They were his swans, the most beautiful, stylish, wealthy and envied women in all of New York. And he, Truman Capote, was their ultimate trophy: the boy genius whose masterpiece, “In Cold Blood,” made him a national celebrity, the party boy who sheathed malicious gossip in gilt-edged wit, the intellectual whose friendship elevated them to his level.
“There’s a little secret to charity benefits these days,” The New York Times said in 1968. “It’s called Truman Capote . . . a 64-inch, 136-pound magnet, particularly attractive to the gilded people who count when it comes to fashionable fund raising.”
Among Capote’s intimates were Babe Paley, the great beauty and wife of CBS head Bill Paley; Slim Keith, a cool, well-married blonde who was the Carolyn Bessette of her day; Pamela Churchill, ex-wife of Winston’s son and future wife of Slim’s husband, Leland; and Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy.
That was all until “La Côte Basque, 1965.”
Capote thought this story was another masterpiece, to be part of his long-awaited book “Answered Prayers.” He told People magazine it would be filled with thinly disguised characters, people he knew. He was going to assassinate them all, his pen the gun.
“There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel and, finally, the bullet,” he said. “And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen — wham!”
Capote never did finish his book. But in 1975, against his editor’s advice, he published that completed chapter in Esquire magazine.
It destroyed everything: Capote’s friendships, his reputation, his social standing and his desire to write. His swans deserted him. Critics and readers alike were appalled that he so easily exposed his friends and all their scandals, from adultery to murder.
Now a little over 40 years old, “La Côte Basque, 1965” deserves a reconsideration. Capote, ever prescient, encapsulated so much of our current culture — from celebrity confessionals to blind items to savage online commentary to the strivers and hypocrites of “The Real Housewives” — in one 13,000-word story.
In her new novelized account “The Swans of Fifth Avenue” (Delacorte Press), author Melanie Benjamin reimagines the glittering friendships Capote so diligently cultivated. Benjamin rightly focuses most on the bond between the writer and Babe Paley, whom Capote worshipped.
“Mrs. P had only one fault: she was perfect,” he wrote in his diary. “Otherwise, she was perfect.”
Their meeting was an accident. Babe and her husband, Bill, had offered the film producer David O. Selznick a ride on their private plane, and Selznick asked whether he could bring along his friend, Truman.
Babe was instantly taken by Capote’s intelligence and flattery. She may have been one of the most beautiful women in New York City, married to a true power broker, but in truth she was lonely. Her husband ignored her. She spent her days as the most pampered, expensive house cat on the Eastern Seaboard, roaming around big, empty houses, the children shunted off to nannies in other wings.
“She was the only person in my whole life that I liked everything about,” Capote told his biographer, Gerald Clarke. “I was her one real friend, the one real relationship she ever had.”
Capote’s longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, had a more pragmatic take. The philandering Bill, Dunphy told Clarke, “handed Babe to Truman on a silver platter . . . she would have been nothing if she hadn’t married [Bill], and Truman wouldn’t have had much to do with her, either. Whether he admitted it or not, he was attracted to money and power.”
Enter, too, Lee Radziwill. Sister to Jackie Kennedy, married to a prince in name only, Lee was a society girl who lacked ambition, intellect, an identity of her own. But Capote smothered her with attention, praised her beauty in the pages of Vogue — and, most importantly, he made her feel smart by association.
In turn, Capote became Lee’s confidant, hearing all about her unsatisfying marriage, her subsequent romance with Ari Onassis, and Onassis’ cold decision to dump Lee for her sister Jackie.
“My God: how jealous she is of Jackie!” Capote wrote in 1962. “I never knew.”
Radziwill leaned on him like no other. She knew he was working on a book called “Answered Prayers,” but didn’t know or grasp what Capote was up to. “He’s the most loyal friend I’ve ever had,” she told Clarke, “and the best company I’ve ever known . . . I feel as if he’s my brother, except that brothers and sisters are rarely as close as we are.”
She gave Capote a cigarette case with gold lining. The inscription read, “To my Answered Prayer, with love, Lee. July 1967.”
Capote was drawn to these swans — most fervently to Babe and Slim — because they reminded him of his own mother, who had abandoned him as a boy to reinvent herself in New York. She never quite loved him, but these swans did.
Slim Keith reinvented herself from a hick named Nancy Raye Gross into a high-end model. She married the director Howard Hawks; she discovered Lauren Bacall, whom Hawks hired and remade in Slim’s image. She would divorce twice and marry three times, settling for an unsatisfying union with a British baron.
As with Babe, Capote electrified Slim’s life. She had never met anyone like him. He had, she told Clarke, “a really extraordinary mind; he was one of the three or four brightest people I’ve ever known in my life . . . His head excited me immensely! Going to lunch with him in a good restaurant was the most fun there was.”
It was Truman’s version of lunch with Slim in a good restaurant that ended everything.
