On the night of November 28, 1966, 540 guests in black and white formal wear and masks gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Senators, film stars, novelists, and socialites arrived from Hollywood, Washington, London, and Rome. The host had planned the evening since July, carrying a black-and-white composition notebook everywhere he went, adding names and removing them, constructing what he would later call the most perfectly proportioned social event of the century. He was Truman Capote, 42 years old, the most famous writer in America, at the absolute peak of everything he would ever achieve.
Capote had been born in New Orleans in 1924 to parents who were teenagers and wanted little to do with him. After their divorce, he was left in Monroeville, Alabama with elderly female cousins he called his aunts. He was a small, delicate, extraordinarily intelligent boy who taught himself to type and spent his days reading. The neighbor’s daughter, Nell Harper Lee, became his protector, and they remained friends for life.
Capote moved to New York in his early teens when his mother remarried a Cuban businessman whose surname he adopted. He never attended college, got a job at The New Yorker, and by age 23 had published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948. Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958 confirmed his staying power. In November 1959, Capote read a small item in the New York Times about a family of four murdered in their home in Holcomb, Kansas.
He went to Kansas with Harper Lee, spent six years researching the case, befriended the killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, and was present at their execution in April 1965. The book, In Cold Blood, was published in January 1966 and sold in quantities no serious literary work had sold in recent memory. Capote became famous not just as a writer, but as a person. The women had been accumulating around him for years.
He called them his swans. They were beautiful, wealthy, and occupied the upper floors of a social structure Capote had spent his adult life ascending. Babe Paley was the first among them and the most important, married to William S. Paley, who had built CBS into the most powerful television network in the world.
Slim Keith was sharp and witty, married successively to Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward. Gloria Guinness had been born in Mexico with no money and married into a fortune. Mela Agnelli was married to the man who ran Fiat. Lee Radziwill was Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister.
C. Z. Guest gardened with a seriousness Capote found charming. Pamela Churchill Harriman was the most politically connected, having been married to Winston Churchill’s son.
What bound these women together was that almost everyone around them wanted something from them, but very few people were interested in who they actually were. Capote was interested. He asked questions, remembered everything, and followed up weeks later. They opened themselves to him and told him things they had not told anyone else.
Babe Paley told him about her husband’s affairs, about the humiliation of being married to a man the world considered a great catch. Capote listened and remembered. He always remembered. The mistake they all made was in not understanding that for Capote, nothing was truly confidential when there was a better story to be told.
The guest list for the ball occupied three months. Capote invited Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer, Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, McGeorge Bundy, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and the doorman of the Plaza Hotel. He did not invite critics who had reviewed him badly or people who bored him. The exclusions became as famous as the inclusions.
Women who received invitations debated their gowns like generals debating strategy. The masks were the detail that separated Capote’s event from any ordinary party. They removed the social shorthand of recognition that governs how the very rich interact with one another. Behind a mask, a senator and a doorman occupied the same formal position.
The guests arrived through crowds of onlookers on Fifth Avenue. At midnight, the masks came off. By the time the last guests left at four in the morning, New York society understood that no one was more socially powerful than the small man with the composition notebook. The reviews were effusive.
The ball was the last perfect thing Capote would do. He was at the summit of a particular kind of American social achievement, and the position was precarious in a way he did not recognize. The party had demonstrated that a man with no financial power and social standing only on loan from his friends could exercise cultural power absolutely. But the summit was followed by a descent.
He had contracted with Random House to deliver a novel called Answered Prayers, with a deadline of January 1, 1968. He missed it, renegotiated, and missed the next deadline. By the time his advances reached one million dollars, he had produced fragments of chapters. The truth was that the book required him to use material that could not be published without destroying the relationships that had provided it.
The story he carried most carefully involved a woman named Ann Woodward. She had been born in Kansas, become a showgirl and model, and in 1943 married William Woodward Jr. , heir to a banking fortune. The Woodward family received her with coldness.
