August 22, 1914 – John Paul “Jack” Dunphy:
“I never wanted fame.”
Dunphy was raised in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. He studied ballet with Catherine Littlefield, danced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and toured with George Balanchine in 1941.
He married another dancer from Philadelphia, Joan McCracken. McCracken kept her type 1 diabetes a secret throughout her life in hopes that she could prevent any damage to her showbiz career. The disease made her prone to fainting spells, sometimes during performances.
In 1940, Dunphy and McCracken moved to New York City. At first, they both had trouble finding work as dancers, but McCracken was finally hired for a spot in Radio City Music Hall’s ballet company. She then joined The Dance Players, formed by choreographer Eugene Loring, with Michael Kidd the lead male dancer.
In 1942, McCracken and Dunphy both auditioned for a new a musical, Away We Go!, written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Agnes de Mille, who had just staged Aaron Copland‘s Rodeo for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, was hired to choreograph the show. The production went into rehearsals in early 1943. Dunphy and McCracken were cast in the dancing ensemble. In out-of-town tryouts, McCracken’s dancing was noticed by audiences and reviewers. By the time of the show opened on Broadway, it was renamed Oklahoma!. and she had refined her comic character of Sylvie (the girl who falls down), taking a pratfall in the Many A New Day number and gaining big laughs.
McCracken, who was quite a character, was a strong influence on her second husband, Bob Fosse, encouraging him to become a choreographer. She was one of the real-life counterparts that inspire the character of Holly Golightly in her friend Truman Capote‘s Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1958).
In 1944, while Oklahoma! was still playing to sold-out audiences, Dunphy enlisted in the U.S. Army. During his service in World War II, he sold his first work, The Life Of A Carrot, to Short Story magazine.
On evening in 1948, Dunphy met a man born Truman Streckfus Persons from Alabama at a swanky soiree in Manhattan. In 1932, Persons had moved from Monroeville, Alabama to New York City to live with his mother and her second husband, José García Capote, who adopted him as his son and renamed him Truman García Capote. He had made a big splash with his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms as “Truman Capote”. Capote was 11 years younger than Dunphy.
Within months of their meeting, the USA was gripped in the panic of the Cold War, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower deemed homosexuals to be “security risks” and vowed to rid the government of all employees discovered to be gay or lesbian. It was known as the Lavender Scare, and for the next four decades, tens of thousands of honest hard-working Americans lost their jobs or were denied employment because of their gayness.
At this time, Dunphy was divorced and had given up dance to become a writer. His novel John Fury (1946) about the lives of an impoverished Irish family in Philadelphia, had been called “remarkable…warm and strong” by Mary McGrory, a New York Times book critic. For Dunphy, the attraction to Capote was there from the moment they met:
“Truman arrived wearing a little cap and showing off. I thought he was adorable.”
The two writers began a 35-year relationship that evening. Dunphy wrote lucidly and sensitively about human despair and loneliness. Capote had been a troubled, precociously brilliant, lonely child, who taught himself how to read and write. Truman had lived mostly in Alabama with cousins and aunts in his formative years before joining his parents in New York, causing a separation anxiety that he later wrote “felt like being a spiritual orphan, like a turtle on its back“.
Harper Lee, Capote’s childhood friend, based the character Dill in To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) on Capote. Of Dill, Lee wrote: “We came to know him as a pocket Merlin, whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies”.
It seems to me that his sense of displacement prompted Capote the need to adopt his famously flamboyant personality, plus his copious consumption of alcohol. He was compulsive/obsessive; his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood (1966) consumed more than six years of his life. Capote ruined his own lofty social status by skewering his famous friends in La Côte Basque, 1966, an excerpt from his unfinished novel published in the November 1975 edition of Esquire. Capote soon started a slide into booze and drugs that ended with his death from what the coroner described as “liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication”. Remember, this is the little man who, in 1966, held a masked ball at the New York’s Plaza Hotel for 500 of his “very closest friends”, including his “swans” Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, and Babe Paley.
The Capote eccentricities, and his idiosyncratic and peculiar mannerisms, seduced Dunphy. In 1950, the two writers settled in Taormina, Sicily, in a house where writer D. H. Lawrence had once lived. During their decades as a couple, at their Manhattan apartment together, during their stays in Switzerland or the Italian Riviera, they would write together, and read each other’s manuscripts. After reading Dunphy’s fifth novel, First Wine, Capote said simply: “Jack, you’re a great artist.”
In most ways, Dunphy was Capote’s opposite, as solitary as Capote was exuberantly social. Though they drifted more and more apart in the later years, the couple stayed together until Capote’s death.
Poor Dunphy, he is doomed to be forever overshadowed by Capote. Nearly all of Capote’s works became bestsellers and were adapted to plays and films. Capote’s life was scrutinized by the press and the writer was a favorite on talk shows. As a couple they were seen around town at openings and events, and at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol‘s circle. Dunphy:
“We were always repeating the pattern that had commenced in childhood, when one’s need to escape from one’s own kind was so savage, so burning in its intensity, that had either of us stayed home, he would certainly have perished.”
When Capote died in 1984, his will named Dunphy as the beneficiary. Eight years later, Dunphy was taken by cancer at 77 years old. Dunphy and Capote had separate houses on the same property in Sagaponack, Long Island. The money from their estates went to The Nature Conservancy, which used it to acquire nearby Crooked Pond. Capote’s ashes were mixed with Dunphy’s and they were scattered on Crooked Pond. A stone marker indicates the spot where their mingled ashes were tossed onto the pond.
Joanna Carson, the third wife of Johnny Carson, always claimed that she had half of Capote’s ashes (a claim Dunphy denied) which she had kept at her home in Los Angeles home. Carson said she kept the ashes in an urn in the room where he died. Those ashes were reported stolen during a Halloween party in 1988, but were then returned six days later, having been found in a coiled-up garden hose on the back steps of Carson’s home.
She bought a crypt for Capote’s ashes at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Brentwood. It remains unclear if any ashes were ever deposited there.
Capote dedicated his short story One Christmas to Dunphy’s sister Gloria Dunphy.
Dunphy is played in the film Capote (2005) by Bruce Greenwood and in the movie Infamous (2006) by John Benjamin Hickey.
In 2013, the producers offered to fly Carson and the ashes to New York for a Broadway production of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Carson declined. In 2016, some of Capote’s ashes previously owned by Carson were sold at auction. Maybe, they were his.
