On the night of November 28, 1966, 540 people arrived at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, dressed in black and white and wearing masks. They came from Hollywood, Washington, London, and Rome. They were politicians, movie stars, novelists, and socialites, and in some cases, the Plaza Hotel’s own doorman.
The host had been planning the evening since July, carrying a black-and-white notebook wherever he went, adding names and deleting others, building what he later called the most balanced social event of the century. The host was 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighed about 120 pounds, and spoke in a voice that sounded like something he had 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 peak of everything he could achieve in his life. He knew it. Most of the people at the party did not know it yet.
Truman Streckfus Persons was born on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans to parents aged nineteen and seventeen who wanted nothing to do with each other and very little to do with him. His father, Arch Persons, was a salesman who spent the rest of his life chasing schemes that never amounted to anything. His mother, Lillie Mae, was beautiful and troubled, and decided almost immediately that motherhood was not what she aspired to.
When Truman was four and his parents separated, he was left in Monroeville, Alabama, with a group of elderly female relatives he would spend the rest of his childhood calling his aunts. The house in Monroeville was large and surrounded by a high rock fence, run by women who smelled of talcum powder and old wood. The relatives were kind in a distracted way, leaving the strange little boy largely to himself.
He was delicate-looking and hyper-intelligent, spending 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 prettiest child he had ever seen. This confidence was real. It served him for decades.
The neighbor’s daughter was two years younger than Truman and named Nelle Harper Lee. She was the daughter of a local lawyer, looked like a boy, and was capable of using violence in short order to defend those she considered friends. She became his protector in the way only children who recognize each other’s strangeness can protect one another. 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 when his mother married a Cuban businessman named Joe Capote, whose surname he took. He never attended college. He got a job at The New Yorker carrying mail and talking to anyone who would listen, which included 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 photo showed Truman reclining on a sofa with an expression combining innocence and knowingness, and the letters that arrived about the photo nearly equaled the letters about the book. He was openly, explicitly gay in an era that had no framework for what that meant except shame, and he wore this 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 an instinct, honed during his childhood among women who talked and whispered and watched from behind their curtains, for calibrating the precise amount of truth that makes fiction magnetic. He would use this talent 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 perfectly ordinary people in the way only certain Kansas families can be, and someone had slaughtered them. The item consisted of a few hundred words. Truman read it several times, then called his editor and told him 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 affected voice and precisely tailored coat, was so much a ghost from another world that the townspeople did not know how to handle him. Harper Lee was an Alabama woman, large and plain and practical, raised thirty miles from where Truman was raised, and able to talk to anyone. She conducted interviews for six weeks, produced more than 150 pages of notes, and made the book possible largely 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, in love with Perry Smith in a way he never precisely defined and perhaps never fully understood. Smith was dark and stocky, psychologically damaged in ways Truman recognized, and he responded to that recognition.
Whether Smith reciprocated or simply realized that a famous New York writer was a more useful friend than most death row inmates would ever have, was a question Truman preferred not to examine. He spent six years working on the book. He befriended both killers with a seriousness that exceeded mere professional interest. When Kansas executed Hickock and Smith in April 1965, Truman was present. He wept.
The book was published in January 1966, after being serialized in The New Yorker, and achieved sales no serious literary work had achieved 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 throw 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 when given by people with real insight. They were beautiful. They moved through the world with a quality of manufactured ease that was entirely expensive and disciplined in ways most people mistook for spontaneity. They had married men of wealth, or in some cases, been born with silver spoons in their mouths. They occupied the upper floors of a social structure Truman, the boy from Monroeville, had always been able to see from below and had spent his adult life climbing toward.
Babe Paley was the first and most important of them. Born Barbara Cushing, daughter of a Boston brain surgeon, she grew up in a family that took social position with a seriousness others reserve for religion. She married first Mortimer, then in 1947 a man named William S. Paley, 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 perfection. Truman loved her with a devotion that was entirely sincere and entirely complicated, the only way Truman knew how to love anyone.
