On the night of November 28, 1966, 540 guests 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 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 later called the most balanced social event of the century.
He 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 ever achieve in life. He knew it. Most people at the party did not know it yet.
Born Truman Streckfus Persons on September 30, 1924,in New Orleans to parents aged 19 and 17 who wanted little to do with each other or with him, Capote spent much of his childhood with elderly female relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. He was a delicate, brilliant child who read constantly and taught himself to type on a machine left in a back bedroom. A neighbor girl two years younger named Nelle Harper Lee became his protector. They climbed trees together and wrote stories together. They remained friends, intermittently at first and then permanently, for the rest of their lives.
Capote 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 age 23, 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 Capote reclining on a sofa with an expression combining innocence and knowingness; the letters that arrived about the photo nearly equaled those about the book. He was openly, 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 her identity—exactly what Capote wanted. He had an instinct, honed during his childhood among women who talked and whispered and watched from behind their curtains, for calibrating the exact amount of truth that makes fiction magnetic. He would use that gift one final time,and it would destroy him
In November 1959, Capote 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, prosperous,and utterly ordinary in the way only certain Kansas families can be,and someone had slaughtered them. The item was a few hundred words. Capote read it several times, then called his editor and told him he was going to Kansas. He took Harper Lee with him. It was a practical decision. In Holcomb, Kansas,in 1959, Capote—with his small body, affected voice,and precisely tailored coat—was so alien that townspeople did not know how to handle him. Harper Lee was a big, plain, practical Alabama woman who could talk to anyone. She conducted interviews for six weeks and produced more than 150 pages of notes, making the book possible largely by providing the access Capote needed
The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested in Las Vegas in late December 1959 and returned to Kansas. Capote visited them in prison regularly over the following years with a frequency 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, compact,and psychologically damaged in ways Capote recognized. He spent six years working on the book. He befriended both killers with a seriousness that exceeded mere professional interest. When Kansas executed them in April 1965, Capote was present. He wept
The book was published in January 1966, after serialization in The New Yorker,and achieved sales that no serious literary work had approached 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
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 coined by people with real insight. They were beautiful. They moved through the world with a quality of expensive, studied ease that most people mistook for spontaneity. They had married wealthy men, or in some cases, had been born with gold spoons in their mouths. They occupied the upper floors of a social structure Capote, the boy from Monroeville, had spent his adult life trying to climb
The most important of them was Babe Paley. Born Barbara Cushing, daughter of a Boston brain surgeon,and raised in a family that took social position with a seriousness others reserve for religion. She married William S. Paley, who built CBS from a Philadelphia radio station into the most powerful television network in the world. She was known primarily for her taste, which was flawless 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 only way he knew how to love anyone
The other swans included Slim Keith, a California-born woman who reinvented herself through a combination of striking looks and sharp intelligence; Gloria Guinness, a Mexican-born socialite whose rise from poverty to immense wealth Capote genuinely admired; Marella Agnelli, an Italian married to the man who ran Fiat; Lee Radziwill, younger sister of Jackie Kennedy; C.Z. Guest, who tended gardens with a seriousness Capote found both baffling and charming; and Pamela Churchill Harriman, the most politically influential of the group, who understood with unusual clarity that access to powerful men was itself a form of power
What bound these women together, beyond money and social standing, was something more specific. They had all reached a point in their lives where everyone around them wanted something from them, while very few 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—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 error in judgment,and a completely understandable one. What they gave him was access. What they gave him beyond that was something rarer: honesty. He was a repository of secrets, a confidant,and an entertainer,and it worked beautifully for everyone for fifteen years
Babe Paley told Capote specific information that she had shared with him over years of 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 aboutthe gap between the life she appeared to live in society pages and the life she actually lived. Capote listened and remembered. He always remembered
