Capote (55 page)

Yet Tynan’s much-quoted assault, followed by Truman’s much-quoted counterassault, furnished still more publicity, and the
In Cold Blood
Express kept on rolling. Jimmy Breslin, the street-smart columnist of the
Herald Tribune
, told his own readers to ignore everything that was said about it and buy the book itself. “The important thing is [it] could affect the type of words on pages you could be reading for a while. This Capote steps in with flat, objective, terrible realism. And suddenly there is nothing else you want to read.”

N
INETEEN
sixty-six was his year, and a new, or almost new, Truman greeted it. “I’ve gotten rid of the boy with the bangs,” he said. “He’s gone, just gone. I liked that boy. It took an act of will because it was easy to be that person—he was exotic and strange and eccentric. I liked the idea of that person, but he had to go.” He was no longer the comparative youth of thirty-five who had first gone to Kansas. He was forty-one, a man of substance and fame, one of the best-known writers in America.

Money had begun coming his way, first in driblets, then in a steady flow, months before
In Cold Blood
was published. During most of the time he was researching and writing, he and Jack had lived decently, but not lavishly, chiefly on the sale of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
to Paramount (sixty-five thousand dollars), his advances from
The New Yorker
, and his fee for writing the screenplay of
The Innocents.
Added together and divided by the more than five years he had labored, it did not make a large annual income. He had had to strain to buy the condominium in Verbier and the houses in Sagaponack. His Jaguar had been his only real luxury—and one he could ill afford, at that.

Now, for the first time in his life, he possessed the options that money alone allows. He was not rich. Some of the two million dollars the newspapers had mentioned was eaten up by fees to agents and lawyers; much also went for taxes. But he had a sizable income nonetheless and began to enjoy some of life’s expensive pleasures. He traded in his Jaguar hardtop for a later model, a sporty convertible, and bought a Ford Falcon station wagon for Jack, who needed a roomier car to carry Charlie, the bulldog, and Diotima, the cat.

Brooklyn Heights, he decided, was no longer the only place to live in New York, and he purchased a two-bedroom apartment in what a fashion columnist called “the most important new address” in Manhattan, the United Nations Plaza at First Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, next to the East River and the United Nations. Many of the other tenants were heads of corporations, and the lobby was like that of a luxurious modern hotel, hushed, dignified and a little intimidating. But dignified luxury was exactly what the mature Truman Capote desired, and the sixty-two-thousand-dollar price tag, which was regarded as high in 1965, did not deter him. “He wanted to be in the thick of things,” said Oliver Smith. “At the time, the U.N. Plaza was very glamorous,
the
place to live in Manhattan.”

His apartment, on the twenty-second floor, was as bright as Oliver’s basement had been dark, and it had a panoramic southern view that stretched to the bottom of Manhattan and beyond. With the help of Evie Backer, who had decorated for some of his friends, Truman ransacked Third Avenue antique shops to furnish it. From Brooklyn he brought his collection of paperweights, including the White Rose that Colette had given him in 1948, and his menagerie of ornamental birds, animals and reptiles. His portrait, painted several years earlier by James Fosburgh, Minnie’s husband and Babe Paley’s brother-in-law, was hung over a sofa in the living room. Every room but one was done with elegant restraint. The exception was the library-dining room, which was a combination of dark reds; walking into it, he wrote in
House Beautiful
, was “rather like sinking into a hot raspberry tart—a sensation
you
may not relish, but I quite enjoy.”

Along with his studio in Sagaponack, his aerie at 870 U.N. Plaza was the place he liked most to be, and he never regretted moving there. “I once stayed on the top floor of the Excelsior Hotel in Naples, overlooking the bay,” he said. “You could see the shore curving around and the ferries sailing back and forth to Capri. The view from my apartment reminds me of that. I love it at all times. I love it when the sun makes everything sparkle. I love it in the fog when everything looks misty. I love it at dusk and I love it at night, when the green lights on the bridges look like strings of emeralds.”