Even today, “La Côte Basque” is, in word and spirit, shockingly bitchy. It may be the meanest American short story ever.
Before “La Côte Basque,” Capote’s swans had no idea what he thought of them. After, there was no doubt.
The story opens with P.B. Jones, a stand-in for Capote, meeting Lady Ina Coolbirth, a stand-in for Slim, at the titular restaurant. Coolbirth gets drunk and rips apart everyone in the room.
Over at another table are Jackie and Lee, who get off easy — “a pair of Western geisha girls.” But Capote uses them as a way into true scandal: Coolbirth’s tale of having been raped, as a teenager, by Joe Kennedy. (It’s unclear if this was based on something Slim told Capote or if it was made up.)
She was a guest of Kennedy’s daughter Kick, and one night, she says, “The old bugger slipped into my bedroom . . . All those Kennedy men are the same; they’re like dogs, they have to pee on every hydrant.”
The bulk of the story concerns two women. The first, Ann Hopkins, was based on the socialite Ann Woodward, who had shot her husband to death on Long Island in 1955.
Woodward claimed it was an accident — she had mistaken her husband for an intruder. Café society knew otherwise, though Woodward was never charged.
“She’s a murderess,” Coolbirth says. “The police know that.”
She describes how the social-climbing Woodward targeted her husband, the scion of a wealthy, prominent family. “I’m sure it was [his] first experience with anything less primitive than a belly rub with his prep-school roomie,” Coolbirth says.
She says Woodward’s husband wanted a divorce, but as she had never divorced her first husband, she’d walk away with nothing.
The so-called prowler had been shot naked, Coolbirth adds, in the shower.
“The water was still running, and the shower door was riddled with bullets,” Coolbirth says. “None of Ann’s story was true.”
More scandalous, says Coolbirth: Woodward’s mother-in-law paid off the cops and the courts.
“That’s why Ann Hopkins got away with murder,” Coolbirth says. “Her mother-in-law is a Rhode Island goddess.”
Three days before “La Côte Basque” hit newsstands, Woodward killed herself with cyanide.
It was Babe Paley, his most beloved swan, who suffered the greatest betrayal. Here she was renamed Cleo, and her husband was Sidney Dillon. Like Bill, Dillon was a Jewish power broker, “adviser to presidents” and unrepentant philanderer.
“The only thing he asked me never to repeat,” Coolbirth says, “was this business about the governor’s wife.”
She goes on to describe “a cretinous Protestant size 40” — believed to be Mary Rockefeller — “who wears low-heeled shoes and lavender water.”
Dillon, she theorizes, raged against WASP society. “That’s why he wanted to f- -k the governor’s wife,” Coolbirth says, “revenge himself on that smug hog-bottom, make her sweat and squeal and call him daddy.”
Dillon and the governor’s wife have sex in the Dillons’ apartment at The Pierre (the Paleys kept one at the St. Regis). After an awful assignation — which Coolbirth describes in detail — Dillon is horrified to discover the governor’s wife has left “the sheets bloodied with stains the size of Brazil.”
She describes Dillon on his knees, scrubbing the sheets in the tub, “flogging away like a Spanish peasant on the side of a stream.”
‘When that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen — wham!’
- Truman Capote
In Coolbirth’s telling, the wife never finds out; in real life, Babe turned a blind eye. When she read the story in Esquire in 1975, she was dying of lung cancer. She was heartbroken and humiliated. Bill, who did love her, was enraged.
Capote, not quite grasping what he had done, called Bill Paley. He wanted to know what Bill thought of the story.
Bill knew just how to wound him. “I started, Truman,” he said, “but I fell asleep. Then a terrible thing happened: The magazine was thrown away.”
Incredibly, Capote offered to mail a copy. Paley told him not to bother. “I’m preoccupied right now,” he said. “My wife is very ill.”
And there it was: To the Paleys, Capote was nothing, not worthy of hearing Babe’s name.
After that, Capote became even more dissolute. The only person of note who’d take him in was Andy Warhol. So he partied at Studio 54, which, like Capote, had lost relevance and allure. He drank and used drugs and nursed his grudge against the swans for excommunicating him.
“What did they expect?” he would say. “I’m a writer.”
Capote felt the swans didn’t keep up their end of the bargain: He’d amuse them, impress at their parties, share his intellect, and he’d take what he wanted and use it.
Babe Paley died on July 6, 1978, never having spoken to Capote again. Capote died in 1984 of liver failure. He was 59 years old.
“La Côte Basque, 1965” was included in “Answered Prayers,” which was published, unfinished, three years after his death. In the first chapter, “Unspoiled Monsters,” the unnamed narrator eviscerates a famous writer who has become a failure and a drunk, eaten up by cancer. Capote gives no hint he’s talking about himself.
“What I thought was: here’s a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who, like one of his own heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total strangers,” he wrote. “Strangers because he has no friends.”