Capote (56 page)

With considerable reluctance, she had also heeded his command to join him on the Agnelli yacht in the summer of 1965. With him at her side, her fear that she would appear dull proved groundless, and she and Marella became good friends. Sailing off the coast of Turkey, she also had an opportunity to read
In Cold Blood
in galleys, before anyone else. “Truman wouldn’t give them to me all at once. He’d just let me read one section at a time, and then we would discuss it. It was wonderful, like going to school, and he would tell me what the people in it were like, what Kansas was like, and why he had done what he had done. Before we finished, I felt I knew all those characters.” In November, not long after their return, she gave a dance for him and the Deweys at her house in Georgetown.

“Now, don’t think you can ever hide something from me!” he told her. “Because I’ll find out about it anyway.” She laughed, but he did see a side of her she showed to few others. “She’s a very, very warm person,” he said. “And very down-to-earth. She once said that seventy percent of the men who came into her office, whether they were Senators or journalists who worked for her, made it clear one way or another that they would like to go to bed with her. ‘They just want to say that they’ve fucked a tycoon,’ she told me. But she said she would never have an affair with anyone who either worked for her or was somehow influenced by her paper.

“‘Kay,’ I said, ‘that leaves out everybody in the country, with the possible exception of some cowboy in Wyoming.’

“‘Well,’ she answered, ‘maybe someday I’ll meet a cowboy in Wyoming.’”

He liked her and wanted to pay her back for her hospitality to the Deweys. But he doubtless had other reasons as well for picking her as his guest of honor. More than Babe, Marella or any of the other swans, she would attract attention. She was arguably the most powerful woman in the country, but still largely unknown outside Washington. Putting her in the spotlight was also his ultimate act as Pygmalion. It would symbolize her emergence from her dead husband’s shadow; she would become her own woman before the entire world.

She was vacationing on Cape Cod when he called her up to tell her his plans. “Honey, I just decided you’re depressed and need cheering up, so I’m going to give you a party.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “I’m not depressed. I’m all right.”

“I’m not so sure about that, honey. Anyway, I’m going to do it very big. I’ve always wanted to give a party in the Plaza ballroom, and it will be in your honor.”

She thanked him but thought little more about it. “But as the thing gathered steam,” she said, “I was just incredulous. I was stunned by what was happening.”

Invitations, written in longhand, went out in early October.

What happened after that can best be described as a chemical reaction. By itself, each of the ingredients Truman had poured into his flask—the select guest list, the strict dress code, the thrill of a masked ball—might have remained inert. Together, they fizzed and gurgled, bubbled and boiled, and all of New York knew that something remarkable was soon to occur. “I’ve never seen women putting so much serious effort into what they’re going to wear,” said Halston, who was making many of the masks.

As word spread, the scenario went precisely as Truman had hoped: everyone he had ever cared about or thought to impress, from Fifth Avenue aristocrats to West Side intellectuals, was longing to come. For some reason, he had not included his old friend, the actress Ina Claire, and she telegraphed from San Francisco, asking for an invitation. No, he replied. He said the same to Tallulah Bankhead, but when she continued to beg, telling him how important it was to her, he gave in. One acquaintance told him that his wife cried herself to sleep every night because they were not on the list. His heart touched, Truman lied and told him that their invitations must have been lost and that a new set would be forthcoming. But he did not send one to his aunt Marie (Tiny) Rudisill, who, as a result, nurtured a grudge that was never to die. “I feel like I fell into a whole mess of piranha fish,” he moaned, joking that he was making so many enemies that he might as well have called his party
In Bad Blood.

“People were really carrying on,” recalled Diana Trilling. “There was a woman who lived in Europe who was absolutely incensed that she hadn’t been asked. Oh, there was a great to-do! I never heard anybody who was so voluble about not having been invited to a party! She was so wildly, ludicrously offended that Leo Lerman tried to intercede. For my own part, my dressmaker, a terribly nice man I’m devoted to, said, ‘You couldn’t possibly get me an invitation, could you? It’s the one thing in this whole world I want to go to.’ He was so desperate that I wanted to give him mine.” But she could not have surrendered it even if Truman had permitted: her husband, Lionel, the most glittering ornament on Columbia’s literary faculty, was also eager to attend.