In February, 1966, shortly after
In Cold Blood
came out, he joined Jack in Verbier. He flew to London in March to help publicize the British edition, and was back in America by April. Followed by a camera crew from NBC News, which was preparing a story, “Capote Returns to Kansas,” he gave a reading to an estimated thirty-five hundred students at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The “Lion of American Literature,” the student newspaper called him. He then proceeded to Garden City—his first visit since his book was published—and seemed nervous about what reaction he might expect. He need not have worried. The municipal library placed a framed photograph of him in a prominent position and held a reception to which five hundred fans came, clutching copies for him to autograph. “Garden City Opens Arms to Capote,” read the next day’s headline in the
Wichita Eagle.

Manhattan was no less friendly when he gave a reading at Town Hall several days later. His rich friends gave small dinners beforehand, then disembarked at the door from a flotilla of limousines. “His light and somewhat nasal voice held the audience spellbound,” said
The New York Times.
“In the eye of the daily beholder,” added
Newsday
, “Truman Capote may appear as a slight, balding man. But last night to a rapt audience of New York’s most socially prominent readers, he stood 10 feet tall.” As usual, “A Christmas Memory” was the favorite, and some still had tears in their eyes when they embraced him afterward. “It was a very moving moment for me,” said Babe.

In Cold Blood
had established him as an authority on the criminal-justice system, and during the next few years he was often called upon to comment about it. He was opposed to capital punishment—“institutionalized sadism,” he termed it—and in favor of prison reforms that would emphasize rehabilitation. His opinions were generally conservative, however, and he did not subscribe to the fashionable view of the sixties that criminals were victims of society. Prosecutors across the country used the examples of Perry and Dick, who had confessed only after some artful prodding by Alvin Dewey and his colleagues, to buttress their opposition to the Supreme Court’s
Miranda
ruling, which severely limited the use of confessions in court. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee in July, Truman attacked the ruling, saying that it had all but handcuffed the police. “People simply will not accept the fact that there is such a thing as a homicidal mind,” he told the Senators, “that there are people who would kill as easily as they would write a bad check, and that they achieve satisfaction from it as I might from completing a novel or you from seeing a proposal of yours become law.”

A week later he was in France, on his way to Portugal with Lee Radziwill, then to Yugoslavia for a cruise down the Dalmatian coast with the Agnellis. “Have not had a genuine holiday in God knows when,” he told Cecil, “so am taking off all of August.” In Paris he proudly informed a reporter that
In Cold Blood
was not the only Capote book that would be published in 1966. “A Christmas Memory,” first published a decade before, would now be brought out in a special boxed edition. “Serious writers aren’t supposed to make money, but I say the hell with that. My next book will be called
A Christmas Memory.
It’s forty-five pages long, and it’s going to cost five dollars and be worth every cent. How do you like that for openers?”

Alexander after the Battle of Issus, Napoleon after Austerlitz could not have been cockier than Truman was after
In Cold Blood.
He had the golden touch, and he was already looking forward to his next triumph, a party that would end the year as it had begun—with all eyes focused on him.

The idea came to him in June, and it immediately captured his imagination. Nothing, he reckoned, could be a better symbol of the new, grown-up Truman. In one evening he could not only repay his peacock friends for all their years of entertaining him, but also satisfy a wish he had nursed most of his life. “I think it was something a little boy from New Orleans had always dreamed of doing,” said Slim. “He wanted to give the biggest and best goddamned party that anybody had ever heard of. He wanted to see every notable in the world, people of importance from every walk of life, absolutely dying to attend a party given by a funny-looking, strange little man—himself.”

Once he grabbed hold of something, he did not let it go, and until he left for Europe at the end of July, he sat by Eleanor Friede’s pool in Bridgehampton nearly every afternoon, jotting down ideas. He was not merely planning a party; he was creating one. It would have his name attached to it, and his presence would be felt in every detail, just as it was in
In Cold Blood
or any of his other books. Bit by bit, his scheme evolved. The date would be Monday, November 28, 1966; the place, the Plaza Hotel, which, in his opinion, had the only beautiful ballroom left in New York. To add a touch of the fantastic, he settled on a
bal masqué
, like those in storybooks. Until the masks came off at midnight, identities would be secret, or so he liked to think, and strangers would meet, dance and perhaps fall in love. And like Prospero, he would be the magician who had arranged those revels.

