Transcription
On the night of November 28th, 1966, 540 people arrived at the Plaza Hotel in New York City wearing black and white and masks. They came from Hollywood and Washington and London and Rome. They were senators and film stars and novelists and socialites, and in a few cases, the doorman from the Plaza itself.
The host had been planning the evening since July, carrying a black and white composition notebook wherever he went, adding names and removing them, constructing what he would later call the most perfectly proportioned social event of the century. The host was 5' 3" tall, weighed roughly 120 lb, and spoke in a voice that sounded like something borrowed from a southern aunt and never returned. His name was Truman Capote. He was 42 years old, the most famous writer in America and at the absolute apex of everything he would ever achieve. He knew this. Most people at the party did not know it yet.
Truman Strike Persons was born on September 30th, 1924, in New Orleans to parents who were 19 and 17 years old, respectively, and wanted almost nothing to do with each other and very little to do with him. His father, Arch Persons, was a salesman who would spend the rest of his life pursuing schemes that came to nothing. His mother, Lily May, was beautiful and restless and had decided almost immediately that motherhood was not what she had in mind. When Truman was 4 years old and his parents divorced, she left him in Monroeville, Alabama, with a collection of elderly female cousins he would spend the rest of his childhood calling his aunts.
The house in Monroeville was large and enclosed by a high rock fence and presided over by women who smelled of talcum powder and old wood. The cousins were kind in a distracted way, and they left the small, peculiar boy largely to himself. He was delicate in appearance and extraordinary in intelligence, and spent his days reading everything he could find, and teaching himself to type on a machine left in the back bedroom. He was also, by his own description, the best-looking child he had ever seen. The confidence was real. It would serve him for decades.
The neighbor's daughter was 2 years younger than Truman and named Nell Harper Lee. She was the daughter of a local lawyer built like a boy and capable of producing violence at short notice on behalf of whoever she considered her friends. She became his protector in the way that only children who recognize each other's strangeness can protect one another. They climbed trees together. They wrote stories together. They stayed friends intermittently and then permanently for the rest of their lives.
Truman moved to New York in his early teens when his mother remarried a Cuban businessman named Joe Capote, whose surname he adopted. He never attended college. He got a job at The New Yorker carrying mail and talking to anyone who would listen, which was everyone. By the time he was 23 years old, he had published his first novel. *Other Voices, Other Rooms* appeared in January of 1948 and was discussed with a ferocity usually reserved for political scandals. The photograph on the dust jacket showed Truman reclining on a chaise with an expression that managed to be simultaneously innocent and knowing, and the letters that came in about the photograph were nearly as numerous as the letters that came in about the book. He was openly, conspicuously homosexual in an era that had no framework for what that meant beyond disgrace, and he wore the fact like a piece of couture that only he could afford. New York decided he was a phenomenon and invited him everywhere. *Breakfast at Tiffany's*, published in 1958, confirmed that the phenomenon had staying power. The character of Holly Golightly was immediately understood to be a version of someone real, and everyone argued about who, which was exactly what Truman intended. He had an instinct refined throughout his childhood among women who talked and whispered and observed from behind their screens for the precise amount of truth that makes fiction magnetic. He would use it one more time spectacularly, and it would destroy him.
In November of 1959, Truman read a small item in *The New York Times*. A family of four had been murdered in their home in Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutters were well-liked, prosperous, entirely ordinary people in the way that only certain Kansas families managed to be, and someone had cut their throats and shot them. The item ran to a few hundred words. Truman read it several times and then called his editor and said he was going to Kansas. He took Harper Lee with him. This was a practical decision. Truman in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959, with his small body and his affected voice and his tailored coat, was an apparition from a world so foreign that the town's people did not know what to do with him. Harper Lee was a large, plain, practical Alabama woman who had grown up 30 miles from where Truman had, and who could talk to anyone. She interviewed for 6 weeks, produced over 150 pages of notes, and largely made the book possible by creating the access Truman needed. The two killers, Richard Hickok and Perry Smith, were arrested in Las Vegas in late December of 1959 and brought back to Kansas. Truman visited them in prison over the following years with a regularity that required explanation and produced gossip. He was, by his own eventual admission, in love with Perry Smith in a way he never adequately defined and possibly never adequately understood. Smith was dark and compact and had been damaged in ways that Truman, the small boy abandoned by his mother, recognized and responded to. Whether Smith returned the feeling or simply understood that a famous New York writer was a more useful friend than most death row inmates could claim was a question that Truman preferred not to examine. He spent six years on it. He befriended the killers, Richard Hickok and Perry Smith, with a thoroughness that crossed into something beyond professional interest. When the state of Kansas executed them in April of 1965, Truman was present. He wept.
The book was published in January of 1966, had been serialized in *The New Yorker*, and sold in quantities that no serious literary work had sold in recent memory. Truman Capote became famous the way that very few writers ever become famous, not as a writer, but as a person. He decided to throw a party. The women had been accumulating around him for years. He called them his swans, and the name was accurate in the way that only nicknames given by people who see clearly are accurate. They were beautiful. They moved through the world with a quality of effortlessness that was entirely manufactured at enormous expense and sustained by the kind of discipline that most people mistake for ease. They had married men with money, or in some cases had simply been born with it, and they occupied the upper floors of a social structure that Truman, the boy from Monroeville, had always been able to see from below and had spent his adult life ascending.