Their friendship was characterized by a mutual dependency 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. 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,and the mistake they all made, was failing to understand that for Capote, nothing was truly confidential when there was a better story to tell
Capote 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 friend Elaine Fried's house in July 1966,and the idea arrived complete: a masked ball at the Plaza Hotel in black and white, honoring Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, whose husband had recently died by suicide,and whom Capote felt deserved to be celebrated in the grandest way possible
The guest list took three months. He carried the black-and-white notebook with him everywhere. He was constantly on the phone. He added names and removed them with a deliberateness befitting a general deploying troops. Every decision was a statement about who mattered and who did not—a declaration of Capote's taste and Capote'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 caused at any gathering. He invited Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda,and Candice Bergen. He invited McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson. He invited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, old and withered but 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's doorman. He did not invite critics who had reviewed him negatively. He did not invite certain actresses he deemed 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
In the weeks before the party, the preparations generated a secondary social event as time-consuming as the party itself. Women who received 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 accessory became an argument about who you were and how seriously you took the matter. Women who did not receive invitations spent the same weeks in states of distress that were sometimes comic and sometimes genuine, and the line between them was not always clear
The masks were the detail that distinguished Capote'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 normally governed how the wealthy and powerful interacted. Behind a mask, the senator and the doorman occupied the same formal status. The equality was brief and theatrical,but Capote correctly judged that even brief theater could change the atmosphere of a room
Guests arrived at the Plaza on the evening of November 28 through crowds of onlookers gathered on Fifth Avenue to watch. The dress code was explicit. Men wore formal black tie and black masks. Women wore black or white dresses with white masks or handheld 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 forthe privilege, while Capote's own mask cost 39 cents froma drugstore and was made of paper and rhinestones
The Grand Ballroom was decorated with red tablecloths, gold candelabra wrapped in smilax,and white candles instead of flowers, because the florist Capote originally contracted had suggested something excessive and been dismissed. The band played. Champagne moved in waves through the room. The masks stayed on, creating 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 simply be interested. Capote 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 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 socially more powerful in the city than that small man with a notebook. He had organized the best party of the century,and done so 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 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 merely a party. Capote 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 after the party was extraordinary and fraught in ways he did not perceive,and his friends did but could not adequately convey to him. He was at the top 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 genuinely believed he was one of them. The swans believed he was one of them. It was an understandable mistake. He had worked very hard to make it so
The question no one asked at the time, or did not ask loudly enough to be heard, was what he would do next. The party was a peak,and peaks by nature are followed by declines. The friendships, invitations,and access were predicated on continuity of performance, on the ongoing production of wit, gossip,and literary reputation that justified the swans' investment of time and trust. He had been performing this role for twenty years. Performance requires raw material. The material was what the swans had given 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 a late manuscript. The advance was generous. The title was *Answered Prayers*. Capote told anyone who would listen it would be his Proustian novel, his most important work, a summing-up 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. Capote missed it. 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 incomplete
The truth, which he did not fully admit 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 had provided it. The swans had given him the raw material for *Answered Prayers*—their secrets, their humiliations,and their own assessments of their husbands and of one another. He was transposing it into fiction with thin disguise. 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 Capote 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 farm wives. They 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 continue living among these women simultaneously, which produced a paralysis he treated with drinking, television appearances,and assurances to interviewers that work was proceeding brilliantly
