On the night of November 28, 1966, five hundred and forty people arrived at the Plaza Hotel in New York City dressed in black and white, their faces hidden behind masks. They came from Hollywood, Washington, London, and Rome, and they included politicians, movie stars, novelists, socialites, and the doorman of the Plaza itself. The host had been planning the evening since July, carrying a black-and-white notebook everywhere he went, adding names and removing others, building toward what he would later call the most balanced social event of the century. He was five feet three inches tall, weighed about one hundred and twenty pounds, and spoke in a voice that sounded like something borrowed from a Southern aunt and never returned.
His name was Truman Capote. He was forty-two years old, the most famous writer in America, and at the summit of everything he could achieve in his lifetime. He knew it. Most of the people in the room did not realize it yet.
Born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans, he was the unwanted child of two teenagers who wanted nothing to do with each other and very little to do with him. His father, Arch Persons, was a salesman who spent his life chasing schemes that came to nothing. His mother, Lillie Mae, was beautiful and troubled, and she decided almost immediately that motherhood was not what she aspired to. When Truman was four, his parents separated and left him in Monroeville, Alabama, with a collection of elderly female relatives he would spend the rest of his childhood calling his aunts.
The house was large, ringed by a high rock wall, and run by women who smelled of talcum powder and old wood. They were kind in a distracted way and left the strange little boy largely to himself. He was delicate-looking and ferociously intelligent, spending his days reading everything he could find and teaching himself to type on a machine left in a back bedroom. He was also, by his own account, the prettiest child he had ever seen.
That confidence was real, and it served him for decades. The neighbors’ daughter, two years younger, was a girl named Nelle Harper Lee. She was a lawyer’s daughter, boyish and quick to violence in defense of anyone she considered a friend. She became his protector in the way only children who recognize their own strangeness in each other can.
They climbed trees together. They wrote stories together. They remained friends, intermittently and then permanently, for the rest of their lives. Truman moved to New York in his early teens after his mother remarried a Cuban businessman named Joe Capote, whose surname he took.
He never attended university. He got a job at The New Yorker fetching mail and talking to anyone who would listen, which turned out to be everyone. By the age of twenty-three he had published his first novel. Other Voices, Other Rooms appeared in January 1948 and was discussed with a ferocity usually reserved for political scandals.
The cover photograph showed Truman reclining on a couch with an expression combining innocence and knowingness, and the letters that arrived about the photograph nearly equaled those about the book. He was openly and unapologetically gay in an era that had no framework for what that meant except shame, and he wore the fact like a piece of high fashion no one else owned. 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.
Holly Golightly was immediately understood as a version of a real person, and everyone argued about who she was, which was exactly what Truman wanted. He had inherited from his childhood among gossiping women the gift of gauging the precise amount of truth that makes fiction magnetic. He would use that gift one final, spectacular time, and it would destroy him. In November 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 beloved, well-off, and utterly ordinary in the way only certain Kansas families can be, and someone had slaughtered them. The article was a few hundred words. Truman read it several times, then called his editor and announced he was going to Kansas.
He took Harper Lee with him. She was a practical, plainspoken Alabama woman raised thirty miles from where Truman grew up, and she could talk to anyone. She conducted interviews for six weeks, produced more than 150 pages of notes, and made the book possible by providing the access Truman needed. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested in Las Vegas in late December 1959 and returned to Kansas.
Truman visited them in prison over the following years with a regularity that raised questions and fueled rumors. He was, by his own eventual admission, infatuated with Perry Smith in a way he never precisely defined and perhaps never fully understood. Smith was dark and stocky and psychologically damaged in ways Truman recognized from his own abandoned childhood, and he responded to it. Truman spent six years on the book.
He befriended both killers with a seriousness that exceeded mere professional interest, and when Kansas executed them in April 1965, Truman was present. He wept. The book, In Cold Blood, appeared in January 1966 after being serialized in The New Yorker, and achieved sales no serious literary work had seen in recent memory. Truman Capote became famous in a way few writers ever do, not just as a writer but as a public figure.
He decided to give a party. The women had been gathering around him for years. He called them his swans, and the name was precise in the way nicknames are precise only when invented by people with sharp vision. They were beautiful.
