Capote on campus: The writer’s 1966 visit to KU
The literary legend made a stop at KU in 1966 en route to the filming of ‘In Cold Blood.’
While traveling to Garden City with In Cold Blood’s filmmaking team, to begin preproduction on the movie adaptation of his wildly popular true crime novel, Truman Capote on April 20, 1966, made a stop at Allen Field House in a rare public appearance. A crowd of about 3,000 KU students gathered to see the celebrated author and hear him share “gory details” from his “blood-curdling best-seller.”
Lawrence Journal-World reporter Marian Warden began her of-its-time coverage by describing outfits worn by “Kansas University coeds”—“stretch pants, gym shoes, sweaters and skirts, cocktail dresses and high, spike heels.” Men, she noted, were dressed casually in faded blue jeans or decked out in pressed suits and starched collars, making it “difficult for this observer to guess whether they were going to a jam session or a semi-formal dance.”
Along with breathless description of confounding fashion on a campus in the early throes of transition into late 1960s pop culture, Warden emphasized that before they heard a word of In Cold Blood, the eager attendees first sat through Capote reading—in his “high, thin voice”—two now-revered short stories.
The first, “A Christmas Story,” drew “a healthy round of applause,” and was followed by soft drinks and cigarettes as attendees sat through a 15-minute intermission.
“Soon the audience was again all set to hear ‘In Cold Blood,’” Warden reported. “But instead they heard Capote’s description of ‘A Ride Through Spain.’” When the “short, greying author” finally picked up his copy of the slim, genre-defining book, he read only from its introduction. To his audience’s dismay, Capote shared none of the “gruesome details of the stranger-than-fiction” Clutter family murders that had shattered western Kansas seven years earlier, and certainly none of the insider gossip for which Capote was renowned.
“The name ‘Clutter’,” wrote the Journal-World’s reporter, “never was mentioned during the entire program.”
Kansas Bureau of Investigation special agent Alvin Dewey, In Cold Blood’s fearless and capable protagonist, accompanied Capote and reportedly drew the largest applause of the evening. Dewey’s son, Alvin III, c’69, g’71, who would go on to become assistant dean of admissions for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, was a KU freshman at the time, and, with the help of Lawrence businessman Odd Williams, b’49, l’52, the KBI investigator had arranged for Capote’s Lawrence stopover.
Capote and his entourage—including director and screenwriter Richard Brooks and Columbia Pictures executive Tom Shaw—stayed in Lawrence that evening, and the next morning joined KU students from the Garden City area for breakfast before departing for western Kansas on a chartered airplane.
You may also like: KU alumna Rosemary Hope, j’84, c’85, writes of Truman Capote’s visit to her family’s Garden City home on Christmas Day 1959, when the author was first covering the In Cold Blood murders, in A Capote Christmas: Recollections of writer’s heartland holiday.
Chris Lazzarino, j’86, is associate editor of Kansas Alumni magazine.
Photos courtesy of University Archives and Spencer Research Library
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