Slim Keith was born Nancy Gross in California and fashioned herself into a completely different person through a combination of attractive features and sharp intelligence. She was married to Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward and finally to a British banker named Kenneth Keith, which gave her a title she used sparingly. She had the sharp wit of women who have lived through interesting marriages, and she and Truman spent hours on the phone conducting what she later described as the most entertaining conversations of her life.
Gloria Guinness was born in Mexico to a poor family and ended up married to Loel Guinness, who had a great deal of money. The distance between those two points represented a journey of strategic precision that Truman genuinely admired. She was the most international of the swans, with a comfort that reflected the nature of people who have learned how to be comfortable.
Marella Agnelli was Italian and married to the man who ran Fiat, and she and Truman shared a precision of observation that made their conversations feel like collaborative work. Lee Radziwill was the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy, which guaranteed her a degree of attention she spent her life both seeking and resenting. She married a Polish prince named Stanislas Radziwill and acquired a title that seemed more significant than the marriage actually was. Her proximity to power was always defined partly by her proximity to her sister, which she handled with a mixture of tact and effort. Truman appreciated that effort and found the tact instructive.
C.Z. Guest cared about gardens with a seriousness Truman found both baffling and charming. Pamela Churchill Harriman, the most politically influential of the swans, was married to Winston Churchill’s son during the war and leveraged 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 used it accordingly.
What connected these women to each other, beyond money and social position, 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 and waited for answers and remembered everything and asked follow-up questions weeks later, which is the most flattering thing possible for a person accustomed to being admired without being seen. So they opened their hearts to him.
It was a catastrophic error in judgment, and entirely understandable at the same time. What they gave him was access. What they gave him beyond that was something rarer: honesty. These were women in their position who lived surrounded by people who wanted things from them, and Truman also wanted things. But he also genuinely listened, which was so unusual that the swans found themselves telling him things they had never told anyone else. He was a repository of secrets, a confidant, an entertainer, and it worked perfectly for everyone for fifteen years.
William Paley was a man of great accomplishments and great appetites. He built CBS from a Philadelphia radio station into a national empire. He also, throughout his marriage to Babe, conducted affairs with a frequency and carelessness that suggested he did not expect anyone to notice, or did not care much if they did. But Babe noticed. She told Truman specific information she had passed on to him over the years of their friendship, and there was plenty of it. 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 prize catch. She talked about the gap between the life she seemed to live on the society pages and the life she actually lived in the apartments and houses she shared with a man who did not care much about her feelings.
Truman listened and remembered. He always remembered. Their friendship was characterized by a mutual dependence that exceeded anything either would have described publicly. She gave him legitimacy and access. He gave her the experience of being truly known by someone who found her interesting rather than merely admirable. She had spent her life being admired. It was not the same thing. He confided in her too, or so it seemed. He told her things about himself and about other people that she understood to be confidential. The deal was mutual. The mistake she made, the mistake they all made, was failing to understand that for Truman, nothing was ever truly confidential when there was a better story to tell.
Truman described planning the party 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 Eleanor Friede’s house in July 1966, and the idea arrived complete: a masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in black and white, honoring Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, whose husband had recently committed suicide, and who Truman felt deserved to be cheered up in the greatest possible way.
The guest list took three months. He carried the black-and-white notebook everywhere. He was constantly on the phone. He added names and removed them with the deliberation of a general deploying troops. This deliberation 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 Mailer’s presence at any event generated. He invited Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda and Candice Bergen. He invited McGeorge Bundy, who had been national security advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson. He invited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who were old and withered and still capable of silencing a room. He invited Lee Radziwill, who was not Jackie Kennedy but made people think of Jackie Kennedy, which served the same purpose. He invited the Plaza Hotel’s doorman.
