Capote (57 page)

In a gesture that hinted of reverse snobbery, the host himself proudly announced that he had paid only thirty-nine cents for his simple Halloween mask. Hearing that, Alice Roosevelt Longworth was even prouder to say that she had bought hers for only thirty-five cents. Whatever they cost, most were removed long before midnight. “It itches and I can’t see,” complained Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt.

At 11 o’clock, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, was asked if it was a good party. “It’s too early to tell how it’s going,” he judiciously answered. “History is made after midnight.” So it was, and most of those who were there talked about it afterward the way they might have a cherished childhood Christmas. There were no spectacular scenes, but there were dozens of memorable ones: Lauren Bacall and Jerome Robbins holding the floor to do one of the best dance numbers since
Top Hat
, the daughters of three Presidents exchanging White House anecdotes, Kay Graham dancing with one of the doormen at the U.N. Plaza, who thanked her for the happiest night of his life. “It was always shimmering,” said David Merrick, the Broadway producer, who was not usually given to praising other people’s productions. “It was never still, nor was there a static moment.” Even Jack, who had resisted coming, had a good time. “It was
formidable vraiment
,” he told Mary Louise Aswell, who had elected to stay home in New Mexico. “
Extra!
”

Across the country the party made front-page headlines. “Splendor Runs Over at Capote Ball of Decade,” said the
Houston Chronicle.
“Capote’s Big Bash Was Just That,” added the
Fort Lauderdale News.
Some who had not been there grumbled that such frolics had also attended the fall of the Roman Empire. Pete Hamill wrote an outraged column in the
New York Post
that contrasted what Hamill thought were silly comments from the merrymakers with grisly scenes from the Viet Nam War. A soldier in an Army training camp sent a letter to
Time
objecting to being called upon to protect “this fat, lethargic, useless intelligentsia.” To which another correspondent, who said he had spent seven years on active duty, responded: “So Truman Capote had a blast. So what? Must we read the trite analogies about the Roman Empire and the U.S. every time somebody has a [party]?”

Truman himself heard few complaints. One came indirectly from Gloria Guinness, who said that she had made a terrible mistake in adorning her elegant neck with not one, but two heavy necklaces, one of rubies, one of diamonds. Their combined weight had exhausted her, she said, and she would have to stay in bed all the next day to regain her strength. Another came from an actress who had taken a handsome stranger home for the night. She had assumed that he was also a guest, but when she woke up in the morning, she discovered, to her vocal dismay, that he was just one of the detectives in black tie.

“So?” Truman inquired. “What’s wrong with that? You had a good time with him, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I did.”

“Well, then, what are you complaining about?”

On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Joe Meehan’s friends lined up to quiz him about what had happened. A few days later Russell Baker, the resident humorist of
The New York Times
, said that “sociologists are still debating whether it was the most important party of the Twentieth Century.” Baker’s own thought was that “writers surely will experience an instant inflation of self-esteem from the knowledge that one of their colleagues has seized Mrs. Astor’s former role as social arbiter.” Diana Trilling, an amateur sociologist herself, declared the party “a very complicated social moment in this country’s life.”

Those who study such things agreed that something important had occurred—exactly what, no one could say. The Museum of the City of New York assembled masks and souvenirs, which were placed alongside memorabilia from such other social moments in the city’s history as George Washington’s first inaugural ball and a gala tribute to General Lafayette in 1824. Also taking her cue from
My Fair Lady
, Suzy Knickerbocker, the gossip columnist, all but burst into song when she told her readers: “He did it. He did it. We always knew he’d do it—and indeed he did.”

“Y
OU
might say Truman Capote has become omnipotent,” declared
Women’s Wear Daily
, and for several years he very nearly was. His party did not fade from memory; it became a legend, magnified by the hyperbolic atmosphere of the sixties. Every subsequent ball was compared with his, and magazine or newspaper profiles of famous people often noted if they had been on the guest list, which was the irrefutable proof of their importance. So great was Truman’s reputation—“his name has a magic ring to people today,” Kay Meehan told a reporter—that his mere presence virtually guaranteed the success of any event he attended. “Anything he does, everyone sort of gravitates to,” said Jan Cowles. He no longer received invitations; he received beseechments: come to lunch, dinner, cocktails, anything—but come.