The story he carried most carefully, the one confided to him under specific conditions of secrecy, concerned a woman named Ann Woodward. She was not one of the swans. She was, in the view of New York society in the 1950s, precisely the kind of woman the swans had been created to exclude. Born in Kansas, she came to New York to become a showgirl and model,and eventually, in 1943, married William Woodward Jr., heir to a banking fortune,and a racing stable,and everything his family decided he should not be wasting on someone like Ann. The Woodwards received her with a coldness recorded in 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 and killed her husband in a dark 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 it an accidental death. Ann Woodward was legally innocent. Legal innocence was not the same as social innocence,and New York society knew the difference. Her social death was immediate. She spent the following years in Europe, moving through cities where people who had been expelled from one world tried 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 Capote. *Esquire* published the first excerpt from *Answered Prayers* in its November 1975 issue. The chapter was called "La Côte Basque 1965," after an elegant French restaurant on East 55th Street where Capote had spent many lunches listening and watching. The chapter was narrated by a character named P.B. Jones, immediately understood to be Capote. At a side table in 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 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 understood to be one of William Paley's real affairs—one Babe had told Capote in confidence,and he had turned into fiction with a disguise so thin as to constitute 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. Everyone named in the chapter, and everyone who knew someone named in it, had an opinion about what Capote had done and why. Gloria Vanderbilt announced that the next time she saw Truman Capote, she would spit in his face. Ann Woodward learned she was in it before the issue reached newsstands. She was living in Paris. She obtained a copy and read it. On October 9, 1975, she swallowed cyanide and died in her apartment. Elsie Woodward, Billy Woodward's mother, was in her nineties and had spent 20 years maintaining a position on her daughter-in-law's guilt she had never publicly expressed but never privately doubted. When she received word of Ann Woodward'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 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 Capote had done. He had not written about her. He had not fictionalized her. He had killed her
Capote's reaction to news of Ann Woodward's death was recorded by several people in his circle. He said very little. She was not a friend of his. 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're so 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 defamation and decided not to proceed, settling for simply not answering the phone when Capote called. 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 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 Capote's invention. It was Babe's information, transferred from the privacy of her marriage onto 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
Capote 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 reporter that the characters were fictional and that the connections being drawn were the work of people with overactive imaginations and little else to do. In his apartment on United Nations Plaza, he was reported to have wept and repeated the same sentence to the person with him:. "I didn't mean it. I thought they would come back. They didn't come back."
The social structure that had supported him for fifteen years—dinner invitations, houses, long lunches,and phone calls—collapsed within months into silence. Truman Capote, the most entertaining man in the room, had become, overnight, a Judas in tweed
In 1977, Babe Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 60, had smoked most of her adult life,and the diagnosis meant that the time available for maintaining silence between her and Capote 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 infidelities had been dissected on the pages of Esquire for a reading public, had no interest in facilitating a reconciliation. Friends who might have served as intermediaries largely took sides the way social circles, once disrupted, tend to harden along lines of division. Babe's side had more people on it. She died on July 2, 1978. She was 63. Capote 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 nearly everything that happened to him. People close to him understood that this silence was a form of grief that could not be publicly expressed. She had been the person he loved most in the world. He had used what she told him in a way that made love indistinguishable from betrayal. Whether he had intended that outcome or not had become, by July 1978, an irrelevant question. She was gone,and the silence was permanent,and there was no one to blame but the writer inside him, who had always believed that the story mattered more than the person who provided it
The years between the publication of "La Côte Basque" and Capote's death spanned nine years of diminishment. He drank. He took pills. He appeared on talk shows in conditions that alarmed audiences and embarrassed hosts. He appeared on The Tonight Show and others in states his friends called performance and his enemies called collapse. 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 present in his life while being practically absent—a reasonable response to what Capote had become
