“Style is what you are,” Truman Capote once said. For him it was not just a glittering, shiny surface; it was a Platonic ideal, a way of looking at the world and a manner of living, and all of the extraordinary women and most of the men he admired had it to one degree or another. Money could not buy it, but real style, the grand style he prized most, was nonetheless impossible unless it was watered daily from a deep well at a prominent bank. “When I was young,” he confessed, “I wanted to be rich, terribly, terribly rich. My mother, after divorcing my father, married a rich man, but they were upper-middle-class rich, and that’s worse than being poor. There’s no taste in middle-class rich. You must be either very rich or very poor. There’s absolutely no taste in between. . . . I’ve always known rich people, but I was so aware of not being rich myself.”

In fact, he was obsessed not so much by money as he was by many of those who have it. He was not interested, except in rare cases, in the Old Line rich, the ancestor-worshiping blue bloods of Boston or Philadelphia. And he was of course bored by the vulgar rich, shopping-center magnates from Ohio and oil barons from Texas or Oklahoma. It was the other rich who fascinated him, New Yorkers mostly, but Europeans too, people of power and achievement who knew, as he himself did, the difference between what was stylish and what was merely expensive.

He looked upon those special few—the stylish rich—the way the Greeks looked upon their gods, with mingled awe and envy. He believed that money not only enlarged their lives; it also excused them from the ordinary rules of behavior—or, indeed, any rules at all. “He explained to me that when you are a very, very rich girl, you don’t marry the same way a real girl marries,” said Carol Matthau. “You marry the way another person travels in a foreign country. You stay there until you tire of it. Then you go elsewhere.”

He regarded the rich as heaven’s anointed, the only truly liberated people on earth. “The freedom to pursue an esthetic quality in life is an extra dimension,” he explained, “like being able to fly where others walk. It’s marvelous to appreciate paintings, but why not have them? Why not create a whole esthetic ambiente? Be your own living work of art?” Although he never had the cash to buy his own wings—or very many expensive paintings, for that matter—he was resolved that at the very least he would be granted a guest membership in the celestial society of those who did.

His friend Oliver Smith, the Broadway set designer, likened him, not altogether whimsically, to a cat that once lived in Smith’s Brooklyn Heights garden. “He was just an alley cat that wandered around the neighborhood eating whenever he could. He was thin—very, very thin—and he would stand on the porch looking wistfully into the kitchen. He was determined to get into the house, but I didn’t want him. I had four other cats, which was a big enough feline population. Well, we eventually fed him on the porch, but still didn’t allow him in. Finally he got himself into the kitchen, and of course now he just rules the house. He’s huge! He can’t get enough to eat. Truman’s craving for a luxurious environment was something like that cat’s.”

The darling of the gods, a friend had named him in the forties, and before he was twenty-two, before he had even published his first novel, he was the darling of half of Manhattan as well. The combination of his little-boy façade with an acute adult intelligence intrigued more than one high-octane gathering, and after dinner the ladies in their gowns and jewels deserted their husbands to listen to his funny and sometimes outrageous stories. They adored him, and by the mid-fifties his rapport with the opposite sex had flowered into perfect communion. No Casanova had ever admired lovely women more fervently. He flattered them, he consoled them, he tried to guide their destinies. Pygmalion was his favorite role, and any woman who took his advice, whatever her age or position in life, he looked upon as a protégée who needed only his word or hand to bring her to perfection. Women delighted him, and he pleasured them in every way but one—the physical act of love.

In all the world there was no more brilliant an assemblage than the regal women Truman now called by their first names. What drew him to these elegant swans was not just their beauty, riches, and style—he disliked many women who had all three. What captured his imagination, what made his favorites shine so brightly in his eyes, was a quality that was essentially literary: they all had stories to tell. Few of them had been born to wealth or position; they had not always glided on serene and silvery waters; they had struggled, schemed, and fought to be where they were. They had created themselves, as he himself had done. Each was an artist, he said, “whose sole creation is her perishable self.”

He installed perhaps a dozen—no more—in his pantheon of class and beauty. There was Gloria Guinness, for example, a Mexican by birth, who after years of poverty and privation had emerged triumphant as the wife of Loel Guinness, a member of one of Britain’s great banking families. There was Barbara Paley, in Truman’s eyes superb and unsurpassable. Like her two sisters, she had been groomed to marry wealth and had achieved her goal by becoming the wife of the founder of CBS. There was C. Z. Guest, who, rebelling against the Boston society in which she was born, had worked as a show girl and had posed nude for Diego Rivera—the picture he painted hung for a time above the bar of Mexico City’s Reforma hotel. Then, her rebellion over, she married Winston Guest, the beneficiary of ancient trust funds, and settled down to a life of parties and horses.

There was Slim Hayward, later Slim Keith, who was born Nancy Gross in Salinas, California. Her slimness—hence her nickname—and distinctly American beauty had so impressed Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, that during the mid-forties Mrs. Snow had featured her in almost every issue. Howard Hawks, her first husband, had used her as the model for his screen heroines, including Lauren Bacall, and Leland Hayward was so taken with her wit and high spirits that he divorced Margaret Sullavan to become her second husband. There was Pamela Churchill, Winston’s ex-daughter-in-law, whose magnetic charms eventually lured Hayward away from Slim herself; and there was Marella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat king Gianni Agnelli and “the European swan numero uno,” in Truman’s words.

In the sixties, Lee Radziwill—“Princess Dear,” as he called her; she was married to a former Polish prince—was also enshrined. Writing in Vogue, he explained, “Ah, the Princess! Well, she’s easily described. She’s a beauty. Inside. Outside.”

Fortunately for him, his adored swans enjoyed his company as much as he enjoyed theirs. Their love of gossip was as consuming as his own, and as long as they believed themselves exempt, which they naïvely did, they laughed when he skewered the others in their group, and they were diverted by his considerable talent for causing discord—the other side of his Pygmalion complex.