Hearing the commotion from her house in Nyack, Carson McCullers, who was not among the chosen, became increasingly agitated. She had bitterly resented the success of
In Cold Blood
, and she was so tortured by the prospect of a second Capote triumph that she began talking about giving a party of her own, but bigger and better in every way. “I’ll invite Jacqueline Kennedy,” she told her cousin Jordan Massee.

“Do you know Jacqueline Kennedy?” Massee inquired.

“No, but she’ll come. I’ll see to it that she comes. And if she comes, you can be certain everyone else will come.” Ill and an invalid—she was to die less than a year later—Carson did not give a ball. But the following March she did have an ambulance deliver her to the Plaza, where she celebrated her fiftieth birthday as a steady stream of admirers came to her suite to pay court.

Truman did not stop at dictating the makeup of his own party; he arranged the preball dinners as well, pairing hosts and guests like a general placing his regiments along the line of battle. “He
ordered
his friends to give preliminary dinner parties,” said Glenway Wescott, “and he told me whom I had to have.” He changed those guest lists too, juggling names from one group to another. The Haywards were given a show-business contingent that included Claudette Colbert and Frank Sinatra and his new wife Mia Farrow; the Paleys were presented with the Deweys, the Agnellis and Cecil, who had made a special trip from England to see what his
My Fair Lady
design had inspired. Kay and Joe Meehan—he was a leading figure on Wall Street—were assigned some of their society chums, including Elsie Woodward, the mother of poor Bill, whose shotgun death had caused such a scandal in 1955. And Glenway was entrusted with such eminent geriatrics as Thornton Wilder, Katherine Anne Porter, Virgil Thomson, Anita Loos and Janet Flanner, who had been
The New Yorker
’s Paris correspondent since the twenties. In her excitement at being asked, Katherine Anne forgot that she had heartily disliked Truman ever since their summer at Yaddo. “The pimple on the face of American literature,” she had called him. Now, cooing to Glenway, she declared, “Oh, I like Truman. I always have.”

For a few tense weeks, however, it appeared that Glenway’s Rich Amelia (minced veal) might never leave the oven. Wilder said he would be in Berlin on November 28, and a variety of ailments finally confined Katherine Anne to her house in Washington. Flanner, who was preparing to fly in from Paris with the first long dress she had purchased in nearly thirty years, was ruffled because Natalia Murray, her best friend and New York hostess, had not received her expected invitation. Flanner asked Glenway to drop Truman “a blackmailing note” saying that unless Murray came, she would not come either. “Without her,” said Flanner, “it is inconceivable that I should go and dance with a merry heart—I don’t dance at all anymore, actually.” Glenway did as he was bidden and was soon pleased to report that she could keep her long dress and plane ticket. “Piping away like Blake’s little devil in the cloud,” he told her, Truman had sworn that Murray’s invitation had merely been misplaced. “He sounded innocent,” Glenway said, “and in any event, having had our way, we’ll never know. My general principle about him is that it isn’t necessary to like him as much as one admires him.”

Others of the appointed dinner hosts doubtless witnessed similar scenes of comedy and consternation. “This city’s normally blasé social set is flapping like a gaggle of geese over a not-so-private party being thrown by author Truman Capote for 500 guests here Monday night,” a reporter for
The Washington Post
wrote a few days before the momentous night. “The magic Capote name—immortalized by his recent blockbuster nonfiction book,
In Cold Blood
—coupled with a guest list that reads like Who’s Who of the World, has escalated his party to a social ‘happening’ of history-making proportions. The New York newspapers are calling it variously the party of the year, the decade or the century.”

Indeed, nearly everyone in the five boroughs seemed to be watching the flutter overhead. When Herb Caen, a columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, arrived at Kennedy Airport, a cabdriver noticed his wife’s feathered headpiece and said, “Hey, you gonna go to Truman’s party, huh?” Guests came from all parts of America—eleven from Kansas alone—as well as from Europe, Asia and South America.

