“I want to pay you all back,” he drawled, when questioned about his notebook, which he guarded fiercely, joked that he kept it locked up in a safe at night. “You’ve all been so kind to me, giving me parties, dinners, vacations, even! Marella, your yacht, it is to die for! A floating palace! So it’s the least I can do, to throw a little ol’ party in return!”
Yes, I want to pay you all back, he said to himself. I want to make you jump through the hoops. Amuse me, amuse me! I want you to remember just who I am now. Truman Capote. The acclaimed author of the acclaimed In Cold Blood, the book that everyone is talking about this summer of 1966. The book none of you shallow idiots could ever have written. I’m not just your little True Heart, your favorite dinner guest, your token fag. I’m just as powerful as you!
And just as glamorous. And just as headline-worthy.
And infinitely more interesting.
Still, as rich as he now was from the proceeds of the book—rich enough to make Nina/Lillie Mae spin in her urn, rich enough finally to move from dreary Brooklyn into a stunning Manhattan apartment at the new UN Plaza, an apartment that Babe helped him decorate, with heady views of the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge, lower Manhattan; rich enough to buy Jack’s Southampton house for him, in his own name, and give it to him as a present, possibly the most generous act of his life, and thinking about it still brought tears to his eyes; rich enough to throw this party—still, he wasn’t rich enough to own a yacht. Or a plane. Or a television network.
So he bit his tongue and planned his party gleefully, telling all his swans that of course they’d be invited—why, they’d be the very top of the list!
Still, it wouldn’t do to throw the party for himself. Far too tacky, even for him. And he couldn’t throw it for any of his swans—dear God, what a tangle of shredded feathers, rent designer gowns, torn jewels that would be! No, best to throw it for someone else, someone rather small and dreary; someone not nearly as fabulous as him, if he was going to have to share the spotlight. Someone like Kay Graham.
Poor Kay!
Poor plain Kay, wife of Phil Graham, a tragic suicide. Poor Kay, left with pots of money and a newspaper, The Washington Post, to run. Poor Kay of Washington, D.C., that dowdy little town where women did not dress for lunch, where they did not get their hair done by Kenneth, where the parties were soggy with politicians and other earnest drabs who talked more than they drank.
Poor Kay, whom Babe had introduced him to, and whom Truman had immediately liked, because of her very plainness. Just as he’d been drawn to Alvin and Marie Dewey of Kansas, whom he’d met while researching In Cold Blood (Alvin was the lead detective on the case); just as he was drawn irresistibly to truck drivers and appliance repairmen and dumb, brawny dockworkers. Truman knew he had a fascination for the ordinary that almost overshadowed his fascination with the rich and famous. He truly couldn’t live without either. He’d left many a dinner in a penthouse apartment on Fifth to go down to the docks and pick up a Teamster.
So, Kay. Dowdy, pitiful Kay, who, he insisted in a phone call that summer, needed cheering up.
“No, not really,” she’d replied, puzzled. “I’m just fine, Truman.”
“No, you’re not. I’m going to give you a party. Just a little party, to put a smile back on your face.”
“You don’t have to, but if you want to, I’d be honored.”
“Fine. It’s settled, then. Just an intimate party with dear friends.”
By August, that intimate party had swelled to five hundred “dear friends.” Only five hundred. Maybe five forty. No more. Because that was all the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel could comfortably hold. And that was to be the setting for this intimate little cheering-up party for his good friend, poor Kay Graham. He, Truman, was giving a party at the Plaza! Mama, Mama, look at me now!
“Now, Marella, don’t feel put out. I couldn’t have you as the guest of honor because everyone else would be jealous! But I will need you to host a pre-party dinner, sweetheart, if you don’t mind. I’m only asking a very few of my dearest friends.”
“Now, Slim, Big Mama, darling! Of course you’ll be tops of the guest list, but I couldn’t have you as the guest of honor—can you imagine how furious La Guinness would be? Knives would be thrown! Daggers! But I’m saving the first dance for you, my darling!”
