hand. Wells told Hickock that Clutter kept a large amount of cash in a safe at home, and described the layout of the Clutter house. Wells testified for the prosecution in the trial of Hickock and Smith.
85 Cuchara is a resort in southern Colorado.
86 Capote’s bulldog.
87 In what became known as “the band shell murder,” Wilmer Lee Stebens killed Walter Mooney, an itinerant farm laborer, in the bandstand at Stevens Park in Garden City, on June 24, 1949. Stebens buried the body, then two days later dug it up and reburied it fourteen miles away. The state proved that robbery was the motive, although Stebens claimed that Mooney had made a homosexual advance toward him. In In Cold Blood (pp. 151–152, Random House, 1966), Capote has Stebens (spelled Stebbins in the book) bury and rebury his victim repeatedly.
88 Adrian was a drifter bound for New Mexico who broke into the Clutters’ house and was an early suspect in their murders. A shotgun and a hunting knife were found in his car. He was sentenced to ninety days in county jail on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon, but was released to relatives just four days later on January 9, 1960.
89 As he had done with Newton Arvin, Capote would occasionally spell his name backward for fun.
90 McCracken, Dunphy’s ex-wife, died on November 1, 1961, of heart disease.
91 Hansen had helped Beaton in several writing projects, including the diaries he was currently publishing.
92 Capote is referring to Colin Wilson’s Encyclopedia of Murder, which was published in 1961. But its publisher was Arthur Barker, not Weidenfeld, which may explain why Weidenfeld did not send him a copy.
93 Cooper was a rich English art critic and art collector who lived in the south of France. He had picked up a young Algerian for sex, then refused the Algerian’s demand that he hand over his watch and all of his money. Pulling out a knife, the Algerian proceeded to make three slashes in his large stomach, one vertical and two horizontal—the pattern of the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine. Though the wounds nearly killed Cooper, he recovered and lived on until 1984.
94 Arthur Jeffress was a rich Englishman who had spent much of his life in Venice. When the duchess of Windsor asked him for a ride home after a grand Venetian ball, Jeffress was embarrassed to discover that his two gondoliers were off carousing and thus unavailable. He fired the gondoliers, who, in retaliation, denounced him to the police as a homosexual. The Venetian authorities, who were trying to rid the city of homosexuals, thereupon forced Jeffress to leave the city he loved. Brokenhearted, he went to Paris and committed suicide, leaving much of his fortune to a home for sailors, for whom he had always had a special affection.
95 Kano is a historic kingdom in northern Nigeria. Capote never went there.
96 A ten-page account of the Clutter murders entitled “America’s Worst Crime in Twenty Years,” bylined “Richard Eugene Hickock as told to Mack Nations,” appeared in Male magazine, December 1961.
97 Russell Shultz was the lawyer appointed to investigate Dick Hickock’s allegations of an unfair trial; Shultz later resigned from the case.
98 Presumably Marie Dewey’s mother’s cat.
99 Lansing, home of the Kansas State Penitentiary for Men, where Smith and Hickock were imprisoned and eventually hanged, is in Leavenworth County.
100 Robert Ruark was the author of such books as Something of Value and Uhuru.
101 Jack Clayton.
102 Amanda Mortimer was Babe Paley’s daughter by her first marriage.
103 Lee Radziwill was Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger sister. She lived with her second husband, Stanislas Radziwill, and their two young children, in London. As a naturalized British subject, Radziwill had no legitimate claim to his Polish title, and neither, of course, did his wife.
104 Mark Schorer was a biographer and literary critic. His book on Sinclair Lewis—Sinclair Lewis: An American Life—was published in 1961.
105 Charade, released in 1963.
106 Capote’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
107 Beaton’s mother, Etty, had died a few days earlier.
108 Beaton went on a safari to Kenya with two unlikely companions, Raymond Mortimer, an aesthete like himself, and Lady Lettice Ashley-Cooper, who was deaf.
109 Arvin’s Longfellow: His Life and Work was published in 1963.
110 Doughty’s biography of Francis Parkman, the great nineteenth-century historian, was published in 1962. It had taken him more than twenty years to write.
111 Clock Without Hands (1961).
112 Lyndon read to Mrs. Crane nearly every afternoon.
113 Alvin Dewey had told Capote about a bizarre series of murders in Nebraska that Capote eventually wrote about in the novella “Handcarved Coffins,” published in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in 1979 and collected in Capote’s book Music for Chameleons (1980). This “nonfiction account” was actually heavily fictionalized and set in the 1970s.