They moved through the world with an ease that was entirely manufactured, at enormous expense, with a discipline most people mistook for spontaneity. They had married wealthy men, or in some cases been born with golden spoons in their mouths. They occupied the upper floors of a social structure Truman, the boy from Monroeville, had spent his adult life climbing toward. The first and most important was Babe Paley.
Born Barbara Cushing, daughter of a Boston neurosurgeon, she married William S. Paley, the man who built CBS into the most powerful television network in the world. She was known primarily for her taste, which was perfect in the way only a few people in any generation achieve. Truman loved her with a devotion that was entirely sincere and entirely complicated.
Slim Keith, born Nancy Gross, had reinvented herself through a combination of striking looks and sharp intelligence. She married Howard Hawks, Leland Hayward, and finally a British banker, and she and Truman spent hours on the phone in what she later described as the most entertaining conversations of her life. Gloria Guinness had been born poor in Mexico and ended up married to Loel Guinness, who had a great deal of money. Marella Agnelli was Italian, married to the man who ran Fiat.
Lee Radziwill was Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister. Babe Paley’s husband was powerful; Slim Keith was sharp; Gloria Guinness was strategic; Marella Agnelli was discreet. What bound these women together, beyond money and status, was something more specific. They had all reached a point in their lives where everyone around them wanted something from them, while very few people were interested in knowing who they actually were.
Truman was interested. He asked questions, waited for answers, remembered everything, and followed up weeks later. That is the most flattering thing in the world for someone used to being admired without being seen. So they opened their hearts to him.
It was a catastrophic miscalculation, and entirely understandable at the same time. The party planning consumed the summer and fall of 1966. Truman described it as the most serious artistic project he had undertaken since In Cold Blood, which was not entirely a joke. The idea arrived complete while he was sitting by a pool at a friend’s house in July: a black-and-white masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in honor of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, whose husband had recently committed suicide and who Truman felt deserved to be cheered in the greatest possible way.
The guest list took three months. He carried the black-and-white notebook everywhere. Every decision on that list was a statement about who mattered and who did not. He invited Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer, Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, Candice Bergen, McGeorge Bundy, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
He invited Lee Radziwill. He invited the Plaza doorman. He did not invite critics who had reviewed him negatively. He did not invite actresses he found uninteresting.
The exclusions became, in their own way, as famous as the invitations. People spent weeks trying to find out whether they were on the list. Some were not, and they never forgave it. In the weeks before the party, the preparations generated a secondary social event as consuming as the party itself.
Women who received invitations discussed their gowns the way generals discuss strategy. The black-or-white requirement narrowed the options but did not simplify the decision. Women who did not receive invitations spent the same weeks in distress that was sometimes comic and sometimes real. The masks were the detail that distinguished Truman’s event from any ordinary party.
He understood from the beginning that the mask was not just a costume accessory but a structural element. It forced people to look at each other differently. It temporarily removed the social shorthand of recognition that normally governed how the wealthy and powerful interacted. Behind a mask, a senator and a doorman occupied the same formal status.
The equality was brief and theatrical, but Truman judged correctly that even a brief theatrical display could change the atmosphere of a room. The guests arrived at the Plaza on the evening of November 28 through crowds of onlookers gathered on Fifth Avenue. The dress code was explicit. Men wore tuxedos and black masks.
Women wore black or white dresses with white masks or hand fans. The instruction that masks remain until midnight created a secondary industry. Adolfo and Halston designed custom masks for guests willing to spend hundreds of dollars, while Truman’s own mask had cost thirty-nine cents at a drugstore and was made of paper and rhinestones. The Grand Ballroom was decorated with red tablecloths, gold candelabra wrapped in smilax vine, and white candles instead of flowers, because the florist Truman originally engaged had proposed something excessive and was dismissed.
The band played. The champagne moved in waves through the room. The masks remained in place, producing the intended effect. People talked to each other without the usual social calculations, because behind a mask you could briefly forget who you were supposed to be.
Truman moved through the room receiving congratulations with the precision of a head of state who had waited a very long time for proper ceremony. He danced with Katharine Graham, in whose honor the party was ostensibly given, 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 four in the morning, an understanding had settled over New York society.
No one in the city was more socially powerful than the small man with the notebook. He had organized the best party of the century, with a guest list that was, by unanimous agreement, 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 excited about.