Unlike fabled gatherings from New York’s past, in which champagne spurted from fountains, live swans floated on artificial lakes, or gilded trees were hung with golden fruit, his would be a model of good taste and simplicity. Inspired by the Ascot scene in
My Fair Lady
, which Cecil had costumed in black and white, he decided to call his party the Black and White Ball and require his guests—the characters in his own play—to dress in nothing else. Worried that the multihued sparkle of rubies, sapphires or emeralds might destroy his austere design, he considered adding a stern “Diamonds Only” to the bottom of the invitations, but relented when Eleanor, who was one of his oldest friends, told him that if he did, she could not go. “Truman,” she said, “I haven’t got any diamonds. My tiaras have all been hocked.”

Most hosts who give large balls permit their guests to bring companions of their choosing. Truman would not. His control was to be absolute. No one could walk through the door whom he did not know and like, and when he sent an invitation, it meant the named person or persons, and no one else. If he did not like a friend’s wife or husband, he dropped both. Single people were expected to come singly. “You can’t bring anybody!” he told Eleanor, who, as a widow, protested vigorously. “There will be a hundred extra men. I’ll see to it. They’ll all be marvelous.”

“Come on!” she replied. “You can keep your hundred extra men! I’m not going to get myself all dolled up and put on a goddamned mask to go to the Plaza by myself. I just won’t come. And Truman, dear, it’s not just me. I’m sure half the single women on your list won’t come either.” Afraid that she might be right, he pondered and returned the next afternoon with the solution. He would arrange small dinners beforehand, and the diners would come in groups. No woman would have to endure the humiliation of arriving by herself.

The secret of a successful party is not lavish food, expensive wine or extravagant decorations; it is the right mixture of lively guests. No one else had friendships as diverse as his, and lounging by Eleanor’s pool, he matched names as carefully as he usually matched nouns and adjectives. Marianne Moore and Marella Agnelli, Henry Ford and Henry Fonda, Sargent Shriver and John Sargent, Andy Warhol and Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, Frank Sinatra and Walter Lippmann, Irving Berlin and Isaiah Berlin. “I don’t know whether or not I should invite the Johnsons,” he said in a tired voice. “It’s such a
bore
when you have to have the Secret Service and all that. No, I don’t want the President to come. I think I’ll just invite his daughter Lynda Bird.” He did, along with the daughters of Teddy Roosevelt (Alice Roosevelt Longworth) and Harry Truman (Margaret Truman Daniel). He also wrote down the names of several princes and princesses, two dukes and a duchess, two marquises, a marchioness and a marquesa, two counts, a countess and a viscomtesse, an earl, a maharajah and a maharani, three barons and two baronesses, and two lords and a lady.

Leo Lerman joked that “the guest book reads like an international list for the guillotine.” Thinking along the same line, Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, speculated that perhaps Truman had made up a roster of those who were to be shot first by those fearsome radicals of the sixties, the Red Guards. Oh, no, said John Kenneth Galbraith, not while
he
was on it. Some suggested that maybe Truman was bringing them all together for some momentous announcement, such as the end of the world. But not everyone on his list of more than five hundred was rich and famous. There were many whom celebrity watchers could not begin to identify—farmer friends from Sagaponack, acquaintances from Garden City, and of course Jack and Jack’s friends and relatives.

Rarely had Truman enjoyed himself as much as he did during those hours in Bridgehampton. Many of those whose names he was inscribing in his schoolboy notebook could buy and sell great corporations, dictate fashions for millions of women, snap their fingers and cause armies of flunkies to jump up and salute. That was not the kind of power he desired. The power he coveted he held in his hand on those sun-scorched afternoons: he could put their names on his invitation list, and he could just as easily cross them out.

One of his masterstrokes was his choice of Katharine Graham, head of the family that owned both
Newsweek
and
The Washington Post
, as his guest of honor. Babe had introduced them in the early sixties, and she had immediately become one of his favorites. Kay Graham was neither beautiful nor stylish like his swans—in those days Washington wives took a perverse pride in their dowdiness—and she was shy and lacking in confidence. The suicide of her dynamic but philandering husband in 1963 had forced her to take command of the family empire, but she was still walking gingerly, step by step. Though she was in her late forties, she was, in short, ideal clay for Truman’s eager sculptor’s hands: rich, powerful and yet amenable to instruction. When her own lawyer, who also had an apartment in the U.N. Plaza, suggested that she buy there too, she said no; when Truman recommended it, she said yes. “Now, honey,” he told her, “I think you ought to have an apartment in New York, and if you can’t run it, I will!”