Babe Paley was the first among them and the most important. She was born Barbara Cushing, the daughter of a Boston neurosurgeon, and she had grown up in a family that understood social position with the seriousness that other families reserved for religion. She had married first a Mortimer and then in 1947 a man named William S. Paley, who had built Columbia Broadcasting System into the most powerful television network in the world. She was known principally for her taste, which was perfect in the way that only a few people in any generation achieve. Truman loved her with a devotion that was entirely sincere and entirely complicated, which is the only way Truman loved anyone.
Slim Keith had been born Nancy Gross in California and had constructed herself into something quite different through a combination of good bones and better wit. She had been married to Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward and eventually a British banker named Kenneth Keith, which gave her a title she used sparingly. She was sharp in the way that women who have survived interesting marriages tend to be sharp, and she and Truman spent hours on the telephone conducting what she later described as the most entertaining conversations of her life.
Gloria Guinness had been born in Mexico to a family with no money and had ended up married to Loel Guinness, who had a great deal of it. The distance between these two points represented a journey of strategic precision that Truman found genuinely admirable. She was the most international of the swans, at ease in a way that people who have had to learn ease generally become.
Mollie Agnelli was Italian and married to the man who ran Fiat, and she and Truman shared a quality of observation so fine that their conversations could be read as collaboration.
Lee Radziwill was Jackie Kennedy's younger sister, which guaranteed a level of attention she had spent her life both seeking and resenting. She had married a Polish prince named Stanisław Radziwiłł and acquired a title that sounded more substantial than the marriage actually was. Her proximity to power was always defined partly by proximity to her sister, which she navigated with a mixture of grace and effort. Truman appreciated the effort and found the grace instructive.
C.Z. Guest gardened with a seriousness that Truman found puzzling and charming in equal measure.
Pamela Churchill Harriman, the most politically connected of the swans, had been married to Winston Churchill's son during the war and had parlayed a series of relationships with powerful men into a position of genuine diplomatic influence. She was a woman who understood with unusual clarity that access to powerful men is itself a form of power, and she had used it accordingly.
What bound these women together beyond their money and their social position was something more specific. They had each arrived at a point in their lives where almost everyone around them wanted something from them, and very few people were interested in who they actually were. Truman was interested. He asked questions and waited for the answers and remembered everything and asked follow-up questions weeks later, which is the most flattering thing you can do for a person who is accustomed to being admired but not actually seen. They opened themselves to him accordingly. It was a catastrophic error of judgment, and it was entirely understandable. What they gave him was access. What they gave him beyond that was something rarer. Honesty. Women of their position lived surrounded by people who wanted things from them, and Truman wanted things, too. But he also genuinely listened, which was unusual enough that the swans found themselves telling him things they had not told anyone else. He was the confessional and the confidant and the entertainer, and for a decade and a half, it worked perfectly for everyone.
William Paley was a man of considerable accomplishment and considerable appetite. He had built CBS from a Philadelphia radio station into a national empire. He was also, throughout his marriage to Babe, conducting affairs with a frequency and carelessness that suggested he did not expect anyone to notice or did not particularly care if they did. Babe noticed. She told Truman the specific information she passed to him over the years of their friendship was extensive. She talked about her husband's behavior with other women. She talked about the particular humiliation of being married to a man the world considered a great catch. She talked about the gap between the life she appeared to lead in the society pages and the life she actually led in the apartments and houses she shared with a man who had very little interest in her feelings. Truman listened and remembered. He always remembered. Their friendship had a quality of mutual dependency that went beyond what either of them would have described in public. She gave him respectability and access. He gave her the experience of being truly known by someone who found her interesting rather than simply admirable. She had spent her life being admired. It was not the same thing. He confided in her as well, or appeared to. He told her things about himself and about other people that she understood to be confidential. The transaction was mutual. The mistake she made, the mistake they all made, was in not understanding that for Truman, nothing was truly confidential when there was a better story to be told.
Truman described the planning of the ball as the most serious artistic project he had undertaken since *In Cold Blood*, which was not entirely a joke. He sat by the pool at his friend Slim Keith's house in July of 1966, and the idea arrived fully formed: a masked ball at the Plaza in black and white in honor of Katharine Graham, the publisher of *The Washington Post*, whose husband had recently taken his own life, and who Truman felt deserved to be cheered up in the grandest possible way. The guest list occupied three months. He carried the black and white composition book everywhere. He was on the telephone constantly. He added and removed names with the deliberateness of a general deploying troops. And the deliberateness was not accidental. Every decision on that list was a statement about who mattered and who did not. A declaration of Truman's taste and Truman's power encoded in 430 paper invitations. He invited Frank Sinatra and his then-girlfriend Mia Farrow. He invited Norman Mailer, which required a willingness to manage the chaos that Mailer's presence at any event inevitably produced. He invited Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda and Candice Bergen. He invited McGeorge Bundy, who had been national security adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson. He invited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who were old, faded, and still capable of causing a room to go silent. He invited Lee Radziwill, who was not Jackie Kennedy, but who would make people think of Jackie Kennedy, which served the same purpose. He invited the doorman of the Plaza Hotel. He did not invite the critics who had reviewed him badly. He did not invite certain actresses he considered insufficiently interesting. He did not invite people who bored him, which was a category that included a surprisingly large portion of New York society. The exclusions became, in their way, as famous as the inclusions. People spent weeks trying to determine whether they were on the list. Some of them were not, and would not forgive it.