He did not invite critics who had reviewed him negatively. He did not invite certain actresses he considered insufficiently interesting. He did not invite people who bored him, a category that included a surprisingly large portion of New York society. The exclusions became, in their own way, as famous as the invitations. People spent weeks trying to find out if they were on the list. Some of them were not, and they never forgave it.
The preparations in the weeks before the party produced a secondary social event as time-consuming as the party itself. Women who received invitations discussed their dresses the way generals discuss their strategies. The black-or-white requirement narrowed the options but did not simplify the decision. Within those constraints, every choice of fabric and design and accessory became an argument about who you were and how seriously you took it. Women who did not receive invitations spent the same weeks in states of distress that were sometimes comedic and sometimes real, and the line between them was not entirely clear.
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 usually governs how the wealthy and powerful interact with each other. Behind a mask, the senator and the doorman occupied the same formal status. And although this equality was brief and theatrical, Truman correctly judged that even brief theater could change the atmosphere of a room.
Guests arrived at the Plaza Hotel on the evening of November 28 through crowds of onlookers who had gathered on Fifth Avenue to watch. The dress code was explicit. Men wore black tie and black masks. Women wore black or white dresses with white masks or hand fans. The instruction that masks remain in place until midnight created a secondary industry. Adolfo and Halston designed custom masks for guests willing to spend hundreds of dollars for the privilege, while Truman’s own mask cost 39 cents from a drugstore, made of paper and rhinestones.
The Grand Ballroom was decorated with red tablecloths and gold candelabra wrapped in smilax vines and white candles instead of flowers, because the florist Truman initially contracted suggested something excessive and was dismissed. The band played. The champagne moved in waves through the room. The masks stayed 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 and become simply interested.
Truman moved through the room receiving congratulations with the precision of a head of state who had waited too long for proper ceremony. He danced with Katharine Graham, in whose honor the party was ostensibly held, and with Babe Paley, and Mia Farrow, and with people who would spend the rest of their lives describing that 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. There was no one more socially powerful in the city than the small man with the notebook. He had organized the best party of the century, 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 get excited about. The New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and the society pages of newspapers in three countries treated the party as a cultural event rather than merely a party. Truman was photographed everywhere. He gave interviews in which his comments about who was invited and who was not were treated as a form of social criticism. The position he occupied in the months following the party was unusual and hazardous in ways he did not recognize, and his friends recognized but could not adequately communicate to him.
He was at the peak of a certain kind of American social achievement that has no official name. The gay man of modest origins who became so skilled at performing social grace that the people he performed for sincerely believed he was one of them. The swans believed he was one of them. The mistake was understandable. He had worked hard to make it so.
The party was, among other things, a demonstration of something New York in 1966 was still trying to absorb. That social and cultural and financial power are not identical and do not always move in the same direction, and that a man who did not possess the third and borrowed the first from his friends could, through the force of his personality and intelligence, exercise the second absolutely. Truman had invited the president’s national security advisor and a Kansas farmer’s wife to the same party and seated them in adjacent rooms, and they had both attended, which tells you a great deal about what he had become.
The question no one asked at the time, or did not ask loudly enough for him to hear, was what he would do next. The party was a peak, and peaks by nature are followed by descents. The friendships and invitations and access were based on continued performance, on the continued production of wit and gossip and literary reputation that justified the swans’ investment in his time and their trust. He had been performing this role for twenty years. And performance requires raw material. The material was what the swans gave him.
He was also a serious writer who had not written a serious book in years, but was under contract to deliver one. Random House had 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, a summation of everything he had seen and heard during twenty years of living among the most interesting people in America.
The contract with Random House was signed in 1966, the same year as 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 the advance reached one million dollars, he had produced fragments of chapters and a vast quantity of justifications for why the chapters were not complete. The truth, which he did not fully admit to himself and certainly did not admit to his publishers, was that the book he was writing required the use of material that could not be published without destroying the relationships that provided it.
The swans had given him the raw material for *Answered Prayers*: their secrets, their humiliations, their own assessments of their husbands and of each other. He transferred them with minimal disguise into literary works. He knew what would happen when the book appeared. But he kept writing.