“Now, Gloria, don’t get furious, but you couldn’t be the guest of honor. That’s going to be Kay Graham, poor Kay! But you know, don’t you, darling, that you’re the guest of honor in my heart of hearts? And I’m instructing you to wear your finest jewelry because it’s going to be fancy, fancy, and you’ll be the belle of the ball, anyway!”
“C.Z.! My pet! What fun we’re going to have! I know you won’t mind if you’re not the guest of honor—you know Kay Graham, don’t you? Poor Kay! I decided she needed some cheering up so she’s going to be the center of attention, because she needs it. But really, who’ll be looking at her, poor dreary soul, when you’re there, the golden goddess of all time?”
“Babe! Bobolink, my heart! Of course, I thought of you right away when I wanted to throw a party. I longed to give it for you, in your honor, after all we’ve been through together! But can you imagine how Slim would feel, the poor dear? Her life with that dreadful English lord is dreary enough. But I absolutely will rely on you for help in planning! And would you be the dearest of dears and host a pre-party dinner? I’m asking only a few really special friends, so that some of the guests who won’t have escorts won’t have to arrive alone. Everyone can dine together, and arrive en masse!”
And Marella, Slim, Gloria, C.Z., Babe, all that summer while they indulged their favorite, showed him off, now even more in demand than ever, a true prize at the dinner table, an intellectual feather in their jeweled caps, all murmured and agreed and felt special, singled out, and superior to poor Kay Graham. Who was a dowdy, dear soul.
And so Truman cackled and rubbed his hands with glee, a Machiavellian party planner, and dangled and withheld, delighting to see all Manhattan dancing at his feet, begging to be invited to what was already, that summer, shaping up to be the biggest event of the season. Truman dropped hints in the press. He called up his famous friends and drawled into their famous ears, tantalizing, purring—“So Tony, Tony Curtis, my favorite actor of all time! You’ll be in Manhattan in November, won’t you?”
Tony Curtis, his favorite actor of all time (that day, anyway), cleared his schedule. And waited for an invitation that never appeared.
“Carson, darling! My pet, my favorite author! You’ll be in town in November, of course?”
And Carson McCullers, former friend and champion of a then-unknown writer named Truman Capote, waited. Until she heard, via Norman Mailer, that she wasn’t invited. Then she grandly announced she’d be giving her own party that same night. But no one paid any attention.
All summer long, Truman schemed and planned and finalized. The guest list was the major work, and he spent as much time agonizing over it as he had any of his manuscripts. It had to be perfect. It had to be a unique mix of the beautiful people, the wealthy, the respected, the new and exciting, for this was 1966! Nineteen sixty-six, and the Beatles were absolutely it, and people were dancing the go-go at the Cheetah, and Andy Warhol was holding parties of his own at his workspace, the Factory, and skirts were up to there, and hair down to here, and Frank Sinatra had just married Mia Farrow!
Frank Sinatra. Mia Farrow. Truman scribbled their names down. Along with Aly Khan. Lynda Bird Johnson—but not Lady Bird, God no; he didn’t want any dreary Secret Service men invading his party. Candice Bergen. Henry Fonda. The Windsors, for the expected touch of royalty.
Cecil Beaton. Henry Ford III. McGeorge Bundy. Norman Mailer. The Deweys and their friends from Kansas. Bennett and Phyllis Cerf, of course. The doorman at his new apartment building. Jack.
Margaret Truman—but not Bess or Harry. Alice Roosevelt. The Whitneys, naturellement. A couple of Vanderbilts and Astors, just for nostalgia’s sake.
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Should he invite the Beatles? Nah. But Andy Warhol, definitely. Christopher, of course—Christopher Isherwood. And John Knowles. He thought, briefly, of the entire Pulitzer Prize committee, sure to award In Cold Blood the prize for nonfiction in the upcoming year, but decided against that as too calculated, even for him.
Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, the Harry Belafontes. Tallulah Bankhead—who was apt to show up naked, please, God! Think of the publicity. Rudolf Nureyev, definitely! George Balanchine. There would be dancing, of course; better book Peter Duchin now.
