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 and Washington, from London and Rome. They were politicians and 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 perfectly balanced social event of the century.

The host stood five feet three inches tall, weighed about 120 pounds, and spoke in a voice that sounded like something 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 ever achieve in his life. He knew it.

Most of the people at the party did not know it yet. Truman Streckfus Persons was born on September 30, 1924, in New Orleans to parents aged nineteen and seventeen who wanted nothing to do with each other and very little to do with him. His father, Arch Persons, was a salesman who would spend the rest of his life chasing schemes that came to nothing. His mother, Lillie Mae, was beautiful and troubled, and decided almost immediately that motherhood was not what she had in mind.

When Truman was four and his parents separated, she left him in Monroeville, Alabama, with a collection of elderly female relatives he would spend the rest of his childhood calling his aunts. The house in Monroeville was large, ringed by a high stone fence, and run by women who smelled of talcum powder and old wood. The relatives were kindly in a distracted way, and largely left the strange little boy to himself. He was delicate-looking and ferociously intelligent, spending his days reading everything he could find, teaching himself to type on a machine left in the 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 neighbors’ daughter, two years younger, was named Nelle Harper Lee.

She was the daughter of a local lawyer, looked like a boy, and was capable of violence in short order in defense of those she considered her friends. She became his protector in the way that only children who recognize each other’s strangeness can protect one another. They climbed trees together. They wrote stories together.

They remained friends, intermittently and then permanently, for the rest of their lives. Truman moved to New York in his early teens when his mother married a Cuban businessman named Joe Capote, whose surname he took. He never attended college. He got a job at The New Yorker carrying mail and talking to anyone who would listen, which turned out to be everyone.

By the age of twenty-three, he had published his first novel. Other Voices, Other Rooms appeared in January 1948 and was discussed with a ferocity usually reserved for political scandals. The cover photograph showed Truman reclining on a sofa with an expression combining innocence and knowingness, and the letters that arrived about the photograph nearly equaled those about the book. He was openly, flagrantly gay in an era that had no framework for what that meant beyond 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 who she was, which was exactly what Truman wanted. He had an instinct, honed during a childhood among women who talked and whispered and watched from behind their curtains, for calibrating exactly how much truth makes fiction magnetic.

He would use that gift one final, spectacular time, and it would destroy him. In November 1959, Truman read a small item in the New York Times. A family of four had been murdered in their home in Holcomb, Kansas. The Clutters were beloved, prosperous, and utterly ordinary in the way that only certain Kansas families can be, and someone had slaughtered them.

The story was a few hundred words long. 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 and his affected voice and his precisely tailored coat, was so much a specter from another world that the townspeople did not know what to make of him. Harper Lee was an Alabama woman, big and plain and practical, raised thirty miles from where Truman had been raised, and able to talk to anyone. She conducted interviews for six weeks, produced more than 150 pages of notes, and made the book possible in large part by providing the access Truman needed. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were captured in Las Vegas in late December 1959 and returned to Kansas.

Truman visited them in prison over the following years with a regularity that raised questions and fueled rumors. He was, by his own eventual admission, infatuated with Perry Smith in a way he never precisely defined and perhaps never understood. Smith was dark and stocky, damaged in ways Truman, the small boy abandoned by his mother, recognized and responded to. Whether Smith returned the feeling or simply recognized that a famous New York writer was a more useful friend than most death-row inmates could hope for was a question Truman preferred not to examine.

He spent six years on the book. He befriended the killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, with a seriousness that went beyond mere professional interest. When Kansas executed them in April 1965, Truman was present. He wept.

The book appeared in January 1966, after serialization in The New Yorker, and sold in numbers no serious literary work had achieved 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 give a party. The women had been gathering around him for years.

He called them his swans, and the name was precise in the way nicknames are precise when coined by people with real insight. They were beautiful. They moved through the world with a quality of expensive, utterly artificial ease and 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 that Truman, the boy from Monroeville, had always been able to see from below and 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 was raised in a family that took social position with a seriousness others reserve for religion. She married first Mortimer, then in 1947 a man named William S.

Paley, who had 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 that only a few people in any generation achieve flawless taste. Truman loved her with a devotion that was entirely sincere and entirely complicated, the only way Truman ever loved anyone. Slim Keith was born Nancy Gross in California and fashioned herself into an entirely different person through a combination of good looks and sharp intelligence.