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 million-dollar 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, over those years, entirely uncertain. 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, the performer who had once made a room of 500 people feel like the most alive place in the world. The intelligence was still there. The observational power was still there. The wit flashed in ways that made the surrounding faltering 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 entered rehabilitation programs. He left them and drank again. He appeared on talk shows looking like a diminished version of himself. The performance that had sustained Truman Capote for so long was collapsing, publicly and in real time, before an audience that was not always sure whether it was watching a tragedy or something else
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* was published. He was 59. The official cause of death was liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drugs in his system. He had been in declining health 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 stayed partly out of loyalty and partly because she was one of the few people still willing to do so. Jack Dunphy received word of his death in New York, where he was living separately but remained Capote's designated heir and executor. The two men had been together, in one way or another, for 36 years. Dunphy wrote a memoir titled *Dear Genius*, published three years after Capote's death, which was the most honest document anyone close to Capote produced about what it was like to live near him
The manuscript of *Answered Prayers* was never found. Whether it was deliberately destroyed, lost in 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 what existed. They are good in the specific way Capote's best work was always good—direct, precise,and startling in their social observation. They are also incomplete in a way that makes them 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 spectacular private social event of the twentieth century. He left a literary legacy that continued to generate revenue,and a cultural presence that kept growing for decades after his death. Partly because the story of the swans and his betrayal of them 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 malice but without excessive bitterness either—perhaps 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 had loved Capote,and that the love was real,and that the betrayal was also real,and that the two things coexisted in a way that could not be resolved. That is probably the most accurate description available of what that friendship was and what its ending 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 had 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 writing was the only thing he was good at,and the only thing he really wanted to do. In 1975, when the choice between writer and friend became unavoidable, he chose 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. People who knew him well could not agree on an answer. Some believed he had no idea what he was unleashing. Others believed he knew exactly. The women who gave Truman Capote the material for the most scandalous literary work of that decade did not simply disappear when he died. Babe Paley was gone by 1978. But the others lived on, some for decades, carrying memories of friendship and betrayal through marriages,and divorces,and deaths,and reinventions that Truman Capote did not live to see
Nancy Keith, known to all who mattered as "Slim," did not register her response to *Answered Prayers* in letters or interviews. She registered it in 400 pages. Her memoir, *Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life*, was published in 1990 with co-author Annette Tapert,and serialized in Vanity Fair before her death. She did not live to read the reviews. The memoir contains the most precise description any of the swans gave of the nature of that real friendship. She describes Capote telling her during one of their phone calls that he exaggerated his persona before people so that they would laugh with him rather than at him. She responded at the time:. "No, no, we love you." Decades later, she left that exchange in her memoir without comment. The gap between what she said then and what she understood by the time she wrote it down says more than any explicit judgment could
Whether "Slim" was the real "Lady Coolbirth" in *Answered Prayers* had been debated since the issue appeared. Some scholars believed the character was Pamela Harriman, whose social history matched certain details in the text more closely. Others believed she was a composite. Slim herself believed she was the model—the only interpretation that mattered for the sincerity of their friendship. She read the story,and recognized herself,and never spoke to Capote again,and her certainty was itself evidence, because people tend to recognize themselves most clearly in portraits that capture something real. Slim Keith died on April 16, 1990, at age 72. She spent her post-Capote decades between New York and London, maintaining the social position she had built through four marriages,and a gift for friendship that remained undiminished until her death. 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 memoir was the last word she chose carefully
Of all the women in Capote's orbit, Pamela Churchill Harriman may have had the most remarkable second act. She had, in fact, a first act that required some explanation. Daughter of an English baron, she briefly married Randolph Churchill during the war,and conducted wartime affairs in London so notorious they were considered a form of intelligence work. After the war, she moved through marriages and affairs with some of the most powerful men in Europe and America before settling,in 1971, with Averell Harriman, the railroad heir and diplomat 31 years her senior whose wealth exceeded that of most of her previous partners combined