The preparations in the weeks before the ball had produced a secondary social event as consuming as the ball itself. Women who had received invitations debated their gowns in the way that generals debate strategy. The requirement of black or white narrowed the field, but did not simplify the decision. Within those constraints, every choice of fabric and silhouette and accessory became an argument about who you were and how seriously you were taking this. Women who had not received invitations spent those same weeks in a state of distress that was occasionally comic and occasionally genuine, and the line between the two was never entirely clear.
The masks were the detail that separated Truman's event from any ordinary party. He had understood from the beginning that the mask was not a costume accessory, but a structural element. It forced people to look at each other differently. It removed temporarily the social shorthand of recognition that normally governs how the very rich and the very powerful interact with one another. Behind a mask, a senator and a doorman occupied the same formal position. And while this equality was brief and theatrical, Truman had judged correctly that even brief theatricality can change the temperature of a room.
The guests arrived at the Plaza on the evening of November 28th through crowds of onlookers who had gathered on Fifth Avenue to watch. The dress code had been explicit. Men wore black tie and black masks. Women wore black or white gowns with white masks or fans. The instruction that masks were to remain on until midnight had produced a secondary industry. Adolfo and Halston both designed custom masks for guests willing to spend several hundred dollars on the privilege, while Truman's own mask had cost 39 cents at a drugstore and was paper and rhinestone. The grand ballroom had been decorated with red tablecloths and gold candelabra threaded with smilax vines and white tapers instead of flowers because the florist Truman had originally engaged had suggested something too elaborate and been dismissed. The band played. The champagne moved in waves through the room. The masks stayed on, which had the intended effect. People talked to each other without the usual social calculations because behind a mask, it was briefly possible to forget who you were supposed to be and simply be interested. Truman moved through the room receiving tribute with the precision of a head of state who has waited a very long time for the appropriate ceremony. He danced with Katharine Graham, in whose honor the evening was ostensibly held, and with Babe Paley, and with Mia Farrow, and with people who would spend the rest of their lives describing the moment. At midnight, the masks came off.
By the time the last guests left at 4:00 in the morning, an understanding had settled over New York society. There was no one more socially powerful in the city than the small man with the composition notebook. He had organized the century's best party, and he had done it with a guest list that was, by consensus, perfect. It was the last perfect thing he would do.
The reviews in the following days were effusive in a way that suggested people had been waiting for something to be effusive about. *The New York Times* and *Women's Wear Daily* and the society pages of newspapers in three countries treated the ball as a cultural event rather than a party. Truman was photographed everywhere. He gave interviews in which his comments about who had and had not been invited were reported as social criticism. The position he occupied in the months after the ball was unusual and precarious in a way that he did not recognize and that his friends recognized but could not adequately convey to him. He was at the summit of a particular kind of American social achievement that has no formal name: the gay man of modest origins who has become so skilled at the performance of social grace that the people he performs for genuinely believe he is one of them. The swans believed he was one of them. The mistake was understandable. He had worked very hard to make it.
The party had been, among other things, a demonstration of something that the New York of 1966 was still working out: that social power and cultural power and financial power were not the same thing and did not always travel together, and that a man with none of the third and the first only on loan from his friends could, through sheer force of personality and intelligence, exercise the second absolutely. Truman had invited the president's national security adviser and a Kansas farm wife to the same party and seated them in adjacent rooms, and both had come, which told you something about what he had become. The question that nobody asked at the time, or not loudly enough for him to hear it, was what he was going to do next. The ball was a summit, and summits, by their nature, are followed by descents. The friendships and the invitations and the access were predicated on continued performance, on the ongoing production of the wit and the gossip and the literary reputation that justified the swans' investment of time and trust. He had been performing for 20 years. The performance required material. The material was what the swans had given him. He was also simultaneously a serious writer who had not written a serious book in years and had contracted to deliver one. The publisher, Random House, had a manuscript due. The advance had been generous. The title was *Answered Prayers*. Truman had told everyone who would listen that it would be his Parian novel, his life's work, his summation of everything he had seen and heard in 20 years of living among the most interesting people in America. The contract with Random House had been signed in 1966, the same year as the ball, with a delivery date of January 1st, 1968. Truman missed it. He renegotiated. He missed the next deadline. He renegotiated again. By the time the amount he had received in advances reached $1 million, he had produced fragments of chapters and an extraordinary volume of explanation for why the chapters were not yet complete. The truth, which he did not entirely admit to himself, and certainly did not admit to his publishers, was that the book he was writing required him to use material that could not be published without destroying the relationships that had provided it. The swans had given him the raw material of *Answered Prayers*: their secrets, their humiliations, their private assessments of their husbands and each other. He had transcribed them, barely disguised, into fiction. He knew what would happen when it appeared. He kept writing.
There was also a simpler problem. *In Cold Blood* had been possible because Truman had embedded himself in a Kansas community that had no power over his literary career or his social life. The subjects of *Answered Prayers* were not Kansas farm wives. They were the women who invited him to their houses in Southampton and Palm Beach and the South of France. He had to finish the book and live among these women simultaneously, which produced a paralysis that he addressed by drinking and appearing on television, and explaining to interviewers that the work was going brilliantly.