There was also a simpler problem. *In Cold Blood* had been possible because Truman immersed 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 farmers’ wives. They were the women who had invited him into their homes 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 he treated with drinking and television appearances and explanations to interviewers that the work was going brilliantly.
The story he carried most carefully, the one conveyed to him under specific conditions of confidentiality, concerned a woman named Ann Woodward. She was not one of the swans. She was, in the eyes of New York society in the 1950s, precisely the kind of woman the swans were created to exclude. Ann Woodward was born in Kansas and came to New York to become a showgirl and model, and eventually, in 1943, became the wife of William Woodward Jr., heir to a banking fortune and a horse racing stable and everything his family decided he should not waste on someone like Ann.
The Woodward family received her with a coldness recorded by the society pages and understood by everyone. She was tolerated because the marriage was legal. But she was not accepted. On October 30, 1955, the night after a dinner party at their home in Oyster Bay, Ann Woodward shot and killed her husband in a dark hallway. She told police she had heard an intruder. A man named Paul Wirths was indeed on the property that night and was arrested. The grand jury returned a verdict of accidental death. Ann Woodward was legally innocent. Legal innocence was not social innocence, and New York society understood the difference. Her end had come. She spent the following years in Europe, drifting through cities where people who had been expelled from one world try to build a smaller version of it.
William Paley knew Billy Woodward well. He told his wife Babe what he believed had actually happened. Babe in turn told Truman. *Esquire* published the first excerpt from *Answered Prayers* in its November 1975 issue. The chapter was called “La Côte Basque 1965,” after an upscale French restaurant on East 55th Street where Truman had spent 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 named Lady Ina Coolbirth, immediately understood to be Slim Keith. During lunch, women at surrounding tables talk. A character named Ann Hopkins tells the story of shooting her husband in a dark hallway, thinking he was an intruder. Ann Hopkins was immediately understood to be Ann Woodward.
A character named 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 immediately understood to be one of William Paley’s real affairs. The one Babe had told Truman in confidence, and which he had turned into fiction with a disguise so thin it amounted to 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 were lit 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 hit the newsstands 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. William Woodward’s mother, Elsie Woodward, was in her nineties and had spent twenty years maintaining a position about her daughter-in-law’s guilt that she never expressed publicly but never doubted privately. When she received news of Ann Woodward’s death, she reportedly 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 Oyster Bay shooting. It acknowledges without ambiguity what the publication of “La Côte Basque” did to a woman who had 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 news of Ann Woodward’s death was recorded by several people in his circle. He did not say much. She was not his friend. He knew the story secondhand. What he seems 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 of the swans’ reactions. They are too stupid. They won’t know who they are. They knew exactly who they were.
Babe Paley never spoke to Truman Capote again. That was the most important sentence among all the silences that followed the chapter’s publication. The others were painful. Slim Keith consulted a lawyer about a defamation suit and decided not to proceed, simply stopping 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 all the ways a woman with multiple homes and a busy social calendar can become unavailable without uttering a decisive word.
Babe’s silence was different because Babe’s relationship was different. She had told him things about her marriage to William Paley that she had told no one 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, transferred from the privacy of her marriage and placed on the pages 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 described the reactions as misplaced. He told Dick Cavett that he did not expect anyone to be upset unless they had been excluded. He told a journalist that the characters were fictional and the connections being drawn were the work of people with overactive imaginations and little else to do. In his apartment at United Nations Plaza, he reportedly wept and repeated the same sentence to the person with him. I didn’t mean it. I thought they would come back.
They did not come back. The social structure that had supported him for fifteen years, the party invitations and houses and long lunches and phone calls, collapsed within months into silence. Truman Capote, the funniest man in the room, became overnight a Judas in tweed.
