As a Depression-era schoolboy in Monroeville, Alabama–where his mother had parked him with relatives while prospecting for love and money in bigger towns—Truman Capote inscribed in a diary the motto he retained for the rest of his life: “I Aspire.” Many decades later, Capote brooded on the meaning of the phrase. “I don’t know why I chose those particular words,” he said. “Odd they are, and I like the ambiguity—do I aspire to heaven or hell?”
By 1996, Capote must have felt that he had finally passed through the gates of paradise. His artistic and social careers had already hit some precociously lofty heights—from the moment he published his first short stories, at age 20 (followed by his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, at 23), the media-lit Establishment had anointed him its fair-haired darling. But his 42nd year marked as clearly as an exclamation point the summit of his fame and achievement. His annus mirabilis began with the highly anticipated arrival in January of In Cold Blood, chronicling the massacre of a Kansas family, the Clutters, by two drifters named Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. The polished fruit of more than half a decade of research and writing, the book was immediately received in a universal embrace. The entire Fourth Estate—magazines, newspapers, television, and radio—became, wrote Gerald Clarke in his definitive Capote: A Biography (1988), “a giant band that played only one tune: Truman Capote.” Capote’s puckish face peered out victoriously from the covers of Newsweek, Saturday Review, Book Week, and The New York Times Book Review. Life published its longest article ever devoted to a writer, and hyped the feature on an electronic billboard in Times Square that throbbed through the night with the words IN COLD BLOOD. With the paperback rights, movie rights, foreign rights, and other sales, the book racked up $2 million for the author. Intimately acquainted with the purses of such Croesus-like friends as the Agnellis and the Paleys, Capote, exasperated with reports of his wealth, pointed out that he was, in fact, not rich. “When you average it out over six years,” he reasoned, “and consider the taxes, any small-time Wall Street operator gets at least that much.”
On the social scene, Capote’s temperature, already sizzling past the boiling point, now blazed with the white heat of a supernova. New York’s literary-minded hostesses, thrilled that their saucy pet (a lapdog nicknamed, alternately, Tru Heart and Tru Love) had pulled off not just the greatest critical success in recent memory but also a major commercial coup, vied more strenuously than ever for his presence at their tables. As much of a draw as Capote at the book-launch celebrations was Alvin Dewey, of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation—the local detective who had been instrumental in cracking the Clutter case—in town to help the best-selling author savor his triumph. Dewey made an appearance at the home of Elsie Woodward, the formidable society matron on whom Dominick Dunne modeled his senior Mrs. Grenville. Earlier, Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post, had given a dance for Capote, the Deweys, and Mrs. Roland Tate, widow of the judge who had presided over the Clutter murder trial, at her Georgetown house. “Dewey was a salt-of-the-earth, American midwestern hero,” recalls Metropolitan Museum lawyer Ashton Hawkins, who met the investigator at the house of Graham’s daughter, Lally Weymouth. “He took it all in his stride.”
In March the book’s publicity blitz whisked the author to London to promote the British edition, and in April spirited him back to Kansas, where he was followed by TV cameramen from NBC News. Returning to Manhattan, where he had just acquired a sleek $62,000 apartment at the U.N. Plaza, he was honored with yet another round of parties, occasioned this time by a heavily attended reading at Town Hall. Not about to relinquish the limelight, he next planned the re-release of the short A Christmas Memory in time for the holidays. But this was just a stopgap measure to keep the motor running while he dreamed up a more grandiose scheme.
In June he evolved a plan guaranteed to refuel the In Cold Blood engine. He was in no shape to start another major book—his nearly six years working on the story had, he said, “scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones.” Instead he decided to give a party that would become the biggest social cause célèbre since Ward McAllister, in 1892, compiled his list of the 400 souls worthy of fitting into Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue ballroom. Sitting poolside in Bridgehampton, at the house of his mother’s friend Eleanor Friede, Capote worked—with a concentration usually reserved for writing—entering (like one of God’s angels) the names of the chosen into a 10-cent black-and-white composition book. When he had filled its ruled right-hand pages, he turned it upside down and continued the roster on the opposite sides. Periodically, he would review the list, deleting names as he inserted new ones into the ledger. “The party,” Gerald Clarke notes, “was the product of a literary mind”—in this case, a manipulative instrument whose considerable might was applied to assembling a cast of characters and moving them about like so many chess pieces. In his diminutive hands he controlled, or so it seemed, the destinies of an international group of players who could rouse presidents to action, steer the course of a country’s economy, determine the silhouettes of millions of women, compose the soundtrack of a generation.
Capote toted his register with him everywhere, canvassing friends for suggestions. A garrulous creature disinclined to make a secret of either his professional activities or his private life, he twittered constantly about his work in progress. The graphic artist Gray Foy remembers Capote revealing his plan soon after its inception to Leo Lerman, the late Condé Nast editor. Lerman anxiously inquired, “When is it going to be?” Capote reassured him, “Don’t worry, you’ll be invited!” Others were taunted with the refrain “Well, maybe you’ll be invited and maybe you won’t.” During the summer of 1966, Mary “Piedy” Gimbel Lumet—a former United Artists employee who was helping Capote with a TV project about prisoners on death row, produced by Leland Hayward—accompanied him, her country neighbor, on a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway. “He kept telling me he was going to invite everybody. I was very disappointed when I finally realized that the Bridgehampton postman wasn’t going to be there.”
