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—politicians, movie stars, novelists, and socialites, and in at least one case, the Plaza’s own doorman. The host had been planning the evening since July, carrying a black-and-white notebook wherever he went, adding names and removing others, building what he would later call the most balanced social event of the century. He was five feet three 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, at the peak of everything he could achieve in his life. He knew it. Most of the people in the room that night did not yet know it.
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. When Truman was four and his parents separated, he was left 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, surrounded by a high stone 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 fiercely 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 description, the most beautiful child he had ever seen. That 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 a lawyer’s daughter, boyish in appearance and quick to use violence in defense of those she considered friends. She became his protector. 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 remarried 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 was everyone. By age 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 couch with an expression combining innocence and knowingness, and the letters arriving about the photo nearly equaled those about the book.
He was openly, explicitly gay in an era that had no framework for what that meant except shame, and he wore the fact like a piece of haute couture 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 her identity, 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 that talent one last time, spectacularly, 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 and shot them. The story was a few hundred words. Truman read it several times, then called his editor and said he was going to Kansas. He took Harper Lee with him.
That was a practical decision. Truman in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959—with his small body, affected voice, and precisely tailored coat—was so alien that the townspeople did not know how to handle him. Harper Lee was an Alabama woman, large, plain, and practical, raised thirty miles from where Truman grew up, and able to 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 let loose rumors. He was, by his own eventual admission, enamored of Perry Smith in a way he never precisely defined and perhaps never adequately understood. Smith was dark and stocky, psychologically damaged in ways Truman recognized—that small boy abandoned by his mother—and he responded to it.
Six years he spent on the book. He befriended both killers with a seriousness beyond professional interest. When Kansas executed them in April 1965, Truman was present. He wept.
In Cold Blood was published in January 1966, after serialization in The New Yorker, and achieved sales no serious literary work had managed in recent memory. Truman Capote became famous in a way few writers ever do—not merely 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 only when given by people with real insight. They were beautiful. They moved through the world with a quality of artificial ease that was genuinely expensive, with a discipline most people mistook for spontaneity. They had married wealthy men, 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 spent his adult life climbing. Babe Paley was the first and most important of them. Born Barbara Cushing, daughter of a Boston neurosurgeon, she grew up in a family that took social position with a seriousness others reserve for religion. In 1947 she married William S.
Paley, who had 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 crafted herself into a completely different person through a combination of striking features and sharp intelligence.
She was married to Howard Hawks, Leland Hayward, and finally a British banker named Kenneth Keith. She and Truman spent hours on the phone conducting what she later described as the most amusing 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 Truman genuinely admired.
She was the most international of the swans. Marella Agnelli was Italian, married to the man who ran Fiat, and shared with Truman a precision of observation so close that their conversations felt like collaboration. Lee Radziwill was the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy, which guaranteed her a measure of attention she spent her life both seeking and resenting. C.
Z. Guest took her gardens seriously in a way Truman found both baffling and charming. Pamela Churchill Harriman, the most politically influential of the swans, had been married to Winston Churchill’s son during the war and parlayed a series of relationships with powerful men into genuine diplomatic influence. What connected these women 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 asked follow-up questions weeks later—the most flattering thing possible for people accustomed to being admired without being seen. So they opened their hearts to him.
It was a catastrophic miscalculation, and a completely understandable one. What they gave him was access. What they gave him beyond that was something rarer: honesty. They told him things they had told no one else.
He was their repository of secrets, their confidant, their entertainment, and it worked perfectly for everyone for fifteen years. William Paley was a man of great achievements and great appetites. Throughout his marriage to Babe, he conducted affairs with a frequency and carelessness suggesting he either expected no one to notice or did not much care if they did. Babe noticed.
She told Truman specific information she conveyed over the years of their friendship, and there was plenty of it. She spoke about her husband’s behavior with other women. She spoke about the particular humiliation of being married to a man the world considered a prize catch. She spoke about the gap between the life she appeared to live in the society pages and the life she actually lived.
Truman listened and remembered. He always remembered. Their friendship had a quality of mutual dependence beyond what either would have described publicly. She gave him cachet and access.
He gave her the experience of being truly known by someone who found her interesting rather than merely admirable. He confided in her too, or so it seemed. The mistake she made, the mistake they all made, was failing to understand that for Truman, nothing was truly secret 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.
