Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.
156 A Dane, Bruhn was a star of the Royal Danish Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre.
157 The book was Arvin’s biography of Longfellow.
158 Van Wyck Brooks was Arvin’s friend and mentor, a critic and scholar who specialized in nineteenth-century American literature.
159 Dewey had suffered two massive heart attacks.
160 Arvin died of pancreatic cancer a month after this letter was written. Capote spoke with him by telephone shortly before his death.
161 There are ink blots on the page.
162 Beaton had designed both sets and costumes for a Metropolitan Opera production of Puccini’s opera.
163 Arvin died on March 21, 1963.
164 From “The Men That Don’t Fit In” by Robert W. Service, in his book The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses (1907).
165 A hotel in Denver.
166 Capote had sent flowers and a letter of condolence to the Kennedys upon the death of their newborn son. Jacqueline Kennedy responded on August 26, 1963: “I keep thinking what power a great writer has. All the things you write move people. It is a selfish thought—but if all you have written all your life was just training to write those seven lines which were only seen by me—and Jack—I am glad you became a writer.”
167 Spiegel was the producer of such films as The African Queen and Lawrence of Arabia.
168 Kin was Beaton’s new, young American lover.
169 Guest’s daughter, Cornelia, was born in November.
170 This capsule biography gives an accurate account of Capote’s emotional history, but the facts are only approximate. His parents divorced when he was seven, not three, for example, and, as best as can be determined, his father only remarried twice.
171 Smith had asked Capote if he were homosexual. Capote told him he was.
172 Capote was visiting his friends Gardner and Jan Cowles. Cowles owned Look magazine, among other things.
173 Enclosed was an article entitled “Writers at Work: A Progress Report for the New Year” from The Sunday Times (London), January 5, 1964, in which Capote marked the passage “Truman Capote must play an unhappy waiting game before he can finish what promises to be a most remarkable exercise in what may be called enriched documentary: ‘In Cold Blood,’ a picture of the impact of a murder in Kansas which still awaits its actual dénouement.” Capote underlined “unhappy.”
174 Capote was visiting his friends Loel and Gloria Guinness.
175 Tate’s husband, the judge who had presided over the Smith-Hickock trial, had died the previous November.
176 On February 25, 1964, boxer Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) defeated Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Auditorium to win the world heavyweight title for the first time.
177 Lazar, usually referred to as Swifty, was one of Hollywood’s most prominent agents.
178 Dominick Dunne was at this time a television producer. He and his wife, Ellen, nicknamed “Lenny,” lived in Beverly Hills. During their visit to California, Capote, the Deweys and Violet Tate had attended a party the Dunnes gave for their tenth wedding anniversary.
179 Pat Lawford, sister of President Kennedy, was married to actor Peter Lawford.
180 Enclosed was a New York Times article from May 21, 1964, about the induction of Capote and others into the National Institute of Arts and Letters the previous day. Among the other new members were James Baldwin, Leon Edel, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud and John Updike.
181 Isherwood’s A Single Man was published in 1964.
182 The heroine of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
183 Writers at Work (1958) is a collection of author interviews from The Paris Review, including Pati Hill’s 1957 interview with Capote, in which he describes such things as his reading habits and methods of composition.
184 A character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
185 Bobby Rupp was Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend.
186 Billy Wilder was the director of such films as Sunset Blvd., Sabrina and Some Like It Hot.
187 The Collector (1963) was the first book by British novelist John Fowles.
188 Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, one of the writers interviewed in Writers at Work.
189 Capote edited the manuscripts of Dewey’s sketches, writing at the head of one of them: “Dear Dewey—I have made corrections on all of these. You are doing well. I’m pleased with the progress. Love to all—T.”
190 In October, Capote had gone to Garden City with Sandy Campbell, his fact checker at The New Yorker. They flew first to Denver, where Capote entertained the Deweys and some other Garden City friends, as well as Aswell, who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
191 He had asked Aswell, whose judgment he respected above almost all others’, to read In Cold Blood.
192 Bowles’s only novel, Two Serious Ladies, was originally published in 1943. Peter Owen published an English edition in 1965.
193 Capote had asked Campbell to report to him on the Supreme Court’s Monday decisions as summarized in The New York Times each Tuesday. The justices were due to consider Hickock and Smith’s request for a review of their conviction.