Quiet bored him; he delighted in turbulence. When none existed, he would stir it up, then stand back and watch the results. “It was almost an intellectual solitaire that he played,” said Slim. “He would invent something out of whole cloth, an absolute fabrication, and say, ‘Did you know that X is having a walk-out with Y?’ I would say, ‘Oh, Truman, for God’s sake! That’s ridiculous!’ Then I began to think about it more and wondered: is it that ridiculous? And something usually did come of his invention. Whether he willed it into being or not, I don’t know. But he could cause a lot of trouble.”

Over the years his tales, true and false, helped to wreck more than a few friendships and marriages, including, as it was to turn out, her own. “I can break up anybody in New York I want to,” he bragged to Slim. Some of his old friends, who formerly had found his imitation of Puck endearing, later detected spitefulness in his gossipy accounts.

When he was not busy telling stories about other people, Truman was telling them about himself. “A friend of mine once went to a dinner at which the host and hostess had just spent a weekend with Truman,” said Glenway Wescott, a writer of a previous generation. “They were sophisticated people, but they were still talking about it with their jaws down to their chests. They said that they had never had such an experience. They had asked something about how his homosexuality started, and he sat down and told them about his first orgasm, his first childhood experience, his first older friend, and so on. I thought it was irresistibly funny. What he had discovered was that ladies in society want to know about everything.”

He had also discovered that, surfeited as they were with all the pleasures that money can buy, ladies in society—and gentlemen too—were desperate for amusement. And who could provide better amusement, who had had more practice at it, than Truman? “He was a constant joy to be around in those days,” recalled Eleanor Lambert, a close friend of Gloria Guinness. “Everything was fun about him. He was like a precocious child, so cute and funny; he was able to bring people’s childhoods back to them. He and Gloria laughed all the time. The three of us once visited the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, which was supposed to be the nadir of taste. Behind the bar was a giant glass wall. It was the wall of the pool, and while you were sitting at the bar, you could see what the swimmers were doing underwater. They would swim by, and though they didn’t know it, we could see that they were urinating in the water! It was absolutely awful, and I wanted to leave. But Truman and Gloria thought it was hilarious. I couldn’t drag them away.”

Where the wives led, the husbands followed. Even those who had not read Truman’s books realized that there was more than a jester behind his observant blue eyes. “He was such a mercurial, many-colored, many-sided person, like a big mirrored ball with light hitting it at different angles,” said Slim. “But inside that ball was 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! But the most rewarding thing of all was to sit alone with him after dinner and just let him go. He was an adored friend.”

It was a small world the stylish rich inhabited in those days. Slim was married to Leland Hayward, for instance, in the garden of the Paley estate on Long Island; the Paleys and the Guinnesses were best friends; and just about everyone had visited one Greek ruin or another on either the Guinness or the Agnelli yacht. Knowing and playing host to Truman became the fashionable thing to do. “Once he got into that part of society, he moved very fast,” said Oliver Smith.

“The wealthy find objects that amuse them: that’s history.”

He was a frequent visitor to their houses, he had a private stateroom on their yachts, and he was a privileged passenger in their private planes. He had a reserved seat by the fire, and he was there listening when the brandy was poured after dinner, when voices were lowered, hearts were opened, and secrets were passed. Spread out before him were enough plots for a hundred novels: the case histories of show girls who became great ladies, of kept boys who inherited ducal mansions in the shadow of Notre Dame, of hushed-up society murders, and of all kinds of couplings within the sumptuous smoothness of Porthault sheets. He saw, he heard, and in the back of his mind he recorded everything. Nothing escaped him.

It was then, most probably, in that period of excited conquest in the mid- and late fifties, that he conceived of himself as the American Proust, a writer who would someday do for the modern American rich what Proust, laboring through the night in his cork-lined room, had done for the French aristocracy of the Belle Époque. In a way, he said, he regarded Proust as his mentor. Proust had not influenced his writing style—Flaubert would always be the master there—but he had set a personal example. “I always felt,” Truman confessed, “he was a kind of secret friend.”

Truman admired all of his swans, but the one who captured his head and heart was in some ways the loveliest of all. “The beautiful darling!” her father had called her when she was a child in Boston, and as long as she lived, that was the universal opinion of Barbara Paley—or Babe, as she was usually called. “So great is her beauty that no matter how often I see her, each time is the first time,” marveled Billy Baldwin, society’s favorite decorator.

Her father was Harvey Cushing, one of the most illustrious American doctors of the century. A man of enormous ambition and energy, he single-handedly transformed brain surgery from a dark and uncertain art into an exact science; in his spare time he wrote a two-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of another renowned doctor, Sir William Osler. Her mother was no less ambitious, using her own talent and energy to mold her three daughters into the kind of women who would attract the richest and most distinguished men in America.

And that is precisely what “society’s three fabulous Cushing sisters,” as the gossip columnists dubbed them, did—twice each. Minnie married Vincent Astor, whose family owned much of New York; she then divorced him for James Fosburgh, an artist and a member of an old Manhattan family. Betsey married James Roosevelt, F.D.R.’s son, then settled on John Hay Whitney, who was as handsome and dashing as he was rich. Babe’s first marriage was to Stanley Mortimer Jr., with whom she had two children; a model member of the American aristocracy, he was a graduate of St. Mark’s and Harvard, the grandson of one of the founders of Standard Oil, and a descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States. By such standards, her second marriage, to William Paley, with whom she had two more children, was something of a comedown. He was rich, certainly, but he was not an American aristocrat: he was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia who had made his fortune manufacturing cigars.

That did not bother Babe, however, whose “immaculate quality and immense serenity”—Billy Baldwin’s description again—elevated her above common feelings. All those who knew her considered her character as faultless as her beauty. She had chiseled features, dark hair, exquisitely shaped brown eyes, and a tall, slim figure that made any dress she wore look elegant. Permanently enshrined on the list of the world’s best-dressed women, she made fashion news every time she walked out the door. Whatever she wore or did became instantly acceptable. When she began wearing pantsuits, they suddenly became respectable; when, in middle age, she refused to color her graying hair, smart women all over America threw out their bottles of dye.

