writer M.F.K. Fisher.
296 He is referring to a review of E. M. Forster’s The Hill of Devi, a memoir of his stint in India as private secretary to the maharajah of Dewas in 1921.
297 Carson McCullers’s estranged husband, Reeves, committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates in a Paris hotel on November 19, 1953. Capote was one of the few mourners who attended his funeral a few days later.
298 Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Sybil Thorndike starred in N. C. Hunter’s play A Day by the Sea.
299 Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh starred in Terence Rattigan’s play The Sleeping Prince.
300 The Confidential Clerk was a play by T. S. Eliot.
301 The Boy Friend, musical by Sandy Wilson set on the French Riviera in 1926.
302 Dorothy Wheelock was a mystery writer, the author of Murder at Montauk (1940) and a Greenwich Village murder mystery, Dead Giveaway (1944).
303 House of Flowers had opened at Broadway’s Alvin Theater on December 30, 1954. It was not a hit, however, and though it had some fanatical admirers, they were not numerous enough for a long run. The show closed May 22, 1955.
304 William Paley was the head of CBS, the television and radio network.
305 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing; Jennifer Jones’s co-star was William Holden.
306 Kirstein was the prime force behind the New York City Ballet.
307 Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden opened on Broadway on October 26, 1955, and closed on March 31, 1956. Selznick produced and Beaton designed the sets and costumes.
308 Eileen Hose was Beaton’s secretary.
309 This letter was published in The New York Times, February 13, 1955, under the heading “Protest Answered.”
310 The Times apparently cut Capote’s letter, inserting starred ellipses to indicate its deletions.
311 Set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, House of Flowers had a cast that was almost entirely black.
312 This letter was the answer to a curious postcard from Brinnin. According to his memoir, Sextet, Brinnin disapproved of Capote’s increasing involvement with the glamorous sets of Broadway, Hollywood, and London. He was in Portofino when he saw a photograph in Time magazine of Capote dancing with Marilyn Monroe. Furious, Brinnin wrote a postcard that, in his words, was designed to scathe: “Was this the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? ‘Joyce’s motto was, Silence, exile, and cunning. What’s yours?’ ” Brinnin then signed his card: “Reader of Time.”
313 Brinnin’s book was Dylan Thomas in America. In his capacity as director of the Poetry Center, Brinnin brought Thomas to the United States and arranged all his American readings. Thomas died in New York on November 9, 1953, after a bout of drinking, and Brinnin’s book was an account of his experiences with the poet. A Broadway play, Dylan, followed in 1964.
314 Hepburn and Ferrer were husband and wife.
315 Jean Anouilh’s The Lark opened on Broadway on November 17, 1955, and ran for 229 performances; Julie Harris won that year’s Tony for best actress.
316 The Vamp was a flop; it opened on November 10, 1955, and closed after sixty performances.
317 In October 1955, Ann Woodward, a former showgirl, claimed she mistook him for an intruder and shot and killed her husband, Bill, one of the bluest of New York’s blue bloods, in their house on Long Island’s Gold Coast. Although a grand jury exonerated her, most of Bill’s friends regarded her as a murderer. Capote recounted the case in fictional form in his short story “La Côte Basque,” which Esquire published in October 1975. After reading an advance copy, Ann Woodward swallowed a lethal dose of Seconal.
318 Levin was the producer of My Fair Lady, for which Beaton designed the costumes. The show was a musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
319 Robert Sherwood was a successful playwright—Abe Lincoln in Illinois was one of his successes—as well as a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
320 Porgy and Bess, the first American theatrical production to tour Russia, opened in Leningrad on December 26, 1955. Capote traveled with the cast and crew; his account, The Muses Are Heard, was serialized in two issues of The New Yorker, October 20 and 27, 1956, and published in book form by Random House on November 8, 1956.
321 Peter Watson was found dead in his bathtub on May 3, 1956. Watson was the love of Beaton’s life, Beaton confided to his diary, though apparently the two had never actually engaged in sex—Watson’s choice, not Beaton’s.
322 Dunphy’s play Light a Penny Candle was performed off-Broadway.
323 Rex Harrison played Henry Higgins, Moss Hart directed, and George Bernard Shaw wrote the play from which the musical was adapted.
324 Shangri-La, based on James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, lasted only twenty-one performances; New Faces of 1956 ran for 220.
325 The Square Root of Wonderful opened on Broadway on October 30, 1957; it closed after only forty-five performances.
326 E. M. Forster’s biography of his great-aunt was titled Marianne Thornton.
327 Born into Boston society, C. Z. Guest worked as a showgirl and posed nude for Diego Rivera before marrying Winston Guest, a leader of Long Island’s monied, horsey set.