As the list took shape, Capote set the date (November 28, the Monday after Thanksgiving), the time (10 o’clock), the place (the Plaza Hotel’s Grand Ballroom), and the theme. Inspired by My Fair Lady’s breathtaking Ascot scene, costumed by Cecil Beaton entirely in black and white, he would restrict his guests’ attire to this most severe of palettes. This decision, he felt, would bring at least visual unity to a convocation of people as different, says former Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor D. D. Ryan, “as chalk and cheese.” Capote explained, “I want the party to be united the way you make a painting.” Furthermore, all guests would be required to wear masks, and the ladies to carry fans. (Capote allowed only this last rule to be bent.) “I haven’t been to a masked ball since I was a child,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to give one.” The masks, according to his scenario, would free guests to dance and mingle as they pleased. At midnight the disguises would be removed. “It was complete autocratic hosting,” recalls D. D. Ryan.
Capote’s despotism extended to asking a number of friends to host pre-ball dinners. Kay Meehan, a Capote loyalist and wife of the late Wall Street magnate Joseph Meehan, says, “Back in the summer he announced that I would be giving a dinner, and he told me exactly who I was to invite.”
Shrewdly, Capote also came to realize that the party spotlight had to shine on someone other than himself. He then conjured up a name guananteed to arouse the most curiosity and reap the most publicity: Katharine Graham. Following her husband Philip’s suicide in 1963, Graham, whom Truman had met around 1961 through Babe Paley, had taken up the reins of the media empire—including The Washington Post and Newsweek—forged by her father, Eugene Meyer. Without fanfare and in spite of her shyness and uncertainty, she had overnight become, arguably, the most powerful woman in America. By introducing her to international society, Truman would consolidate her power, and by association, of course, his own. The inventor of such memorable characters as Holly Golightly also liked playing Pygmalion to real-life women (he had, for example, briefly turned Lee Radziwill into an actress). “Truman absorbed people who interested him,” says Piedy Gimbel Lumet. “He took over their whole lives, re-creating them.”
Katharine Graham, known as Kay, says, “Truman called me up in the summer and said he wanted to give a party for me, to, quote, cheer me up. I told him I didn’t need cheering up. At first I didn’t think he was serious. He had the idea of the party first—I think he had always wanted to give a party at the Plaza. Then afterwards he was looking for a reason, and I guess I was it. . . . I suppose he chose me because I didn’t conflict with all the glamorous women he knew.” Capote’s celestial flock of swans—Babe Paley, Marella Agnelli, Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, Lee Radziwill, C. Z. Guest—presumably would not have appreciated his showing favoritism by designating just one of them belle of the ball.
Capote spent August traveling with two of these rarefied creatures—Lee Radziwill, who accompanied him to Portugal, and Marella Agnelli, who invited him to cruise down the Dalmatian coast with her and her husband, Gianni, on their yacht. All the while, he edited his roster of names, just as the summer before he had proofread galleys for In Cold Blood on the Agnellis’ boat. In early October, he at last mailed out the invitations, 480 cards bordered in red and yellow, which read:
“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 / DRESS Gentlemen: Black tie; Black mask. Ladies: Black or White dress; White mask; fan. R.S.V.P. Miss Elizabeth Davis, 465 Park Avenue, New York.” (Elizabeth Davis worked for Irving Lazar, Capote’s agent.)
If Capote had yelled Fire! on opening night at the opera, the pandemonium among the Beautiful People that autumn could not have been more frenzied. Precipitating all the hysteria, says Peter Duchin, whose orchestra Capote hired for the party, was the simple truth that “if you weren’t invited, you’d think you were nowhere.” The writer gave Duchin strict instructions, none related to music. “I could not tell anyone that I was playing, and I could not tell the press who was coming. Truman said, ‘I’ll take care of that.’” Enid Nemy, then a fledgling New York Times society reporter fresh out of Canada, says, “I was stunned at the idea that any social event could be so important. What shocked me most was that suddenly all these people started insisting they had to be in London, or wherever, on the day of Truman’s party. And then there was absolutely no question—to make good on their lie, they really had to go!”
One of Capote’s extra men says, “Jerry Zipkin was a major factor among those who pretended to be called away to Monte Carlo, or was it Paris? It was so dumb!” (Capote and Zipkin remained bitter enemies for years after, going as far as to have a public slapping match in the parking lot of the Bistro, a Beverly Hills restaurant. Capote retaliated with his best weapon, words, and said that Zipkin had “a face shaped like a bidet.”) Man-about-town John Galliher remembers that some people actually tried to bribe Capote with “great sums of money.” All this shameless striving, Galliher says, “thrilled Truman. And, of course, it added to the anticipation and delight of those of us who had been asked.”
A certain well-known man, Capote gleefully reported to Esquire, “announced to his staff . . . that there would be a meeting at his office at five p.m. on the 28th, and there were rumors all week long. Was the company going to dissolve? The boss retire? Well, at five o’clock everyone was tense tense tense, and . . . he announced that he wanted everyone to know that he had been invited to the party . . . but had refused!” New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers says, “The ultimate thing was when a man told Truman his wife had threatened to kill herself if she weren’t invited.” This time Capote—whose mother had committed suicide in 1954—caved in to the demand. The beleaguered writer sighed that he might as well rename the event “the ‘In Bad Blood’ party.”