In 1977, Babe Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 60 years old, had smoked most of her adult life, and the diagnosis meant the time available for maintaining the silence between her and Truman was running out. He 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 on the pages of Esquire for the reading public, had no interest in facilitating a reconciliation. Friends, who might have served as intermediaries, mostly took sides in the way social circles, once disrupted, tend to harden along lines of division. Babe’s side had more people.
She died on July 2, 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 wrote publicly about almost everything that happened to him. Those close to him understood that this silence was a form of grief that could not be publicly expressed. She was the person he had 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 this outcome or not had become an irrelevant question by July 1978. She was gone, and the silence was permanent, and there was no one to blame but the writer in him, who had always seen the story as more important than the person who provided it.
The years between the publication of “La Côte Basque” and Truman’s death stretched over 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 appeared on The Tonight Show and other programs in states his friends described as performance and his enemies described as breakdown. 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 eyewitness accounts, destructive in the specific way relationships between addicts and their enablers are destructive. His longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, who had been with him since 1948 and was a writer of real quality and quiet temperament, remained technically in his life while being practically absent, 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 close to finished for years. The one million dollars he had received as an advance from Random House represented a contract with a deadline of March 1, 1981, which he missed, leading to another renegotiation and another deadline and another period of justifications. The existence of the manuscript in any completed form became entirely uncertain over those years.
His television appearances in the late 1970s and early 1980s are difficult to watch now. Partly because they are genuinely painful, and partly because you can still see beneath the pain. That performer who had once made a room of 500 people feel like the most vital place in the world. The intelligence was still there. The observational power was still there. The wit flashed in ways that made the surrounding flailing more painful. He was, in contrast, a man trying to perform a version of himself that required a stability he no longer possessed. The gap between performance and reality was visible the way certain kinds of damage are visible, not all at once but cumulatively, appearance after appearance.
He was arrested for drunk driving 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 sustained for so long, was collapsing publicly and in real time before an audience not always sure whether it was watching tragedy or something else.
On August 25, 1984, Truman Capote died in Bel Air, California, at the home of Joanne Carson, the second wife of Johnny Carson and one of the few people who had not abandoned him in the years following 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 declining health for years. He died in a bed that was not his bed, in a city that was not really his city, cared for by a friend who stayed partly out of loyalty and partly because she was one of the few who remained willing.
Jack Dunphy received news of his death in New York, where he was living separately but remained Truman’s designated heir and executor. The two men had been together, more or less, for 36 years. Dunphy wrote a memoir called *Dear Genius*, published three years after Truman’s death, which was the most honest document anyone close to Truman produced about the reality of living near him.
The manuscript of *Answered Prayers* was never found. Whether it was deliberately destroyed, or lost in a life that moved through too many apartments and houses, or never completed beyond what was published in Esquire, was a question that remained open and was never answered. Three chapters were published posthumously, assembled from what existed. They are good in the specific way Truman’s best work was always good, direct and precise and stunning in the accuracy of their social observation. They are also incomplete in a way that is difficult to read without sadness, because you can see what the complete novel would have been and understand exactly what was lost.
Truman Capote left behind two perfect books and one unfinished book. He left behind a party still described as the most spectacular private social event of the twentieth century. He left a literary legacy that continued to generate revenue and cultural presence for decades after his death. Partly because the story of the swans and their betrayal was exactly the kind of story every generation rediscovers and finds immediately compelling.
He left behind women who built walls around what happened to them and maintained those walls with a firmness 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 affection but without excessive bitterness, which was probably 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 without publicly forgiving him and without publicly accusing him of anything worse than poor judgment.
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 things existed simultaneously in a way that could not be resolved. That is probably the most accurate description available of what that friendship was and what its end meant.
Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, daughter of Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan, once observed that the cruelest thing you can do to a person 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 wanted, above all, to be one of the people in the room. He achieved that completely and permanently through talent and charm and work, and systematic courtship 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 was good at, and the only thing he really 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. 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. Whether he understood that publication would be permanent, and 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 an answer. Some believed he had no idea what he was unleashing. Others believed he knew exactly.