Her only apparent defect was that she may have been too flawless to be real, more like a goddess than a creature of earth. As Truman observed in one of his notebooks, “Mrs. P. had only one fault: she was perfect; otherwise, she was perfect.” Try as she might, she could not help keeping most people, including her own children, at a discreet distance. “She was warm but not tactile,” said one of her closest friends. “She was not a toucher. She would never pick up and hold her children, for example, and they suffered from the lack.” She was not, in fact, as confident as she appeared, nor quite as saintly. Although she professed to be embarrassed by her reputation as a stylish trendsetter, or to treat it as a joke, it meant more to her than she liked to admit, and she secretly envied Gloria Guinness, her good friend and chief rival as Queen of Chic. Gloria, she more than once pointed out to Truman, had started her career as a shill in a Mexico City nightclub.

Beautiful Babe, he discovered, was human after all, and lonely on the pedestal on which her looks and breeding had placed her. Perhaps more than any of the other swans, she needed a friend like him, someone with whom she could relax and who in turn would tell her, time and again, that she was a perfect person. “She had an icy exterior,” he said, “but once you got behind that fine enamel outside, she was very warm and very young.”

He met the Paleys in January 1955, just after the opening of his Broadway musical, House of Flowers, when his friends the Selznicks, David and Jennifer, were invited for a long weekend at the Paley house at Round Hill, Jamaica. “Do you mind if we bring Truman along?” David asked Bill Paley. “No, of course not,” Paley replied. “It would be an honor.” And so early one cold morning Truman boarded Paley’s private plane and was introduced to the golden couple, Bill and Babe. Although Bill looked startled when he saw him walk into his airplane, the inevitable scarf trailing behind him, he said nothing until they were airborne. He then turned to David. “You know, when you said Truman, I assumed you meant Harry Truman. Who is this?”

“This is Truman Capote, our great American writer,” responded David.

On such mistakes do fortunes turn. By that time, Truman and Babe were already deep in conversation and had begun a friendship that was to last more than two decades, an attachment that had much of the passion but none of the complications of a sexual entanglement. “Babe looked at him and Truman looked at her, and they fell instantly in love,” said Jennifer. “I had a few jealous pangs because up until that time I had been his best friend—we really did adore each other. By the time we got to Jamaica, not only was Babe absolutely enchanted with him, but so was Bill. Truman was almost adopted by them. The three of them became inseparable.”

From then on, wherever the Paleys went, Truman often followed. He was a frequent guest at their house in Jamaica, and then at a later warm-weather house at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas; he spent weekends at Kiluna Farm, their eighty-five-acre estate overlooking the Sound on Long Island; he went with them on other people’s yachts, and he vacationed with them in Europe. Indeed, the three of them traveled the world together and, in Truman’s words, “did every kind of conceivable thing. I loved them both because they were bright, they were attractive, and they were with it in every sort of way. We were a great little trio. I was really their best friend, the best friend they ever had.”

That was undoubtedly the case with Babe, who was more protective of him than she probably was of her own children. “There’s great beauty in his face,” she said. “Especially in his eyes just after he takes his specs off. They look so vulnerable.” Bill was less effusive, but obviously enjoyed his company. An exception to Truman’s observation that the rich are cheap, Bill was exceedingly generous, paying Truman’s way on most of their travels and once even offering to buy him a house, an offer that Truman wisely but gratefully refused. Most of all, Bill was generous in giving him his wife, in allowing Truman to join them on their travels and in their home. “He handed Babe to Truman on a silver platter,” said Jack Dunphy, who had been Truman’s companion since the late forties and who knew and liked both Paleys. “It wasn’t the Cushing family in Boston that made her. It was Bill. She would have been nothing if she hadn’t married him, 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.”

Babe and her sister Minnie Fosburgh gave him a graduate degree in the manners and mores of the cultured rich. “Truman had a passion to identify with quality,” said Oliver Smith. “He eagerly wanted to know how you behave in society, and Mrs. Paley and Mrs. Fosburgh educated him. They taught him about decoration, painting, and all the other things that are the intelligent result of great wealth.” Truman willingly admitted as much. “Babe taught me a lot of things,” he said, “how to look at a room, for instance. She showed me how to decorate by throwing things together, expensive things with cheap things from the dime store. She showed me that a room could be fun and personal, and that’s the way I’ve decorated ever since. I taught her a lot of things too, such as how to read and how to think.”

Like many women of her class and generation, Babe had ended her formal training with secondary school, just as he had, and the world of books was, by and large, terra incognita to her. Truman opened up avenues for her, she said, adding that he had even made her read Proust—“the whole thing.”

To Truman, Babe represented the ultimate in style. She was the genuine article. “I was madly in love with her,” he said. “I just thought she was absolutely fantastic! She was one of the two or three great obsessions of my life. She was the only person in my whole life that I liked everything about. I consider her one of the three greatest beauties in the world, the other two being Gloria Guinness and Garbo. But Babe, I think, was the most beautiful. She was in fact the most beautiful woman of the twentieth century, and with the single exception of Gloria, who was sort of neck and neck with her, she was also the most chic woman I’ve ever known. When I first saw her, I thought that I had never seen anyone more perfect: her posture, the way she held her head, the way she moved.

“She was the most important person in my life, and I was the most important person in hers. I was her one real friend, the one real relationship she ever had. We were like lovers; she loved me and I loved her. The only person I was ever truly in love with was her. She once joked that her analyst said that she loved me more than anyone else, more than Bill or her children, and he thought she should have an affair with me. It was one of those jokes that wasn’t actually a joke. He was right; we had a perfect rapport. We had an understanding: if I suspected she was feeling bad about something, no matter what time of the year it was, I would send her lilies of the valley, without any note. And she would do the same for me. She once told me that she had bought her funeral plot on Long Island and that there was a place for me, because she wanted me to be buried beside her. I was her sounding board and the only one who really knew her. She always said to me, ‘There’s only one person in the world who could hurt me, really hurt me, and that’s you. You could do something. I don’t know what it would be. But I know that you’re the one person in the world that could ever really, really hurt me.’”