Capote’s exclusions in certain cases seemed ruthless and capricious. Ina Claire, an old friend, pleaded from San Francisco via telegram, to no avail. Tallulah Bankhead fared better, but only by sheer persistence. The invitation, in its way, was a great leveler; the intelligentsia and show-biz folk, Capote’s family and jet-setters, all received the same maddeningly arbitrary treatment. Truman invited the president’s daughter Lynda Bird Johnson but excluded her steady beau, actor George Hamilton. It is not difficult to understand why he barred fellow southern author Carson McCullers. Once his protector, she had turned on him the instant he became famous. Ailing (she was less than a year away from death), McCullers issued the absurd announcement from her sickbed that she would upstage her rival by throwing a party of her own. Capote also banned any reviewer who had dared to give him an unfavorable notice. His old friend Kenneth Tynan, who had thrashed In Cold Blood in the London Observer, was now persona non grata. But Capote welcomed F. W. Dupee, who had lauded the work in The New York Review of Books. He slighted Tiffany chairman Walter Hoving, giving as his reason the fact that the publicity he had generated for the store with Breakfast at Tiffany’s was inadequately acknowledged. “When I moved into my new apartment,” he said, “they finally sent me a silver breakfast service. Should have been gold!”
“There was a slight note of insanity about the party,” Katharine Graham concedes. “There is just no rational reason why the whole situation escalated.” No rational reason, perhaps, but certainly some irrational ones. Former Condé Nast editorial director Alexander Liberman suggests, “When you think of all the people in New York, there were a tremendous number of exclusions. It titillated a lot of people.” As the aristocratic Parisian host Étienne de Beaumont purportedly remarked, “A party is never given for someone. It is given against someone.”
Despite Capote’s efforts to contain the number of his elect, as the day of the ball approached, the roll call swelled from 480 to 540. With a fiction writer’s crafty sense of timing, Capote held back the final invitations until the last minute—presumably to build suspense. After all, while Mrs. Astor’s ballroom may have held only 400, the Plaza’s Grand Ballroom, at 4,000 square feet, has, according to the hotel, a 550-person capacity.
Who exactly made Capote’s final cut? Though his remark that it was “just a party for the people I like” had the hollow ring of false modesty, he in fact “knew everyone in the world,” says Graham, who at that point did not. What gave the Black and White brew its intoxicating piquancy was the fact that he had flung together, in a gilt-edged melting pot, the most alluring power brokers in the worlds of high society, politics, the arts, and Hollywood—disconnected universes that collided, if not for the first time that evening, then at least with unprecedented force. “I have always observed,” Capote told Esquire, “in almost every situation, and I have been in almost every situation, that people tend to cling to their own types. The very rich people, for instance, tend to like the company of very rich people. The international social set likes international socialites. Writers writers, artists artists. I have thought for years that it would be interesting to bring these disparate people together and see what happens.”
But by no means did Capote forget about the more obscure company he kept. Eleven of the gentry of Garden City, Kansas—a country doctor, a banker, a broadcaster, as well as the Deweys, Judge Tate’s widow, and a farmer named Odd Williams—strengthened the texture of the bouillabaisse. He also welcomed Katharine Graham’s secretary Elizabeth Hylton; family members of his lover of 18 years, writer and ex-dancer Jack Dunphy; one of his former schoolteachers; and a doorman from the U.N. Plaza. Says photographer Gordon Parks—who claims he was, along with Ralph and Fanny Ellison, “the Black of the Black and White Ball”—Truman was “very democratic. He used to say everybody goes to the bathroom for the same thing.”
During the fall of 1966, it also seemed as if everyone were going to the dressmaker for the same thing. An old gown simply would not do for the lady, whether she was Diana Vreeland or Diana Trilling. Milliners on two continents rejoiced as mask-seeking women streamed into their salons; their profession, dangerously near extinction, suddenly rallied. Diana Trilling says, “I had a relation who worked at Bergdorf Goodman. She told me the millinery department was going mad, that it was absolutely being raided for masks.” The store’s hot young hatmaker, a handsome Indianan named Halston, wearily reported from the front, “The ladies have killed me.” Among the perpetrators of this crime of fashion was Babe Paley, for whom Halston contrived a white zibeline mask embellished with a false ruby. Its goggle-like peepholes showcased her eyes, which she considered her best feature. For 19-year-old Candice Bergen, he devised a fluffy, long-eared, $250 white mink bunny mask. And for D. D. Ryan, Halston surpassed himself with a white kid, nose-tip-to-hairline Kabuki mask. “I painted the eyes on myself,” Ryan says. “My mask was austere, modern. Everyone else’s was encrusted with rhinestones and plumes. If they were giving out a prize, it would have gone to me.” (Halston also designed one of his earliest dresses for the party, a plumed black organza gown and stole, worn by his great fan fashion journalist Carol Bjorkman.)