114 A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy had aired on February 14, 1962. The television broadcast reached nearly eighty million Americans and won an Emmy award.
115 Random House was planning a Modern Library edition of some of Capote’s writing, and he had asked Mark Schorer, a noted critic, to write an introduction.
116 Jason Epstein was a Random House editor.
117 He was referring to what should be included in his book of selected writings.
118 “Old Sincerely” was one of his several nicknames for Alvin Dewey.
119 John Anderson, Jr., was elected to a second term as governor of Kansas in 1962.
120 Written on the verso of an invitation to a state dinner at the White House on May 11, 1962, honoring author André Malraux, France’s Minister of Culture.
121 Schorer wrote, “The next change [in Capote’s career] will become evident when he publishes the book at which he is now at work—In Cold Blood, the re-creation of a brutal Kansas murder and its consequences. Thoroughly unpredictable, it will be the most remarkable change of all, and the most exciting.”
122 Peter De Vries’s parody of Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools. De Vries once famously wrote, “Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle and an end.”
123 Seabon Faulk was Capote’s maternal uncle.
124 Born on September 1, 1897, Capote’s father was actually sixty-four. He died in 1981 at the age of eighty-three.
125 Arch Persons’s wife.
126 The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962), edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
127 Another Country (1962) by James Baldwin.
128 Grimes was an actress who gained fame in the title role of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, whose long Broadway run had ended earlier that year.
129 Marilyn Monroe was found dead at her home in Los Angeles on August 5, 1962; she was thirty-six.
130 In “What Became of Our Postwar Hopes?” in The New York Times Book Review, July 29, 1962, John W. Aldridge assessed what he perceived as the weaknesses of some of the younger American novelists, declaring that Capote’s style is “indemnified by Faulkner and then powdered and perfumed by the ladies’ fashion magazines.”
131 The Deweys’ post office box in Garden City, Kansas.
132 John Anderson, Jr., governor of Kansas.
133 Tom Mahar was the manager of the Warren Hotel in Garden City.
134 The latest execution date for Smith and Hickock.
135 The inscription on Dewey’s father’s headstone is given on p. 196 of In Cold Blood (Random House, 1966), and the book ends with a scene in which Dewey, having gone to the cemetery to weed his father’s grave, has a chance encounter with Nancy Clutter’s friend Sue Kidwell.
136 He had been waiting for word that the execution date for Hickock and Smith had finally been set, without the possibility of further delays. But the date was once again postponed.
137 Probably a telegram from a man at Yale who planned a party for Capote’s thirty-eighth birthday on September 30.
138 This card was written in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
139 The play Harold, by Herman Raucher, lasted little more than two weeks. It opened on November 29 and closed on December 15.
140 Sandy Campbell, Windham’s companion, had become a fact checker at The New Yorker.
141 Ackerley won the 1962 WHSmith Award.
142 Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools was published in 1962.
143 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which had opened at Broadway’s Billy Rose Theatre on October 13.
144 The November 17, 1962, issue of The New Yorker was almost entirely dedicated to James Baldwin’s article “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” about race relations, civil rights, Christianity and the Black Muslim separatist movement. The essay later appeared in Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time (1963) under the title “Down at the Cross.”
145 The English call such a concoction a “summer pudding.”
146 John Persons was one of Arch’s two brothers; Frances was John’s wife.
147 He was, of course, exaggerating the facts to impress his grandmother. It was Cecil Beaton, not the Queen, who invited him to lunch, and the Queen was the Queen Mother, not the reigning monarch as he implied.
148 Wendle Meier, the undersheriff of Finney County, Kansas, had discovered the body of Kenyon Clutter in the basement of the Clutter home. His wife, Josephine, provided meals and magazines to Hickock and Smith while they were in the local jail.
149 Nominated by President Kennedy, White was the newest member of the U.S. Supreme Court.
150 “The Duke in His Domain” and The Muses Are Heard.
151 Lester McCoy was a well-known landowner and businessman in western Kansas.
152 Arthur Hornblow was the producer of such movies as The Asphalt Jungle and Witness for the Prosecution.
153 A real-photo postcard of Capote holding his bulldog, Charlie, in the snows of Verbier.
154 Capote was playing on an item in the news. French president Charles de Gaulle was insisting that France have an independent deterrent—atomic bombs, in other words.
155 Beaton was to do the designs for the Hollywood version of My