in 1951.
130 “Petrified Man” was a story in Eudora Welty’s first book, A Curtain of Green (1941).
131 British novelist.
132 Lerman’s apartment was at 1453 Lexington Avenue.
133 Several characters in The Grass Harp find refuge in a tree house.
134 Seth Gordon Persons was governor of Alabama from 1951 to 1955. He worked to increase funding for roads and education, but he also supported bills to limit the rights of unions and to discourage blacks from voting.
135 How to Meet a Millionaire.
136 Fleet lived with Juliet Duff.
137 Beaton’s play The Gainsborough Girls.
138 In the Summer House.
139 A year younger than Capote, Hoetis was a Greek American who lived in Paris for several years after World War II and edited an avant-garde magazine called Zero, which published, among others, Samuel Beckett, Paul Bowles, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
140 Goyen’s volume of stories, Ghost and Flesh, was published by Random House in 1952.
141 E. B. White parodied Hemingway’s 1950 novel, Across the River and into the Trees, calling it Across the Street and into the Grill.
142 Tennessee Williams’s first novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950).
143 The Invisible Worm centers on the suicide of a rich American woman in Sicily.
144 Lieberman, like Cooper, was an art critic.
145 Marguerite Young’s massive novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was not published until 1965.
146 Ethel Merman was starring in the Broadway musical comedy Call Me Madam, which opened on October 12, 1950. Wolcott Gibbs’s Fire Island comedy Season in the Sun was on Broadway at the time.
147 Glenway Wescott, who had gained modest fame in the twenties and was a well-known figure in literary New York, was the author of such novels as The Pilgrim Hawk and The Grandmothers.
148 “A House in Sicily,” a description of Capote’s life in Taormina, was published by Harper’s Bazaar in January 1951.
149 At that point, Local Color had sold a little over three thousand copies.
150 In 1950 Beaton designed a suite on the thirty-seventh floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue. In return, he received a 50 percent discount when he stayed in the suite and a 25 percent discount at the hotel’s restaurant.
151 Eileen Herlie was the lead actress.
152 Garbo used “Miss Brown” as a pseudonym.
153 Beaton’s Photobiography was published in 1951.
154 Robert Horan, an American poet, was the lover of Gian Carlo Menotti.
155 Henry Allen Moe, chief administrator of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
156 Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning.
157 Mount Etna’s volcanic eruptions from November 1950 to December 1951 produced one of its most voluminous lava flows in three hundred years.
158 Guys and Dolls opened at the 46th Street Theatre in Manhattan on November 24, 1950, and was an immediate hit, with a run of 1,200 performances.
159 The matter was dropped when Capote’s mother called Cerf to tell him that “A Bushel and a Peck” was an old Southern rhyme and that she distinctly remembered singing it to him when he was a baby.
160 Pearl Kazin was a guest at the Fontana Vecchia for three months.
161 Ernest Hemingway’s newest novel, Across the River and into the Trees, had been savaged by the critics. Faulkner came to his defense in a letter to Time.
162 Harold J. Rome’s musical revue Bless You All had opened on Broadway on December 13, 1950.
163 Newton Arvin’s biography of Melville won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1951 but not the Pulitzer Prize.
164 Arvin and Lyndon had, in fact, had a fling while Capote was in Europe in 1948.
165 Kraft was a photographer and the companion of Aaron Copland.
166 Kazin’s story “The Raven” was published by Botteghe Oscure in 1952 (vol. 9), and people did indeed think that the chief protagonist, Kuney, was a portrait of Lerman. Lerman himself was deeply offended by passages that portrayed him as little more than an intellectual gadfly. “He knew without a doubt the precise moment when the James ‘revival’ went into decline,” Kazin wrote, “that Stendhal was old hat, Cocteau a bore, and Genet the newest, freshest genius of them all.… Kuney’s spongey availability to shifts of taste and favor, his facility at a one-hour mastery of sophisticated clichés on any subject, his terror that intellectual sobriety might stamp him dull, his brash inside knowledge about every pen and brush and piano in New York—these were the goods the editors bought from him.”
167 Brinnin followed Dylan Thomas’s trips to America and after Thomas’s death in 1953 wrote Dylan Thomas in America, which was published in 1955.
168 Ohio State University in Columbus.
169 “He” was Fritz Peters.
170 Horan, a young poet from California, became despondent when Thomas Schippers, a rising young composer, replaced him in Gian Carlo Menotti’s affections.
