It’s no secret that Truman Capote—Little T. to those who love him, The Tiny Terror to those who hate-love him—is passionate about secrets: his own, other people’s. His books are rife with them, brought to horrendous or hilarious or exquisite flower. The star-y role he plays in Neil Simon’s movie, Murder by Death, explodes with secrets. And in his apartment and three houses (Manhattan, Long Island, California, Switzerland), Truman has accumulated hundreds of objects—a zoo of beasts, many of which conceal secret repositories—little drawers, infinitesimal hollows.
“I’ve just been collecting for thousands of years,” says Little T.—his speaking voice ranges at least three octaves per sentence, from Little Nell to Old Mischief. “And I bought all of these animals. I’ve collected them—well, all over the world. Why animals? I love animals per se, in real life.” Maggie, the presiding “real” beast, is a sedately rampageous, hideously attractive English bull, referred to by Capote as “my little doggie.” Little T. continues, “And I like objects, ’specially objects that are—well, I don’t like them just for themselves. Usually I like them to be something else other than what they are. Like that English dog’s head over there with that cap on his head [Truman sometimes wears one very like it]—he’s one of my favorites, and he’s a tobacco jar. My house at the beach’s got just loads of marvelous, curious objects.”
And that’s what Truman Capote’s Zoo is all about: “marvelous, curious objects,” collected seriously for years—the inanimates like the ones on these pages, the animates in his writings from “Miriam” to Other Voices, Other Rooms to In Cold Blood to Answered Prayers—with its gamy-rich, pants-down fill of look-look-now, isn’t that Lady Κ., B.P., Princess R., T.W.? Isn’t that Little T. just loving them all to death for posterity? … Little T. smiles seraphically, as he contemplates his zoo, peering at a life-sized, carved wooden tree about whose branches winds a terrifying wooden serpent. “That,” he murmurs sweetly, “came off a Zen temple.”
Below, 24 residents of the Manhattan Branch of Truman Capote’s Zoo, complete with Trumanisms about his creatures.
