364 Observations (1959).
365 Capote was not telling the truth, perhaps because he thought Arvin would disapprove of publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in Esquire. He had of course given his approval to the magazine.
366 Playback (1958) by Raymond Chandler. Capote believed Chandler’s talents had not been properly recognized by the literary establishment.
367 William Aalto, whom Capote had met on Ischia in 1949, had died of leukemia.
368 Jack Dunphy named the cat “Diotima,” after the Greek priestess who taught Socrates the philosophy of love.
369 Nick was a Greek whom Beaton apparently had promised a job in England.
370 Beaton was planning to publish his diaries. The first volume—Cecil Beaton’s Diaries: 1922–1939—was published in 1961.
371 Wolcott Gibbs, the humorist and drama critic, had died on August 16, 1958. The tribute was by his fellow New Yorker writer E. B. White.
372 Tynan did indeed become The New Yorkers theater critic.
373 Capote had planned to write a children’s book for a series Phyllis Cerf was editing.
374 On December 14, 1958, Capote gave readings from several of his works at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. Brinnin, who had arranged the reading, introduced him to an audience of about a thousand.
375 The daughter of Capote’s friend Marietta Tree, Fitzgerald went on to write such acclaimed books as Fire in the Lake and Cities on a Hill.
376 Brinnin was director of the YMHA’s Poetry Center, otherwise known as the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, from 1949 to 1956.
377 William Goyen’s review of Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories appeared in The New York Times Book Review on November 2, 1958. He disparaged Capote as “perhaps the last of the old-fashioned Valentine makers” and accused him of dwelling in a “doily story-world” entirely of his own making.
378 A brief, unsigned review in The New Yorker (November 15, 1958) dismissed Breakfast at Tiffany’s as empty nostalgia.
379 The Paris Review’s Writers at Work series, vol. I.
380 Silverman did. He became a biographer and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for The Life and Times of Cotton Mather.
381 The musical Gypsy had opened on Broadway May 21, 1959.
382 Beaton was still trying to make a success of his play The Gainsborough Girls, which had been renamed Landscape with Figures. As before, the play toured British provincial cities; but, as before, it was not successful enough to find a home in either London or New York.
383 New York society was riveted by the breakup of the marriage of Leland and Slim Hayward, brought about by Leland’s love affair with Pamela Churchill, the onetime daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill.
384 The letter was intended for Cerf and his wife, Phyllis.
385 Act One, a memoir of Hart’s early life in the theater.
386 Wesley Hartley, a high school English teacher, wrote many authors, posing the question: “How important to you was your high school education, and is college experience necessary for creative writing?”
387 Beaton’s play opened in Newcastle on September 7.
388 The three Cushing sisters were the daughters of Harvey Cushing, a Boston doctor who had transformed brain surgery from an art into a science. They had all married rich, glamorous men—all more than once. Betsey, the oldest, was now married to John Hay Whitney; Minnie, the middle sister, had married Vincent Astor before finding love with James Fosburgh, a socially connected artist; and Babe, the youngest, was now married to William Paley, the head of the CBS television and radio network.
389 Hornblow was the wife of Arthur Hornblow, Jr., a film producer.
390 Hose was Beaton’s secretary.
391 Capote and Avedon were collaborating on Observations; Capote wrote the text and Avedon took the photographs.
392 Avedon had been in Sicily.
393 Simon & Schuster published Observations.
394 Winchell, Kilgallen, Sullivan, Lyons and Watts were all widely read columnists.
395 Garroway was the host of The Today Show, a popular morning program; Paar was the host of The Tonight Show.
396 Evie Avedon was Avedon’s wife.
397 E. M. Forster contributed an introduction to Windham’s book of stories, The Warm Country (1960).
398 The writers Capote suggests are Robert Penn Warren, Glenway Wescott, Baroness Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), E. M. Forster and Carson McCullers.
