A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Sandy Campbell had a part.
42 Ralph Pomeroy was a poet and art critic.
43 Pearl Kazin was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar.
44 B. V. Winebaum, author of Postcards & Snaps (limited edition, 1965).
45 Viereck won the Pulitzer Prize for Terror and Decorum: Poems 1940–1948 (1948).
46 To the North (1932), novel by Elizabeth Bowen.
47 An amusing and good-looking young American, Caskey was Isherwood’s lover.
48 Jordan Massee and Paul Bigelow were companions.
49 Shelter Island is at the eastern end of Long Island, between the larger island’s North and South Forks.
50 Fritz Peters’s gay-themed novel Finistère (1951), about an American student in France and his relationship with a teacher.
51 According to a medical examiner in Manhattan, Heggen, the author of Mister Roberts, which was a novel first, then a play and a movie, was a probable suicide. He was found dead in the bathtub of his apartment. Friends, however, believed his death was the result of an accident—that, as a result of too many sleeping pills, he had fallen asleep and drowned.
52 Although seven thousand people attended his one-man show in Manhattan in 1937, Paul Cadmus’s figurative and satirical style of art was out of fashion amid the abstract expressionism of the forties and fifties. He was a close friend of Jack Dunphy’s.
53 Nina Capote was his mother.
54 “Bubble-Brain” was probably Howard Rothschild, whom Capote disliked.
55 Joan McCracken was Jack Dunphy’s former wife. She was a memorable dancer and comedienne, rising to something near stardom in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma!, a musical in which Dunphy himself also had a part.
56 Peter Watson’s address in London.
57 Thomas Heggen wrote Mister Roberts; Klaus Mann, one of Thomas Mann’s sons, was also a writer; Owen Davis, Jr., was a movie actor.
58 They had been jailed for homosexual activity.
59 The magazine, Flair, had a brief life, beginning publication in February 1950 and ending a year later.
60 Angus Wilson’s The Wrong Set was his first book; it was a collection of short stories.
61 Published in 1939, My Royal Past was Beaton’s parody of royal memoirs.
62 A writer and composer, Bowles lived in Tangier with his wife, Jane, who was both a novelist and a playwright. The Bowleses had an unusual marriage—he was homosexual and she was a lesbian—but were nonetheless devoted to each other. Capote was particularly fond of Jane Bowles; he praised the surrealistic style of a novel like Two Serious Ladies and placed her close to the top of his list of favorite American women writers, just below Willa Cather and Edith Wharton.
63 Arvin’s book was his biography of Herman Melville.
64 Garbo did not make the movie.
65 Oscar-winning Greek actress.
66 The Canadian, Peter Sager, was actually a painter, not a sculptor.
67 The Wrong Set and Other Stories (1949) was Wilson’s first book. His story “Realpolitik” appeared in the debut issue of Flair, February 1950.
68 Newton Arvin’s Herman Melville (1950).
69 English on his father’s side, American on his mother’s, Denton Welch died in 1948 at the age of thirty-three. Brave and Cruel, and Other Stories was published posthumously in 1949.
70 Dunphy turned thirty-five.
71 Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, had died in Atlanta on August 16, 1949, after being struck by a speeding taxi five days earlier.
72 A friend of Newton Arvin, Edman was a much respected professor of philosophy at Columbia.
73 Edman replied that it would give him “real pleasure” to recommend him for a Guggenheim grant. Capote was turned down, however, by the Guggenheim committee itself.
74 AML, academic abbreviation for American Literature.
75 A Streetcar Named Desire.
76 The World Next Door (1949), novel by Fritz Peters.
77 Capote and George Davis had a rocky relationship from the beginning. It is unclear what dispute he is referring to here.
78 On December 8, 1949, Capote was to give a reading, arranged by John Malcolm Brinnin, at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
79 Ted Walworth.
80 Capote and Dunphy were staying at the Hôtel de l’Université, a small establishment on the Left Bank.
81 Speed Lamkin was a novelist and playwright.
82 Bowles’s first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949).
83 An artist, Foy had become Lerman’s companion.
84 Kelly was a dog, a Kerry blue, a breed known for its pugnacity.
85 “A Diamond Guitar” was published in Harper’s Bazaar, November 1950.
86 The Lady’s Not for Burning (1949), a popular comedy by Christopher Fry.
87 The composers Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber owned a house called Capricorn in Mount Kisco, 38 miles north of New York City. Goyen was Barber’s lover for a time, and Robert Horan, a talented young poet, was Menotti’s.
88 Capote was referring to his travel book, Local Color, which included contributions from several well-known photographers.