In matters of style, Bill Paley was also the genuine article. His taste was as assured as his wife’s, and he was even more of a perfectionist. When CBS built its new headquarters on Sixth Avenue, for example, he supervised every aspect of the building’s design, right down to the shape of door handles. When he created the little park that bears his name on East Fifty-third Street, he put his stamp on the smallest detail, not excluding the hot dogs that were to be sold at the concession stand. Unsatisfied with the dozens of different kinds of frankfurters he tasted, he ordered one made to his own recipe—then specified how it was to be cooked.

From early manhood, he had been accustomed to being obeyed and to getting precisely what he wanted when he wanted it. He could turn off his charm as quickly as he could turn it on. Associates who assumed they were his friends often learned otherwise. “I don’t think I am a very easy person to know,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It is my impression that although I have had a multitude of acquaintances in my life, many of whom call me friend and whom I call friend, I have had very few intimates. Apart from these few, I think I do not like the idea of depending on others. I don’t feel safe.”

He did feel safe with Truman, however, but as the months and years passed, their relationship became decidedly more complicated. Truman admired, liked, and respected Bill, but, given his love for Babe, he could also be jealous and resentful, afflicted by all the emotions associated with the Oedipus complex. For his part, Bill could be generous and indulgent, but Truman felt he could also be mean and petty.

“Everybody who meets Bill thinks he is Mr. Cool and that he never loses his temper about nothin’,” said Truman. “That’s not the person he really is. The person he really is is a highly disturbed man with a terrific inferiority complex, despite all of his success. He has a terrible temper, which nobody realizes, and Babe was scared of him.”

“Bill has the best taste of any man I’ve ever met, and I think he realized that Babe was ‘it’ so far as women are concerned. He married her because she was so chic. It wasn’t because of love, and I don’t think it was because of her social position—though that certainly helped. To him she was the ideal woman, perfect in every way. But what he wanted was Marilyn Monroe, a sexy broad. Babe thought he didn’t love her. I tried to tell her that he did love her, but she never believed me. She thought that love and sex had to go together.

“She had a love-hate relationship with him: she loved, loved, loved him and hated, hated, hated him. I have never met anybody who was so desperately unhappy as she was. Twice I saved her when she tried to kill herself. One time she took pills and the other time she cut her wrists. Once she was ready to leave him, and I set her down and said, ‘Look, you don’t have any money and you’ve got four children. Think of them. Bill bought you. It’s as if he went down to central casting. You’re a perfect type for him. Look upon being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job, the best job in the world. Accept it and be happy with it.’ She cried and said, ‘I’ve got to think it over. Let me take a nap.’ She lay down and slept for a couple of hours. When she woke up, she shook herself and said, ‘You’re right.’ And that was the end of it.”

Yet if Truman thought Bill behaved badly toward beautiful Babe, so did Truman himself, who betrayed her trust by putting the Paleys’ sex life, or, as he said, lack of it, at the top of his list of lunch-time stories. Perhaps—to make the best case for him—he thought that his disclosure would somehow diminish Bill in the eyes of his peers and gain sympathy for Babe. Or perhaps—to make the more probable case—he was such an addicted gossip that he could not resist telling a juicy story, and making it clear that he was the only one to whom she had entrusted such intimate details. In either event, he did her an injury, whether she knew it or not.

Whatever his motive, the reputation most tarnished by his breathless report was neither Babe’s nor Bill’s, but his own. “Babe made a mistake in trusting him,” said one of her friends. “My husband and I had lunch with him in the early sixties, just after he had spent some time with her. He told us that Bill would no longer sleep with her and that she was greatly bothered by it. We were both horrified by his indiscretion, and my husband wanted me to tell her. But I just couldn’t do that. I couldn’t tell her about Truman, and I didn’t want to humiliate her by saying that he had spread the intimate facts of her life from coast to coast. He didn’t tell just a couple of us who were closest to her. He told everybody.”

“You might say Truman Capote has become omnipotent,” declared Women’s Wear Daily after the success of In Cold Blood and his Black and White Ball, and for several years he very nearly was. His 1966 party at the Plaza, a masked ball for 540 guests in honor of Kay Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post and Newsweek, 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 that his mere presence virtually guaranteed the success of any event he attended.

At the end of the decade he reluctantly picked up his pad and pencils again and returned to Answered Prayers, the novel that had been pursuing him, he said, “like a crazy wind” since 1958. When nothing appeared in the years that followed, even his friends started to wonder if the book in fact existed. To reassure them, as well perhaps as himself, in June 1975 he nervously published one chapter, “Mojave,” in Esquire. The enthusiastic response surprised even him, and from those who read it he heard nothing but hosannas. Tennessee Williams, who was not usually an admirer, thought that it even demonstrated a touch of genius. “I’ve never read anything by him, except possibly ‘Miriam,’ that was comparable,” said Tennessee.

Such an enthusiastic reception erased all Truman’s worries and doubts, reducing his writer’s block to a small and contemptible pile of dust. At the age of fifty he still had what it took; neither alcohol and pills nor a series of disruptive love affairs had damaged the faculty he prized most: his magician’s power over words. Perhaps, he seemed to say to himself, Answered Prayers would be the masterpiece he had claimed; perhaps he would be the American Proust after all. Before “Mojave” came out, he had jealously guarded his book’s contents; now he could scarcely wait for everyone to applaud his achievement. To the astonishment of the editors of Esquire, he promised even more chapters. In November 1975, rushing to give them something new, he disregarded chronology, plucking from his notebooks what was probably the only other finished chapter, the fifth of a projected eight. “It seemed to be complete in and of itself,” he explained. “So without really thinking about it, I sent it on.”