Adolfo, who created about 125 made-to-order masks at his East 56th Street salon and sold about 100 more through Saks Fifth Avenue, says, “A lot of birds donated their feathers to the cause. For three weeks it was a real deluge, one lady after the other. I had to turn some away! Making a mask, you know, is not so easy. The configuration of everyone’s eyes is different, so I needed to make a buckram and do fittings for each one. My whole staff was up all night! I made them not just for the ladies—Merle Oberon, Adele Astaire, C. Z. Guest, Kay Meehan—but for some of the gentlemen too.” At Saks, the millinery buyer, Elena Schouvaloff, complained, “Most women don’t know what they want when they come in. But they do know their enormous false eyelashes have to show.”
Many women ordered two masks, often from different designers, leaving their final decision to the last minute. Some designers sent out masks unsolicited to women they knew had been invited, just in case. Women’s Wear Daily published in its advance fashion reports an illustration of Isabel Eberstadt in an Adolfo mask, but she in fact arrived at the party in a tour de force confected by milliner turned photographer Bill Cunningham—two interlocked swams, one black, the other white. And several of the uninvited went as far as to commission masks just to keep up appearances.
Even jewelers leapt into the fray. Kenneth Jay Lane, for example, converted a chrysoprase-and-”diamond” necklace dripping with pearls into a mask for Benedetta Barzini, daughter of the Italian writer Luigi Barzini. Seventeen years old and a Vogue mannequin, she was one of the “ravishing little things” Truman added to his compound for some youthful leavening, so necessary in those youthquake days. Over in Paris, French *Vogue’*s editor in chief, Françoise de Langlade, called upon the services of a theatrical-costume designer, who created for her a white marabou cat disguise. (Her date—and future husband—Oscar de la Renta, wore a matching black cat face.) Gloria Guinness, who had commissioned a white gown and mask from Castillo, sought de Langlade’s opinion about whether to drape her famously long neck with an extraordinary diamond necklace or an equally ravishing ruby choker. The editor replied with the only possible answer: “She advised Gloria to wear both,” recalls Oscar de la Renta. The combined weight of the jewels so strained Guinness’s vermicelli-thin neck, Charlotte Curtis reported in The New York Times, that she predicted she would have to remain in bed the next day to recuperate.
Other guests relied upon their own ingenuity and made masks themselves: Henry Fonda glued every last spangle on his wife Shirlee’s, and Adolph Green’s mask was produced by his son and the boy’s nanny. George Plimpton bought a cheap white dime-store mask so “full of glue I got high from sniffing it all night.” Octogenarian Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, economized with a 35-cent white mask which she trimmed into a narrow band and attached to her temples with adhesive tape. Capote’s own black domino, from F. A. O. Schwarz, set him back 39 cents.
The writer had no intention of squandering money on decorations, either. He solicited help from Evie Backer, wife of former New York Post editor George Backer. Admired for her taste in interior design, Evie had helped Kitty Carlisle Hart with her East 64th Street apartment, the Swifty Lazars with their pied-à-terre at the Ritz, and Capote with his U.N. Plaza garçonnière. (To accommodate her petite frame, in her own apartment the pictures were hung low and the furnishings were small-scale—features that must have endeared the place to the 64-inch writer, who nicknamed Evie “Tiny Malice.”) Taking their cues not only from the host’s predilections but also from the wine-red velvet curtains festooning the Plaza ballroom’s stage and “royal boxes,” the pair agreed to inject color into the black-and-white scheme in the form of scarlet tablecloths for the 53 round tables they would set up. (Babe Paley talked Capote out of draping the walls with more red fabric.) Golden candelabras wreathed in smilax (a twining green plant) and holding white tapers would provide the only centerpieces. “The people are the flowers,” Backer suggested poetically.
As Black and White Day drew near, Capote, still besieged by invitation seekers, cut off his phone and abruptly withdrew to the country. “Only Babe had his phone number and knew where he was,” Kay Meehan remembers. “Truman told me that I should call Babe if there were any emergencies. A friend of mine, someone Babe and Truman knew, called me from London, hoping to be invited. I telephoned Babe, who asked Truman–and he said yes.”
Very early on the morning of the 28th, the East 54th Street doors of the city’s most fashionable hairdresser, Kenneth, slid open, admitting a swarm of women, many carrying hairpieces. The salon traffic did not abate until after dusk, when the master coiffed his last heads. Among those ladies who ascended to the third floor, where Kenneth himself presided, were Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill (who had lunched at the Colony that day with Capote), Lauren Bacall, Mrs. Alvin Dewey (sent by Capote), Rose Kennedy, Marietta Tree, Isabel Eberstadt, D. D. Ryan, and Pamela Harriman (then Mrs. Leland Hayward.) “We had a lot of wives, ex-wives, and mistresses that we had to hide in different places,” Kenneth recalls. “This was before the days of wash-and-wear hair. Some of these hairdos required up to seven hairpieces at a time. We had some for sale, as well as a few masks.” Piedy Gimbel Lumet remembers one client goading Kenneth into copying a picture of an 18th-century hairdo. “I’ve never seen Kenneth so upset. No matter what he did, he couldn’t pile the hair high enough to please her.” Among the stylist’s last patrons that evening was Denise Bouché, widow of the portraitist and fashion illustrator René Bouché, for whom he created the party’s most extraordinary coiffure. He parted her hair in the center, dying one side black and powdering the other half white. “It followed the line that I normally wore, very like a Fragonard hairdo,” Bouché says. While Kenneth worked on her, Bouché was mortified to discover Kay Graham settling into the seat beside her. “I buried my head in my lap! I wanted it to be a surprise.” At 4:30, Carol Bjorkman reported in Women’s Wear Daily, the guest of honor was still in the salon waiting patiently, her head bristling with rollers. States Graham, “I was the last one in and the last one out.”