After "La Côte Basque," Pamela Harriman became a different kind of figure. Some scholars argued that she, not Slim Keith, was the real model for Lady Coolbirth in the story. She never commented publicly on the matter. What she did instead was transform herself into the most effective Democratic Party fundraiser in America. In 1980, she founded an organization called "Democrats for the Eighties," informally known as "PamPAC," which raised $12 million forthe party over the following years. She hosted dinner parties in Washington that functioned as both policy salons and talent showcases. Jimmy Carter benefited. Walter Mondale benefited. Bill Clinton perhaps benefited most of all. Averell Harriman died in 1986, leaving her the houses, wealth,and Washington social position she had spent 15 years acquiring. In 1993, President Clinton appointed her U.S. Ambassador to France. She moved into the American embassy in Paris and hosted the most sought-after dinner parties in the diplomatic corps,and exercised real influence in Franco-American relations at the precise moment both countries were trying to figure out what the post-Cold War world required of them. The American embassy in Paris under Pamela Harriman became one of the social centers of the city. She hosted parties with instincts developed over 60 years, understanding that a dinner table, with the right people seated in the right proximity to one another, was as effective a foreign policy tool as any official statement. She spoke fluent French and moved through Parisian society with an ease rarely achieved by American diplomats, because she had been frequenting European salons since the 1940s and never really left them
What she never did publicly was address her place in *Answered Prayers*. If she was the model for Lady Coolbirth, she accepted that identification without comment and channeled her energy into becoming something no fictional character could compete with. The woman in the story was a society hostess whose importance had faded. The woman in the real world became a senator's widow, a party chairwoman,and an ambassador,and one of the most influential political women of her generation. By any measure, she got the better outcome. She died on January 5, 1997, at age 76, of a cerebral hemorrhage. She had been swimming in the pool at the Ritz Hotel in Paris earlier that day. The woman who met Truman Capote at a party in the 1950s, whose social life was chronicled and dissected in his fiction, ended her days as U.S. Ambassador, representing her adopted country to the country where she died, in a hotel where "Babe" had once stayed,and where the bar still serves the champagne cocktail she preferred
Lee Bouvier Radziwill spent more than 40 years after the publication of "La Côte Basque," and during those years she tried, with varying success, most of the things women of her class tried in the 1970s and beyond. She opened an interior design firm in 1976, landed a contract to design suites for a hotel chain,and appeared in Architectural Digest. The business did not survive its first decade. She tried acting, appearing in a 1967 production of *The Philadelphia Story*—a role Capote himself had coached her for—and in the 1983 miniseries *The Winds of War*. Neither career went as she had hoped. What became central in her later life was fashion, the way fashion becomes central for women who have always understood it as a form of self-construction. She worked as a fashion consultant for Giorgio Armani,and kept apartments in Paris, London,and finally the Upper East Side of New York,and was regularly photographed in the company of people who found her social history romantic and her aesthetic sense inspiring
Her sister Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in May 1994. Lee outlived her by 25 years, meaning she outlived Jackie,and Capote,and Slim Keith,and Babe Paley,and nearly everyone from that world Capote had both immortalized and destroyed in a single magazine issue. Her son Anthony Radziwill died of cancer in August 1999, weeks after her cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash over the Atlantic. The losses accumulated with a particular cruelty reserved for those who live long enough to bury both the generation after them and their own generation. In the years before her death, Lee Radziwill gave occasional interviews in which she discussed Capote with a measured distance suggesting time had done its work. She remembered him as brilliant and funny,and as someone who understood her in ways others did not. She did not explicitly forgive the betrayal. But she did not condemn it with the same intensity that marked the years immediately after publication. She had simply moved past it, the way a room that was once important becomes, over time, just a place you are used to passing through
There was a particular irony in Lee Radziwill's relationship to Capote's memory,and it was one she seemed to understand. He had coached her for the acting role she attempted in 1967, spending weeks on the phone with her while she prepared for *The Philadelphia Story* in Chicago, advising her on delivery, presence,and how to hold an audience's attention—subjects on which he spoke from deep personal experience. The role did not go well. The reviews were kind the way reviews are kind when critics want to be honest but don't feel they can be. Capote had not succeeded in making her an actress. He had simply been present during the attempt, just as he had been present for everything his swans attempted and failed at, offering encouragement with the genuine warmth that made him indispensable to them,and with sharp eyes that noticed everything they would rather have had unnoticed
