GLR May June

career as a screenwriter, an actor, and as a theatrical and cine- matic character both in film and on television. The archival work on Capote’s unproduced teleplays is especially interest- ing and unexpected. Anyone seeking a handy guide to Uncle Sam’s Hard Luck Hotel , Capote’s unproduced 1973 teleplay for an NBC series about a halfway house for parolees, need look no further. Pugh is more interested in cataloguing Capote’s career than in analyzing its contents. For instance, he records Capote’s thoughts on his own and others’ fame and notes the unusual prominence of his subject’s gay persona, but he doesn’t ask how this celebrity came about, much less what it meant to his public. In general, his critical apparatus is defined by noticing how queerness creeps into adaptations of Capote’s work, de- spite considerable censorship. Much of this is fascinating, es- pecially in unusual cases such as the adaptation of Capote’s campy, gruesome story “Children on Their Birthdays” into a Christian family film. Pugh also makes some useful observa- tions about Capote’s sustained interest in pre-adolescent gay characters. Too often, however, Pugh’s research raises questions and leaves them unanswered. For example, he devotes a whole chapter to Capote’s failed attempt to make Lee Bouvier Radzi- will into a movie star by turning the classic 1944 noir film Laura into a TV movie in the late ’60s. Radziwill was the sis- ter of Jackie Kennedy and the wife of a Polish prince, and Capote seems to have thought that her glamour was sufficient to compensate for her lack of talent. But why was he so in-

vested in her career as a performer? More broadly, why was he so invested in the rich, upper-class women he called his “swans”? And why choose Laura , a mystery about a woman who’s the subject of an æsthete’s murderous obsession, a man who, if not gay, is certainly not straight? Pugh unearths fasci- nating details, but I kept waiting for him to make some sense of it all. When he does offer some analysis, a different kind of ques- tion arises. For example, he goes to great lengths to demon- strate the inadequacy of Capote’s script for the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby , which was rejected in favor of one by Fran- cis Ford Coppola. But the interesting question is why Capote proved unequal to this assignment. He was considered to be a reliable, hard worker by the studios, and Pugh documents the success of his screenplays for Beat the Devil , Indiscre- tions of an American Wife, and especially The Innocents . So what happened? Such questions do not detract from Pugh’s achievement in unearthing a bounty of archival material, much of it ephemeral. Movies and television were not the most important of Capote’s concerns, but they were certainly more important than is com- monly recognized. Pugh offers scholars a great gift by provid- ing what he calls a “Cinema Capoteana,” a bibliography of all of his screenplays and all adaptations of his work. ________________________________________________________ Jeff Solomon is a lecturer at the University of Southern California. His book Fabulous Potency: Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein will be published next year.

Jamie Brickhouse Remembers Mama ARTIST’S PROFILE

Jamie Brickhouse: Actually, I don’t love booze anymore. But my mother—I think about her every day. Was it hard? Sure, it’s revealing my own bad behavior. I had to come to terms with whether I was going to tell everything. With the alcohol side of things, I wasn’t so nervous. I had been sober for some time so that wasn’t such a hurdle. Talking about my mother, though? For a while, I felt I might be be- traying her. JB: No, there wasn’t. My family was very supportive about the book. My father gave me carte blanche. But I had to overcome my fear that I might betray her by writing about our relationship or her behavior. The last hurdle was revealing that I’m HIV-positive, because I was still in the closet about that. CS: Was there any pushback from family members? CS: In the book, you mention your mother died not knowing your status. JB: I never told her because I wanted to protect her. I was also, quite frankly, afraid that she’d say: “Goddammit! I told you so! I knew this would happen to you!” However,

even if she’d had that reaction at first, she would’ve gotten over it.

C OURT S TROUD “Y OU A BITCH OR WHORE ?” asks Jamie Brickhouse with a mis- chievous grin from across the lacquered coffee table in his trendy Chelsea flat in New York City. With his copper hair, black sweater, purple shirt, and indigo plaid trousers, it’s clear the author of the new book Dangerous When Wet (St. Mar- tin’s Press) is accustomed to colorful ac- cents, both on and off the page. As he pours from the silver teapot, curlicues of steam spill out of two china cups, each rimmed with broad bands of emerald and embla- zoned with campy epithets. With his back against a velour throw, a zebra-patterned pillow under one arm, and his tabby Lotte Lenya at his side, we begin our interview about the native Texan’s first book, a campy yet touching memoir about his struggles with the bottle, his sexuality, and his mother, Mama Jean. Court Stroud: Was it difficult for you to write so candidly about the three great loves of your life: booze, sex, and your mother?

CS: You struggled about whether to put your HIV status in the book? JB: I had shame about it. I don’t, for the most part, now. Although I didn’t write this book as a form of therapy, it’s helped me come to terms with being HIV-positive. It’s a disease, a condition, like any other. I de- cided, in the end, it’s crucial as a conse- quence of my drinking. CS: If you didn’t write the book as a form of therapy, why did you write Dangerous When Wet ? JB: Because I wanted to be a writer. I wrote from the time I was young. I wrote in high school. I wrote in college. I’ve always wanted to express myself artistically—and this was a story I had to tell. I started writ- ing it in a workshop a year after my mother died knowing that I wanted to tell this story. In other words, I had the fire in me to write this because I had to.

CS: Your mother tells you to be a writer during your freshman year of college. Why

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