Toward eight o’clock, about 300 of Capote’s guests headed for 18 pre-ball dinner parties. As festively bedecked revelers stepped out into the rainy night (weather was one element of the evening Capote could not control), the whole city, it seemed, was tingling with Black and White fever. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen and his wife, Maria, went to Dru and Jack Heinz’s triplex for dinner (the hostess wore Galitzine’s white palazzo pajamas), where they were joined by Alan Jay Lerner and his fifth wife, Karen, Jules and Doris Stein, Carol Bjorkman, and a cluster of photographers and reporters, who, tipped off about dinner-party locations, stood watchfully in the lobby. Piedy Gimbel Lumet hosted another, literary group composed of Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and Capote’s editor, Joe Fox. C. Z. and Winston Guest attended Kay Meehan’s dinner for about 30. “Winston left early,” Meehan says, “to pick up the Maharani and Maharaja of Jaipur at the airport.” C. Z. Guest says, “Mr. Guest had asked Truman if they could come. Ayesha was then at the height of her beauty”—one of the several reasons no one complained when the Maharani broke the dress code by wearing a gold sari. At Carter and Amanda Burden’s apartment in the Dakota, Candice Bergen, who had recently completed her first movie, The Group, dazzled the guests with her vernal beauty.
The winking eye of the gathering storm, however, was situated in the apartment of Amanda Burden’s mother, Babe Paley, who had been assigned the supreme role of entertaining—along with Lauren Bacall, Prince Stanislas and Princess Lee Radziwill, Philip Johnson, and the Deweys—the host himself and his guest of honor. Reporters had been staking out the Paleys’ building since early in the evening, quizzing Mrs. Paley’s hairdresser about her coiffure (“simple”) and makeup (“She’ll do her own”), and her doorman about deliveries of food and flowers. Slipping out after cocktails, Capote and Graham withdrew to the Plaza suite he had booked for the night. With only moments to spare before taking their places in the receiving line, they fortified themselves with what Capote called a repast of “bird and bottle.”
Meanwhile, gawkers, restrained by police sawhorses, thronged outside the hotel’s front entrance, on Grand Army Plaza. Unanticipated numbers of journalists, paparazzi, and TV cameramen waited in the lobby. “The Black and White Ball commanded more media attention than the Beatles did when they stayed at the Plaza in February 1964 to tape The Ed Sullivan Show,” says Curt Gathje, the hotel’s historian and V.I.P. manager. According to Peter Duchin, who had refused gossip columnist Earl Wilson’s entreaty to be smuggled in disguised as a trombonist, the party “closed an era of elegant exclusiveness and ushered in another of media madness—the one in which we still live.”
Just after Kay Graham and Capote assumed their posts in the Grand Ballroom, some of the first guests—the Kansas 11, conveniently bunked at the Plaza—arrived. Outside the hotel, the crowd applauded bedizened revelers as they issued from the endless caravan of limos. One of the mask-makers who had contribued to the evening’s fancy dress planted himself among the mob. Eyeing the work of a competitor, he shrieked, “Oh, dear, what a catastrophe. . . . I’ve never seen so many pimples. They should have made the masks bigger to cover their entire faces.” In the midst of the commotion, Prince Bertil of Sweden and two of his aides turned up to check into the Plaza. Their interest piqued, they mingled briefly with the horde in the chilly, damp night to watch the shimmering spectacle pass.
The hotel’s main doorway and two side entrances were monitored by a dozen policemen, who permitted the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur and Winston and C. Z. Guest to sneak in via 58th Street. Inside, the hotel’s stairways and doors were cordoned off and guarded at strategic points. Lynda Bird Johnson’s Secret Service men checked each partygoer who rode the elevators up to the Grand Ballroom. As if that were not enough security, Harry Winston had sent in some henchmen to keep an eye on the walnut-size diamond Princess Luciana Pignatelli had borrowed to suspend from her headdress.
Those who attended the pre-ball dinners had already received white cards engraved in red, reading: “Mr. Capote’s Dance. Please present at door.” Two security officers dressed in black-tie took these cards, which had been printed at the last minute to avoid forgeries. Those who went directly to the hotel checked in at a desk where secretaries matched names with a master list.
As guests filed in to the receiving line, an announcer read their names. Aileen Mehle stationed herself just behind the host and guest of honor, where—glittering in her striped Nilo de Paul mini—she gathered information for her “Suzy Knickerbocker” column. Kenneth Jay Lane recalls, “None of us really knew Kay at that point. In the receiving line we said ‘How do you do?’ to her instead of ‘Daaaling, how are you?’—kiss KISS.” Graham herself says, “Though I obviously appreciated it and loved the role, I was terribly nervous. I felt like an ancient debutante! . . . Once I forgot all the excitement outside and the party really started, it became great fun.”
