MONROEVILLE, Ala. -- Some rare family photos and a collection of Truman Capote's letters to his favorite aunt in Alabama -- on topics ranging from Harper Lee to Tallulah Bankhead to his longing for down-home butter beans -- are going on permanent display in the state's literary capital, where the writer spent some of his boyhood.\nThe collection, while apparently containing no riveting new material on his life and times, is a coup for the town that was spun into memorable works by Capote and Lee, his childhood friend and neighbor. It was assembled by Capote's cousin, Jennings Faulk Carter, who donated it to the Monroe County Heritage Museums for an exhibit that opens April 27 in Monroeville's Old Courthouse on town square.\nCarter said there has been a "lot of static" in his family about turning over the family memorabilia, but he said he's making it public so people will learn more about his famous cousin.\n"I'm the only one that tried to accumulate the stuff that related to Truman and put it in a scrapbook," Carter, 79, a retired crop-duster pilot, said in an interview at the museum.\nThe carefully restored Old Courthouse in southwest Alabama already draws about 30,000 visitors a year, mainly to an exhibit about Lee, famous for her novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." A stage production of the book is performed each April and May, with the 16 performances drawing sold-out crowds to the 250-seat courthouse auditorium.\nCapote, who died in Los Angeles at age 59 in 1984, had close emotional ties to his aunt, Carter's mother, Mary Ida Faulk Carter, a younger sister of Capote's mother.\nA prolific correspondent, Capote wrote the bestseller "In Cold Blood," the Kansas murder story of the Clutter family that was featured in the movie, "Capote," which won an Academy Award for Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played the writer.\nThe memorabilia Jennings Carter preserved includes a dozen handwritten letters, which he said accumulated in dresser drawers, though some were lost over the years.
\nIn one, dated July 9, 1959, Capote tells his aunt that Lee -- known to family and friends by her first name, Nelle -- has a novel in the works: "Yes, it is true that Nelle Lee is publishing a book ... I liked it very much. She has real talent."\nIn another letter to his aunt, Capote, who loved gossip, discussed a planned trip to Alabama with another Alabama native, Tallulah Bankhead, He canceled the trip to go to Hollywood to work on the movie version of his book, "Breakfast at Tiffany's." He wrote that Marilyn Monroe will play Holly Golightly in the film -- a role that producers instead gave to Audrey Hepburn.\nHe wrote that Bankhead -- whose father was a congressman from Alabama -- would be disappointed in not going to Alabama, but it's probably good that she didn't stay in Monroeville because, he wrote, "Tallulah stays up all night every night and never gets up till five in the afternoon. She is a marvelous woman, and very amusing -- but oh so exhausting!\n"Two evenings with her would be enough to last you a lifetime."\nCapote also wrote about his stepfather's bad behavior after his mother's death in 1954, saying he shouldn't be expected to financially support him if he "wants to stay out all night dancing in nightclubs with a stable of girlfriends." Capote underlined "stable."\nIn closing the July 9, 1959, letter, Capote told his aunt, "Oh I do wish I could have some butter beans. Now! This very minute."\nMany of Capote's letters were published in "Too Brief a Treat," a collection edited by Gerald Clarke.\nClarke, who wrote a 1988 Capote biography, notes that Capote's letters can be found in libraries and personal collections throughout the United States and Britain. The largest collection is housed in the New York Public Library.\nClarke, who said he talked at great length with Carter's parents for his biography, has not seen the Carter collection but doubts it contains anything that would surprise him.
