On the night of November 28, 1966, 540 guests in black and white and masks filled the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York. They came from Hollywood, Washington, London, and Rome—senators, film stars, novelists, socialites, and the Plaza’s own doorman. The host had planned 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. Truman Capote was forty-two years old, the most famous writer in America, and at the absolute apex of everything he would ever achieve.
Born September 30, 1924, in New Orleans to parents who were nineteen and seventeen years old and wanted little to do with him, Capote spent his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama, cared for by elderly female cousins. He was delicate, extraordinary in intelligence, and 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, two years younger, was named Nelle Harper Lee. She became his protector, and they stayed friends for life. Capote 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. By twenty-three, he had published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in January of 1948, discussed with a ferocity usually reserved for political scandals. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, published in 1958, confirmed the phenomenon had staying power. In November 1959, Capote read a small item in the New York Times about a family of four murdered in Holcomb, Kansas.
He called his editor and said he was going to Kansas. He took Harper Lee with him. She interviewed for six weeks, producing over 150 pages of notes, largely making the book possible by creating the access he needed. The killers were arrested in Las Vegas in late December of 1959.
Capote visited them in prison for years, befriending them with a thoroughness that crossed into something beyond professional interest. By his own eventual admission, he was in love with Perry Smith. When the state of Kansas executed them in April of 1965, Capote was present. He wept.
In Cold Blood was published in January of 1966, serialized in The New Yorker and sold in quantities that no serious literary work had sold in recent memory. Capote became 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. They were beautiful, married to money or born with it, and they 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. Born Barbara Cushing, she had married William S.
Paley, who had built CBS into the most powerful television network in the world. She was known for her taste, which was perfect in the way only a few people in any generation achieve. Capote loved her with a devotion that was entirely sincere and entirely complicated. The other swans—Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Lee Radziwill, C.
Z. Guest, Pamela Churchill Harriman—had each arrived at a point where almost everyone wanted something from them, and few were interested in who they actually were. Capote was interested. He asked questions, remembered everything, and asked follow-up questions weeks later.
They opened themselves to him accordingly. It was a catastrophic error of judgment, and it was entirely understandable. Babe Paley told him things she had not told anyone else. She talked about her husband’s affairs, conducted with a frequency and carelessness that suggested he did not care if anyone noticed.
She talked about the particular humiliation of being married to a man the world considered a great catch. Capote listened and remembered. He always remembered. The Black and White Ball was a triumph.
The guest list occupied three months. He 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. He did not invite critics who had reviewed him badly, certain actresses he found uninteresting, or people who bored him. The exclusions became as famous as the inclusions.
People spent weeks determining whether they were on the list. Some were not, and would not forgive it. The masks were the detail that separated Capote’s event from any ordinary party. Behind a mask, a senator and a doorman occupied the same formal position.
The instruction that masks were to remain on until midnight produced a secondary industry. Adolfo and Halston both designed custom masks for guests willing to spend several hundred dollars. Capote’s own mask cost thirty-nine cents at a drugstore, paper and rhinestone. 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. 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. It was the last perfect thing he would do.
He had contracted to deliver a novel to Random House. The title was Answered Prayers. The advance had been generous. He had told everyone it would be his Proustian novel, his summation of everything he had seen in twenty years among the most interesting people in America.
The deadline was January 1, 1968. He missed it. He renegotiated. By the time his advances reached $1 million, he had produced fragments.
The truth, which he did not entirely admit to himself, was that the book required material that could not be published without destroying the relationships that had provided it. The swans had given him their secrets, their humiliations, their private assessments of their husbands. He kept writing. Esquire published the first excerpt in November 1975.
The chapter was called “La Côte Basque, 1965,” named for the fashionable French restaurant where Capote had spent many lunches listening. A character named Ann Hopkins tells the story of how she shot her husband believing him to be a prowler. The disguise was transparent. Ann Hopkins was Anne Woodward.
A character named Sydney Dylan, married to Cleo, was William Paley. The story about the governor’s wife was one of Paley’s actual affairs, told to Capote in confidence by Babe. New York received the chapter the way cities receive catastrophic weather. First disbelief, then assessment of damage, then a long reckoning.
Gloria Vanderbilt announced she would spit in his face. Anne Woodward had learned before the issue appeared that she was in it. She was living in Paris. She obtained a copy and read it.
On October 9, 1975, she swallowed a cyanide pill and died in her apartment. Billy Woodward’s mother, in her nineties, said, “She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her. ”
Babe Paley did not speak to Capote again. The others withdrew.
Slim Keith consulted a lawyer about a libel suit and simply stopped answering the telephone. Gloria Guinness ended the friendship. Marella Agnelli became unavailable. Capote characterized the reactions as misguided.
He told a journalist the connections were the work of people with too much imagination. In his apartment, he reportedly wept and repeated to the person with him, “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. He called people who might carry a message.
She did not respond. She died on July 2, 1978, at age sixty-three. Capote was not present. He was not invited to the funeral.
The years that followed stretched across a decade of diminishment. He drank. He took pills. He appeared on talk shows in states that prompted concern.
He continued to claim Answered Prayers was nearly finished. It was not. On August 25, 1984, Capote died at the home of Joanne Carson in Bel Air, California. He was fifty-nine.
The official cause of death was liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drugs in his system. The manuscript of Answered Prayers was never found. Of all the swans, Pamela Churchill Harriman had the most remarkable second act. After the publication, she transformed herself into the most effective Democratic Party fundraiser in America, raising $12 million for the party.
In 1993, President Clinton appointed her United States ambassador to France, where she occupied a position of genuine influence. She died on January 5, 1997, at age seventy-six. Lee Radziwill outlived her sister Jackie, outlived Capote, outlived Slim Keith, outlived Babe Paley. She died on February 15, 2019, at age eighty-five.
Marella Agnelli died twelve days earlier, on February 3, 2019, at age ninety-one. 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. In 2024, the streaming series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans dramatized the betrayal with Tom Hollander as Capote, Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, and Demi Moore as Anne Woodward.
Critics noted the series took liberties, inventing dialogue and amplifying emotions. But the dramatizations confirmed that the story had not lost its power. 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 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. Then he took 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 became unavoidable, he chose the writer. The writer did not finish the book.