The story he carried most carefully, the one that had been passed to him under specific conditions of confidentiality, involved a woman named Anne Woodward. She was not one of the swans. She was, in the view of New York society of the 1950s, precisely the kind of woman the swans had been constructed to exclude. Anne Woodward had been born in Kansas and had come to New York and become a showgirl and a model and eventually, in 1943, the wife of William Woodward Jr., who was the heir to a banking fortune and a stable of racehorses and everything that his family had decided he should not waste on someone like Anne. The Woodward family received her with a coldness that the society pages recorded and everyone understood. She was tolerated because the marriage was legal. She was not accepted. On October 30th, 1955, the night after a dinner party in their home in Oyster Bay, Anne Woodward shot and killed her husband in a darkened hallway. She told police she had heard a prowler. A man named Paul Witz had indeed been on the property that night and was arrested. The grand jury returned a verdict of accidental death. Anne Woodward was legally innocent. Legally innocent was not the same as socially innocent, and New York society understood the difference. She was finished. She spent the years that followed in Europe, drifting through the cities where people who have been expelled from one world try to construct a smaller version of it. William Paley had known Billy Woodward well. He had told his wife Babe what he thought had actually happened. Babe had told Truman.
*Esquire* magazine published the first excerpt from *Answered Prayers* in its November 1975 issue. The chapter was called "La Cote Basque, 1965," named for a fashionable French restaurant on East 55th Street where Truman had spent many lunches listening and observing. The chapter was narrated by a character named P.B. Jones, who was understood immediately to be Truman. At a corner table at La Cote Basque, Jones encounters a woman named Lady Ina Coolbirth, who is understood immediately to be Slim Keith. Over lunch, the women at surrounding tables talk. A character named Anne Hopkins tells the story of how she shot her husband in a darkened hallway, believing him to be a prowler. Anne Hopkins was understood immediately to be Anne Woodward. A character named Sidney Dillon, married to a woman named Cleo, appears in the chapter in a story involving a sexual encounter with the wife of a state governor conducted in circumstances of some squalor. Sidney Dillon was understood immediately to be William S. Paley. Cleo Dillon was understood immediately to be Babe Paley. The story about the governor's wife was understood immediately to be one of William Paley's actual affairs, told to Truman in confidence by Babe, transformed into fiction with a thinness of disguise that amounted to a dare.
New York received the chapter the way cities receive catastrophic weather. First disbelief, then assessment of damage, then a long period of reckoning. The phones ran hot for weeks. Every person mentioned in the chapter, and every person who knew a person mentioned in the chapter, had an opinion about what Truman had done and why. Gloria Vanderbilt announced that the next time she saw Truman Capote, she was going to spit in his face. Anne Woodward had learned before the issue appeared on newsstands that she was in it. She was living in Paris. She obtained a copy and read it. On October 9th, 1975, she swallowed a cyanide pill and died in her apartment. Billy Woodward's mother, Elsie Woodward, was in her 90s and had spent 20 years maintaining a position on her daughter-in-law's guilt that she had never expressed publicly, but had never doubted privately. When she received word of Anne Woodward's death, she is reported to have said, "She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her." The sentence contains everything. It acknowledges without ambiguity what Elsie Woodward believed about the shooting in Oyster Bay. It acknowledges without ambiguity what the publication of *La Cote Basque* had done to a woman who had no remaining social protection. And it names precisely and permanently what Truman had done: not written about, not fictionalized, murdered.
Truman's response to the news of Anne Woodward's death was recorded by several people in his circle. He said very little. The woman had not been his friend. He had known the story secondhand. What he appears to have understood by October of 1975 was that the calculation he had made about the consequences of publishing the chapter had been catastrophically wrong. He had told people who warned him about the reactions of the swans: "They are too dumb. They will not know who they are." They knew exactly who they were. Babe Paley did not speak to Truman Capote again. This was the sentence that mattered most out of all the silences that followed publication of the chapter. The others stung. Slim Keith consulted a lawyer about a libel suit and decided not to pursue it and simply stopped answering the telephone when it was Truman. Gloria Guinness withdrew from the friendship with a completeness that suggested she had been waiting for a reason. Mollie Agnelli, the most restrained of the swans, simply became unavailable in all the ways that a woman with several houses and a full social calendar can become unavailable without ever saying a definitive word. Babe's silence was different because Babe's relationship had been different. She had told him things about her marriage to William Paley that she had not told anyone else in the world. The fictional Sidney Dillon's encounter with the governor's wife was not Truman's invention. It was Babe's information, carried out of the privacy of her marriage and placed on the page of a magazine sold at newsstands. She had trusted him with the specific, documented humiliation of her adult life, and he had published it.
Truman initially characterized the reactions as misguided. He told Dick Cavett that he had not expected anyone to be annoyed unless they had been left out. He told a journalist that the characters were fictional and the connections being drawn were the work of people with too much imagination and too little to do. In his apartment at United Nations Plaza, he reportedly wept and repeated the same sentence to the person who was with him: "I did not mean to. I thought they would come back." They did not come back. The social structure that had sustained him for 15 years—the party invitations and the houses and the long lunches and the telephone calls—collapsed over the course of a few months into a silence that was total. He had been Truman Capote, the most entertaining man in the room. He became overnight Judas in Tweeds.