She married Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward and finally a British banker named Kenneth Keith, which gave her a title she used sparingly. She had the quick wit of women who have lived interesting marriages, and she and Truman spent hours on the telephone in 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 that Truman genuinely admired.

She was the most international of the swans, possessed of an ease that reflected the nature of people who have learned how to be comfortable. Marella Agnelli was Italian and married to the man who ran Fiat, and she and Truman shared a precision of observation so complete that their conversations felt like collaborative work. Lee Radziwill was Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister, which guaranteed her a degree of attention she spent her life both seeking and resenting. She married a Polish prince named Stanislas Radziwill and acquired a title that seemed more significant than the marriage actually was.

Her proximity to power was always defined partly by her proximity to her sister, something she handled with a mixture of tact and effort. Truman appreciated that effort and found in that tact a useful lesson. C. Z.

Guest cared about gardens with a seriousness Truman found both baffling and charming. Pamela Churchill Harriman, the most politically influential of the swans, had been married to Winston Churchill’s son during the war and had parlayed a series of relationships with powerful men into a position of genuine diplomatic influence. She was a woman who understood with unusual clarity that access to powerful men is itself a form of power, and she used it accordingly. What bound these women together beyond money and social position was something more specific.

They had all reached a point in their lives where everyone around them wanted something from them, while very few people were interested in knowing who they actually were. Truman was interested. He asked questions and waited for answers and remembered everything and asked follow-up questions weeks later, which is the most flattering thing in the world to a person accustomed to being admired without being seen. So they opened their hearts to him.

It was a catastrophic error in judgment, and a perfectly understandable one. What they gave him was access. What they gave him beyond that was something rarer. Honesty.

They were women of their station who lived surrounded by people who wanted things from them, and Truman wanted things too. But he also listened genuinely, which was so unusual that the swans found themselves telling him things they had never told anyone else. He was the repository of secrets, the confidant, the entertainment, and it worked perfectly for everyone for fifteen years. William Paley was a man of great accomplishments and great appetites.

He had built CBS from a Philadelphia radio station into a national empire. He had also, throughout his marriage to Babe, conducted affairs with a frequency and carelessness that suggested he either expected no one to notice or did not much care if they did. But Babe noticed. She told Truman things, specific things, passed on to him over the years of their friendship, and there was a great deal of it.

She talked about her husband’s behavior with other women. She talked about the particular humiliation of being married to a man the world considered a prize. She talked about the gap between the life she appeared to live on the society pages and the life she actually lived in the apartments and houses she shared with a man who did not much care about her feelings. Truman listened and remembered.

He always remembered. Their friendship had a quality of mutual dependence that went beyond 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. That was not the same thing. He confided in her too, or so it seemed. He told her things about himself and about other people that she understood to be confidential.

The deal was mutual. The mistake she made, the mistake they all made, was failing to understand that for Truman, nothing was ever truly 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. He sat by the pool at his friend Eleona Freed’s house in July 1966 and the idea arrived complete: a black-and-white masked ball at the Plaza in honor of Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, whose husband had recently killed himself, and who Truman felt deserved to be cheered up in the greatest possible way.

The guest list took three months. He carried the black-and-white notebook everywhere. He was on the telephone constantly. He added names and removed them with the deliberation of a general deploying troops.

That deliberation was not accidental. Every decision on that list was a statement about who mattered and who did not, a declaration of Truman’s taste and Truman’s power encoded in 430 paper invitations. He invited Frank Sinatra and his then-girlfriend Mia Farrow. He invited Norman Mailer, which required a readiness to manage the chaos Mailer’s presence brought to any occasion.

He invited Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda and Candice Bergen. He invited McGeorge Bundy, who had been national security advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson. He invited the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who were old and withered and still capable of making a room fall silent. He invited Lee Radziwill, who was not Jackie Kennedy but made people think of Jackie Kennedy, which served the same purpose.

He invited the doorman of the Plaza Hotel. He did not invite critics who had reviewed him negatively. He did not invite certain actresses he considered insufficiently interesting. He did not invite people who bored him, a category that included a surprisingly large portion of New York society.

The exclusions became, in their own way, as famous as the invitations. People spent weeks trying to find out if they were on the list. Some of them were not, and they never forgave it. The preparations in the weeks before the party produced a secondary social event as consuming as the party itself.

