TRUMAN CAPOTE

Interlude in Key West, 1979

Last night I watched the award winning movie, “Capote” again after a reminder from a dear friend who is studying it with her film class. I’d seen it long ago. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of the diminutive author is astonishing and warrants a second viewing. I reminisced on how the man for whom the movie was centered around and I shared two geographical intersections, one of which included time as well.

In the late spring of 1972 I was hitchhiking with a former high school pal across America on the way to Alaska to work the oil pipeline being built near Fairbanks. That was the plan anyway. Despite taking in amazing vistas like The Badlands, Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse sculpture and more we got tired of the road traveling, as we were, with his 100 pound Malamute and struggling for rides.

Me in The Badlands, 1972 (Photo by Paul Lueders)

One morning a man approached us from the driver’s side window of a white Cadillac convertible in a ‘Sambo’s Pancake House’ parking lot in the town of Greeley, Colorado. We had just spent some of our disappearing traveling funds on a stack of hot cakes and milkshakes. The road can take it out of you. He asked if we wanted to make some money doing a concrete job. I said ‘yes’. My friend said ‘no’. Two days later and 340 miles to the southeast later I was checked in to a Holiday Inn located in Garden City, Kansas having arrived in the concrete business owner’s slow AF heavy truck. Each day I went to work joining with a gang of Mexican laborers and a buddy I convinced to join me who zipped west from Illinois building concrete pit silos for cattle feed lots on the outskirts of a town known as Holcomb. In 1966 Truman Capote wrote about a family who lived in that town and the horrific multiple murders that took place at their quiet home in his purported to be first ever ‘non-fiction novel’ “In Cold Blood”.

Not long after, but in some ways seemingly a century in my progressing cooking life, I was working at beautiful ‘The Pier House’ located on the water in Key West at the end of U.S. 1. The resort’s developer and owner, David Wolkowsky, brought many of the New York City ‘literati and glitterati’ down to Key West to bask in the bawdy tropical Island playground of a town.

The Pier House, Key West

Truman Capote and he were walking along the tropically foliage dense pathway by the pool area as I parked my bicycle for work one morning. I will never forget the two men’s voices. Such contrasts! I pulled off my now sweat damp T shirt, tossed in in the bike’s basket, drained a Cuban ‘to go’ coffee from ‘Five Brothers’ and put on my white cook’s shirt in the alley which took me into the kitchen to begin to daily prep for lunch. After the rush of guests was over I stepped back out to look at the gentle waters of the Gulf of Mexico and savor my ‘post shift beer’. I heard the same two men leaving, talking again. I wanted to go out and ask the famous writer about Holcomb, the process of writing his masterpiece and about his childhood friend Harper Lee, the author of, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ . But a cook just doesn’t go up and start chatting with an icon. Not back then I didn’t.