The New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and society pages in three countries treated the party as a cultural event rather than a mere gathering. Truman was photographed everywhere. He gave interviews in which his comments about who was and was not invited circulated as social criticism. The position he occupied in the months after the party was unusual and dangerous in a way he did not recognize.
He was at the summit of a particular kind of American social achievement. The gay man of modest origins who had become so skilled at performing social grace that the people he performed for sincerely believed he was one of them. The swans believed. It was a natural error.
He had worked hard to make it true. The question no one asked at the time, or no one asked loudly enough for him to hear, was what he would do next. The party was a summit, and summits are followed by descents. The friendships, the invitations, the access, all rested on continued performance, on the ongoing production of wit and gossip and literary reputation that justified the swans’ investment of their time and their trust.
He had been performing this role for twenty years. Performance requires raw material. The material was what the swans gave him. He was simultaneously a serious writer who had not written a serious book in years, under contract to deliver one.
Random House held an overdue manuscript. The advance was generous. The title was Answered Prayers. Truman told everyone who would listen that it would be his Proustian novel, his most important work, his distillation of twenty years spent among the most interesting people in America.
The contract was signed in 1966, the year of the party, with a delivery date of January 1, 1968. Truman missed the deadline. He renegotiated. He missed the next deadline.
He renegotiated again. By the time his advance reached one million dollars, he had produced fragments of chapters and an enormous volume of explanations about why the chapters were not complete. The fact he did not fully admit to himself, and certainly not to his publishers, was that the book he was writing required using material that could not be published without destroying the relationships that had provided it. The swans had given him the raw material for Answered Prayers: their secrets, their humiliations, their private assessments of their husbands and of each other.
He transposed them with minimal disguise into literature. He knew what would happen when the book appeared. He kept writing anyway. The story he guarded most carefully, the one told to him under specific conditions of confidence, concerned a woman named Ann Woodward.
She was not one of the swans. She was, in the view of 1950s New York society, precisely the kind of woman the swans had been created to exclude. Born in Kansas, she had come to New York to be a showgirl and model, and in 1943 she married William Woodward Jr. , heir to a banking fortune and a racing stable, heir to everything his family decided he should not waste on someone like Ann.
The Woodwards received her with a coldness recorded by the society pages and understood by everyone. She was tolerated because the marriage was legal. She was not accepted. On October 30, 1955, the night after a dinner party at their home in Oyster Bay, Ann Woodward shot her husband and killed him in a darkened hallway.
She told police she had heard a prowler. A man named Paul Witz was indeed on the property that night and was arrested. A grand jury ruled the death accidental. Ann Woodward was legally innocent.
Legal innocence was not social innocence, and New York society knew the difference. Her end had come. She spent the following years in Europe, drifting through cities where people expelled from one world try to build a smaller version of it. William Paley had known Billy Woodward well.
He told his wife, Babe, what he believed had actually happened. Babe told Truman. Esquire published the first excerpt from Answered Prayers in its November 1975 issue. The chapter was titled “La Côte Basque 1965,” after the fashionable French restaurant on East 55th Street where Truman had eaten many lunches listening and watching.
The chapter was narrated by a character named P. B. Jones, immediately understood to be Truman. At a side table at La Côte Basque, Jones meets a woman called Lady Ina Coolbirth, immediately understood to be Slim Keith.
At lunch, the women at surrounding tables talk. A character called Ann Hopkins relates the story of shooting her husband in a darkened hallway, mistaking him for a prowler. It was immediately understood that Ann Hopkins was Ann Woodward. A character called Sidney Dillon, married to a woman named Cleo, appears in the chapter in a story involving a sexual encounter with a governor’s wife under somewhat sordid circumstances.
Sidney Dillon was immediately understood to be William S. Paley. Cleo Dillon was immediately understood to be Babe Paley. The governor’s wife story was one of William Paley’s real affairs, which Babe had told Truman in confidence and which he had converted into fiction with a disguise so thin it approached a dare.
New York received the chapter the way cities receive catastrophic weather. First shock, then damage assessment, then a long period of accounting. The phones burned for weeks. Everyone mentioned in the chapter, and everyone who knew someone mentioned in it, had an opinion about what Truman had done and why.
Gloria Vanderbilt announced that the next time she saw Truman Capote, she would spit in his face. Ann Woodward learned before the issue reached newsstands that she was in it. She was living in Paris. She obtained a copy and read it.