The fifth chapter borrowed its title, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” from Henri Soulé’s renowned restaurant on East Fifty-fifth Street, a popular gathering spot for the swans and one of the few Manhattan restaurants that possessed what Truman regarded as “established chic.” The action takes place on an afternoon in 1965, when P. B. Jones encounters his friend Lady Coolbirth on the street nearby, and Lady Coolbirth, who has been stood up by her lunch date, the Duchess of Windsor, drags him along to fill the Duchess’s empty seat at one of Monsieur Soulé’s choice front tables.

Despite her title, Lady Coolbirth is an American, a “big breezy peppy broad” in her forties, who grew up on a ranch in the West and whose latest husband is a rich English knight. In looks, manners, and speech, she resembles another big breezy peppy broad, who in 1965 was also in her forties, who also grew up on a ranch in the West, and whose latest husband was also a rich English knight. She is a photograph, in short, of Truman’s old friend Slim Keith. On this afternoon in 1965 the fictional Lady Coolbirth has a lot she wants to talk about, and over many glasses of Roederer Cristal champagne, talk she does. Using her voice as his own, Truman is able to stuff his narrative, like an almost infinitely expandable Louis Vuitton bag, with many of the secrets he had become privy to during his years of hobnobbing with the rich.

As Lady Coolbirth’s knowing eyes pass over the other patrons—a singular assembly that includes Babe Paley and her sister Betsey Whitney; Lee Radziwill and her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy; and Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Matthau—she becomes Truman’s mouthpiece. “The truth of the matter is that Lady Ina Coolbirth is me!” he later insisted. “I’m the person who gathered all that information, and her conversation is precisely the kind I might have had with somebody.” Lee, for instance, receives the usual valentine. “If I were a man, I’d fall for Lee myself,” says Lady Coolbirth. “She’s marvelously made, like a Tanagra figurine.” Older sister Jackie is given Truman’s usual needle. “Very photogenic, of course,” Lady Coolbirth reluctantly admits, “but the effect is a little. . . unrefined, exaggerated.” But most of Lady Coolbirth’s monologue is devoted to two long and scan-dalous stories: a barely disguised account of the Woodward killing and a tale of a philandering tycoon’s comic comeuppance.

The Woodward killing had intrigued the social world since 1955, when, taking aim in their house in Oyster Bay, Ann Woodward had unloaded a double-barreled Churchill shotgun into the smooth and handsome head of her husband Bill. A sportsman, whose racing colors, red and white, had been worn by the great Thoroughbred Nashua, Bill had been a popular figure in New York society; on the day of his funeral, his clubs had lowered their flags to half-mast, and servants all over Manhattan’s East Side had demanded time off to pay their respects. A Long Island grand jury had exonerated trigger-happy Ann, who asserted that she had mistaken him for a prowler, but most of Truman’s friends, who had heard about her fits of insane rage, believed otherwise. When she pulled the trigger. Bill had just emerged from the shower. How many burglars, they asked themselves, make their rounds in the nude?

When Truman began making notes for Answered Prayers in 1958, he apparently had planned to make Ann his central character; in a list of eight names he jotted down in his journal, hers was the only one he had underlined. By 1975 the Woodward affair was largely forgotten, and he had a different heroine for the novel, Mrs. Harrison Williams, “Marvelous Mona,” as the newspapers had called her, a swan of the generation that preceded Babe, Marella Agnelli, and Gloria Guinness. Now, in “La Côte Basque,” Ann Woodward—Ann Hopkins, he calls her, not even bothering to change her first name—has been reduced to a bit player whose entrance into the restaurant induces Lady Coolbirth to lay out the facts of that twenty-year-old case, or the facts as Truman and most of his friends understood them.

His Ann is a West Virginia hillbilly who becomes a Manhattan call girl, then a gangster’s moll, and finally, through luck and wile, the wife of one of society’s golden boys—Bill Woodward right down to his shirt size. Her career is a smooth glissando until her husband, who is tired of her flamboyant adulteries, learns that she has never dissolved a teenage marriage; in the eyes of the law, she is not his wife at all. Realizing that he is about to send her packing, Ann bangs away with her shotgun. She gets away with it, too, as old Mrs. Hopkins, willing to do anything to avoid ugly publicity, buys off the police and pretends, as Bill’s mother, Elsie Woodward, did, that her son has been the victim of a cruel accident. Ending her macabre little history. Lady Coolbirth says that now the old lady never gives a dinner party without inviting her daughter-in-law, the assassin. “The one thing I wonder,” adds Lady Coolbirth, “is what everyone wonders—when they’re alone, just the two of them, what do they talk about?”

The second of Lady Coolbirth’s cautionary tales is prompted by the sight of the wife of a former New York governor, who is also partaking of Monsieur Soulé’s expensive hospitality. One night at a dinner party, says Lady Coolbirth, Sidney Dillon—“conglomateur, adviser to Presidents”—found himself sitting next to the lady. He had always hankered after her, and since both their spouses were away, he invited her back to his pied-à-terre in the Pierre hotel, where, without any difficulty at all, he lured her into bed. It proved to be a disappointing conquest: she had neglected to warn him that it was the wrong time of the month, and she was menstruating—nearly hemorrhaging, in Truman’s grossly exaggerated account. When she left, the sheets were covered with bloodstains “the size of Brazil.”

Expecting his wife to return early the next morning, before the hotel maid came to make up the bed, Dillon struggled frantically to expunge the evidence of his infidelity, scrubbing those crimson sheets in the bathtub with the only soap at hand, a bar of Guerlain’s Fleurs des Alpes. “There he was,” related Lady Coolbirth, “the powerful Mr. Dillon, down on his knees and flogging away like a Spanish peasant at the side of a stream.” The sheets finally came clean, and after baking them in the apartment’s tiny oven, he made up the bed and crawled under the covers for a warm but somewhat soggy sleep. He was so exhausted that he did not hear his wife come and go, leaving an affectionate message on the bureau: “Darling, you were sleeping so soundly and sweetly that I just tiptoed in and changed and have gone on to Greenwich. Hurry home.”

