Laurence Leamer - Capotes Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

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Assignment

The Presidents Butler

F or years, Truman Capote had been proudly telling anyone within hearing that he was writing the greatest novel of the age. The book was about a group of the richest, most elegant women in the world. They were fictional, of course... but everyone knew these characters were based on his closest friends, the coterie of gorgeous, witty, and fabulously rich women he called his swans.

Truman understood what these women had achieved and how they had done it. They did not come from grand money but had married into it, most of them multiple times. Their charms were carefully cultivated, and to the outside eye, they seemed to have everything... but for most of them happiness was an elusive bird, always flying just out of sight. This was something the fifty-year-old Truman knew about. He was calling his novel-in-progress about the swans Answered Prayers, following the saying attributed to Saint Teresa of vila: There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

In 1975, Truman was one of the most famous authors in the world. Even those who had not read a word of Trumans writing knew about the diminutive, flamboyantly gay author. His 1958 novella, Breakfast at Tiffanys, had been widely celebrated, and the movie starring Audrey Hepburn was a sensation when it premiered in 1961. Millions of Americans had devoured his masterful 1966 true crime book, In Cold Blood, and countless more saw the 1967 film adaptation. The Tiny Terror, as Truman was called, was a fixture on late-night television, mesmerizing audiences with his outrageous tales.

Trumans richly evocative style and the astonishing global success of In Cold Blood several years before had created an audience that waited impatiently for his latest work. Answered Prayers would be a daring literary feat, an expos of upper-class society that blended the fictional flourishes of Breakfast at Tiffanys with the closely observed narrative nonfiction of In Cold Blood. No one had ever gotten that close to these women and their elusive, secretive world. Marcel Proust and Edith Wharton had written classic novels focused on the elite of their ages, of course, but they were children of privilege, raised in that world and of it.

Truman, on the other hand, was an interloper. Since coming from a small town in Alabama decades earlier, hed carved out a unique spot in New York society: a scathingly sharp, always entertaining guest whose charm opened the doors to the most exclusive circles... and whose eyes and ears were always open and observing what he saw there.

As much as Truman was drawn to the beauty, taste, and manners in that world of privilege, he was repulsed by its arrogant sense of superiority and ignorance of life as most people lived it. Life had a way of intruding and teaching hard lessons. The tension between those two beliefs would create his immortal book.

Crucial to Trumans masterpiece would be evoking the world of the swans. And that world could be summed up in one word: sumptuous. These women knew the power of money (what it could buy, what it could compensate for). But despite what their spiteful detractors might have suggested, their allure wasnt due to money alone. It may be that the enduring swan glides upon waters of liquefied lucre; but that cannot account for the creature herself, Truman wrote in an essay in Harpers Bazaar in October 1959. His swans were wealthy, yes. But that wasnt all.

To Truman each swan was the personification of upscale glamour in the postwar world. She was the confluence of a number of unique factors. Her good looks and elegant demeanor made both men and women turn and look at her. A woman could not simply buy her way into this. If expenditure were all, a sizable population of sparrows would swiftly be swans, he wrote. He would reach beyond the gold, the silver, and the jewels and see his swans as they truly were. Each woman had an extraordinary story to tell, and Truman was the only one who could tell them.

The swans were all famously beautiful as wellwas it their looks that defined them?

Not so, Truman maintained. The swan was lovely, yes, but it was not just her beauty that created the attentionrather, it was her extraordinary presentation. Many of these women had been celebrated for years, even decades, not just for their looks but for their unique style. A swan had not only the money to buy her clothes from the finest couturiers but the style to wear them at their best. Other women imitated her fashion sense, and men eyed her with appreciative (and often covetous) eyes.