“The ladies have killed me,” said Halston, who had been busy for six weeks designing the masks for which he charged as much as six hundred dollars. One woman, he said, had come in eight times, taking an hour each time to have hers fitted. “I think I’ve lost my mind, and it’s just too much,” added his rival, Adolfo. By the twenty-eighth, the furor had reached Kenneth’s, Manhattan’s elite hairdressing salon. Arriving that afternoon, Kay Graham automatically went to the second floor, where ordinary customers were sent, rather than the third, where the smart set went. “But I didn’t know Kenneth, didn’t know anybody,” she said. “I had never really done my hair much. I had never made up my face. I hardly knew how to do it! We didn’t
lead
that kind of life in Washington. Then, while I was on the stairs, a wonderfully funny, Cinderella-ish thing happened.

“‘Oh, Mrs. Graham,’ one of the hairdressers said. ‘We’re all so busy with this Black and White Ball! Have you heard about it?’

“‘You won’t believe it, but I’m the guest of honor.’

“‘You are? Well, who’s doing your hair?’

“‘I don’t know. I was just trying to find out.’

“‘Kenneth has to do it,’ she said. And so I went to Kenneth himself. But I had to wait while Marisa Berenson had curls placed all over her head. I was the last one in and the last one out.”

Many of those expensive coiffures unraveled a few hours later, in a chill, end-of-November rain—Truman had arranged everything but the weather. As the Caens were leaving the Regency Hotel for their dinner, the bell captain whispered, “Boy, is this town full of phonies. Do you know there are people hanging around here in black-and-white clothes who ain’t even going to Truman’s? Whoo—eeee!” At Eleanor Friede’s, where soft background music was playing on the radio, a newscaster interrupted to say that crowds were already beginning to gather outside the Plaza to watch the guests arrive. Eleanor’s group, mostly editors and publishers, were amused, but still did not realize how fascinated people were by what seemed, after all, like only a dance. Truman and Kay Graham had drinks at the Paleys’, then went to the Plaza for a supper for two, in the suite he had taken for that purpose. But they also were late, not arriving until 9:10, and had time only to enjoy a few bites of caviar before taking up their posts at the ballroom door, alongside a man in white tie and tails, who was to announce each guest to them.

Television cameras had been set up in the lobby, and almost two hundred still photographers and reporters jostled for position, stepping on the delicate toes of every fashion columnist in the city. Security guards had been stationed in the kitchen to keep out gate-crashers, and black-tied and black-masked detectives waited to mingle and watch for jewel thieves. A dozen Secret Service agents came along to look after Lynda Bird Johnson; like it or not, Truman was forced to endure the boredom of Government agents. Four bars had been set up to dispense four hundred and fifty bottles of Taittinger champagne, and chefs were preparing a simple midnight buffet: chicken hash, spaghetti bolognaise, scrambled eggs, sausages, pastries and coffee. (As such things go, Truman spent relatively little on his fete: about sixteen thousand dollars, part of which he was able to deduct from his taxes.)

At 10:15, the ballroom was all but empty. Onlookers began to mutter that there were more reporters and photographers than guests, and it appeared that Pamela Hayward might have been right in fearing “that with all the publicity, the party might flop.” But that, of course, was an impossibility. At 10:30 masked faces began emerging from the rain. “Your names, please,” intoned the man in the white tie and tails, who then turned to Truman and Kay and announced, “The Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur.”

The masks did not actually hide many faces, but then, despite Truman’s fantasy, they were not really supposed to. Many of the women, like Marella Agnelli and Rose Kennedy, attached theirs to elaborate feather headdresses. Others wore fur around their eyes. Candice Bergen’s mask was topped by giant rabbit ears; Frank Sinatra’s had cat’s whiskers. Mrs. John Converse, Gary Cooper’s widow, wore black velvet, from which sprouted a gardenia tree bearing live blooms. Breaking Truman’s rule that men wear black, Billy Baldwin had engaged a Tiffany craftsman to make him a golden unicorn’s head. “Oh, Billy, that’s fantastic!” exclaimed Truman. Princess Luciana Pignatelli had also cheated by painting her mask on her face. She made up for it, however, by attaching to her feathered headdress a sixty-carat diamond, which bobbed above her pretty nose like a piece of bait on a fish line.