Of all Truman’s writing, “La Côte Basque” is probably the one piece that can be called a tour de force: he has transformed a table in a Manhattan restaurant into a stage on which he has placed his own jet-set Vanity Fair. One by one, he shines a spotlight on his glittering cast, which includes, besides his fictional characters, the very real Carol Matthau, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Lee Radziwill. There is no plot—the only unifying element is a tone of profound disenchantment—and he has pulled off one of the most difficult tricks in fiction, which is the fashioning of a seamless narrative out of disparate characters and unrelated deeds. “La Côte Basque” is not great art, but it is superb craftsmanship, storytelling at its most skillful.

But Truman had more than literature in mind when he wrote “La Côte Basque.” He also used it to get back at some of his rich friends who, for one reason or another, had offended him over the years. Wrapped inside it is a hit list. Ann Woodward is on that list, of course. Besides being fascinated by her rather compelling biography, he remembered a much-talked-about meeting in Saint Moritz in which she had called him a “fag,” and he, in return, had nicknamed her “Bang-Bang,” a label that stuck. Also on his roster are Princess Margaret (“I was about to doze off, she’s such a drone,” says Lady Coolbirth, who had the misfortune to be stuck with her at a party); J. D. Salinger, who was one of Oona Chaplin’s early beaux (“It seemed to me he must be a boy who cries very easily,” Carol Matthau thought after Oona read some of his letters to her); Gloria Vanderbilt, who is made to appear so vacuous and self-absorbed that she cannot even recognize her first husband when he stops by her table to say hello (“Oh, darling. Let’s not brood,” says Carol consolingly. “After all, you haven’t seen him in almost twenty years”); and Josh and Nedda Logan, whom Truman had not forgiven for trying to stop one of his New Yorker articles back in the fifties (How was the Logans’ party? Carol asks Gloria. “Marvelous,” replies Gloria. “If you’ve never been to a party before”). All those names might have been anticipated. But one is a startling surprise, and that is Truman’s old friend Bill Paley, who is his model for Sidney Dillon, the millionaire turned laundryman.

In an earlier version, Dillon had been based on W. Averell Harriman; the woman he had been in bed with was his mistress, not someone he had lured home for a night; and the bloodstain she had left behind had been a mere spot, not a splotch the size of Brazil. By the time it appeared in “La Côte Basque,” the episode had been radically altered. Dillon was no longer, like Harriman, a Wasp patrician; he was now a rich and attractive Jew who yearned to be a Wasp patrician. He wanted to go to bed with the former governor’s wife not because she was appealing—in fact she “looked as if she wore tweed brassieres and played a lot of golf”—but because she was a symbol of what he most desired. “It was simply that for Dill she was the living incorporation of everything denied him, forbidden to him as a Jew, no matter how beguiling and rich he might be,“ says Lady Coolbirth, “the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White’s— all those places he would never sit down to a table of backgammon, all those golf courses where he would never sink a putt. . .” Conversely, the reason she had agreed to go to bed with him was so that she could humiliate him with those bloody sheets; it was her way of putting him in his place. “She had mocked him,” concludes Lady Coolbirth, “punished him for his Jewish presumption.”

Few readers could have guessed that Dillon was supposed to represent Bill Paley. He did not look or act like Bill, and there were no obvious hints, as there usually are in romans à clef. But to some of those who knew Truman and the Paleys well, it was clear that Bill was his target. The first clue was his description of Dillon’s deceived wife, Cleo—“the most beautiful creature alive,” in Lady Coolbirth’s reverential words. Truman employed such extravagant language to describe only one mortal, Babe Paley; even Lee Radziwill was not accorded such an encomium. The second clue was his emphasis on Dillon’s hungering for Wasp gentility; Truman was convinced that Bill Paley shared that appetite as well. In any event, he thought that by means of such cryptic signals he was doing to Bill what the former governor’s wife had done to Dillon: putting him in his place. Through words, he liked to think that he was hitting perhaps the only vulnerable spot possessed by a man of such monarchical self-confidence: his sensitivity about being a Jew.

“Truman told me that the point of the bloody-sheets story was that Bill Paley was a Jew from the Midwest who was doing a number on a New York Wasp,” recalled his friend John O’Shea, who proofread “La Côte Basque” before it was sent off to Esquire. Offended by the anecdote—“That’s gossip! That’s bullshit!” he exclaimed—John tried to shame him into removing it. He pointed out that they had been the Paleys’ guests at Kiluna Farm a few weeks before, that over the years the Paleys had laden him with gifts, and, finally, that he might hurt Babe, who, as they had had sad occasion to observe, was gravely ill with lung cancer. Take the Dillon section out, John urged him; but Truman could not be persuaded. “It was a vicious story,” said John, “and I’ve never understood, and will never understand, why he put it in. There’s something there that defies analysis.”

Only someone who had observed that curious trio—Babe, Bill, and Truman—in earlier times could have fathomed Truman’s tangled reasoning. He liked and admired Bill; some even speculated that he had a crush on Bill as well as Babe. But he was also jealous of him, as he would have been jealous of anyone married to Babe. Yet at the same time, he resented Bill’s inexplicable failure to appreciate that glorious woman; he was infuriated by what he saw as Bill’s put-downs of her, his insufferable condescensions. Divine Babe! Revered by Truman and so many others, but mocked and belittled by her own husband! Contemplating the unfairness of it all was more than Truman could bear. She was the one person in the world he loved without qualm or reservation, and he alone realized how unhappy she was. Now that she was dying—for that was the case—he was avenging her in the only way he knew how: by holding up to ridicule the man who had caused her so much hurt.