Sitting by the pool at his friend Eleanor Friede’s house in July 1966, the idea arrived fully formed: a masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in black and white, honoring Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, whose husband had recently committed suicide and whom Truman felt deserved to be cheered up in the grandest possible way. The guest list took three months. He carried the black-and-white notebook everywhere. He was on the phone constantly.
He added names and removed them with the deliberation of a general deploying troops. Every decision was a statement about who mattered and who did not—an announcement 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 brought to any occasion.
He invited Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, and Candice Bergen. He invited McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to both Kennedy and Johnson. He invited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, old and withered but still able to silence 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’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 determine whether they were on the list. Some were not, and they never forgave it. The preparation in the weeks before the party produced a secondary social event as time-consuming as the party itself.
Women with invitations discussed their dresses the way generals discuss strategy. The black-or-white requirement narrowed options but did not simplify decisions. Within those constraints, every choice of fabric, design, and accessories became an argument about who you were and how seriously you took the matter. Women without invitations spent the same weeks in distress that was sometimes comic and sometimes real, and the line between the two was not always 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 merely 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 governed how the rich and powerful interacted.
Behind a mask, the senator and the doorman occupied the same formal status. Though the equality was brief and theatrical, Truman correctly judged that even brief theater could change the atmosphere of a room. The guests arrived at the Plaza on the evening of November 28 through crowds of spectators 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. Instructions 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 thirty-nine cents from a drugstore, 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 had 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 the 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 a very long time for proper ceremony. He danced with Katharine Graham, with Babe Paley, with 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. No one in the city was more socially powerful than that small man with the notebook. He had staged the best party of the century and done it with a guest list that was, by consensus, perfect. It was the last perfect thing he would ever do.
The reviews in the following days were lavish in a way suggesting people had been waiting for something to get 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 merely a party. Truman was photographed everywhere. He gave interviews in which his comments about who was invited and who was not were published as a form of social criticism.
The position he occupied in the months after the party was unusual and hazardous in a way he did not perceive and his friends perceived but could not adequately communicate to him. Behind the party was the question no one asked at the time, or no one asked loudly enough for him to hear: what would he do next? The party was a peak, and peaks by nature are followed by descents. The friendships, invitations, and access were based on continued performance—on the ongoing production of humor, gossip, and literary reputation that justified the swans’ investment of their time and trust.
He had been performing this role for twenty years. 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, the most important work of his life, a summation of everything he had seen and heard during twenty years of living among the most interesting people in America.
The contract 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 an enormous quantity of justifications for why the chapters were not complete. The truth he did not fully acknowledge to himself, and certainly not to his publishers, was that the book he was writing required 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 assessments of their husbands and of each other—and he was transferring it to fiction with minimal disguise.
He knew what would happen when the book appeared. But he kept writing. There was also a simpler problem. In Cold Blood was possible because Truman immersed himself in a Kansas community that had no power over his literary career or social life.
The subjects of Answered Prayers, by contrast, were the women who invited him into their homes in Southampton, 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, television appearances, and assurances to interviewers that the work was progressing brilliantly. The story he carried with the greatest care, the one conveyed to him under specific conditions of confidence, concerned a woman named Ann Woodward. She was not one of the swans.
Born in Kansas, she came to New York to become a showgirl and model, and in 1943 became the wife of William Woodward Jr. , heir to a banking fortune and a racing stable. The Woodward family received her with a coldness the society pages recorded and everyone understood. 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 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. The grand jury returned a verdict of accidental death. Ann Woodward was legally innocent.
Legal innocence was not social innocence, and New York society knew the difference. Her end had come. 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 of Answered Prayers in its November 1975 issue. The chapter was called “La Côte Basque 1965,” after the 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, immediately understood to be Truman. At a side table in La Côte Basque, Jones meets a woman called 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 darkened hallway, mistaking him for a prowler. 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 one of William Paley’s real affairs—the one Babe had told Truman in confidence and 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 reckoning. Phones rang for weeks. 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 a cyanide pill and died in her apartment. Billy Woodward’s mother, Elsie Woodward, was in her nineties and had spent twenty years holding a position about her daughter-in-law’s guilt she never expressed publicly and never doubted privately.
When she received news of Ann Woodward’s death, she was reported to have said, “She shot my son, and Truman just killed her. ”
Babe Paley never spoke to Truman Capote again. That was the most important sentence among all the silences that followed publication. The others were wounded.
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 suggesting 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 several houses and a busy social calendar can become unavailable without uttering a decisive word. Babe’s silence was different because her relationship was different.
