NEW York, 1966: American writer Truman Capote throws the party of the century. As 500 guests gather for his Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel,…
Andrew O’Hagan's play 'The Ballad of Truman Capote' is on at theSpace on Niddry Street until August 26As 500 guests gather for his Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, Capote retreats to his suite to drink Martinis – a cocktail Andrew O’Hagan is also a fan of.
“The friendship interested me, his childhood and the journey towards adult celebrity and becoming possibly the most interesting reporter of his generation and a very, very memorable novelist too.”He says: “I used to meet writers, editors, public figures who had been to that ball and I started collecting information about it. The most important piece of information from a dramatic point of view was that Truman, just before the 500 guests came, went to his suite for an hour and locked the door.
Much like the writer at the centre of his play, O’Hagan flirts between fiction and non-fiction. His latest book, the autobiographical Mayflies, was adapted for television last year. He believes acting and writing are the two “principal art forms that are most like each other”. “It really mattered to me that they understood the weather, the culture, the language, some of the moral and ethical difficulties at the centre of the drama.”
“I remember a newspaper asked me to go begging on the streets of London, and I enthusiastically threw myself in a kind of Orwellian rush of energy into this crazy, dangerous nighttime world of sleeping rough in London. Guys were desperate and on drugs, often alcoholic and living a miserable existence begging in the streets of the capital.
As some journalists are starting to resort to artificial intelligence for work purposes, he doesn’t believe AI will ever be able to do what journalists do. “You’re looking somebody in the eye and you’re asking questions. We take it for granted.”That’s according to O’Hagan, who gives the example of a snowy Christmas Eve where he listened to one man’s heartbreaking story.“The Grenfell story,” he pauses. “I had to go and find a man whose wife and children died on the 21st floor.
He takes a trip down memory lane – down to the dreaded school discos. “There was a particularly lovely person at my school. I had a date at the disco with this girl who I thought was excellent.
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