Truman wanted Bill to be aware that he was being ridiculed; otherwise the Sidney Dillon anecdote would have had no purpose. But so confused and contradictory were his thoughts, he also tried to convince himself that neither Bill nor some of the others he had made fun of would recognize themselves. One day in July he took a friend for a swim in Gloria Vanderbilt’s pool in Southampton—Gloria and her husband Wyatt Cooper were away in Europe—and after the friend had read his manuscript, Truman identified, one by one, the models for his characters. “But, Truman, they’re not going to like this,” protested the friend. Floating on his back and looking up at a sky of cloudless serenity, Truman lazily responded, “Nah, they’re too dumb. They won’t know who they are.”

But they did know, and when “La Côte Basque” reached the stands in mid-October, their wrath shook the ground beneath his feet. The first tremors were felt on October 10, even before it appeared. Learning of her own leading role—someone had smuggled her an advance copy of the November Esquire—Ann Woodward swallowed a fatal dose of Seconal, the same drug that had killed Truman’s mother. Ann had been deeply depressed anyway, and “La Côte Basque” may only have been the catalyst that hastened the inevitable. What had bothered Ann most, a weary Elsie Woodward told a friend, was not Truman’s dredging up of the sordid past, but his suggestion that her marriage to poor Bill had been bigamous. Few regretted Ann’s death, in any event; the general feeling was that justice had been served at last. But many were angered by the embarrassment Truman had caused that beloved icon, ninety-two-year-old Elsie, who had spent twenty years trying to make everyone forget the scandal. Now, in a few paragraphs, he had destroyed her hard work.

When “La Côte Basque” was available to everyone a week later, the earthquake itself struck, sending shock waves from New York to California. Within hours phones were ringing all over the East Side of Manhattan. One of the first callers was Babe, who asked Slim to identify Sidney Dillon. “Who is that?” Babe inquired suspiciously. “You don’t think that it’s Bill, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” answered Slim, who knew very well who Dillon was meant to be—Truman had told her months before. But Babe found out anyway, and instead of accusing Bill of infidelity, she blamed Truman for putting such a distasteful tale into print. Although Truman had studied her with the rapt attention of a lover, he had failed to understand perhaps the most important component of Babe’s character: her loyalty to her family. Brought up to honor the stem Roman virtues of Old Boston, she had different values from many of her fashionable friends, including Slim. She believed that whether or not he had strayed, and no matter how much he had humiliated her, a wife’s duty was to stand beside her husband. She was now standing beside Bill. In attacking him, Truman had also attacked her family and the code by which she lived, and she could not forgive him.

Nor could Slim. “You’re in it. Big Mama,” he had warned her; but, expecting no more than a walk-on part, Slim was totally unprepared to encounter herself as the gabby Lady Coolbirth. “When you read it, there’s my voice, my armature, my everything!” she exploded. “She looks like me, she talks like me, she’s me! A mirror image of me! I was absolutely undone when I read it, staggered that he could be sitting across from me at a table and then go home and write down everything I had said. I had adored him, and I was so appalled by the use of friendship and my own bad judgment.”

Others were equally chagrined. “Never have you heard such gnashing of teeth, such cries for revenge, such shouts of betrayal and screams of outrage,” reported Liz Smith. One cry came from the Logans, who were enraged by his witty gibe about their parties. “That dirty little toad is never coming to my parties again,” declared Nedda. Another came from Gloria Vanderbilt, who vowed that if she ever saw him again, she would spit at him. “After all,” explained her husband Wyatt Cooper, “they’ve known each other a long time. It’s not that a secret has been betrayed, it’s that a kind of trust has been betrayed.”

“It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer,” Somerset Maugham had said, and in the end Truman had elected to be the latter. He had broken the rules of the club, and he had to be punished. Just as it once had been the fashion to take him up, now it became the fashion to put him down, “the chic of the week,” as Charlotte Curtis, the society columnist for The New York Times, phrased it. Those who were not hurt by “La Côte Basque” were often as angry as those who were. Marella Agnelli, who more than once had begged him to be her guest on one Mediterranean cruise or another, could not even bring herself to mention his first name. “Capote despises the people he talks about,” she complained. “Using, using all the time. He builds up his friends privately and knocks them down publicly.” Overnight, doors slammed in his face, and except for a few hardy loyalists like C. Z. Guest, who had not been made fun of, his society friends refused even to speak to him. Not since Franklin Roosevelt came to power had the rich felt themselves so misused by someone they had considered one of their own. Truman had been accepted, pampered, and allowed into the inner recesses of their private lives; in return, he had mocked them and broadcast their secrets. He was, in their opinion, a cad and a traitor.

“In society a great friendship does not amount to much” was Proust’s cynical observation. So it seemed to be, as even his erstwhile best friend, Cecil Beaton, who was eagerly following events from England, rushed to join the pack of Truman haters. Forgotten were the unblemished days he and Truman had enjoyed together in Tangier, Portofino, and Palamós; disregarded the many words of sticky adulation Cecil had scribbled about him in his diary; banished from mind the time Truman had rescued him from two hustlers in Honolulu. After having dedicated most of his life to protecting his place in the front ranks of fashion, Cecil did not want to be left behind now.

Actually, Cecil, whose chief defect was not snobbery, as many assumed, but a consuming envy, had secretly turned against Truman a decade earlier, after the success of In Cold Blood. “The triumph of Truman is salt in one’s wound,” he had bitterly noted in his diary at the end of 1965. The further triumph of the Black and White Ball had inflamed him still more. For ten years he had waited for the weather to change. To Cecil’s envious ears, the howls of indignation he now heard from the other side of the Atlantic were as soothing as a lullaby—Truman’s most venomous enemy could not have taken more delight in his downfall. “I hate the idea of Truman,” he happily confessed to one correspondent. “How low can he sink?” Even Cecil had pronounced his name anathema: there could have been no clearer confirmation that he had been expelled from Olympus.

