dearly loved inner circle of "swans" with his unfinished book, "Answered Prayers", and became a hard core drug addict and alcoholic, dying in 1984, abandoned by almost everyone he loved. 

The story was just tragic all the way around. So much meanness. So much unneeded cruelty. Whether or not Ann actually murdered her husband in cold blood (see what I did there?) is a question we'll most likely never know the answer to, but what we do know is all the pain could have been avoided if Capote had acted like an adult instead of a petty, jealous blowhard. But if he had, we wouldn't still be talking about him, so there's that. All in all, I enjoyed it. She told the two stories well.