Betty Bacall. Pamela and Leland Hayward—well, hell, of course he had to invite them; surely Slim was over that whole thing by now! The cabdriver who took Truman home for free one night because he’d had his wallet stolen at a dive bar. Rose Kennedy. Ethel and Bobby, his neighbors at the UN Plaza. Jackie, naturally. Although Truman had taken to whispering, to anyone who would listen, that she looked like a drag version of herself, in person.
For every name added there were two crossed out, perhaps to be added later. Or not. Truman was God. And not a benevolent one, either. Old grievances were dredged up—of course, Carson McCullers wouldn’t be invited, the sow. The bitchy, envious sow who had turned on him ever since he became more acclaimed than she was. And forget Gore Vidal, that bitch. Ann Woodward could forget it, too, and not just because she was a murderess. They’d met at a party at the Windsors’ not too long ago, where the other guests were giving her a wide berth. Ann was standing alone, one arm on the fireplace mantel, surveying the crowd. Truman strolled right up to her.
“Well, if it isn’t Miss Bang Bang herself,” he had greeted her. “Seen any burglars lately?”
“Well, if it isn’t Truman Capote, literary asshole and garden-variety fag,” Ann had slurred back. She was stoned. Her eyes were glazed over, her lipstick smeared all over her face, and Wallis was surveying her grimly, visibly regretting having invited her. But some people had started to feel sorry for her, trapped in Elsie’s golden grip, and she was starting to make the rounds again.
Then she threw her drink in his face, chest heaving, pupils dilated. She had a twisted grin of triumph on her cherry-streaked lips. “You don’t fool me, you little queer. You’re just as pathetic as I am. Maybe more pathetic.”
“You’ll regret this,” he assured her calmly, as she was hastily ushered away, cackling wildly, by one of Wallis’s lapdogs. He was already starting to plot his revenge….
But that was for later. After. Right now, the only thing he wanted to work on, could work on, was his party. Throwing this party meant he didn’t have to worry about what to write next. He’d worked himself raw, scraped his soul to the marrow, writing In Cold Blood. At first it was just a diversion, a small article in the Times about a murdered Kansas family that piqued his interest. He thought it might make a nice little piece for The New Yorker—something about a murder in a small town, the shocking randomness of it, the reverberations. So he convinced William Shawn, the editor, to send him out to Kansas so he could report on it. That was all.
But from the moment he laid eyes on Dick—stupid, blustering Dick—and Perry—mesmerizing, charismatic Perry—at the tiny Kansas courthouse, the night the two men were arrested for the murders of the Clutter family, he knew that he had something more. His masterpiece. A case study, a brilliant piece of journalism, written with the lyricism of a novel. “In fact, I’ve invented a new genre. The nonfiction novel,” he never tired of telling anyone who would listen, back in 1959, when the whole thing started. He spent endless weeks in Holcomb, Kansas, gathering the material, interviewing the townsfolk, trying to understand the doomed Clutters, getting cozy with the lead detective, granite-faced Alvin Dewey, and his adorable wife, Marie, getting even cozier with the arrested and then convicted murderers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith—and understanding the latter better, more intimately, than he ever did the Clutters.
When he returned to New York and settled down with his notebooks to write, it had been easy, for a change. The manuscript flowed from his fingertips on its own, and he told absolutely everyone about it, and soon everyone in New York was salivating to read it, and he would give them glimpses, little performances of certain scenes, at parties and dinners. But then the waiting; the everlasting, tortuous waiting for the end. The End–oh, how he longed to write it, but he couldn’t, not for years, agonizing years that dragged on while Dick and Perry were granted stay after stay, pleading with him, Truman—their great hope, their chronicler—to help them. Years in which all he could do was talk about this great opus, not finish it, even while he had to watch Nelle Harper Lee win all the prizes for her story about their childhood, To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh, Christ, the pain of watching that happen to Nelle, of all people! Clumsy, inarticulate Nelle! And the fear—shocking, jolting him awake at night so that his heart raced, his body swam in clammy sweat—that people would lose interest in the story—and him. And then he would be just another writer. And not the greatest of all time.