Naïveté may be a necessary armor for writers who, like Truman, closely pattern their fiction on real people and real incidents. How, after all, could they ever write anything if they could foresee what their words would cost them? Only such protective ingenuousness could explain how Thomas Wolfe, for example, could have imagined that his family and friends would not have been wounded by Look Homeward, Angel. Only such deliberate blindness could account for Proust’s surprise when some of his titled friends were offended by their portraits in Remembrance of Things Past. And only such obstinate self-deception could explain the astonishment and dismay with which Truman now watched the reversal in his fortunes that followed “La Côte Basque.”

He had, of course, hoped to raise the blood pressure of people like the Logans and to cause momentary annoyance to a few more, like Bill Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt. What he had not anticipated was the disaster, complete and absolute, that had now befallen him. Forced to remain in California while he was acting in his first and only movie, Neil Simon’s Murder by Death, he kept in touch with events from afar. “He was the most surprised and shocked person you can imagine,” recalled Liz Smith, “and he would call to ask me—torment me—about what people in New York had said about him. After ‘La Côte Basque’ he was never happy again.” Joanne Carson watched helplessly as he rambled around her house in Bel Air in a near daze, repeating over and over, “But they know I’m a writer. I don’t understand it.”

He telephoned Slim to make up. When she refused to take his call, he persuaded John O’Shea to phone her. Although Lady Coolbirth may have borne a superficial resemblance to her, John was instructed to say, she was really supposed to represent Slim’s old enemy, Pamela Hayward, the new Mrs. W. Averell Harriman. “Truman’s very upset by your reaction,” John said. “He thought it would make you laugh.”

“I didn’t,” retorted Slim, who, quite the contrary, had consulted her lawyer about suing him.

“Don’t you think it’s well written?” John asked.

“No. It’s junk,” said the implacable Slim, who at that point detected breathing on the other end and hung up, realizing that Truman was listening in on an extension phone. Truman persisted nonetheless, and at the end of the year he sent her a cable in Australia, where she was vacationing. “Merry Christmas, Big Mama,” he said. “I’ve decided to forgive you. Love, Truman.”

Bracing himself for more harsh words, he also phoned Bill, who did take his call, blandly pretending that nothing had transpired since they had last talked. “I have other ways of torturing the little shit,” he later told a friend. Truman asked if he had read his Esquire story, and Bill said, “I started, Truman, but I fell asleep. Then a terrible thing happened: the magazine was thrown away.” When Truman, with pathetic eagerness, offered to send him another copy, Bill politely declined. “Don’t bother, Truman. I’m preoccupied right now. My wife is very ill.” My wife! Not Barbara, not Babe, but my wife! As if Truman had hardly known her, had not spent some of the most enchanted hours of his life with her, had not been entrusted with secrets she confided to no one else, including her husband. To be dismissed as a stranger: that was torture indeed.

To Babe herself, Truman wrote two long letters. She did not reply, but in early 1976 chance brought them together in Quo Vadis, a then fashionable restaurant on East Sixty-third Street—though ill, she was occasionally still able to go out. He introduced her to his luncheon companions, and, like Bill, she was polite but distant, as if he were someone she knew only slightly. Eventually Jack Dunphy also approached her, phoning her one Saturday afternoon at Kiluna Farm. Forgive him, Jack asked her. “Never! Never! Definitely not!” she declared.

“Babe, what Truman said in that piece is none of your business. Or his business either,” replied Jack, in that stern voice Truman himself had so often heard. “He is an artist, and you can’t control artists.”

“Oh, Jack. . .” she began and seemed about to say more, then after a second’s hesitation concluded, “Let me talk it over with Bill.” Jack knew then that he had lost the argument.

As consumed with anger as they might have been toward a lover who had deceived them, Babe and Slim were not prepared to make peace. Nothing Truman did, whether it was to write eloquent letters or to send amusing telegrams, could change their minds. All the devices that had worked so well for him in the past were now of no avail. “Babe always spoke of Truman with total loathing, as this snake who had betrayed her,” said their mutual friend John Richardson. “Have you heard what Truman’s done now?” she would ask her friends, professing to be horrified by each new comment she saw quoted and each new escapade she heard about. When her sister Minnie’s husband, Jim Fosburgh, who had once painted Truman’s portrait, broke ranks to lunch with him, Babe called to upbraid him that very afternoon. How could he, her own brother-in-law, have been so disloyal? she demanded. Yet carefully hidden beneath her fury lay a great disappointment: like Truman, she too had lost perhaps her best friend. The novelist Harper Lee—Truman’s friend since childhood—glimpsed that disappointment the few times they met in the ensuing months: seeing her, Babe was reminded of Truman and automatically burst into tears.

For her part, Slim could not stop herself from chewing endlessly on the wrong that had been done her. “If ever there was a woman who was beside herself, it was Slim,” said one friend. And it was literally true. When she discussed him, Slim became so agitated that she could not remain seated for more than a moment, moving restlessly from couch to chair, chair to couch. “After ‘La Côte Basque’ I looked on Truman as a friend who had died,” she said, “and we never spoke again. I took the cleaver and chopped him out of my life. And that was it.”

In public Truman regretted the loss of Babe, and Slim too, but claimed to be otherwise unaffected by the commotion he had created. Like Jack, he lectured rather loftily on his mission as an artist. “The artist is a dangerous person because he’s out of control,” he said. “He’s controlled only by his art.” Defiantly saying that he had done nothing that Proust had not done before him, he tried to wrap his work in the mantle of literature. “Oh, honey! It’s Proust! It’s beautiful!” he exclaimed to Diana Vreeland.

In a more practical vein, he noted what probably would have been evident all along if he had not, in Slim’s rueful words, been “so wily, so clever, and so bright” that even the most suspicious dropped their guard. “All a writer has for material is what he knows,” he said. “At least, that’s all I’ve got—what I know.” But sometimes in private, late at night and when he had been drinking, he would break into tears. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” he would cry. “I didn’t know the story would cause such a fuss.”