[ Things to Know ] [ 1930's Prejudice ] [ Quizzes and Review Material ] [ A 1930's Scrapbook ] [ Truman Capote's Aunt ] [ Home ]

The relative 'truth' about Capote Truman's aunt: A bio in cold blood   By Dannye Romine Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1983, Section 5, p. 1-2

IF THERE'S NOT one in every family, there ought to be.

In Truman Capote's family, it was his distant cousin, the indomitable Jenny Faulk of Monroeville, Ala. At 17, Jenny assessed her parents' fortunes, ravaged by the Civil War, lifted her strong, round chin, and vowed never to pick cotton again. Instead, she picked up her needle and set to making hats.

"Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by An Aunt Who Helped Raise Him" [Morrow, $12.95] is a new book, fascinating in spite of its sometimes antiquated and self-conscious style. The author is Marie Rudisill of Beaufort, S.C.

Rudisill is the sister of Capote's mother, Lillie Mae Faulk Persons Capote, who commited suicide in 1954. From its title, you would expect the illustrious Truman to steal the show. But Jenny Faulk definitely upstages him. "If it hadn't been for Jenny," said Marie Rudisill in a telephone iterview, "the family would've gone down the drain. They just had no push and no get up and go. They were completely demoralized by the Civil War, and they would have gone down to absolutely nothing. Just like beggars." IN 1900, AFTER a millinery apprenticeship in St. Louis, Jenny Faulk, 27, bought two town lots in Monroeville, a crossroads village about 90 miles south of Montgomery.

On one lot, she build a row of red brick offices. She held one office for herself, where she opened an elegant women's shop, and rented the others out. The front picture window of her shop, which was shipped from New Orleans, had a top border of cut glass with "large diamond-shaped fans that appeared to explode in the sunlight."

On her other lot, Jenny Faulk built a rambling, two-story hourse with a wide veranda. At the back of the trellised yard, perhaps a reminder of the bare-bones existence she'd escaped, she erected a tall grim fence of animal bones.

Now Jenny moved her family-her widowed mother, a bachelor brother and two spinster sisters-the six miles into town.

None of the Faulk siblings ever (p. 1) married, but they raised three generations of children in that house: First two orphaned brothers from Mississippi, who were distant Faulk cousins. ["Even if they'd been no more than a smear of kin, Jenny would've sent for them," Rudisill said. "They were Faulks."] Then, the orphaned children of one of those brothers. Then, when Jenny entering her 50s, a toddler named Truman, grandson of one of those Mississippi orphans.

STRONG AND resourceful as Jenny Faulk was, she rarely showed emotion, according to Rudisill, and thus her love for Truman was only an "undercurrent." And Soo, Jenny's sister, upon whom Capote based "A Christmas Memory," "A Thanksgiving Visitor" and "The Grass Harp," was perfect for him as a child. But as he grew older, according to Rudisill, Sook couldn't give him the affection and understanding he needed.

"I frankly am the only person in the world that's ever loved Truman-and you can quote me," Rudisill said. "I was the one who was with him and stuck by him."

Then why have the two not spoken for 15 years?

"One by one he cut us off-his father, Jenny, Nelle (Nelle Harper Lee, Capote's childhood friend and author of "To Kill a Mockingbird"], finally me," Rudisill writes. "My letters are returned unopened. When Truman travels through the South today, he no longer comes to visit."

Reading this book, it's easy to see why. By page 12 Rudisill has described the "ugly mess" of her sister's life [Truman's mother], and a dozen pages later she is tattling on him for an incident that took place more than 30 years ago, when Capote visited Rudisill at her home.

Listen:

"Truman, eating that curry of shrimp in the restaurant reminded me of the time you and writer Donald Windham visited us in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had a large buffet dinner for you and served curry of shrimp in a silver chafing dish. You announced to the whole party, 'I have eaten all over the world, but this is the best curry of shrimp I have ever tasted.' "

LATER ON I remember seeing you standing by the chafing dish with a big serving spoon just shoveling the shrimp down without even bothering about a plate. One prominent Charlotte attorney approached you and invited you to lunch with him at an exclusive Charlotte country club. Do you remember what you said to him?"

"Sure do. [This is Truman talking.] I told him to go s--- on a stick."

"Whatever possessed you to say a thing like that?

"Simply because he was a nobody, and he only wanted to be seen with a somebody."

[Remember, dear Tru, this Darling Tiny, the only person in the world who really loved you.]

So, if you sniff out right away that Aunt Darling has some huge scores to settle with Nephew Nasty and that she uses this book in part to do so, then you can relax and enjoy the sport.

Capote, by the way, recently told the Washington Post, "If there are 20 words of truth in it [Rudisill's book], I will go up on a cross to save humanity."

EVEN IF HER literary hemstitching didn't show, Rudisill leaves a wide wake in her credibility by putting quotation marks around conversation from as far back as 60 years-occasionally, even before her birth.

But Ridisill says, "I'm 72 years old, and I remember everything very vividly, and a lot more, too."

Perhaps even worse than her liberty with conversation is her us of a black dialect that puts Uncle Remus in the shade.

Here's the Faulks' black cook, Little Bit, circa 1930, when Aunt Sook won't let little Truman ride his bicycle into town:

"Oh, Miz Nanny, yo let date chile ride dat cycle," she hollered. "I do declare my soul, youse gwine make a sissy out o' dat boy if yo ain't careful."

Rudisill says the publishing house, William Morrow, "loved the dialect." And, as for James Simmons, whom her agent hired to "pull the book together," Rudisill says that "he wasn't a Southerner to begin with" and wouldn't have known what to do with the dialect.

THIS IS THE second version of the book. The first, according to Rudisill, Capote "stopped dead" by threatening suit against Delacorte Publishers, who had not yet offered Rudisill a contract.

"On the second go around, I completely revised everything that might offend Truman in any sense of the word," Rudisill said by phone. "There were some real personal things about him, you know. I just took them completely out. I don't think you need to announce to the world that Truman Capote is a homosexual."

Roberta Ashley at Cosmopolitan magazine helped Rudisill get an agent for the book. The agent sold it to William Morrow.

"Look," Rudisill told [former] Morrow editor Hillel Black, "Truman's a powerful thing. I don't want you to buy the book and have Truman come up here and stop it."

Rudisill said that Black told her, "Truman Capote can go to hell. We're not scared of Truman Capote."

In fact, Rudisill said Black told her the book could stand on its own as true Southern folklore even if she had never mentioned Capote.

YET RUDISILL said Capote claims he doesn't draw from this folklore.

"But that's all he's ever drawn from," she said. "He did, and so did Faulkner and so did Erskine Caldwell and so did all of them. They're bound to draw from that. It's a wonderul thing to draw from.

"I'll tell you one thing-you can bet your bottom dollar it's the way he really is, it's what really happened to him and it's what made Truman the wonderful writer he is today."

"All those old maids and Bud [Jenny's brother] and all that conglomeration. To live in that environment, how in the world could anybody come out of that and be an average, normal person? No way in the world!"

Knight-Ridder Newspapers