But finally, there were no more stays, no more last-minute calls from the governor, and the executions—oh, God, oh, Jesus, oh, Mama. They’d shamed him into being there, Dick and Perry and, yes, Nelle, who’d helped him research it, and William Shawn, who expected blood, no less, for what he was paying Truman. So he’d gone to see Perry and Dick only an hour before their execution. They were white as sheets, were still trying to be brave, flippant, but obviously terrified, poor boys! What had Truman felt, talking to them this last time? He hadn’t processed it all; he wasn’t brave enough for that. Truman knew he was a coward in many ways; it was, he believed, one of the most charming things about him. That night—it was near midnight, dark, raining, a horrible, bone-chilling nightmare that he knew had seeped into his very being, and that he would carry with him forever—his cowardice and bravery, both, astonished him. The cowardice that had kept him from going to Dick and Perry despite their pleas, until the very last moment when there would be no time for them to say what he knew they would, that he had deserted them, given up on them—used them. But he had come, after all, and his bravery overwhelmed him; the courage to stay when the two murderers asked him to witness their final moments—the barbaric ritual, the last words, the hoods over the heads, the knees buckling, the tortured writhing at the end of the noose, and then, finally, the eerie stillness, the absence of breathing, the one less person in the cavernous barn despite the fact that there were still the same number of bodies. The subtraction of a soul. The tragic waste of lives not unlike his own, if he was being honest—lives of men abandoned by their parents, treated like crap, like dirt, like fungus, all their lives. Men who had taken one turn while he had taken another, and that simple act of a change in direction, in wind, in air, of one foot in front of another, was all that separated the two of them, killer and artist.
But a killer could be an artist, he discovered. And an artist a killer.
The soul-searching, the exhaustion of reality, of bearing witness, of coming to the aid of a fellow man, even a killer—he must hold it all at bay. He could not examine it, for fear of what it would do to the work, which was the most important thing. This masterpiece he had crafted, astonishing himself with every perfect word, every exquisitely crafted paragraph. The book was all. He must write it, and he did, that last chapter coming quickly for a change, as usually he agonized over endings.
And the book was all he had dreamed it would be, all he had told everyone—his swans, his literary rivals, the doorman to his apartment building, the grocer on the corner, his crazy family back in Alabama, even his sniveling deadbeat of an attention-hog father. In Cold Blood was a masterpiece, and this time the critics all agreed. And now that he was at the top of the heap—had become that spire in the great city beckoning others from lesser lands—he must rejoice in his success. For enjoying the fruits of his labor was just as serious as the writing itself.
So now he was throwing a party. The most swellegant, elegant party evah.
—
LATER, TRUMAN SAID
THAT the morning the invitations went out, he made five hundred friends and fifteen hundred enemies.
Only one of these was an exaggeration.
CHAPTER 13
…..
A summit. A counsel. Of utter fabulousness.
The day before Truman’s party, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, accompanied by her sisters, Minnie Cushing Astor Fosburgh and Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley, sailed into the Palm Court at the Plaza. Her head held high, she didn’t slow down, only barely nodded at a maître d’ who scurried ahead of her to pull out a chair just as she sat down at an intimate table, one of her own choosing. Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney did not wait to be told where to sit, not even at the Plaza.
It was afternoon tea; all around them were adorable little girls dressed in pink dresses with matching hair ribbons, white gloves, patent-leather shoes, accompanied by indulgent parents or grandparents. There were other—lesser—socialites present, too, and out-of-towners who couldn’t help but gape at the trio of fabulously dressed women, all with cheekbones as prominent as their good breeding, but the triumvirate paid the tourists no attention. This was a sister meeting, a ritual from their childhood. Long ago, their tribunals had centered around who could borrow whose hair ribbon, or what birthday present should they pool their money for and purchase for their mother. But as they grew up and into the beauty and elegance laid out for them, like their school uniforms, by their mother, the conferences had turned to more serious matters, usually presided over by Gogs. Minnie’s long affair with Vincent Astor, for instance, had been discussed and dissected and determined to have run long enough at one of their summits; Vincent found himself proposing soon after. And Babe’s miserable marriage to Stanley Mortimer had come to a merciful end after one of their conclaves; Gogs and her daughters had weighed the pros and cons and finally determined that Babe could remove herself with her reputation intact. And so, she did.