When FX aired a series about the betrayal in 2024, Calista Flockhart played Lee Radziwill. Lee had died five years earlier. The actress playing her was working from interviews, photographs,and written records of a woman who had spent her adult life being the second-most-famous person in every room she entered, standing always to the left of her extraordinarily magnetic sister,and who had found in Truman Capote someone who found her interesting for herself. Whatever his other failures, he had given her that. She died on February 15, 2019, in her Upper East Side apartment. She was 85
Cornelia Guest, known from her debutante years as"C.Z.," handled the problem of what to do after Capote in the most literal way possible. She went to the garden. Her properties in Palm Beach, particularly an estate called Villa Artemis, became over the following decades some of the most written-about private gardens in America. She published books on gardening. She appeared in magazines seated among her flowers with a practicality that made her seem less like a socialite who had found a hobby and more like a gardener who happened to have a famous address. Andy Warhol photographed her extensively throughout the 1970s and 1980s, producing images that captured something the society photographers of the 1950s and 1960s had missed. A woman genuinely comfortable with herself in a way few of her peers managed. She attended his Factory gatherings and parties with the same ease she brought to Palm Beach, to the horse shows she judged,and to the multiple committees she served on, with the precision of someone who considers social obligation a serious form of work. Her daughter Cornelia became a society figure and model of the next generation, known more for her fashion presence than for any inherited wealth—itself a comment on what the world had become
The Warhol friendship deserves a pause. He photographed C.Z. throughout the 1970s and 1980s,and the portraits he produced captured something her social peers rarely allowed to be captured:. genuine relaxation. Most of the women Truman Capote knew appeared with a degree of armor that you only see when you look at a photograph taken by someone who saw them without it. Warhol had a gift for that,and C.Z. seems to have trusted him the way she once trusted Capote—the trust of someone who knows she is being watched and does not particularly mind. She knew Capote before the party and after the publication,and she simply continued to know herself—the rarest and most useful quality for someone living in a social world perpetually on the verge of collapse. The garden was not an escape. It was an affirmation of self. This is what I do,and I do it well. Whatever noise remains is just that. C.Z. Guest died on November 8, 2003, in Palm Beach, at age 83. She had spent 43 years after the party doing exactly what she wanted to do, which was not"nothing."
Marella Agnelli was the most European and the most private of the swans. Born in Naples, she married into the Agnelli family that controlled Fiat and therefore much of Italy's economic life,and spent her young adulthood moving between Agnelli houses in Turin and Villa Perosa, the yacht,and the various residences that came with being wife to one of postwar Italy's most powerful men. When Gianni Agnelli died in January 2003, she had been with him for more than 50 years. She outlived him by 16 years. She published books on Italian gardens that were received as reference works on a particular kind of private beauty most people would never see in person. She gave interviews in which she discussed design, architecture,and the vanishing world of a certain European upper class with the depth of someone who had watched that disappearance from inside. By most accounts, she did not discuss Truman Capote much. Marella Agnelli died on February 3, 2019. She was 91
The coincidence was the kind a novelist might cut for being too perfect. Marella Agnelli died on February 3, 2019. Lee Radziwill died on February 15, 2019. Twelve days apart. 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 of their position,and they had lived through betrayal,and ostracism,and decades of distance,and then died in the same winter month more than half a century later. No one wrote a news story linking them at the time. They lived in different countries,and different social worlds,and different decades of widowhood and reinvention. Marella was in Turin. Lee was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. That they had been together at the Plaza in 1966, in black or white clothing and masks,and in conversation with the man who would later use their secrets as literary material, was a detail in their biographies rather than a living connection by the time they died. And yet, the proximity of timing seemed, from outside, less than supernatural,and not bearing mystical meaning,but structurally resonant the way history sometimes produces endings that look choreographed. The world of the swans was Truman Capote's great subject and his greatest failure. The last swans left this world in the same month and same year, as if the story had finally decided it was time to end