171 The young American was Thomas Schippers.
172 Goyen had been part of the Samuel Barber–Gian Carlo Menotti ménage in Mt. Kisco, a suburb north of New York City.
173 They had talked of renting a house together for the summer.
174 Jack Dunphy’s second novel, Friends and Vague Lovers, dedicated to Capote, was published by Farrar, Straus and Young in 1952.
175 Gerald Brenan’s The Face of Spain (1950).
176 The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams opened on Broadway on February 3, 1951, and was published the same year.
177 Peters’s novel was Finistère.
178 Fritz Peters.
179 Published in 1950, Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted was based on Schulberg’s experience of writing a screenplay with F. Scott Fitzgerald shortly before Fitzgerald’s death in 1940.
180 Manley Halliday was the character modeled after Fitzgerald.
181 James Jones’s From Here to Eternity was both a critical and a popular success.
182 Arvin had won the National Book Award for his Melville biography.
183 James Agee’s short novel The Morning Watch, which had appeared in Botteghe Oscure, was published in book form (120 pages) by Houghton Mifflin in April 1951.
184 James Jones.
185 The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was a novel by Tennessee Williams.
186 Linscott had sent him a proposed description of The Grass Harp for inclusion in the Random House catalog.
187 Katherine Cornell was often called the first lady of the American theater; her husband, Guthrie McClintic, directed most of her plays.
188 Emlyn Williams was a Welsh actor and playwright.
189 Enid Bagnold’s The Loved and Envied was published in 1951.
190 Beaton’s play The Gainsborough Girls opened in Brighton, a seaside resort, on July 16, 1951.
191 Donald Elder was an editor at Doubleday.
192 Mary Margaret McBride had a popular radio program in which she interviewed a wide range of people, from fan dancers to writers and politicians.
193 Moss and Kitty Hart.
194 Stephen Spender’s World Within World was published in 1951.
195 Henri-Louis de la Grange was to become the world’s foremost Mahler scholar.
196 Pass Christian, Mississippi.
197 The biography Capote wrote for the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms was mostly fictional, claiming, among other things, that he danced on a river boat, painted flowers on glass, and studied fortune-telling “with the celebrated Mrs. Acey Jones.”
198 Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar.
199 Polly was a copy editor.
200 The Gainsborough Girls was scheduled to open on July 16.
201 Messel was also one of Britain’s leading theatrical designers and one of Beaton’s rivals.
202 Emlyn Williams’s best-known play is The Corn Is Green.
203 A South African, Graham Payn was Coward’s companion. Mordaunt Shairp’s play of the thirties, The Green Bay Tree, had recently been revived on Broadway.
204 Saint Subber was, in fact, the producer of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, which was a huge hit, running for more than two and a half years on Broadway.
205 Princess Marguerite Caetani was the editor of Botteghe Oscure, a magazine published in Rome, in the authors’ original languages.
206 Ehrlich was a writer (God’s Angry Man, 1932) who had several stays at Yaddo.
207 The trinity was Linscott, Bennett Cerf and Robert Haas. “We all had a slight feeling of let-down,” Linscott wrote Capote, “of the story tapering off a little, with the ending coming too soon and lacking the profusion of delight that had so entranced one up to that point.”
208 Verena and Dolly, two old-maid sisters, were loosely based on two of the three female cousins, the Faulk sisters, who lived in Monroeville, Alabama, and who took care of Capote as a child.
209 Capote did not make the changes suggested by the Random House editors, and Bennett Cerf gave in with his usual grace. “If it is now in the form that you wish to keep it, it’s good enough for me,” he replied. The critics took Capote’s side, and The Grass Harp was widely praised.
210 Lotte Lenya had originated the role of Jenny in the first Berlin production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. When Hitler came to power, she fled with Weill to the United States, where he died in 1950.
211 At Saint Subber’s suggestion, Capote had agreed to adapt The Grass Harp for the stage.
212 A few months younger than Capote, Brook was considered the rising young British director in both theater and film.
213 Paul Osborn’s Point of No Return, based on the novel of the same name by John P. Marquand.
214 Beaton’s London address.
215 Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were America’s most famous acting couple.
216 Irene Selznick was David O. Selznick’s ex-wife and a leading Broadway producer.
217 Beaton’s Ballet, a short, eighty-six-page book of ballet photographs, was published in 1951.
218 John Van Druten had adapted Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories for the stage. The play was later translated into film, then into the musical Cabaret, which in turn became a movie.
219 Williams gave readings from the works of Dickens.
220 Despite Capote’s pleas, Peter Brook had declined to direct The Grass Harp.
221 Miss Baby Love Dallas was the only character that had not been in the original novel.
222 After a distinguished career on