Women who had received invitations discussed their gowns the way generals discuss strategy. The black-or-white requirement narrowed the options but did not simplify the decision. Within those constraints, every choice of fabric and cut and accessory became an argument about who you were and how seriously you took the matter. Women who had not received invitations spent the same weeks in states of distress that were sometimes comic and sometimes genuine, and the line between the two was not always clear.

The masks were the detail that set Truman’s event apart 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 rich and powerful interacted with one another.

Behind a mask, the senator and the doorman occupied the same formal status. The equality was brief and theatrical, but 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 onlookers gathered on Fifth Avenue to watch. The dress code was explicit.

Men wore black tie and black masks. Women wore black or white dresses with white masks or hand fans. The instruction that masks remain in place until midnight created a secondary industry. Adolfo and Halston designed custom masks for guests willing to spend hundreds of dollars for the privilege, while Truman’s own mask cost 39 cents from a drugstore, made of paper and rhinestones.

The Grand Ballroom was decorated with red tablecloths and gold candelabra wound with smilax vines and white candles instead of flowers, because the florist Truman had originally contracted suggested something excessive and was dismissed. The band played. The champagne moved in waves through the room. The masks stayed in place, producing the intended effect.

People talked to each other without the usual social calculations, because behind a mask you could briefly forget who you were supposed to be and simply become 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, in whose honor the party was ostensibly given, and with Babe Paley, and Mia Farrow, and with people who would spend the rest of their lives describing the moment. At midnight, the masks came off.

By the time the last guests left at four in the morning, an understanding had settled over New York society. There was no one more socially powerful in the city than the small man with the notebook. He had organized the best party of the century, and he had done it with a guest list that was, by unanimous agreement, perfect. That was the last perfect thing he would ever do.

The reviews in the following days were gushing in a way that suggested people had been waiting for something to be excited about. The New York Times and Women’s Wear Daily and the society pages of newspapers in three countries treated the party as a cultural event rather than merely a party. Truman was photographed everywhere. He gave interviews in which his comments about who was invited and who was not were treated as a form of social criticism.

The position he occupied in the months after the party was unusual and hazardous in a way he did not perceive, and his friends perceived but could not adequately convey to him. He was at the summit of a particular kind of American social achievement that has no formal name. The gay man of modest origins who became so skilled at performing social fluency that the people he performed for sincerely believed he was one of them. The swans believed he was one of them.

The mistake was understandable. He had worked very hard to make it so. The party was, among other things, a demonstration of something New York in 1966 was still trying to absorb. That social and cultural and financial power are not identical and do not always move in the same direction, and that a man who possessed none of the third and borrowed the first from his friends could, by force of personality and intelligence, exercise the second absolutely.

Truman had invited the president’s national security advisor and a Kansas farmer’s wife to the same party and seated them in adjoining rooms, and they had both come, which tells you a great deal about what he had become. The question no one asked at the time, or no one asked loudly enough for him to hear, was what he would do next. The party was a summit, and summits are by nature followed by descents. The friendships and invitations and access were predicated on continuity of performance, on the continued production of wit and gossip and literary reputation that justified the swans’ investment of their time and their trust.

He had been performing that 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, and he was under contract to deliver one.

Random House had a manuscript that was overdue. 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, the summation of everything he had seen and heard in twenty years of living among the most interesting people in America.

The contract with Random House was signed in 1966, the same year as the party, with a delivery date of January 1, 1968. Truman missed 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 not finished. The truth he never fully admitted to himself, and certainly never to his publishers, was that the book he was writing required the use of material that could not be published without destroying the relationships that had provided it. The swans had given him the raw material for Answered Prayers, their secrets, their humiliations, their own assessments of their husbands and of each other.

He was transposing it into 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 had been possible because Truman had immersed himself in a Kansas community that had no power over his literary career or his social life. The subjects of Answered Prayers, by contrast, were not Kansas farm wives. They were the women who had invited him into their homes in Southampton and Palm Beach and the south of France. He had to finish the book and live among these women simultaneously, which produced a paralysis he treated with drinking and television appearances and assurances to interviewers that the work was proceeding brilliantly.