In 1977, Babe Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 60 years old, had smoked for most of her adult life, and the diagnosis meant that the silence between her and Truman was running out of time in which to be maintained. He tried to reach her. He wrote letters. He called people who might carry a message. He wanted, by every account, to speak to her before she died. She did not respond. William Paley, whose infidelities had been anatomized in the pages of *Esquire* for the reading public, had no interest in facilitating a reconciliation. The friends, who might have served as intermediaries, had largely taken sides in the way that social circles, once disrupted, tend to calcify around the lines of division. Babe's side had more people on it. She died on July 2nd, 1978. She was 63 years old. Truman was not present. He was not invited to the funeral. He did not write publicly about her death, which was unusual for a man who had written publicly about almost everything that had ever happened to him. The people who knew him well understood the silence as a form of grief that had no adequate public expression. She had been the person he loved most. He had used what she told him in a way that made the love indistinguishable from betrayal. Whether he had intended this outcome was, by July of 1978, an irrelevant question. She was gone, and the silence was permanent, and he had no one to blame except the writer in him that had always found the story more important than the person who provided it.
The years between the publication of *La Cote Basque* and Truman's death stretched across nine years of diminishment. He drank. He took pills. He appeared on talk shows in conditions that prompted concern from audiences and embarrassment from hosts. He was on *The Tonight Show* and various other programs in states that his friends described as performances and his enemies described as collapse. And in retrospect, the distinction was less clear than it seemed at the time. He had a relationship with a man named John O'Shea that was, by the accounts of people who witnessed it, damaging in the specific way that relationships between alcoholics and the people who enable them tend to be damaging. His long-term partner, Jack Dunphy, who had been with him since 1948 and who was a writer of genuine quality and quiet disposition, remained technically present in his life, while practically absent, which was a reasonable response to what Truman had become. He continued to claim to publishers and journalists and anyone who would listen that *Answered Prayers* was nearly finished. It was not nearly finished. It had not been nearly finished for years. The million-dollar advance from Random House represented a contract with a deadline of March 1st, 1981, which he did not meet, producing another renegotiation and another deadline and another period of explanation. Whether the manuscript existed in any complete form became, over the course of these years, genuinely uncertain.
The television appearances of the late 1970s and early 80s are difficult to watch now. Partly because they are genuinely distressing and partly because you can still see beneath the distress. The performer who had once made a room of 500 people feel that they were exactly where the world was most alive. The intelligence was still there. The observation was still there. The wit emerged in flashes that made the surrounding incoherence more painful. By contrast, he was a man trying to perform a version of himself that required a stability he no longer possessed. And the gap between the performance and the reality was visible in the way that certain kinds of damage are visible, not all at once, but in accumulation, one appearance after another. He was arrested for drunk driving in Southampton in 1977. He attended rehabilitation programs. He emerged from them and drank again. He appeared on talk shows looking like a diminished version of himself. The performance of Truman Capote, which had been so brilliant and so sustained for so long, was breaking down in public in real time in front of audiences who were not always sure whether they were watching a tragedy or something else.
On August 25th, 1984, Truman Capote died in Bel Air, California, at the home of Joanne Carson, who had been the second wife of Johnny Carson and had remained one of the small number of people who had not abandoned him in the years after the publication of *Answered Prayers*. He was 59 years old. The official cause of death was liver disease complicated by phlebitis and the presence of multiple drugs in his system. He had been in failing health for years. He died in a bed that was not his own, in a city that was not really his, attended by a friend who had stuck around partly out of loyalty and partly because she was one of the few people left who would. Jack Dunphy received word of his death in New York, where he had been living separately, but remained Truman's designated heir and the executor of his estate. The two men had been together in one form or another for 36 years. Dunphy wrote a memoir called *Dear Genius*, published 3 years after Truman's death, which was the most honest document anyone close to Truman ever produced about what it had been like to be close to him.
The manuscript of *Answered Prayers* was never found. Whether it had been destroyed intentionally, lost in the course of a life conducted across too many apartments and houses, or never truly completed beyond what had already appeared in *Esquire*, was a question that remained open and was never answered. Three chapters appeared posthumously, assembled from what existed. They are good in the specific way that Truman's best work was always good: immediate, precise, and devastating in the accuracy of their social observation. They are also unfinished in a way that is hard to read without grief because you can see what the completed novel would have been and understand precisely what was lost.
Truman Capote left two perfect books and one unfinished one. He left a party that is still described as the finest private social event of the 20th century. He left a literary estate that generated significant royalties and a cultural presence that continued to grow in the decades after his death. Partly because the story of the swans and their betrayal was precisely the kind of story that each generation rediscovers and finds immediately compelling. He left behind women who had built walls around what had happened to them and maintained those walls with a consistency that was itself a kind of tribute to what he had done. Slim Keith wrote her memoirs and discussed the friendship and the betrayal without warmth but without excessive bitterness, which was perhaps the most honest response available to her. Lee Radziwill lived long enough to see the story dramatized in ways she declined to comment on. C.Z. Guest died in 2003, having never publicly forgiven him and never publicly accused him of anything worse than poor judgment. Babe Paley's daughter, Amanda Burden, said in later years that her mother had loved Truman, and that the love had been real, and that the betrayal had also been real, and that these two things existed simultaneously in a way that could not be resolved. This is probably the most accurate description available of what the friendship had been and what its ending had meant. Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, who was the daughter of Rita Hayworth and Prince Ali Khan, once observed that the cruelest thing you can do to someone who trusts you is to prove that their trust was misplaced. She was not speaking about Truman Capote, but she could have been.