The party’s jubilant atmosphere was punctuated by the sound of barmen popping open 450 bottles of Taittinger champagne—flowing, according to C. Z. Guest, “like the Mississippi, or the Nile.” Not into Frank Sinatra’s glass, however; the crooner—who, rounding up his friends, had requisitioned two tables in front of the stage—had a thirst only for Wild Turkey, says Plaza waiter Joe Evangelista, who was assigned to “take care” of his idol for the night. Liquor alone didn’t account for the party’s high spirits, however. Peter Duchin’s upbeat music, including show tunes by several composers and lyricists present—Alan Jay Lerner, Comden and Green, Harold Arlen—swept people out of their seats and onto the dance floor. Duchin’s band traded off with another, funkier group, the all-black Soul Brothers of Detroit. “My biggest memory is of John Kenneth Galbraith being a hepcat,” says Gray Foy. “Here was this large gentleman with all these intellectual credentials bouncing around, dancing by himself.” Galbraith was not the only egghead to get into the groove. Columbia University’s eminent literary scholar Lionel Trilling thrilled to the discovery that it was possible to “dance without having to lead a partner,” his widow, Diana, recounts. Vividly etched in Lee Radziwill’s memory is a pas de deux performed by Lauren Bacall and choreographer Jerome Robbins. “Near the end of the evening Jerome Robbins and Lauren Bacall began to waltz,” she says. “They were superb. The floor cleared, and everyone stood back enraptured. . . . It was a beautiful, fleeting moment”—one that was nearly nipped even shorter by a blunder on the part of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “I tried to cut in on my old friend Lauren Bacall,” he says. The actress admonished him, “Don’t you see whom I’m dancing with?”
Bacall also danced with Capote; only Lee Radziwill, incandescent in a silver paillette dress by Mila Schön, and Katharine Graham, sheathed in a monkish white wool jersey Balmain trimmed in jet beads, shared this rare privilege. Ironically, says Radziwill, “dancing was not Truman’s forte.” Like a sorcerer satisfied with the knowledge that he has successfully cast his spell, Capote was content to stand back and watch the magic take hold. And, most guests agree, the real charm of the evening lay in people-watching. Aileen Mehle says, “Everybody, no matter how rich or sophisticated, was rubbernecking.” Gray Foy elaborates: “It was almost more like a pageant than a party, very self-conscious and, in spite of the music, stately—a congress of peacocks.” From the galaxy of beauties, Diana Trilling singles out Amanda Burden, who had rented one of Cecil Beaton’s original Ascot costumes from My Fair Lady for the evening. But, for most observers, the girl who really stole the show was 16-year-old Penelope Tree. Draped in a black sleeveless, floor-length tunic slit up to her ribs and clinging to those few surfaces it covered, she was the wood nymph in the enchanted forest. Her stemlike legs were enveloped in sheer black tights topped by hip-hugger bikini briefs—an outfit purchased at the ultra-mod boutique Paraphernalia. Her hair hung loose and straight, and her bangs nearly covered her eyes, which were revealed (once she removed her black batwoman mask) to be painted like Pierrot’s. “It was a total revelation among that very dressed-up crowd,” says Isabel Eberstadt. “It absolutely gave one a frisson—one had the impression of Cinderella in her rags and tatters looking so beautiful and waiflike you couldn’t believe it. It was really Penelope’s coming-out. It launched her career.” The ever watchful eyes of photographer Richard Avedon and Diana Vreeland, then American Vogue’s editor in chief, alighted with equal alacrity on this remarkable sight. Not long after, to the consternation of Ronald and Marietta Tree, Vreeland ran a huge Avedon portfolio of their daughter in Vogue—officially inaugurating the flower-child look of the late 60s. Isabel Eberstadt remarks, “The ball was a carryover from the 50s—the last time when people felt no guilt about expenditures, and were not bothered by any serious social questions. . . . Penelope Tree was the forerunner of what was to come.”
The Vietnam War, about to become the gravest political crisis, weighed heavily on the mind of at least one guest. Pundit and literary critic Norman Podhoretz remembers sitting at a table with policymaker McGeorge Bundy and writer Lillian Hellman when Norman Mailer came over to Bundy and fired off some salvos about the war. “Lillian tried to calm him down,” Podhoretz says, “but Mailer got belligerent. He invited Bundy outside for a fistfight.” Not deigning to respond to the challenge, Bundy, according to Podhoretz, “looked down at Norman with lofty disdain. And Mailer retorted, ‘I paid you too much respect.’ Everybody was very embarrassed.”
By the time waiters had spread out a midnight buffet of chicken hash with sherry, spaghetti Bolognese, pastries, and coffee in the ballroom’s foyer, a few guests had grown restless from so many hours of heady confinement. Jill Fox (wife of Capote’s editor) and George Plimpton, spotting John Kenneth Galbraith walking around with a candelabra “as if he were in some kind of a stately procession,” Fox says, grabbed the economist’s top hat off a table and began to play football with it. Further improvising, Fox and Plimpton incorporated not just the hat but Galbraith and his candelabra into the rules of their spontaneous game. “It somehow also involved George pushing me around in a chair,” Fox says. “I was wearing a white silk sleeveless dress that made me look as if I had a smashing bosom, and a white boa of ostrich feathers that kept blowing up my nose. But I was running around that room as if I were in blue jeans. The party had a rather formal, strange feeling, which had a lot to do with the masks. When it came time to toss the top hat around, it was a welcome relief.”