She had told him things about her marriage to William Paley 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, transported 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 he had not expected anyone to be upset unless they had been excluded. He told a journalist the characters were fictional and the connections being drawn were the work of people with excessive imaginations and too little to do. In his apartment at the 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—party invitations, houses, long lunches, telephone calls—collapsed within months into total silence.
Truman Capote, the most amusing man in the room, had become overnight a Judas in tweed. In 1977, Babe Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was sixty years old and had smoked most of her adult life, and the diagnosis meant the time available for maintaining 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 anatomized on the pages of Esquire for the reading public, had no interest in facilitating 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, at 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. Those close to him understood this silence as a form of grief that could not be expressed publicly.
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. 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 conditions that worried the public and embarrassed hosts. He was arrested for drunk driving in Southampton in 1977. He attended rehabilitation programs and left them to drink again.
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 close to finished for years. The one-million-dollar advance from Random House had become a contract with a deadline of March 1, 1981, which he missed, producing another renegotiation, another deadline, another period of justifications.
Whether the manuscript existed in any complete form became entirely uncertain over those years. On August 25, 1984, Truman Capote died in Bel Air, California, at 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 Answered Prayers. He was fifty-nine years old. The official cause of death was liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drugs in his system.
He died in a bed that was not his, in a city that was not really his, cared for by a friend who stayed partly out of loyalty and partly because she was one of the few people left willing to do so. Jack Dunphy received the news in New York, where he had been living apart, but he remained Truman’s designated heir and executor. The two men had been together, more or less, for thirty-six years. Dunphy wrote a memoir called Dear Genius, published three years after Truman’s death, the most honest document anyone close to Truman produced about what living near him was actually like.
The manuscript of Answered Prayers was never found. Whether it was deliberately destroyed, lost in the shuffle of a life that moved through too many apartments and houses, or never completed beyond what Esquire published, remained a question that 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, precise, and stunning in the accuracy of their social observation.
They are also incomplete in a way that is hard 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 one. He left behind a party still described as the most spectacular private social event of the twentieth century. He left behind a literary estate that generated significant income and a cultural presence that continued to grow for decades after his death.
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 memoir and discussed the friendship and betrayal without warmth but without excessive bitterness, which was perhaps the most honest response available to her. She died on April 16, 1990, at seventy-two. Pamela Harriman turned herself into the most effective Democratic fundraiser in America, established an organization informally called “PamPAC” that raised twelve million dollars for the party, and in 1993 was appointed by President Clinton as United States Ambassador to France, where she hosted the most sought-after dinner parties in the diplomatic quarter.
She died on January 5, 1997, at seventy-six. Lee Radziwill lived forty years after publication, worked as a fashion consultant for Giorgio Armani, outlived her sister Jackie, outlived Capote, outlived Slim Keith, outlived Babe Paley, and died on February 15, 2019, at eighty-five. C. Z.
Guest went to the garden, published books about gardening, was photographed extensively by Andy Warhol, and died on November 8, 2003, at eighty-three, having spent forty-three years after the party doing exactly what she wanted to do. Marella Agnelli lived more than fifty years with Gianni Agnelli, published books about Italian gardens, rarely discussed Truman Capote, and died on February 3, 2019, at ninety-one. Twelve days separated her death from Lee Radziwill’s. They had been together at that party in 1966.
They had known Capote in the years when knowing him was the most important social friendship available to a woman in their position, and they had lived through the betrayal and the exile and the decades of distance, and then died in the same winter month more than half a century later. The last of the original swans left the world in the same month and same year, as if the story had finally decided it was time for the ending. Gloria Guinness died on September 18, 1980, in Paris, at sixty-seven, having lived only five years after publication, dying knowing exactly what Capote had done and without the benefit of the distance time eventually provides to those who live long enough to receive it. 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, starring Toby Jones. 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. Critics noted the liberties the series took with the historical record: some dialogue was invented, some chronology was compressed, some emotions were amplified for dramatic effect.
That is always the case with dramatizations of events involving real people who left real records. The drama is always slightly bigger, slightly louder, slightly more certain about things the historical record leaves ambiguous. That does not make the substance of the story less true. The images remain.
The Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in November of ’66. Five hundred forty people in black and white and masks at the summit of a world that would not last much longer. The small man with the notebook, who planned everything, who assembled this particular room at this particular moment, and who would spend the rest of his life watching it empty out around him. The boy from Monroeville wanted, above all, to be one of the people in the room.
He achieved it completely and permanently through talent and charm and work—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 always said writing was the only thing he was good at, 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 never finished the book.