Run your hand up under her dress.
The Fruitcake Lady
Something caught my ears while I was watching the trailer for the movie Capote. Never heard it before. But was it true?
Listen to this 13-second snippet from the trailer and see if you pick up on it.
Did you catch it?
When Phillip Seymour Hoffman is talking to Katherine Keener about Perry Smith, he tells her, “His brothers and sisters killed themselves.”
“Did you tell him your mama did the same thing?” she quickly replies.
She’s implying that Capote’s mother committed suicide. The first I heard about it. Did Truman Capote’s mother really commit suicide?
So I did a little digging and picked up some fascinating stuff. So let’s go back and update what we already now.
Truman Streckfus Persons was born in a hotel in New Orleans to Julian Archulaus – just call me Arch – Persons and Lillie Mae Faulk on September 24, 1924.
Okay. We already know that Truman’s last name was Persons when he was born, but look at that middle name – Streckfus – S-T-R-E-C-K-F-U-S. Where the hell did that come from? Never heard it before.
And he was born in a hotel, you say. Interesting. Let’s take a quick look at his parents.
Arch Persons was a charming ne’er-do-well, a master of double-talk, and a no-account con man.
He worked as a salesman.
Lillie Mae was pretty, and an ambitious young woman.
She wanted to escape Monroeville so badly, she married Arch because she thought he was her ticket out of town.
Lillie Mae was nineteen, and she realized she made a mistake within hours of marrying Arch. But she got pregnant. She wanted to get an abortion, but Arch talked her out of it.
But after Truman was born, Lilly Mae and Arch went their separate ways, and Lillie Mae dumped Truman in Monroeville with four maiden aunts and a bachelor uncle.
One of the maiden aunts was Aunt Edna Mae Faulk.
But Aunt Edna Mae wasn’t some old lady in a rocking chair sitting on the front porch.
She was a writer who would become known as the “The Fruitcake Lady.”
So young Truman was blessed to grow up with an aunt who was a writer and Nelle Harper Lee who was destined to write To Kill a Mocking Bird.
Getting back to Lillie Mae, she divorced Arch in 1931, moved to New York, and changed her name to Nina. A year later, she met and married a wealthy Cuban immigrant named José – just call me Joe – García Capote.
The following year. Truman moved in with his mother and his new stepfather. He was going on eight years old. Joe Capote officially adopted him and changed his name from Truman Streckfus Persons to Truman García Capote.
Joe and Nina lived extravagantly in Manhattan, then moved to fashionable Greenwich, Connecticut, for three years before returning to an apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
Nina became an alcoholic. She often flew into violent rages with Truman, a teenager at the time, because of his homosexuality. To “cure” him, she took him for psychiatric treatments and sent him to military school. And in her drunken rants she wished he’d been born a female.
But Nina and Joe’s lavish lifestyle ended with a bang when Joe got caught embezzling money from his company. The years was 1952.
By then Truman was 28 years old and living on his own. He was working at The New Yorker magazine and his first book Other Voices, Other Rooms had been published four years earlier.
Joe Capote was fired and arrested. But Nina Capote, unable to cope with the drastic changes in her lifestyle, committed suicide two years later in 1954.
The next year Joe pleaded guilty and served a year in Sing Sing Prison.
Getting back to Aunt Edna Mae. After her nephew Truman moved to New York, she married a man of Japan descent. But her family disapproved of the union so much, she relented and got a divorce.
In 1939, when Truman was living with his family in Connecticut, Aunt Edna Mae married James Rudisill. About that marriage, she wrote “A man who drinks excessively, it’s not a happy marriage. We loved each other, but we had our times.” They had one son and three grandchildren.
Then Aunt Edna Mae dropped the Edna Mae and started writing as Marie Rudisill. She published eight books.
When she hit 89 – that’s right, 89 – she started doing a bit called “Ask the Fruitcake Lady” on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
And she did her routine until she passed away at the age of 94.
And I gotta tell ya – she’s funny. But see for yourself. Here’s a video from one of those appearances:
So there you have it. Truman Capote’s mother did, in fact, commit suicide, and his Aunt Edna Mae became an author and a TV celebrity.
You can’t make this stuff up.
So that almost wraps up our organic flow of posts from In Cold Blood. Just two more left. If you recall, Robert Blake played killer Perry Smith in the movie. He was an interesting character – both on the screen and in real life.
I’m America’s Best Crime Writer
and I approve this message.
Comments
Comments Off on The Fruitcake Lady