The story he carried most carefully, the one conveyed to him under specific conditions of confidence, concerned a woman named Ann Woodward. She was not one of the swans. She was, in the eyes of 1950s New York society, precisely the kind of woman the swans had been created to exclude. Ann Woodward was born in Kansas and came to New York to become a showgirl and model, and eventually, in 1943, the wife of 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 Woodward family received her with a coldness that the society pages recorded and everyone understood. 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. The grand jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

Ann Woodward was legally innocent. Legal innocence was not the same as social innocence, and New York society knew the difference. Her life was over. She spent the following years in Europe, drifting through cities where people who had been expelled from one world tried to build a smaller version of it.

William Paley had known Billy Woodward well. He had told his wife Babe what he believed had actually happened. Babe in turn told Truman. Esquire published the first excerpt from Answered Prayers in its November 1975 issue.

The chapter was called “La Côte Basque 1965,” after the chic French restaurant on East 55th Street where Truman had spent many lunches listening and watching. The chapter was narrated by a character named P. B. Jones, instantly understood to be Truman.

At a side table at La Côte Basque, Jones meets a woman named Lady Ina Coolbirth, instantly understood to be Slim Keith. Over lunch, the women at the 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 instantly 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 instantly understood to be William S. Paley. Cleo Dillon was instantly understood to be Babe Paley.

The governor’s wife story was instantly understood to be one of William Paley’s real affairs, the one Babe had told Truman in confidence, transformed into fiction with a disguise so thin it amounted to a dare. New York received the chapter the way cities receive catastrophic weather. First astonishment, then damage assessment, then a long period of reckoning. The phones rang for weeks.

Everyone mentioned in the chapter, and everyone who knew someone mentioned in it, had an opinion about what Truman had done and why. Gloria Vanderbilt announced that the next time she saw Truman Capote, she would spit in his face. Ann Woodward learned before the issue hit the newsstands that she was in it. She was living in Paris.

She obtained a copy and read it. On October 9, 1975, she swallowed a cyanide pill and died in her apartment. William Woodward’s mother, Elsie Woodward, was in her nineties and had spent twenty years maintaining a position on her daughter-in-law’s guilt that she never publicly expressed but never privately doubted. When she received the news 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” had done to a woman with no social protection left. And it names precisely and permanently what Truman had done.

He had not written about her. He had not fictionalized her. He had killed her. Truman’s reaction to the news of Ann Woodward’s death was recorded by several people in his circle.

He said very little. The woman was not his friend. He had known the story secondhand. What he appeared to understand 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 sentence was the most important of all the silences that followed the chapter’s publication. The others were painful. Slim Keith consulted a lawyer about a libel suit and decided not to proceed, contenting herself with simply not answering the phone when the caller was Truman. Gloria Guinness withdrew from the friendship with a finality that suggested she had been waiting for a reason.

Marella Agnelli, the most reserved of the swans, simply became unavailable in every way a woman with several houses and a busy social calendar can become unavailable without uttering a decisive word. Babe’s silence was different because Babe’s relationship was different. She had told him things about her marriage to William Paley that she had told no one else in the world. The fictional Sidney Dillon’s encounter with the governor’s wife was not Truman’s invention.

It was Babe’s information, transferred from the privacy of her marriage and placed on the pages of a magazine sold at newsstands. She had entrusted him with the specific recorded humiliation of her adult life, and he had published it. Truman initially described the reactions as misplaced. He told Dick Cavett that he had not expected anyone to be upset unless they had been left out.

He told a journalist that the characters were fictional and the connections being drawn were the work of people with overactive imaginations and too little to do. In his apartment at United Nations Plaza, he was reported to have cried and repeated the same sentence to the person with him. “I didn’t mean it. I thought they’d come back.

” They did not come back. The social structure that had supported him for fifteen years, the party invitations and the houses and the long lunches and the telephone calls, collapsed over a period of 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 years old, had smoked for most of her adult life, and the diagnosis meant that the time available for maintaining the silence between her and Truman was running out. He tried to reach her. He wrote letters. He called people who might carry a message.

He wanted, by all accounts, to speak to her before she died. She did not respond. William Paley, whose infidelities had been anatomized in the pages of Esquire for the reading public, had no interest in facilitating a reconciliation. Friends who might have served as intermediaries largely took sides in the way social circles, once disrupted, tend to harden along lines of division.

Babe’s side had more people. She died on July 2, 1978. She was 63 years old. Truman was not present.

He was not invited to the funeral. He did not write publicly about her death, which was unusual for a man who wrote publicly about almost everything that happened to him. Those closest to him understood that this silence was a form of grief that could not be expressed publicly. She had been the person he loved most in the world.