On October 9, 1975, she swallowed cyanide and died in her apartment. When Billy Woodward’s mother, Elsie Woodward, received the news of Ann’s death, she was reported to have said: “She shot my son, and Truman has just killed her. ” That sentence contains everything. It acknowledges without ambiguity what Elsie Woodward believed about the shooting in Oyster Bay.
It acknowledges what the publication of “La Côte Basque” did to a woman with no social protection left. And it names precisely and permanently what Truman had done. He had not written about her. He had not fictionalized her.
He had killed her. Truman’s reaction to the news of Ann Woodward’s death was recorded by several people in his circle. He said little. She was not his friend.
He had known the story from a secondhand source. What he appears to have understood by October 1975 was that his calculations about the consequences of publishing the chapter had been catastrophically wrong. He had told people who warned him about the swans’ reactions: They are too stupid to know who they are. They knew exactly who they were.
Babe Paley never spoke to Truman Capote again. That was the most significant sentence of all the silence that followed publication. The others were painful. Slim Keith consulted a lawyer about a defamation suit and decided not to pursue it, settling simply for not answering the phone when the caller was Truman.
Gloria Guinness withdrew from the friendship with a finality that suggested she had been waiting for a reason. Marella Agnelli, the most reserved of the swans, simply became unavailable in every way a woman with several houses and a busy social calendar could become unavailable without a decisive word. Babe’s silence was different because the relationship was different. She had told him things about her marriage to William Paley that she had told no one else in the world.
Sidney Dillon’s fictional encounter with the governor’s wife was not Truman’s invention. It was Babe’s information, transferred from the privacy of her marriage and placed on the pages of a magazine sold at newsstands. She had entrusted him with the specific documented humiliation of her adult life, and he had published it. Truman initially described the reactions as misplaced.
He told Dick Cavett that he had not expected anyone to be upset unless they had been excluded. He told a journalist that the characters were fictional and that the connections being drawn were the work of people with overactive imaginations and little to do. In his apartment at United Nations Plaza, he reportedly wept and repeated the same sentence to whoever was with him: I didn’t mean it. I thought they would come back.
They did not come back. The social architecture that had supported him for fifteen years, the party invitations, the houses, the long lunches, the telephone calls, collapsed over the course of a few months into total silence. He had been the funniest man in the room. Overnight he became Judas in tweed.
In 1977, Babe Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was sixty years old. Truman tried to reach her. He wrote letters.
He called people who might carry a message. He wanted, by all accounts, to speak to her before she died. She did not respond. William Paley, whose betrayals had been dissected in the pages of Esquire for the reading public, had no interest in facilitating a reconciliation.
The friends who might have served as intermediaries largely took sides, in the way social circles, once disturbed, tend to harden along lines of division. Babe’s side had more people. She died on July 2, 1978. She was sixty-three.
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 wrote publicly about almost everything that happened to him. The people closest to him understood this silence as a form of grief that could not be expressed in public.
She had been the person he loved more than anyone else. He had used what she told him in a way that made love indistinguishable from betrayal. Whether he had intended that result had become an irrelevant question by July 1978. She was gone, the silence was permanent, and there was no one to blame but the writer inside him, who had always believed the story mattered more than the person who provided it.
The years between the publication of “La Côte Basque” and Truman’s death spanned nine years of diminishment. He drank. He took pills. He appeared on talk shows in states that alarmed the public and embarrassed the hosts.
He continued to claim to publishers, 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. He was arrested for driving under the influence in Southampton in 1977.
He attended rehabilitation programs. He left them and resumed drinking. He appeared on talk shows looking like a diminished version of himself. The Truman Capote performance, so brilliant and so sustained for so long, was collapsing in public and in real time before an audience never entirely sure whether they were watching a tragedy or something else.
On August 25, 1984, Truman Capote died in Bel Air, California, in the home of Joanne Carson, Johnny Carson’s second wife, who remained one of the few people who had not abandoned him in the years after publication. He was fifty-nine. The official cause of death was liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drugs in his system. His health had been declining for years.
He died in a bed that was not his, in a city that was not really his, cared for by a friend who remained partly out of loyalty and partly because she was one of the few still willing. Jack Dunphy, his longtime partner, received the news in New York, where he had been living separately, but he remained Truman’s designated heir and executor. The two men had been together, after a fashion, for thirty-six years. The manuscript of Answered Prayers was never found, and whether it had been deliberately destroyed, lost in the shuffle of a life that moved through too many apartments and houses, or never completed beyond what was published in Esquire, remained a question that was never answered.