“There’s a little secret to charity benefits these days,” wrote a society reporter for
The New York Times.
“It’s called Truman Capote. Mr. Capote is considered by many to be a 64-inch, 136-pound magnet, particularly attractive to the gilded people who count when it comes to fashionable fund raising. His name on an invitation to just about anything, even if it costs money, is as potent as a Rockefeller signature on a check. There is just about no chance that it won’t be honored.”

Among ordinary, ungilded folk his name was equally potent. Like most other things, fame can be measured, and his was now on the level of a movie idol or a rock star. He was as sought after by the television talk shows as he was by Manhattan hostesses, and nearly every public move he made was considered newsworthy by national magazines. He had not given a ball; he had presided over his own coronation. He was Truman, Rex Bibendi—King of the Revels.

Every monarch needs a consort, and he had his, Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister, Lee Radziwill. They were together so often that a woman friend wrote to complain: “I don’t want to see another picture of you holding Lee Radziwill’s hand. I want you to hold my hand.” Suzy Knickerbocker jokingly chided him in her column: “Somebody has got to tell Truman that Lee Radziwill can’t have him
ALL THE TIME
. There’s only one Truman and we saw him first.” Their jealous finger-waving did no good. Truman was besotted, as enamored of “Princess Dear,” as he called her—she was married to a former Polish prince—as he was of Babe. “I love her,” he gushed. “I love everything about her. I love the way she looks, the way she moves, the way she thinks.” Writing in
Vogue
, he said, “Ah, the Princess! Well, she’s easily described. She’s a beauty. Inside. Outside.”

Although she was less effusive, Lee felt much the same about him. “He’s my closest friend. More than with anyone else, I can discuss the most serious things about life and emotional questions. I miss him
terribly
when I’m away from him. I trust him implicitly. He’s the most loyal friend I’ve ever had and the best company I’ve ever known. We’ve always been so close that it’s like an echo. We never have to finish sentences. We just know what the other one means or wants to say. I feel as if he’s my brother, except that brothers and sisters are rarely as close as we are.”

It was easy to see why he appealed to her; he was the man of the moment. It was harder to understand why she appealed to him, and many searched in vain for the extraordinary qualities that made him prattle like a moonstruck adolescent. She was stylish and undeniably lovely: slim, dark-haired, and favored with eyes that were, to use his words, “gold-brown like a glass of brandy resting on a table in front of firelight.” Even so, she did not seem to belong in his pantheon of goddesses: she lacked Babe’s stellar presence, Gloria Guinness’ transcendental chic, Pamela Hayward’s fabled charm. Lee seemed, indeed, to have no clear sense of her identity, possessing nothing like the cast-iron egos of those formidable females. Just the reverse; she appeared to be spoiled—even he admitted that—and rather shallow.

But those who were puzzled by his infatuation did not judge her by his standards. He saw her through the eyes of a novelist; he viewed her, as he did all those he enshrined, as a character in a work of fiction. Seen from his perspective, she was a modern Becky Sharp for whom fate had chosen an exquisitely poignant torture: her childhood rival—her sister, Jackie—had grown up to be the wife of a President and the most celebrated and admired woman in the world.

Lee’s father, John Bouvier III, had been a darkly handsome, blue-blooded wastrel—“Black Jack,” he had been called—who had squandered his inheritance and cheated on his wife even during their honeymoon. After their divorce, her mother had married Hugh Auchincloss, who was boring but safe, rich enough to provide his wife and two stepdaughters with all the perquisites of the privileged class, including estates in both Newport and Virginia. Having learned her own lesson the hard way, the new Mrs. Auchincloss taught her daughters one simple rule: marry money. And they did, Jackie spectacularly well, Lee a little less so, marrying first Michael Canfield, whose father was a well-known publisher, then Stanislas Radziwill.

Though he was not Kennedy-rich, Stas Radziwill (who, as a naturalized British subject, had no real claim to his Polish title) had made enough money in London real estate to provide her and their two young children with an exceedingly comfortable life: a three-story Georgian town house near Buckingham Palace, staffed by a cook, a butler, two maids, and a nanny; a Queen Anne country house with a huge indoor swimming pool near Henley-on-Thames; a twelve-room duplex on Fifth Avenue; vacations in Portuguese and Italian villas.