He had used what she told him in a way that made the love indistinguishable from betrayal. Whether he had intended that outcome or not became an irrelevant question by July 1978. She was gone, and the silence was permanent, and there was no one to blame but the writer in him who had always seen the story as more important than the person who provided it. The years between the publication of “La Côte Basque” and Truman’s death stretched over nine years of diminishment.

He drank. He took pills. He appeared on talk shows in states that alarmed the public and embarrassed the hosts. He appeared on The Tonight Show and other programs in conditions 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 long-term 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, which was a reasonable response to what Truman had become. He continued to claim to publishers and journalists and anyone who would listen that Answered Prayers was nearly finished.

It was not nearly finished. It had not been nearly finished for years. The million dollars he had received as an advance from Random House represented a contract with a deadline of March 1, 1981, which he missed, leading to another renegotiation and another deadline and another period of justifications. The existence of the manuscript in any complete form became entirely uncertain over those years.

His television appearances in the late 1970s and early 1980s are now difficult to watch. Partly because they are genuinely painful, and partly because you can still see underneath the pain. That 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 surfaced in flashes that made the surrounding lurching more painful. He was 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 by appearance.

He was arrested for drunk driving in Southampton in 1977. He attended rehabilitation programs. He left them and resumed drinking. He appeared on talk shows looking like an inferior version of himself.

The Truman Capote performance, so brilliant and so sustained for so long, was collapsing in public and in real time before an audience not always sure whether it was watching tragedy or something else. On August 25, 1984, Truman Capote died in Bel Air, California, at the home of Joanne Carson, the second wife of Johnny Carson and one of the few people who had not abandoned him in the years since the publication of Answered Prayers. He was 59 years old. The official cause of death was liver disease complicated by phlebitis and the presence of multiple drugs in his system.

His health had been deteriorating 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. Jack Dunphy received the news in New York, where he lived separately but remained Truman’s designated heir and executor. The two men had been together, more or less, for 36 years.

Dunphy wrote a memoir called Dear Genius, published three years after Truman’s death, the most honest document anyone close to Truman produced about the reality of living near him. No manuscript of Answered Prayers was ever found. Whether it was deliberately destroyed, or lost in the shuffle of 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 Truman’s best work was always good, direct and precise and astonishing in the accuracy of their social observation. They are also incomplete in a way that is difficult to read without sadness, because you can see what the complete novel would have been and understand exactly what was lost. Truman Capote left behind two perfect books and one unfinished one. He left behind a party still described as the most brilliant private social event of the twentieth century.

He left a literary estate that generated substantial income and a cultural presence that continued to grow for decades after his death, partly because the story of the swans and their betrayal was exactly the kind of story every generation rediscovers and finds immediately compelling. He left behind women who built walls around what happened to them and maintained those walls with a firmness that was itself a kind of tribute to what he had done. Slim Keith wrote her memoirs and discussed the friendship and the betrayal without warmth but without excessive bitterness, which was probably the most honest response available to her. Lee Radziwill lived long enough to see the story dramatized in ways she declined to comment on.

C. Z. Guest died in 2003 without publicly forgiving him and without publicly accusing him of anything worse than misjudgment. Amanda Burden, Babe Paley’s daughter, said in later years that her mother loved Truman, that the love was real, that the betrayal was also real, and that the two things existed simultaneously in a way that could not be resolved.

That is probably the most accurate description available of what that friendship was and what its end meant. Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, daughter of Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan, once observed that the cruelest thing you can do to a person who trusts you is to prove that their trust was misplaced. She was not talking about Truman Capote, but she could have been. The boy from Monroeville had wanted, above all things, to be one of the people in the room.

He achieved that completely and permanently through talent and charm and work, and through the systematic cultivation of women who had no reason not to trust him. Then he took what they had given him and put it in a magazine, and watched the room empty out. He had 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 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 the publication would be permanent, that Babe’s silence would be permanent, that he was choosing the paragraph over the person. The people who knew him best could not agree on an answer.

Some believed he had no idea what he was unleashing. Others believed he knew exactly. The women who gave Truman Capote the material for the most scandalous literary work of the decade did not simply disappear when he died. Babe Paley was gone by 1978.