Three chapters were published posthumously, assembled from whatever existed. They are good in the specific way Truman’s best work was always good: direct, precise, startling in their social observation. They are also incomplete in a way that is difficult to read without sadness, because you can see what the completed novel would have been and understand exactly what was lost. Truman Capote left behind two perfect books and one unfinished one.
He left behind a party still described as the most glamorous private social occasion of the twentieth century. He left behind a cultural presence that continued to grow for decades after his death. He left behind women who built walls around what had happened to them and maintained those walls with a firmness that was itself a form 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.
Lee Radziwill lived long enough to see the story dramatized in ways she declined to comment on. C. Z. Guest died in 2003 without publicly forgiving him and without publicly accusing him of anything worse than misjudgment.
Amanda Burden, Babe Paley’s daughter, said in later years that her mother loved Truman, and the love was real, and the betrayal was also real, and the two existed simultaneously in a way that cannot be resolved. That is probably the most accurate description available of what that friendship was and what its ending meant. Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, Rita Hayworth’s daughter, 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 talking about Truman Capote, but she could have been.
The boy from Monroeville had wanted, above all, to be one of the people in the room. He achieved that completely and permanently through talent, charm, work, and the systematic cultivation of women who had no reason not to trust him. Then he took what they gave him and put it in a magazine, and watched the room empty. He always said that writing was the only thing he did well, the only thing he really wanted to do.
In 1975, when the choice between writer and friend became unavoidable, he chose the writer. The writer never finished the book. The only question worth asking from this distance is whether he knew, when he sat down to write “La Côte Basque,” that Babe would not come back. The women who gave 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 for years, some for decades, carrying the memories of friendship and betrayal through marriages and divorces and deaths and reinventions of self that Truman Capote did not live to see. Slim Keith died on April 16, 1990, at the age of seventy-two. She outlived Howard Hawks.
She outlived Leland Hayward, whom she described as the great love of her life. She outlived Truman Capote by six years. The memoirs were the last word she chose with care. Pamela Harriman died on January 5, 1997, at seventy-six.
The woman who had recognized Truman Capote at a party in the 1950s, whose social life had been drawn and analyzed in his stories, ended her days as the American ambassador to France. Lee Radziwill died on February 15, 2019, at eighty-five. She lived longer than Jackie, longer than Capote, longer than Slim Keith, longer than Babe Paley, longer than almost everyone from that world. C.
Z. Guest died on November 8, 2003, in Palm Beach, at eighty-three. She spent forty-three years after the party doing exactly what she wanted to do. Marella Agnelli died on February 3, 2019, at ninety-one.
Twelve days separated her death from Lee Radziwill’s. They had been together in that room in 1966, dressed in black or white, masked, in conversation with the man who would later use their secrets as literary material. The last of the original swans left the world in the same month and the same year, as though the story had finally decided it was time for the ending. Gloria Guinness died on September 18, 1980, in Paris.
She was sixty-seven. She lived only five years after the publication of “La Côte Basque,” which meant she died knowing exactly what Capote had done, without the benefit of distance. She had been private in the specific way of women who built themselves carefully and understood that extended exposure threatened the construction. Truman Capote died in 1984.
The swans outlived him, most of them for a long time, and the story outlived the swans. In 2005, a film called Capote covered the research years of In Cold Blood, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. The following year, a separate film called Infamous covered the same period with Toby Jones. Neither dealt with “La Côte Basque” in the depth the story deserved.
In 2024, the streaming series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans dramatized the betrayal and its aftermath, with Tom Hollander as Capote, Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, Demi Moore as Ann Woodward, and Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill. The series was described as stylish and emotionally affecting but at times speculative in ways the historical record does not support, the usual problem with dramatizing recent events involving people whose families are still alive. What these dramatizations confirmed, whatever their individual accuracy, is that the story has not lost its power to grip people who were not there.
The images remain. The Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in November of ’66. Five hundred and forty people in black and white, masked, at the summit of a world that would not hold for much longer.
The small man with the notebook, who had planned everything, who had assembled this particular room at this particular moment.