On October 30, 1955, she shot and killed her husband in a darkened hallway, telling police she had heard a prowler. A grand jury returned a verdict of accidental death. She was legally innocent but socially finished. William Paley had known Billy Woodward well and had told his wife Babe what he thought had actually happened.
Babe had told Capote. Esquire published the first excerpt from Answered Prayers in November 1975. The chapter was called La Côte Basque, named for a fashionable French restaurant. It was narrated by a character understood to be Capote.
It contained a character named Lady Ina Coolbirth, understood to be Slim Keith, and a story about a woman who shot her husband believing him to be a prowler, understood to be Ann Woodward. It contained a character named Sydney Dillon, understood to be William Paley, involved in a sexual encounter with the wife of a state governor, understood to be one of Paley’s actual affairs told to Capote in confidence by Babe. The disguise was so thin it amounted to a dare. New York received the chapter like a city receives catastrophic weather.
Gloria Vanderbilt announced she would spit in Capote’s face if she saw him. Ann Woodward learned she was in it, obtained a copy in Paris, and on October 9, 1975, swallowed cyanide and died. Billy Woodward’s mother, Elsie Woodward, is reported to have said, quote, She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her. Capote said very little about Ann Woodward’s death.
He had told people who warned him about the reactions of the swans that they were too dumb to know who they were. They knew exactly who they were. Babe Paley did not speak to Truman Capote again. She had told him things about her marriage she had not told anyone else, and he had published them.
Slim Keith consulted a lawyer about a libel suit and decided not to pursue it, simply stopping answering the telephone. Gloria Guinness withdrew with a completeness that suggested she had been waiting for a reason. Mela Agnelli simply became unavailable. Capote initially characterized the reactions as misguided.
He told Dick Cavett he had not expected anyone to be annoyed unless they had been left out. In his apartment, he reportedly wept and repeated, I did not mean to. I thought they would come back. They did not come back.
In 1977, Babe Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer. Capote tried to reach her. He wrote letters and called people who might carry a message. She did not respond.
She died on July 2, 1978. Capote was not present, was not invited to the funeral, and did not write publicly about her death. She had been the person he loved most, and he had used what she told him in a way that made the love indistinguishable from betrayal. The years between the publication of La Côte Basque and Capote’s death stretched across nine years of diminishment.
He drank, took pills, and appeared on talk shows in states his friends described as performances and his enemies described as collapse. He continued to claim Answered Prayers was nearly finished. It was not nearly finished. On August 25, 1984, Capote died in Bel Air, California, at the home of Joanne Carson.
He was 59 years old. The official cause of death was liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drugs. The manuscript of Answered Prayers was never found. Three chapters appeared posthumously, assembled from what existed.
They were good in the specific way that Capote’s best work was always good, and unfinished in a way that is hard to read without grief. The swans outlived him. Slim Keith published her memoir, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, in 1990, containing the most precise account any swan ever offered of what the friendship had been. She wrote that Capote had told her he performed himself so people would be laughing with him rather than at him, and she had replied, No, no, we love you.
On the page, decades later, she leaves the exchange without comment. She died on April 16, 1990. Pamela Churchill Harriman, who some scholars believed was the real model for Lady Coolbirth, never commented publicly. She transformed herself into the most effective Democratic fundraiser in America, raised twelve million dollars for the party, and in 1993 President Clinton appointed her United States ambassador to France, where she became one of the most consequential political operatives of her generation.
She died on January 5, 1997. Lee Radziwill lived more than 40 years after the publication, outliving her sister, outliving Capote, outliving almost everyone from that world. She gave interviews in which she remembered him as brilliant and funny, a person who had understood her in ways other people had not. She did not forgive the betrayal explicitly.
She had simply lived past it. She died on February 15, 2019. Mela Agnelli died 12 days earlier, on February 3, 2019. They had been at the ball together in 1966.
The last of the original swans left the world in the same month, as if the story had finally decided it was time to close. 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 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 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 became unavoidable, he chose the writer. The writer did not finish the book.