328 Capote was traveling to Japan, in the company of Cecil Beaton, to write an article for The New Yorker on the making of the movie Sayonara, starring Marlon Brando. A problem with visas delayed his arrival, however, and he and Beaton spent two weeks in Hong Kong, Thailand and Cambodia. More problems arose in Japan, and when Capote finally arrived in Kyoto, the director, Joshua Logan, barred him from the set. To be polite, Brando, whom he had known in New York, invited him to a long dinner he later bitterly regretted. The result was “The Duke in His Domain,” a Brando profile that one columnist labeled “a vivisection” and another called “the kind of confession usually confined to an analyst’s couch.”
329 Marlon Brando was the star of Sayonara; Joshua Logan was its director and William Goetz its producer.
330 Oliver Smith, the set designer, owned the Brooklyn Heights town house in which Capote and Dunphy had an apartment.
331 Dunphy’s play was titled Saturday Night Kid.
332 Anna Christie is a play by Eugene O’Neill.
333 Moon for the Misbegotten is also by O’Neill.
334 Jean Genet’s play was The Balcony.
335 “The Duke in His Domain,” his profile of Marlon Brando.
336 With music and lyrics by Lerner and Loewe, the team that created My Fair Lady, Gigi was a movie musical based on a story by Colette. Vincente Minnelli directed; Maurice Chevalier, Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan starred; and Beaton was the costume and production designer. The film opened in 1958 and was a box office success.
337 Rudolph Bing was the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Beaton and Capote apparently hoped that Paley’s company, the broadcast network CBS, would underwrite a new production of Madame Butterfly for which Beaton would design the sets.
338 Time Remembered, by Jean Anouilh, opened on Broadway November 12, 1957.
339 Noël Coward’s Nude with Violin opened on Broadway November 14, 1957, and ran for only eighty performances, closing February 8, 1958.
340 An American, Jack Wilson had been Coward’s lover and business manager.
341 The piece was “The Duke in His Domain,” Capote’s long profile of Marlon Brando.
342 Logan had barred Capote from the set of Sayonara and had advised Brando not to talk to him.
343 The Face of the World.
344 Nancy Mitford’s new book was Voltaire in Love.
345 Wilson’s collection was titled A Bit Off the Map and Other Stories.
346 Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
347 Irene Selznick’s father was Louis B. Mayer, the longtime head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
348 Edie Goetz, who was married to William Goetz, the producer of Sayonara, the movie Capote had gone to Japan to write about.
349 Whitney Warren was a rich bachelor and one of the fixtures of San Francisco society.
350 Brodovitch was art director for Harper’s Bazaar. Diana Vreeland was its fashion editor; in fact, she remained at the magazine until 1962.
351 In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, directed by Peter Brook.
352 The London production of My Fair Lady opened on April 29, 1958. Many people did, in fact, believe that Beaton, who had designed the costumes, also designed the sets; that credit belonged to Oliver Smith.
353 Dunphy’s play was Light a Penny Candle; it soon closed.
354 The Old Man and the Sea, starring Spencer Tracy, was based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel. It was produced by Leland Hayward.
355 Beaton did both the sets and costumes for the movie Gigi, which, like My Fair Lady, had words and music by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.
356 Gloria Vanderbilt, an heiress, artist and fashion designer, was one of the three women—the others were Carol Marcus and Oona O’Neill—Capote palled around with as a teenager in New York.
357 Harper’s Bazaar had promised to publish Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the summer of 1958, a few months before it appeared in book form. Not long before publication, however, Capote’s old friend and Harper’s Bazaar editor, Carmel Snow, was booted out, and a new team decided Breakfast at Tiffany’s was too racy and reneged on Snow’s promise. The novella was published by Esquire instead, but Capote never forgave Harper’s Bazaar. “Publish with them again?” he said. “Why, I wouldn’t spit on their street.”
358 Arvin’s address was 45 Prospect Street, Northampton, Massachusetts.
359 Probably Humphrey Richardson’s erotic version of the Daniel Defoe classic.
360 Mr. Darcy, Mr. Bingley, and Elizabeth Bennet: characters from Pride and Prejudice. Topsy, Little Eva, Simon Legree, and Uncle Tom: characters from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
361 William Humphrey’s Home from the Hill.
362 Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things, a novel of life on an Indonesian island when it was ruled by the Dutch.
363 Frederick Buechner’s novel The Return of Ansel Gibbs and Shirley Anne Grau’s