The others lived for years, some for decades, carrying the memories of friendship and betrayal through marriages and divorces and deaths and rediscoveries of self that Truman Capote did not live to see. Nancy Keith, known to everyone who mattered as Slim, expressed her response to Answered Prayers not in letters or interviews but 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 critical 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 telephone calls that he exaggerated his personality in front of people so they would laugh with him, not at him. She replied, “No, no, we love you. ” Decades later, she left that exchange in her memoir without comment.

The gap between what she said at the moment and what she understood when she wrote it down later expresses more than any explicit judgment. The question of whether Slim was the real Lady Ina Coolbirth in Answered Prayers had been debated since the moment 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, which was the only interpretation that mattered to the honesty 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 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 across 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 already had a first act that required some explaining. She was the daughter of an English baron, briefly married during the war to Randolph Churchill, and had conducted affairs in wartime London so well-known they were considered a form of intelligence work. After the war, she moved through marriages and relationships with some of the most powerful men in Europe and America before settling in 1971 with Averell Harriman, the railroad heir and diplomat who was 31 years her senior and richer than most of her previous companions 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 the unflattering Lady Coolbirth. She never commented publicly on the matter. What she did instead was transform herself into the most effective Democratic fundraiser in America.

In 1980 she founded an organization called Democrats for the Eighties, unofficially known as PamPAC, raising twelve million dollars for the party over the following years. She hosted dinner parties in Washington that functioned as both policy discussions 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 and the fortune and the Washington social position she had spent fifteen years acquiring. In 1993, President Clinton appointed her United States Ambassador to France. She moved into the American embassy in Paris, hosted the most sought-after dinner parties in the diplomatic quarter, and held a position of genuine 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 placed in the right proximity to one another, was a foreign policy tool as effective as any official statement. She spoke fluent French and moved through Parisian society with an ease American diplomats rarely achieved, because she had been frequenting European salons since the 1940s and had never entirely left them. What she never did publicly was address her place in Answered Prayers.

If she was the model for Lady Coolbirth, she accepted the characterization without comment and directed her energy toward becoming something no fictional character could match. The woman in the story was a society hostess whose significance was fading. The woman in the real world became a senator’s widow, a party chairwoman, an ambassador, one of the most influential political women of her generation. It was by every measure the better outcome.

She died on January 5, 1997, at age 76. The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage. She had swum in the pool of the Ritz Hotel in Paris earlier that day. The woman who had met Truman Capote at a party in the 1950s, whose social life had been sketched and analyzed in his stories, ended her days as an American ambassador, representing the country she had adopted before the country in which she died, in a hotel where Proust had once lived, where the bar still served 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 wealthy 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 professional acting, appearing in a production of The Philadelphia Story in 1967, two years before the party, a role Capote himself had coached her for.

She appeared in the television miniseries The Winds of War in 1983. Neither career became what she had hoped. What became central to her later life was fashion, in the way fashion becomes central to women who have always understood it as a form of self-construction. She worked as a fashion consultant for Giorgio Armani, kept apartments in Paris and London and finally on 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, which meant she outlived Jackie, and Capote, and Slim Keith, and Babe Paley, and nearly everyone from that world Capote had both embodied and destroyed in a single issue of a magazine. Her son Anthony Radziwill died of cancer in August 1999, weeks after the death of his cousin John F. Kennedy Jr.

in a plane crash over the Atlantic. The losses accumulated with the 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 amusing, 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 sharpness that had marked the years immediately after publication. She had simply gotten over it, the way one gets over a room that was once important and has become merely a place one is used to going. There was a particular irony in Lee Radziwill’s relationship with Capote’s memory, 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 and presence and how to hold an audience, which he knew from vast personal experience. The role did not go well. The critics were kind the way critics are kind when they wish they could be honest. Capote had not made her an actress.

He had simply been present during the attempt, just as he was present for everything his swans tried and did not quite manage, offering encouragement with the genuine warmth that made him indispensable to them, and with a sharp eye that noticed everything they would have preferred he not notice. When the FX series about the betrayal aired in 2024, Calista Flockhart played Lee Radziwill. Lee had died five years earlier. The actress playing her was working from interviews and photographs and written records of a woman who had spent her adult life as the second most famous person in every room she entered, always standing to the left of her extraordinarily magnetic sister, 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 years old. Cornelia Guest, known since 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 Palm Beach estate, a property called Villa Artemis, became over the following decades one of the most written-about private gardens in America.