Duchin’s orchestra played on until 3:30 in the morning, and even then the Kansas contingent had not yet ingested its fill of fun. Dr. Russell Maxfield recalled that they were “the last to leave. When we went back to our rooms in the Plaza, Truman joined us. He was so excited. He wanted to talk to us all night.
The furor stirred up by the press before the Black and White Ball was but a summer downpour compared with the media maelstrom unleashed the next day. “Truman once told me, ‘I’m a better publicist than a writer,’” says Kay Meehan. “He said that to make a best-seller you or your publisher had to spend a lot of money, saturating the media all at once. Well, the Black and White Ball saturated the media.” Late the evening before, CBS had aired live coverage of the party. Stories were dispatched on wire services to places most of Capote’s 540 would never see: Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Fort Worth, Texas; Deer Park, New York. Aileen Mehle’s paper, the New York World Journal Tribune, ran front-page coverage; so did the New York Post. Women’s Wear Daily rated the guests with a system of stars. The trade paper bestowed on style queens Gloria Guinness and Marella Agnelli the top accolade of four and a half stars, Diana Vreeland earned a miserly single star, and Norman Mailer was consigned to fashion hell with a score of minus five.
But what most captivated ball followers was *The New York Times’*s implied endorsement of Capote’s own method of scorekeeping. To supplement articles by Charlotte Curtis and Enid Nemy, the newspaper printed the master list of invited guests—an optimistic list well in excess of 540. Some of those named had not in fact gone to the party—Edward Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mayor John Lindsay, and Nelson Rockefeller had sent regrets because they either were out of town or had conflicting engagements. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had declined, deeming it, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “inappropriate to frug-with-Kay at Truman’s blast” while the Vietnam War fermented. (Pete Hamill, seething with moral outrage, wrote a column in the New York Post in which he interspersed snippets of imagined fatuous ball chitchat with reports of war horrors.) Writer Katherine Anne Porter—who had once called Capote “the pimple on the face of American literature” and whom Capote would later pillory in Answered Prayers as the sex-starved octogenarian Alice Lee Langman—had badly wanted to go, but was ill and bedridden.
But Times readers who quibbled about the discrepancy between those listed and those in attendance missed the whole malicious point: the fakers who had fled to the Bahamas or claimed they had “frugged-with-Kay” were exposed, routed, and humiliated. Capote insisted that Charlotte Curtis had snatched the list off the party’s registration desk, but Enid Nemy avers, “Truman provided the list. He was really cooperative.”
Norman Podhoretz recalls, “The only other time guest lists were ever published was for state dinners at the White House. But then, the only other time I remember being at a party where every single person was delighted to be there was at a White House state dinner.” As many of the 540 soon learned, “having your name on the list became a mark of tremendous status for a few months,” Podhoretz continues. “It provoked enormous hostility, admiration, and curiosity. Aferwards I went to Yaddo [the writers’ retreat in upstate New York], and all anyone wanted to talk to me about was the party.”
Katharine Graham calls the party “astounding—a very big event in my life, very important to me. I had just gone to work in ‘63, and was not well known. Though I had never met most of those people before, many have stayed in my life since.” As for Capote, he was nearly buried alive by the windfall of flowers and champagne that blew into his apartment over the next several days.
In a stroke worthy of Napoleon, that other bantam, Capote had not only conquered the worlds of his choice but also crowned himself, in a self-generated and self-glorifying ceremony, emperor. Women’s Wear Daily declared him “omnipotent,” and through the agency of decorator Billy Baldwin (whose unicorn mask, designed by Tiffany display artist Gene Moore, had eclipsed all the other men’s efforts), the Museum of the City of New York established an archive of memorabilia—invitations, costumes, masks—from what the press now labeled “the Party of the Century.” George Washington’s inaugural ball was one of the few other parties to be so consecrated.
“It was the Last Great American Party,” D. D. Ryan declares elegiacally. “The Last Gasp! I hate the sound of that—it’s so final.” The Black and White Ball, in fact, did sound the death knell of an elite culture founded on privacy, exclusivity, and breeding, and heralded the emergence of another, more raucous one, devoted to publicity, celebrity, and big money. It was the last hurrah of the glamorous go-go phase of the 60s, the optimistic era of Camelot, space launches, “the Great Society,” horizonless prosperity, and a certain sophisticated, irretrievable naïveté. Capote’s artistic and social potency peaked at the same moment as America’s supremacy as a world power. In 1966—before Vietnam escalated disastrously, before R.F.K.’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassinations, before disillusionment took hold—Capote and the country both felt invincible. All the rules of society were about to flip around, reverse, and go topsy-turvy: positive was about to become negative, and black become white.