The boy from Monroeville had wanted above everything else to be one of the people in the room. He had achieved it fully and permanently through talent and charm and work and the systematic cultivation of women who had no reason to distrust him. And then he had taken what they gave him and put it in a magazine and watched the room empty. He had always said that writing was the only thing he could do and the only thing he truly wanted to do. In 1975, when the choice between the writer and the friend had become unavoidable, he chose the writer. The writer did not finish the book. The only question worth asking at this distance is whether he knew when he sat down to write *La Cote Basque* that Babe would not come back. Whether he understood that the publication would be permanent and that Babe's silence would be permanent and that he was choosing the paragraph over the person. The people who knew him best could not agree on the answer. Some believed he had no idea what he was unleashing. Others believed he understood exactly.
The women who had given Truman Capote the material for the most scandalous literary work of the decade did not simply disappear when he died. Babe Paley was gone by 1978. But the others lived on for years, some of them for decades, carrying the friendship and the betrayal through marriages and divorces and deaths and reinventions that Capote never lived to see. This is what happened to the swans when the party was finally completely over.
Nancy Keith, known to everyone who mattered as Slim, did not produce her reaction to *La Cote Basque* in letters or interviews. She produced it eventually in 400 pages. Her memoir, *Slim, Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life*, was published in 1990 with a co-author named Annette Tapert and serialized in *Vanity Fair* before Slim herself died. She did not live to read the reviews. The memoir contains the most precise account any swan ever offered of what the friendship had actually been. She describes Capote telling her in one of their telephone conversations that he acted campy and performed himself for people so that they would be laughing with him rather than at him. She had replied at the time, "No, no, we love you." On the page, decades later, she leaves the exchange without comment. The gap between what she had said in the moment and what she understood when she wrote it down says more than any explicit verdict could. The question of whether Slim had been the real Lady Coolbirth in *La Cote Basque* was debated from the moment the issue appeared on newsstands. Some scholars believed the character was Pamela Harriman, whose social history more closely matched certain details in the text. Others believed it was a composite. Slim herself believed it was her, which was the only interpretation that mattered for the purposes of their friendship. She had read the story and recognized herself and never spoken to Capote again, and the certainty she felt about the identification was itself a piece of evidence, since people tend to recognize themselves most clearly in portraits that capture something true. Slim Keith died on April 16th, 1990, at the age of 72. She had spent her post-Capote decades between New York and London, maintaining the social position she had built through four marriages and a talent for friendship that was, by the time she died, entirely unimpaired. She had outlived Howard Hawks. She had outlived Leland Hayward, whom she described as the great love of her life. She had outlived Truman Capote by 6 years. The memoir was the last word, and she had chosen it carefully.
Of all the women in Capote's orbit, Pamela Churchill Harriman had perhaps the most remarkable second act. She had already had a first act that required some explaining. The daughter of an English baron, she had been married briefly during the war to Randolph Churchill and had conducted wartime affairs in London that became so well known they were considered a form of intelligence work. After the war, she had moved through marriages and relationships with some of the most powerful men in Europe and America before landing in 1971 on Averell Harriman, the railroad heir and diplomat who was 31 years her senior and worth considerably more than most of the others combined. After *La Cote Basque*, Pamela Harriman became a different kind of figure. Some scholars argued that she, not Slim Keith, was the real model for the unflattering Lady Coolbirth in the story. She did not comment publicly on the matter. What she did instead was transform herself into the most effective Democratic Party fundraiser in America. In 1980, she founded an organization called Democrats for the '80s, which became known informally as PAMPAC, and over the following years raised $12 million for the party. She organized dinner parties in Washington that functioned as policy seminars and talent showcases simultaneously. Jimmy Carter benefited. Walter Mondale benefited. Bill Clinton benefited, perhaps most of all. Averell Harriman died in 1986, leaving her the houses and the fortune and the social position in Washington that she had spent 15 years acquiring. In 1993, President Clinton appointed her United States ambassador to France. She moved to the American embassy in Paris, hosted the most sought-after dinners in the diplomatic quarter, and occupied a position of genuine influence in Franco-American relations at the precise moment when both countries were trying to figure out what the post-Cold War world required of them. The American embassy in Paris under Pamela Harriman became one of the social centers of the city. She entertained with the instincts she had spent 60 years developing, understanding that a dinner table, where the right people were placed in the right proximity to each other, was a foreign policy instrument, as effective as any formal communiqué. She spoke French with genuine fluency and moved through Parisian society with an ease that American diplomats rarely achieved because she had been arriving in European drawing rooms since the 1940s and had never entirely left them. What she had never done publicly was address her place in *Answered Prayers*. If she was the model for Lady Coolbirth, she had absorbed the identification without comment and redirected her energy into becoming something that no fictional character could match. The woman in the story was a socialite of fading consequence. The woman in the actual world became a senator's widow, a party chairman, an ambassador, and one of the most consequential political operatives of her generation. It was, by any measure, the better outcome. She died on January 5th, 1997, at the age of 76. The cause was a brain hemorrhage. She had been swimming in the pool at the Ritz Hotel in Paris earlier that day. The woman who had been introduced to Truman Capote at a party in the 1950s, whose social life had been mapped and dissected in his fiction, ended her days as an ambassador of the United States, representing the country she had adopted to the country where she died, in a hotel where Capote had once lived and where the bar still served a particular champagne cocktail she had preferred.