She published books about gardening. She appeared in magazines sitting among her flowers with a practicality that made her seem less a socialite with a hobby and more a gardener who happened to have a famous address. Andy Warhol photographed her extensively through the 1970s and 1980s, producing images that captured something the society photographs of the 1950s and 1960s had missed. A woman genuinely comfortable with herself in a way her peers rarely achieved.

She attended his Factory gatherings and parties with the same ease she brought to Palm Beach, the horse shows she judged, the various committees she served on, with the precision of someone who considers social obligation a serious form of work. Her daughter Cornelia became a socialite and model of the next generation, known for her fashion presence more than any inherited fortune, which was 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. Actual relaxation. Most of the women Truman Capote knew appeared with a degree of armor you only notice when you see a photograph of them without it.

Warhol had a gift for that, and C. Z. seemed to trust him the way she had once trusted Capote, the trust of someone who knows she is being observed and does not particularly mind. She had known Capote before the party and after the publication, and she simply continued to know herself, the rarest and most useful quality for a person living in a social world perpetually on the verge of collapse.

The garden was not a refuge. It was an affirmation of self. This is what I do, and I do it well. The rest of the noise is nothing but 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, married into the Agnelli family that controlled Fiat and therefore much of Italy’s economic life, she spent her young years moving between the Agnelli homes in Turin and Villa Perosa, the yacht, and the various residences that came with being the wife of 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 about Italian gardens that were received as reference documents for a particular kind of private beauty most people would never see in person. She gave interviews in which she discussed design and architecture and the vanishing world of a certain European upper class, with the depth of someone who had watched that disappearance from the inside. By most accounts, she did not discuss Truman Capote much. Marella Agnelli died on February 3, 2019.

She was 91 years old. Lee Radziwill died on February 15, 2019. Twelve days separated them. 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 station, and they had lived through the betrayal and the ostracism and the decades of distance, and then they died in the same winter month more than half a century later. No journalist connected them at the time. They lived in different countries, different social worlds, different decades of widowhood and self-reinvention. Marella was in Turin.

Lee was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The fact that they had been together at the Plaza in 1966, in black or white with masks, in conversation with the man who would later use their secrets as literary material, was a detail in their biographies rather than a living link by the time they died. And yet the proximity of the dates seemed from the outside something not supernatural, not carrying mystical meaning, but structurally resonant in the way history sometimes produces endings that feel arranged. 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 the same year, as though the story had finally decided it was time for the end. Gloria Guinness left the least documentary record of what she thought and felt about the betrayal. She was born in Mexico in 1912, daughter of a family with nothing, and built herself through marriages and relationships and an instinct for choosing beautiful things and beautiful places into one of the most admired women in Europe. She ended up with Loel Guinness, the banker and aviation pioneer, and spent her middle years between Paris and Mexico and the yachts that served as the primary social venue for a certain kind of international wealth.

She spent her final years largely between Marbella and Paris, in the company of 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 construction required maintenance that casual acquaintances could not provide. She wore Balenciaga and was considered one of his most devoted 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, every appearance a statement of terms. What she thought about Answered Prayers, about the specific transaction it represented between a man she had trusted and the world before which he exposed her, is 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 in the way the lives of wealthy reclusive women are quiet, full of events, none of them narrated.

She died on September 18, 1980, in Paris. She was 67 years old. She lived only five years after the publication of La Côte Basque, which meant she died knowing exactly what Capote had done, without the benefit of the distance time eventually provides to people who live long enough to receive it. Whatever 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 have carefully constructed themselves and understand that extended exposure threatens 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 depicted the research years for In Cold Blood, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role.

The following year, a separate film called Infamous covered the same period with Toby Jones. Both were received as serious works. But neither addressed the matter of La Côte Basque with the depth the story deserved. In 2024, the streaming series Feud: Capote vs.

The Swans dramatized that betrayal and its aftermath, with Tom Hollander as Capote and a cast that included 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 sometimes speculative in ways the historical record does not support, the usual problem of dramatizing recent events involving people whose families are still alive. Feud was produced by Ryan Murphy and ran 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 glamorous 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 guarded and reticent as people who have been publicly humiliated tend to be, does not support. That is always the case with dramatizations of events involving real people who left real documents. The drama is always slightly larger, 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, whatever their individual accuracy, is that the story has not lost its power to compel people who were not there. The images remain. The Grand Ballroom of the Plaza in November of 1966.

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, who assembled this particular room at this particular moment.