If, for a time, Capote seemed to be the axis on which the planet spun, he was from the start a somewhat off-kilter pivot. Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, he wobbled out of control, weakening with each unsteady rotation his once irresistible gravitational pull. Some of his more perceptive friends had already sniffed out trouble in paradise. Cecil Beaton in 1966 confided to his journal a somewhat wishful insight: “I secretly feel T. is in a bad state and may not last long. He has become a real neurotic case.” Kay Meehan, who, unlike Beaton, never abandoned Capote, recalls experiencing a certain poignant sensation occasioned by the Black and White Ball. “When I thought of all the power he commanded at the ball, I couldn’t help but remember his terrible, lonely childhood and how he’d been abandoned by his parents. The party represented for him some kind of longing. Some sensitivity in me made me at that point question his stability.”
The causes of Capote’s decline during the 70s and early 80s are many and complex. He never quite recovered from the shock, in 1965, of witnessing Perry Smith and Dick Hickock’s double execution by hanging. (This harrowing experience, exacerbated by the gnawing thought that he might somehow have saved them, turned him into a crusader against capital punishment.) Another major problem, Robert Silvers points out, was that he was “a man divided in his missions. A serious author, he was taken seriously, but he was also a great social figure. . . . Ultimately it was a question of what to sacrifice.” Unlike his “secret friend” Proust (Capote sought to emulate the Frenchman in his projected magnum opus, Answered Prayers, a nonfiction novel biting many of the café-society hands that had fed him), who spent the first period of his adult life immersed in the haut monde before retiring to the cork-lined isolation of his bedchamber to write, Capote ambitiously tried to do it all at once. Yet his last years don’t necessarily unfold like a cautionary tale against mixing artistic and worldly aims. Capote managed to publish five books after In Cold Blood—all of them, however, short works or story collections. Misguidedly, though, he had pinned his writerly ambitions on the ill-starred Answered Prayers. Before the scandalous excerpts were published in Esquire—a devastating event that made him a pariah among the very people who had fawned over him 10 years earlier at the Black and White Ball—he admitted, “I basically don’t really want to finish it. . . . It’s like suddenly taking some beautiful animal, say, or . . . some lovely child . . . in the yard and [shooting] it in the head.”
Capote never understood why his “swans” Babe, Slim, et al. felt so betrayed by his writer’s exercise of airing their dirty laundry—the “laundress,” after all, was an artist—and his lack of comprehension only aggravated his suffering. It was as if, in a self-destructive case of repetition compulsion, Capote felt constrained to recapitulate his recurrent childhood trauma of being seduced and then rejected by a larger-than-life, adorably glamorous mother figure.
Capote’s central psychic drama of attraction and abandonment followed precipitously by rage and despair was also replayed ad nauseam in a series of damaging, disturbed relationships with inappropriate men (usually straight, in one case an air-conditioning repairman), at first prompted by the dissolution of the writer’s long-standing relationship with Jack Dunphy. These sexual obsessions were so consuming that they pre-empted writing and most other activities, except boozing and pill popping.
And, of course, the example of his alcoholic mother—who, like Capote, had ended up dying from complications related to an overdose—made him acutely susceptible to the siren song of substance abuse. The cosseted, blond-banged prodigy with the signature castrato drawl had by his late 50s degenerated into a figure of fun, an embarrassing bad joke. And his worst humiliations, like his greatest triumphs, took place in public. At a party for Liza Minnelli in 1983 (the year before his death), New York gossip columnist Liz Smith, noticing how assiduously other guests were ignoring him, organized half-hour shifts of people who—strictly out of charity—agreed to speak to America’s most celebrated living novelist.
One late-life friend, tourism consultant Joe Petrocik, who lived near Capote in the country, remembers how he would often—over long, liquor-soaked dinners—reminisce about the Black and White Ball. “He was proud of it till the day he died, never regretted giving it. He was so pleased with the way it had opened a new kind of career for Kay Graham.” The ball, in fact, loomed so large in his imagination that when he spoke of its cost—actually, a rather modest $16,000—the sum grew and grew, as in a fisherman’s tale of his catch, first to $75,000, then to $155,000. “He liked the fact that he had paid for it with his own money, that he didn’t have some corporation sponsor it,” Petrocik says. A favorite pastime of Capote’s was poring over his Black and White Ball scrapbooks. “There were albums and albums and albums,” Petrocik says. “Large black ones with black pages. There were clippings and photos—300 to 400 pictures—glued in or mounted with corners. Truman, you know, was a big gamester. One game he’d play was to look at a woman’s picture in the album and name how many husbands she’d had since the ball, and then name how many wives her spouse at the time had had since the ball. And he’d figure out the various marriages that took place among ball guests who didn’t even know each other at the time.” Toward the end of his life Capote spoke about giving another ball. “I have right here in his own writing an invitation he drafted,” Petrocik says. “‘Don Señor Truman Capote requests your company for a masked ball—in Asunción, Paraguay.’ He liked the idea of people having to travel a very long way for his party. I’m sure as hell Truman would have repeated the ball if he could. It was his social chef d’oeuvre.”
Once, over afternoon drinks in the Plaza’s Oak Room, Capote told Andy Warhol that he considered anything into which he poured great effort—a novel, a traffic ticket, or a ball—an artistic act. Refining this point on another occasion, he explained, “For some people, religion is the consolation for being human. For me, it’s art.”
Amy Fine Collins, a Vanity Fair special correspondent, helps supervise the annual International Best-Dressed List. Her book The God of Driving tracks her adventures behind the wheel.
