had been to pick up the two killers in Las Vegas, where they had been caught, and return them in handcuffs to Garden City. Capote and Harper (Nelle) Lee attached this note to a bottle of J&B scotch.
6 “This person” was June Osborn, a widow, many years younger, from an aristocratic background. She turned down Beaton’s proposal of marriage, and it is not hard to see why. This is the wording of his proposal speech, as recorded in his diary: “For a long time I’ve been wondering if I dare ask you if you would marry me, as I think it would be such a good thing for me although there is every reason why you shouldn’t want to.” Refusing to accept “no,” he later tried again, even more ineptly. “Have you thought any more about our being spliced?” he asked her. “Oh don’t put it like that,” she replied, and the answer was still no.
7 The Super Chief was a luxurious train that the Santa Fe Railway ran between Chicago and Los Angeles.
8 The book was In Cold Blood.
9 Capote and Avedon had collaborated on the book Observations, published by Simon & Schuster in 1959.
10 Paul and “Dewey” (Alvin Dewey III) were the young sons of Alvin and Marie Dewey; Pete was the Dewey family’s cat.
11 Postmarked from Southampton on April 21, 1960.
12 Richard Avedon.
13 Nancy Clutter was one of the two murdered Clutter children.
14 Perry Smith had been convicted, along with Dick Hickock, of murdering the four Clutters.
15 The year given in In Cold Blood is 1948.
16 Garden City, Kansas, home of the Deweys.
17 Selznick wrote on April 12, 1960, reminding Capote that he expected to see galleys of In Cold Blood (not yet titled) in hopes of acquiring film rights to it.
18 Quintero was a theatrical director best known for his productions of the plays of Eugene O’Neill.
19 Hayward was going through a divorce from her husband, Leland Hayward.
20 The Selznicks’ daughter, Mary Jennifer.
21 His words were prophetic. TO Kill a Mockingbird won not only critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, but enormous commercial success as well.
22 William Styron and his future wife, Rose, were on their first date in late October 1952 when they first met Capote—with Lola perched on his shoulder—at the bar of the Hotel Excelsior in Rome. At the time Styron was the author of a single novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Capote and Styron held each other in high regard and always commented favorably on each other’s works.
23 Styron’s novel Set This House on Fire, about American expatriates in Italy in the 1950s, was published by Random House on May 4, 1960.
24 This letter was written at the bottom of a letter to Capote, dated June 14, 1960, from Selznick’s assistant, Shirley Harden.
25 The “two of them” were Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.
26 Donald Cullivan was a Boston engineer and former army acquaintance of Perry Smith. Cullivan befriended Smith when he was in jail and served as a character witness at his trial.
27 Josephine Meier was the wife of Finney County undersheriff Wendle Meier.
28 This scene appears in In Cold Blood, pp. 288–292 (Random House, 1966).
29 “Among the Paths to Eden.”
30 Klopfer and Cerf were the co-founders of Random House.
31 Ned Spofford was a colleague and intimate friend of Arvin’s at Smith.
32 George Docking, the governor of Kansas, was not reelected.
33 Oliver Messel, who had designed the sets for House of Flowers, was the uncle of Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who had become the earl of Snowdon after his marriage to Princess Margaret a few months earlier, in the spring of 1960. Vagn (not Vaughn) Riis-Hansen was Messel’s Danish companion. Professional rivals, Beaton and Messel were, by an odd coincidence, London neighbors. Beaton lived at 8 Pelham Place, Messel at No. 17.
34 Messel was designing the costumes for the movie Cleopatra, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He was, however, later replaced.
35 Jamie Hamilton was Hamish Hamilton, Capote’s British publisher.
36 That person was June Osborn.
37 The tragic news was the arrest of Newton Arvin. Acting on information from a raid on a publisher of pornography, on September 2, 1960, police broke into Arvin’s home in Northampton and discovered more than a thousand items, stories and photographs of a homosexual nature, outlawed in the Massachusetts of that era. He was arrested and charged with being “a lewd and lascivious person in speech and behavior.” Though he received a one-year suspended sentence rather than jail time, he was nonetheless removed from his teaching position at Smith College. He suffered a nervous breakdown and entered Northampton State Hospital, “Dippy Hall,” as Smith students called it. He avoided prison by ratting on two younger gay faculty colleagues, Joel Dorius and Ned Spofford, who were untenured; both were fired by Smith in 1961.