The last of the original swans to die were not Babe Paley, who died in 1978 and began the sequence of departures. They were two women who died twelve days apart in a February no one assigned any significance to, amid global competition that had transformed the auto industry beyond recognition. Marella was not at the center of those conflicts. She occupied the margins of family drama the way wives of great men occupy the margins of their husbands' complications after their deaths—present and secondary simultaneously. She gave interviews in her final years discussing design with the authority of someone who had lived in beautiful spaces for eight decades and understood what made them distinctive. She spoke of Gianni with the calm of a woman who had been married to a man of enormous appetites and complicated fidelity,and had long since decided what the terms of that arrangement were. She did not discuss Truman Capote in the available recorded interviews. Perhaps there was nothing to add to what silence had already said. She had been at the party. She had been in his inner circle. She had watched what happened and drawn her conclusions,and gone on living her life the specific way Italian aristocratic women of her generation lived theirs—with discipline,and beauty,and a refusal to be defined by other people's narratives, which was itself a form of response from all the women in Capote's circle
Gloria Guinness left the least documentary record of what she thought and felt about the betrayal. Born in Mexico in 1912, daughter of a family with nothing, she built herself through marriages,and affairs,and an instinct for choosing beautiful objects and beautiful places, becoming one of the most admired women in Europe. She ended up with Loel Guinness, the banker and aviator,and spent her middle years between Paris,and Mexico,and the yachts that served as the primary social venue for the kind of international wealth she moved among. She spent her final years largely between Marbella and Paris, with a small circle of people who had known her long enough to accept the terms under which she allowed herself to be known. She had been born with nothing and built everything,and that building required maintenance that casual acquaintances could not provide. She wore Balenciaga and was considered one of his most loyal clients. She had the kind of relationship with the designer that is only available to women who understand clothing as a form of argument. Every piece was a position taken,and every appearance was a statement of terms. What she thought about *Answered Prayers*, and about the specific bargain it represented between a man she had trusted and the world he had exposed her to, was not recorded with any precision. She was not a woman who made her inner life available for documentation. The five years between publication and her death were quiet the way the lives of wealthy, reclusive women are quiet—eventful,but with none of it narrated. She died on September 18, 1980, in Paris. She was 67. She lived only five years after the publication of"La Côte Basque," meaning she died knowing exactly what Capote had done,and without the benefit of the distance time eventually provides to people who live long enough to receive it. What she said to him in the intervening years, if she said anything, was not recorded. She was private in the specific way of women who had built themselves carefully and knew that extended exposure was a threat to that construction
Truman Capote died in 1984. The swans outlived him, most of them by a long time,and the story outlived the swans. In 2005, a film called *Capote* covered the research years for *In Cold Blood*, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in the lead role. The following year, a separate film called *Infamous* covered the same period, starring Toby Jones. Both were received as serious works. But neither addressed the "La Côte Basque" affair with the depth the story deserves. In 2024, the streaming series *Feud: Capote vs. The Swans* dramatized that betrayal and its aftermath, with Tom Hollander as Capote,and a cast including Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, Demi Moore as Ann Woodward,and Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill. The series was described as elegant and emotionally affecting,but also as speculative in ways the historical record does not support—the usual problem with dramatizing recent events involving people whose families are still alive. *Feud* was produced by Ryan Murphy and aired in eight episodes on FX in 2024. Tom Hollander's portrayal of Capote was praised for its physical accuracy and its sense of the man's essential loneliness—the way he built the most charming social life of his era precisely because he needed it more than anyone in it did. Naomi Watts played Babe Paley as a woman of unbearable elegance and quiet devastation, which was probably accurate. Demi Moore appeared as Ann Woodward briefly but memorably,and the episode depicting the publication of"La Côte Basque" was said to be one of the season's most controversial. Critics familiar with the historical record noted the liberties the series took. Some dialogue placed in the swans' mouths was invented. Some chronology was compressed. Some emotions were amplified for dramatic effect in ways the actual record—which was cautious and restrained, as people who have been publicly humiliated tend to be—does not support. This is always the case with dramatizing 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 core of the story less true. What these dramatizations confirmed, regardless of their individual accuracy, was that the story had not lost its power to attract people who were not there. The images remain. The Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in November '66. 540 people in black and white with masks at the summit of a world that would not last much longer. The small man with the notebook, who planned everything,and who assembled that particular room at that particular moment—