399 A superb comic actress and the current wife of Rex Harrison, Kendall had died of leukemia on September 6, 1959.
1959–1966
Four Murders and a Ball in Black and White
ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY, November 16, 1959, Capote read a one-column story buried on page thirty-nine of The New York Times. WEALTHY FARMER, 3 OF FAMILY SLAIN, read the headline. “A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home,” the story went on to say. “They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged.” Going on nothing but that short newspaper story, Capote convinced The New Yorker to send him to Kansas. His intention was to write an article about the effects of the murders on the small community of Holcomb and neighboring Garden City, in which the Clutters—the murdered family—had lived.
Taking with him Harper Lee, his friend from earliest childhood, he set out for a part of the world that was, for him, as alien as the Soviet Union had been. Nor did the good folk of Garden City take to a creature—short, oddly dressed and with a little boy’s voice—who was alien to them. A kind invitation to Christmas dinner gave an opening to the Capote charm, however, and the town was soon his. Five days later, on December 30, the killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were arrested; two and a half months after that, in March 1960, they were tried, convicted and sentenced to death. With their capture and conviction, Capote realized that he had more than an article; he had a book—and possibly a great book at that. He titled it In Cold Blood.
Finishing his basic research in Kansas, he returned to Europe, where he and Dunphy rented houses on the Spanish coast for a couple of summers. For the winters they bought a small condominium in the Swiss village of Verbier. In Europe Capote slowly and painfully wrote his book. “I suppose it sounds pretentious,” he told Donald Windham, “but I feel a great obligation to write it, even though the material leaves me increasingly limp and numb and, well, horrified—I have such awful dreams every night.” Eventually he completed everything but his concluding chapter, which could not be written until the condemned men had exhausted the last of their many appeals. Month after anxious month he waited for the final verdict of the final court. That came at last, and on April 14, 1965, with Capote watching, Hickock and Smith were hanged.
The New Yorker published In Cold Blood in four installments in the fall of 1965. Random House followed with the hardcover in January 1966, and the reception was what every writer dreams of—almost universal praise, stupendous sales and a fame usually reserved for movie stars. In Cold Blood was the publishing event of the decade, and Capote was the man of every hour.
After so much work, Capote wanted to play, and the book of the decade was followed, in the autumn of 1966, with the party of the decade. On the night of November 28, a rainy Monday, the rich and famous, as well as many lesser mortals whom he liked, walked into Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel for a masked black-and-white ball. As The Washington Post wrote, the Capote name, “coupled with a guest list that reads like Who’s Who of the World, has escalated his party to a social ‘happening’ of history-making proportions.” The little boy from Alabama had come, he had seen and he had conquered.
With the exception of Robert Linscott, who had retired from Random House, Capote’s correspondents during this period remain much the same, with two significant additions—Alvin Dewey, the detective in charge of the Clutter case, and his wife, Marie. Many of his letters to the Deweys include requests for information—his debt to them is obvious—but it soon becomes clear that the friendship is more than convenient. Indeed, he all but adopts them—and they him. “Precious Ones” is how he addresses them in one letter; “Dearest Honey Funny Bunnies” in another. Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post and the guest of honor of his black-and-white ball, also makes an appearance as “Precious KayKay.” So, briefly, does Perry Smith, who had asked him for the words of a poem he remembered. Capote found it—it was written by Robert W. Service, a once-popular Canadian poet—and he may have noticed that the words applied equally well to both of them:
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin;
And they roam the world at will …
TO CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
[New York]
23 November 1959
Dear Chris—
You would be pleased (I think) by all the enthusiastic comment I’ve heard about the excerpt from your novel published in The London magazine.1 That issue evaporated from the counters so swiftly that I had a helluva time locating it. Well, really it is very good; as good as people say it is—I long to read the book.
I understand you did leave Random House; I guess you did the right thing—it’s a pretty shabby crew around there.
The last time I heard from Don [Bachardy], and that was too long ago, he said you were going to teach in a college, where?2 What is it like?
Cecil was here until a week ago—working (sets and costumes) on a musical called “Saratoga.” I saw it in Philadelphia.3 Dreadful. Except for Cecil’s contribution. The Selznicks are here—he has been