She was not happy, however, as Truman quickly discovered. Stas, who was nineteen years her senior, was jealous, moody and unsympathetic to her desire for greater independence. “Understand her marriage is all but finito,” Truman wrote Cecil in 1962, following what was probably his first intimate conversation with her. So it seemed to be. A year later she and Stas spent much of the summer on the yacht of Aristotle Onassis, and she appeared to be deeply in love with the golden Greek, who, despite his froglike appearance, was irresistible to many women. The irate husband of his longtime lover, Maria Callas, went so far as to crow to the press that Onassis tossed Maria aside so he could be with Lee. Washington columnist Drew Pearson asked, “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?”

When the Kennedys’ newborn son Patrick died in August, 1963, Lee told Ari how shaken Jackie was. He responded by inviting Jackie to join the cruise as well; the
Christina
would go anywhere she wanted, he said. “Oh, Jackie, it would be such fun,” Lee assured her and Jackie was persuaded. But for Lee it was not fun, and if she had dreams of marrying Ari, they were soon forgotten. At the end of the cruise, he bestowed on Jackie a diamond-and-ruby necklace. Lee’s reward for bringing them together was only three little bracelets, so “dinky,” she complained to Jack Kennedy, that little Caroline Kennedy would have been embarrassed to wear them to her own birthday party. That was not the end of Lee’s complaints, and nearly five years later she called Truman to inform him of the final, bitter result of her good deed. “She’s crying and weeping and sobbing,” he told friends. “I can’t tell you what she said, but it’s going to be in the news. It’s the biggest piece of gossip there is, and she’s crying her eyes out because of it.” The piece of gossip, which resulted in headlines all over the globe, was that Jackie and Ari were soon to be married. Lee’s consolation prize, according to Truman, was a valuable parcel of land on a promontory near Athens, which Ari apparently had given her in hopes that Jackie would build a house there.

Her sister’s climb from peak to peak was thus the second and perhaps more enduring cause of Lee’s melancholy. When they were growing up, Lee was the center of attention, and Jackie sat off in the corner reading a book. “Lee was the pretty one,” sighed Jackie. “So I guess I was supposed to be the intelligent one.” From then on, the fickle spotlight turned the other way, and Lee seemed condemned to live in Jackie’s shadow forevermore. “Why would anyone care what I do when there are so many more interesting people in the world?” Lee asked not long after Jackie became First Lady. “I haven’t done anything at all.” Only a few perceived the resentment that lay behind that plaintive comment. “My God, how jealous she is of Jackie: I never knew,” wrote Truman in 1962.

Lee was desperate to make a name for herself, but did not know how. Enter Truman, the master of self-promotion. If Lee yearned for recognition, he yearned to give it to her. Never before had he had either the time or the opportunity to play Pygmalion on such a grand scale. Babe and the other swans were several years older than he was; he could give advice here and there, but the plots of their lives had been laid out long since. Lee was nearly nine years younger; her future was still undetermined. It was his dream to shape it, to make of her life a work of art. He saw her not merely as a character in a novel, but as a character in his novel. Molding her into a woman who could rival and perhaps surpass her sister became a cause to which he would devote much of the year following his ball. “She doesn’t want to be just somebody’s sister,” he said. “She wants to have a life and identity of her own. She’s a very, very extraordinary girl. She’s got a really good, first-class mind. It just has to get released!”

In January, 1967, he joined that extraordinary girl for a leisurely week or so in Morocco, which the international set had turned into its playground. Lee had been there twice the previous year. They traveled south, from Rabat to exotic Marrakesh, to pink-walled Taroudant. She rode horses while he slept and relaxed under the palm trees of their hotel gardens. Parting from her at the end of the month, he flew to Switzerland, going first to St. Moritz, where the Aga Khan was giving a party for the Shah of Iran, then to Verbier, where Jack and the animals—Charlie and Diotima—awaited him. He returned to New York with Charlie in early March, then proceeded to a spa in Miami Beach, where he went on a crash diet and lost, by his own account, eleven pounds.