38 Green was the assistant prosecuting attorney in the trial of Hickock and Smith.
39 Khrushchev, the Soviet Union’s premier, was attending a United Nations conference in New York.
40 The baroness was Isak Dinesen, the Danish author of Out of Africa and a friend of Capote’s.
41 The Hero Continues.
42 Earlier that year, in March, Avedon had joined Capote on a trip to Kansas, where he photographed Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.
43 Aggie was Aswell’s companion.
44 Lillian Ross’s article in the August 20, 1960, issue of The New Yorker followed a group of Midwestern high school students on a bus tour of New York City.
45 The film of Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s was released in 1961.
46 Beverly and Eveanna, the two surviving Clutter daughters.
47 Mabel Helm, the Clutters’ housekeeper.
48 Kenyon Clutter was the second of the Clutter children who were murdered.
49 William Maxwell was fiction editor of The New Yorker.
50 Crowell was the American publisher of Windham’s novel The Hero Continues.
51 Zabel was a literary critic, an authority on Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
52 Brinnin taught at various colleges and universities, including Vassar and Harvard, and would have known what people in “Academia” were saying about the Arvin affair.
53 Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Mount Everest in 1953, led an expedition in 1960–61 that failed to find any evidence of the legendary Yeti, otherwise known as the “abominable snowman” of the Himalayas.
54 The American edition of Windham’s The Warm Country was published by Scribner.
55 The first anniversary of the Clutter murders.
56 Myrtle Clare, the widowed postmistress of Holcomb, Kansas.
57 John F. Kennedy had been elected president earlier in the month.
58 The film of Set This House on Fire was never produced.
59 The Turn of the Screw is Henry James’s dark novella about a governess who believes her two young charges are haunted by a former governess and valet. Directed by Jack Clayton, the movie version was titled The Innocents. Capote considered it his best film script.
60 Judge Roland H. Tate presided over the trial of Hickock and Smith. He died on November 9, 1963, nearly a year and a half before their execution.
61 The sheriff’s secretary was Edna Richardson.
62 Michael and Sonia Pitt-Rivers were Beaton’s neighbors at his country house in Broadchalke.
63 Gilliatt was a novelist, screenwriter and film critic.
64 La Dolce Vita was a movie directed by Federico Fellini. It starred Marcello Mastroianni, who played a journalist who descends into the debauchery of “the sweet life”—the English translation of the title.
65 Aswell lived on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
66 Aswell was helping Carmel Snow, the editor who turned Harper’s Bazaar into a model of excellent writing, design and photography, write her memoirs. The World of Carmel Snow was published in 1962.
67 Lowell Lee Andrews, a schizophrenic University of Kansas student who murdered his family and sat on death row at the same time as Hickock and Smith. Andrews was executed by hanging on November 30, 1962.
68 James Stern was an Irish writer and critic, as well as the translator of Kafka’s letters.
69 James Gardiner was a British collector of gay photographs and ephemera, and author of books and articles on gay male culture.
70 Robert Lewis directed The Grass Harp.
71 For TO Kill a Mockingbird.
72 The 1962 film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel.
73 Mina Curtiss was Lincoln Kirstein’s sister. She did not go into politics.
74 Opened in 1941, for many years Le Pavillon was the premier restaurant in New York.
75 Dolores Hope was a columnist for the Garden City Telegram. It was Hope, whose husband, Clifford R. Hope, Jr., was one of the town’s leading lawyers, who invited Capote and Harper Lee to Christmas dinner in 1959. That invitation broke the ice for Capote in Garden City, and people who had ignored him until then were suddenly vying for his presence, along with Lee’s, at their parties. Clifford Hope was the lawyer for the Clutter estate, and he later advised Capote on legal matters. He is thanked in the acknowledgments for In Cold Blood.
76 Dudley Moore’s musical comedy Beyond the Fringe opened May 10, 1961, at the Fortune Theatre in London.
77 Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
78 The Berlin Crisis was another episode in the Cold War. It culminated in the erection, on August 12, of the infamous Berlin Wall, which divided East and West Berlin until Germany was reunified in 1989.
79 Gerald Brenan.
80 Down There on a Visit (1962).
81 Christopher and Jonathan were the Cerfs’ sons.
82 Aswell had requested from Capote a contribution to the book she was writing with Carmel Snow; Capote’s recollections of Snow follow the letter.
83 Both Maxwell’s The Chateau and McCullers’s Clock Without Hands were published in 1961.
84 Dick Hickock first learned of the Clutters from Floyd Wells, a fellow inmate who was once employed by Herb Clutter as a ranch