RADIO : Bud Cort’s Voice and Invective Suggest a Call From Capote

The voice is raspy and reedy, like a crone’s, and the bitchiness showered on everybody is outrageous.

This is radio, folks, and the actor is Bud Cort, bringing you the voice and invective of Truman Capote, who returns from the Great Divide to chat about his life and his friends (tonight, 8-9:30 p.m., KCRW, 88.9 FM).

Robert Morse may be doing Capote on Broadway in “Tru,” but Cort’s uncanny impersonation of the high-pitched, self-destructive social and literary butterfly will make eyes out of your ears. Nobody could dish the dirt like Capote, and the intimacy of this Rabelaisian theater of the air suggests a personal phone call from Capote himself.

The words, beginning with the beguiling line “Before I died . . . ,” are all adapted from Lawrence Grobel’s book and subsequent (unstaged) play, “Conversations With Capote.” (Grobel taped interviews with Capote up to the time of the writer’s death, at 59, six years ago.)

Director Christopher Toyne intersperses vocal interludes from a few of the celebrity subjects whom Capote exuberantly gnashes (such as “the mean-spirited” Jacqueline Kennedy, “that old French queen, Gide” and the “jealous” Gore Vidal). Capote’s rare compliments are for those he praises for favoring style over content (Billie Holiday, Flaubert).

You want a crash course in writers? Glitz? Sleaze? “All literature is gossip,” says Capote. You do come to understand why he lost many of his friends, and Capote does hint at “regret” for allowing those excerpts to be published from his last, unfinished tell-all manuscript, “Unanswered Prayers.”

But there are moments in Cort’s performance when the thin voice breaks and Capote’s frivolous mask disappears. When Cort’s Capote talks about researching and writing “In Cold Blood”--”the most emotional experience of my creative life”--the artist emerges.

At one point Capote even throws off his cloak of hedonism: “Actually, I was never that promiscuous. I didn’t have the energy.” You’ll never hear this material on TV.