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 s
parkle 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!”
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.
In honor of Mrs. Katharine Graham
Mr. Truman Capote
Requests the pleasure of your company
At a Black and White Dance
On Monday, the twenty-eighth of November
At Ten O’Clock
Grand Ballroom, The Plaza
RSVP DRESS
Miss Elizabeth Davis
46 Park Avenue
New York Gentlemen: Black Tie; Black Mask
Ladies: Black or White Dress
White Mask; Fan
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 fizze
d 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.
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