89 Found among his papers posthumously, a typescript of the then-unpublished “The Bargain” was donated to the archives of the New York Public Library. More recently, the story was included in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote (Random House) after making its publishing debut in The New York Times Book Review in September 2004.
90 Louann Cleghorn was Beaton’s secretary.
91 Beaton was designing the sets and costumes for Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, a play first performed in 1893.
92 Beaton had apparently been approached to do designs for Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam, which opened on Broadway October 12, 1950, with Ethel Merman in the starring role. In the end, he had nothing to do with it, however.
93 Beaton’s play The Gainsborough Girls opened in the seaside resort of Brighton on July 16, 1951. It was a failure, however, and ended its life in the British provinces without productions in London or New York.
94 It is unclear which Wilder play he is referring to.
95 Smith was a well-known American set designer.
96 An Englishman, David Herbert was a longtime resident of Tangier—indeed the Western colony’s social arbiter. Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, and Bottom, a weaver who is transformed into an ass, are characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
97 His letter brought an immediate reaction. After demanding credit under each photograph that had first appeared in its pages, Harper’s Bazaar agreed to a compromise that did not require Random House to spend the time and money to make up new photographic plates.
98 Capote is referring to a photograph of him taken by Harold Halma.
99 Holiday was an upscale travel magazine. “House of Flowers” was published in Botteghe Oscure in 1950 and in Mademoiselle, April 1951. Published in Rome, Botteghe Oscure was a biannual review that featured original poetry and fiction from England, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and the United States in the original language. Among those who contributed were André Malraux, Albert Camus, Paul Valéry, Ignazio Silone, Robert Graves, Archibald MacLeish, and e.e. cummings.
100 An Italian girl in her late teens who was Capote’s housekeeper and cook in Taormina.
101 Proprietor of an antiques and specialty shop in Taormina.
102 Firenze is the city of Florence.
103 Fulco di Verdura was the duke of Verdura—the “duke of vegetables,” he was called behind his back. A Sicilian aristocrat with a home in Taormina, he was also one of the twentieth century’s most creative jewelry designers.
104 The Panther was a hustler who sold his wares on the beaches near Taormina.
105 Edwin Denby, American poet who specialized in sonnets; also a noted dance critic.
106 Catherine Wood.
107 Bessie Breuer, American novelist and short-story writer.
108 By S. J. Perelman.
109 This book became The Grass Harp, which borrowed extensively from Capote’s childhood in Alabama.
110 Capote’s article, “A Ride Through Spain,” was published in The New Yorker September 2, 1950. It was the first time the magazine ever published his writing.
111 Kirstein was the father of the New York City Ballet, which performed at the City Center for Music and Drama on West 55th Street in Manhattan. Windham had worked for Kirstein’s magazine Dance Index in the 1940s.
112 American artist-photographers Jared and Margaret French.
113 The limited edition of Windham’s story “The Hitchhiker” (Florence: Tipografia Giuntina, 1950).
114 A wealthy English resident of Taormina.
115 He was probably referring to heightened Cold War tensions caused by the beginning, a few weeks earlier, of the Korean War.
116 Douglas Sladen, a British poet and travel writer, was the author of the novels A Japanese Marriage (1895) and A Sicilian Marriage (1906). The Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street was one of Manhattan’s best known bookstores.
117 “A Writer’s Quest for a Parnassus” by Tennessee Williams.
118 Al Hirschfeld, cartoonist known for his caricatures of Broadway and entertainment figures.
119 Proprietor of an antiques shop in Taormina, whom he called “Carlo” in an earlier letter.
120 Carlos Baker, who had written about Other Voices: “The story of Joel Knox did not need to be told, except to get it out of the author’s system.”
121 He is referring to the Hirschfeld drawing mentioned in the previous letter.
122 “You-goosed-me,” a play on the title of You Touched Me!, the 1945 romantic comedy by Tennessee Williams and Donald Windham.
123 Cyrilly Abels was the managing editor of Mademoiselle magazine. She had complained that her magazine had not received credit for one of the photographs in Local Color.
124 In “Portrait of Hemingway” Lillian Ross followed Hemingway and his wife, Mary, around New York for two days, meticulously recording the writer’s incessant drinking and sometimes foolish comments. (“I beat Mr. Turgenev,” he says at one point. “Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant.”)
125 This letter to Bennett Cerf and the one that follows to his wife, Phyllis, were written separately, but included in the same envelope.
126 Herbert Wise was Bennett Cerf’s uncle.
127 Provincetown, Massachusetts.
128 The news was that Lyndon and Harold Halma had broken up.
129 Phoebe Pierce helped Lilly write her book How to Meet a Millionaire, which was published