Lee Bouvier Radziwill spent more than 40 years after the publication of *La Cote Basque*, and during those years, she tried with varying success most of the things that wealthy women of her background tried in the 1970s and beyond. She opened an interior design business in 1976, secured a contract to design suites for a hotel chain, and was featured in *Architectural Digest*. The business did not survive its first decade. She attempted an acting career, appearing in a production of *The Philadelphia Story* in 1967, two years before the ball, which Capote himself had coached her through. She appeared in the television miniseries *The Winds of War* in 1983. Neither career became what she had hoped. What did become central to her later life was fashion, in the way that fashion becomes central to women who have always understood it as a form of self-construction. She worked as a style counselor to Giorgio Armani, maintained apartments in Paris and London, and eventually New York's Upper East Side, and was photographed regularly in the company of people who found her social history romantic and her aesthetic sensibility instructive. Her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, died in May of 1994. Lee outlived her by 25 years, which meant she outlived Jackie, outlived Capote, outlived Slim Keith, outlived Babe Paley, outlived almost everyone from the world that Capote had captured and destroyed in a single magazine issue. Her son Anthony Radziwill died of cancer in August of 1999, weeks after his cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash over the Atlantic. The losses accumulated with the specific cruelty that comes to people who live long enough to bury the generation below them as well as their own.
In the years before her death, Lee Radziwill gave occasional interviews in which she discussed Capote with a measured distance that suggested time had done its work. She remembered him as brilliant, as funny, as a person who had understood her in ways that other people had not. She did not forgive the betrayal explicitly. She did not condemn it with the same heat that had marked the years immediately after publication. She had simply lived past it, the way you live past a room that was once important and is now just somewhere you used to go. There was a particular irony in Lee Radziwill's relationship to Capote's memory that she seemed to understand. He had coached her through the acting role she had attempted in 1967, spending weeks on the telephone with her as she prepared for *The Philadelphia Story* in Chicago, advising her on delivery and presence and how to hold the audience's attention, which was something he knew about from extensive personal experience. The role had not gone well. The critics had been kind in the way that critics are kind when they want to be honest but do not feel they can. Capote had not made her an actress. He had simply been present for the attempt in the way he was present for all the things his swans tried to do that did not quite work, offering encouragement with the genuine warmth that made him indispensable to them and the sharp eye that noticed everything they preferred he would not. When the FX series about the betrayal was broadcast in 2024, Calista Flockhart played Lee Radziwill. Lee had been dead for 5 years by then. The actress who played her was working from interviews and photographs, and the written record of a woman who had spent her adult life being the second most famous person in every room she entered, always standing slightly to the left of her sister's extraordinary gravity, and who had found in Truman Capote someone who thought she was interesting in her own right. Whatever his other failings, he had given her that. She died on February 15th, 2019, in her Upper East Side apartment. She was 85 years old.
Cornelia Guest, known since her debutante years as C.Z., addressed the problem of what to do after Capote in the most literal possible way. She went into the garden. Her Palm Beach estate, a property called Villa Artemis, became over the following decades
One of the most written about private gardens in America. She published books on gardening. She appeared in magazines sitting among her own flowers with a practicality that made her seem less like a socialite who had found a hobby and more like a gardener who happened to have a famous address.
Andy Warhol photographed her extensively throughout the 1970s and 80s, producing portraits that captured something that the society photographs of the 50s and 60s had missed: a woman who was genuinely comfortable with herself in a way that her set very rarely managed to be. She attended his factory gatherings and his parties with the same ease she brought to Palm Beach and the horse shows she judged and the various committees she sat on with the thoroughness of someone who considered social obligation a serious form of work.
Her daughter Cornelia became a socialite and model of the next generation, known more for her fashion appearances than for any inherited estate, which was its own kind of commentary on what the world had become. The Warhol friendship deserves a moment. He photographed CZ throughout the 1970s and 80s, and the portraits he produced captured something that her social peers rarely allowed to be captured: genuine relaxation. Most of the women Capot knew presented themselves with a degree of armor that was invisible until you saw a photograph where someone had managed to photograph them without it. Warhol had a talent for that, and CZ apparently trusted him in the way that she had once trusted Capot, which was the trust of a person who understood they were being observed and did not particularly mind. She had known Capot before the ball and after the publication, and had simply continued to know herself, which is the rarest and most useful quality available to a person navigating a social world that is always on the verge of collapse.
The garden was not a retreat. It was an assertion. "This is what I do, and I do it well. And the rest of the noise is exactly that." CZ Guest died on November 8th, 2003 in Palm Beach at the age of 83. She had spent 43 years after the ball doing exactly what she wanted to do, which was not nothing.
Mela Agnelli was the most European of the Swans and the most private. She had been born in Naples, married into the Agnelli dynasty that controlled Fiat and therefore controlled a significant portion of Italian economic life, and had spent her adult years moving between the Agnelli houses in Turin and Villa Perosa and the boat and the various residences that came with being married to one of the most powerful men in postwar Italy. When Giani Agnelli died in January of 2003, she had been with him for more than 50 years. She outlived him by 16 years.
She published books on Italian gardens that were received as authoritative documents of a particular kind of private beauty that most people would never see in person. She gave interviews in which she discussed design and architecture and the vanishing world of a certain European upper class with the thoughtfulness of someone who had watched it disappear from inside. She did not, by most accounts, discuss Truman Capot frequently. Mela Agnelli died on February 3rd, 2019. She was 91 years old.
The coincidence was the kind that a fiction writer would have removed for being too neat. Mela Agnelli died on February 3rd, 2019. Lee Radziwill died on February 15th, 2019. 12 days separated them. They had been at the ball together in 1966. Had known Capot in the years when knowing Capot was the most socially consequential friendship available to a woman of their position and had lived through the betrayal and the ostracism and the decades of distance and had died in the same winter month more than half a century later.