194 Jacqueline Kennedy and three of the late president’s siblings—Patricia Kennedy Lawford, Bobby Kennedy and Jean Kennedy Smith—and their children.
195 An article entitled “The Fabulist” appeared in Newsweek, December 28, 1964, reporting on Capote’s reading from In Cold Blood at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in New York just before Christmas.
196 Charlie Starkweather, accompanied by his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, killed eleven people in a 1958 murder spree across the farmlands of Nebraska and Wyoming. Starkweather was executed in 1959, while Fugate was sentenced to life in prison. Following the Supreme Court’s 1964 Escobedo decision (that testimony by a defendant not informed of his or her right to counsel is inadmissible in court), Fugate’s attorneys filed a petition for habeas corpus, and a judge ruled that the manner in which her original statement had been taken was a violation of the principle of law established by Escobedo. This did not, however, result in a new trial, as the Supreme Court subsequently decided in 1966 that Escobedo should not be applied retroactively. Fugate was eventually paroled in 1976.
197 A clipping in which Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine defined the changing meanings of the word “square.”
198 On January 18, 1965, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear Hickock and Smith’s latest appeal.
199 Robert Bingham was Smith’s lawyer.
200 After Capote’s endorsement of Buddhism, Smith wrote “ditto” in the margin.
201 In the margin Smith wrote, “Please read Philip Wylie’s ‘Night Unto Night’—the special chapter is Rebus Incognitis. It influenced me greatly in deciding spiritual matters. Please read it.” Wylie wrote science fiction and mystery novels, as well as such nonfiction books as A Generation of Vipers. Night Unto Night (1944) is a ghost story, with afterlife adventures. The author’s preface begins: “Here is a novel about death—a novel that is about the living & their thoughts of death.”
202 He bought Charlie at Harrods in London.
203 Le Beau Rivage is a luxury hotel overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
204 Joseph P. Jenkins was a Kansas City attorney who, along with Robert Bingham, represented Hickock and Smith after Russell Shultz resigned from the case.
205 Joseph Fox had replaced Robert Linscott as Capote’s editor. Linscott had retired from Random House in 1958 and died in September 1964, at the age of seventy-eight.
206 In his capacity as a New Yorker fact-checker, Campbell had sent Dewey a long list of factual questions. The purpose was to verify the accuracy of Capote’s story.
207 Director of the Kansas State Penal Institutions.
208 Gianni Agnelli was head of Fiat, the Italian car company, and was one of Italy’s leading industrialists. He and his wife, Marella, were Capote’s close friends.
209 Stavros Niarchos was a rich Greek shipowner.
210 Count Brando Brandolini d’Adda, a rich Venetian nobleman, was Gianni Agnelli’s brother-in-law.
211 Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple opened on Broadway on March 10, 1965, and ran for nearly a year and a half, closing on July 2, 1967.
212 The third daughter of the eighth duke of Rutland, Lady Diana Cooper had long been a brilliant social figure. She was the widow of Duff Cooper, a British politician who had held several high-ranking jobs before and during World War II and was later British ambassador to France.
213 Tillotson was a man who did yard work for Capote and Dunphy on Long Island.
214 Katharine Graham was the publisher of The Washington Post.
215 The New Yorker published In Cold Blood in four consecutive issues.
216 On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Burton Lane, opened at Broadway’s Mark Hellinger Theatre on October 17, 1965. Oliver Smith, another of Beaton’s rivals, designed the scenery.
217 He was one of the few who did like it. Leland Hayward, the show’s producer, closed it in Boston.
218 He was speaking of Antony Armstrong-Jones, the earl of Snowdon, and his wife, Princess Margaret. Snowdon was yet another of Beaton’s rivals, although as a photographer, not as a set designer.
219 Graham had entertained Capote, together with Alvin and Marie Dewey and Violet Tate, in Washington, D.C.
220 Theda was Marie Dewey’s sister.
221 In April 1966, Capote read to an estimated 3,500 students at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where the student newspaper proclaimed him the “Lion of American Literature.”
222 Don Carpenter was a California novelist and screenwriter. He published a mixed review of In Cold Blood in the April 1966 issue of Ramparts, the literary magazine of the New Left and the counterculture. When his own first novel, Hard Rain Falling, which appeared in the same season, began to attract mixed notices, he wrote to Capote to soften the blow of his critical remarks on In Cold Blood, and Capote graciously replied with this letter.
223 He was promoting In Cold Blood.
224 Dunphy