Nobody had written a news story connecting them at the time. They had occupied different countries, different social worlds, different decades of widowhood and reinvention. Mela had been in Turin. Lee had been on the upper east side of Manhattan. The fact that they had both been at the Plaza Hotel in 1966, both wearing black or white and masks, both in conversation with the man who would later use their confidences as material, was a biographical detail rather than a living bond by the time they died.
And yet the closeness of the timing felt from the outside like something not supernatural, not meaningful in any mystical sense, but structurally resonant in the way that history occasionally produces endings that seem to have been arranged. The world of the swans had been Truman Capot's great subject and his great failure. The last of them left it in the same month, in the same year, as if the story had finally decided it was time to close. The last of the original swans to leave was not Babe Paley in 1978, who had started the chain of departures. It was two women dying 12 days apart in a February that nobody had marked on any calendar as significant and international competition that had transformed the automotive industry beyond recognition.
Mela was not at the center of those disputes. She occupied the margins of the family drama in the way that the wives of great men often occupy the margins of their husband's posthumous complications: present and peripheral simultaneously. She gave interviews over her final years in which she discussed design with the authority of someone who had lived in beautiful spaces for eight decades and understood what made them work. She discussed Giani with the equanimity of a woman who had been married to a man of enormous appetites and complicated fidelities and had decided long ago what the terms of the arrangement were. She did not, in the interviews available to record, discuss Truman Capot. Perhaps there was nothing to add that the silence did not already say.
She had been at the ball. She had been in his circle. She had watched what happened and drawn her conclusions and gone on living in the specific way that Italian aristocratic women of her generation went on living: with a discipline and a beauty and a refusal to be defined by other people's narratives that was itself a form of reply. Of all the women in Capot's circle, Gloria Guinness left the smallest documentary record of what she thought and felt about the betrayal. She had been born in Mexico in 1912, the daughter of a family with nothing and had constructed herself through marriages and relationships and an instinct for beautiful objects and beautiful places into one of the most admired women in Europe. She had ended up with Loel Guinness, the banker and aviation entrepreneur, and had spent her middle years between Paris and Mexico, and the yachts that served as the primary social venue for the kind of international wealth she moved among. The last years of her life were spent largely between Marbella and Paris, in the company of the small circle of people who had known her long enough to accept the conditions under which she allowed herself to be known.
She had been born with nothing and had constructed everything, and the construction required maintenance that casual acquaintance could not provide. She dressed in Balenciaga and was considered one of his most devoted clients. She had the kind of relationship with a designer that is only available to women who understand clothing as a form of argument. Each piece a position taken, each appearance a statement of terms. What she had thought about answered prayers, about the specific transaction it represented between a man she had trusted and the world he had shared her with, is not recorded with any precision. She was not a woman who made her interior life available for documentation.
The 5 years between publication and her death were quiet in the way that the lives of reclusive wealthy women are quiet: full of things happening, none of them narrated. She died on September 18th, 1980 in Paris. She was 67 years old. She had lived only 5 years after the publication of *La Côte Basque 1967*, which meant she died knowing exactly what Capot had done, and without the benefit of the distance that time eventually provides to people who stay alive long enough to receive it. What she had said to him in the years between, if anything, was not recorded. She had been reclusive in the specific way of women who have constructed themselves carefully and understand that extended exposure is a threat to the construction.
Truman Capot died in 1984. The swans outlived him, most of them significantly, and the story outlived the Swans. In 2005, a film called *Capote* examined the years of the *In Cold Blood* research with Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role. The following year, a separate film called *Infamous* covered the same period with Toby Jones. Both were received as serious work. Neither touched the *La Côte Basque* affair with the same depth that the story deserved.
In 2024, the streaming series *Feud: Capote vs. The Swans* dramatized the betrayal and its aftermath with Tom Hollander as Capot and a cast that included Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, Demi Moore as Ann Woodward, and Kalista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill. The series was reviewed as stylish, emotionally acute, and sometimes speculative in ways that the historical record did not support, which is the standard problem with dramatizations of recent events involving people whose families are still alive. The *Feud* series was produced by Ryan Murphy and ran eight episodes on FX in 2024. Tom Hollander's portrayal of Capot was praised for its physical precision and its sense of the man's fundamental loneliness: the way he had constructed the most glamorous social life of his era, precisely because he needed it more than anyone in it needed him. Naomi Watts played Babe Paley as a woman of almost unbearable elegance and quiet devastation, which was probably accurate. Demi Moore's Ann Woodward appeared briefly but memorably, and the episode depicting the publication of *La Côte Basque* was reportedly one of the most discussed episodes of the season.
Critics who had access to the historical record noted the series' liberties. Some of the dialogue it put in the swans' mouths was invented. Some of the chronology was compressed. Some of the emotions were amplified for dramatic effect in ways that the actual record—careful and understated in the way that people who have been publicly humiliated tend to be—did not support. This is always the situation with dramatizations of events that happened to real people who left real documents. The dramatization is always slightly too large, slightly too loud, slightly too certain about things that the record leaves ambiguous. It does not make the core of the story any less true.
What the dramatizations confirmed, whatever their individual accuracy, was that the story had not lost its power to compel people who had not been there. The images remained: the grand ballroom of the Plaza in November of '66. 540 people in black and white and masks at the summit of a world that would not last much longer. The small man with the composition notebook, who had planned it all, who had assembled this particular room at this particular moment.