He was born in New Orleans, grew up in Monroeville (Alabama), but became a writer in New York. At age 17, Truman Capote went to work at The New Yorker magazine, selecting comic strips. At 23, he published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Fields. Capote loved the city of skyscrapers. Glamorous homosexual, Hollywood screenwriter and gossip expert, he became the essential guest at all Park Avenue parties. He soon had his circle of rich and famous ladies – his swans – to whom he knew how to give advice, offer gossip or recommend a designer.
In 1955 he met the Paleys. Babe was her favorite, beautiful and intelligent, married to William Paley, son of a cigar manufacturer and president of CBS. The first encounter with marriage appears in the series Feud; The role of Babe is nailed by Naomi Watts. The Paleys invited Jennifer and David Selznick, a Hollywood producer who won an Oscar for Gone with the Wind, to their Jamaican home, and he asked them if he could bring Truman. The couple responded that it would be an honor.
Waiting on the private plane, the Paleys saw a disconcerting, effete character dressed in a thousand colors arrive. Bill turned to David: “When you said Truman, I assumed you meant the former president. “Who is this him?” “It’s Truman Capote, our great American writer,” David replied. From that confusion a beautiful friendship was born and his entry into the world of the ladies of the New York jet set, until he became the star of their parties. He was the one who told the best gossip and the one who flayed with the most grace.
Capote lived on the ground floor of the brick house at 70 Willow Street, Brooklyn, which appears in some guidebooks but does not even have a commemorative plaque. Its owner was the set designer Oliver Smith (West Side story), who lived on the upper floors; The writer could use his dining room if he had guests. The walk through the neighborhood is worth it: near the East River, on a street of protected century-old houses, the visit can conclude by crossing the Brooklyn Bridge or going to dinner at the River Café, where Capote dropped by in the last years of his life. Today he has a Michelin star.
It was in this house where, reading The New York Times of November 16, 1959, he found on page 39 a brief news item of events, dated in Holcomb (Kansas): “Rich farmer, his wife and two children were found today in their house shot dead. “They shot them at point-blank range after having tied and gagged them.” That day he knew that he had a great story there, his Madame Bovary. Even Holcomb went with her friend Harper Lee, who months later would win a Pulitzer for To Kill a Mockingbird. And she managed to speak with all the sources, including the murderers, arrested weeks later.
To escape the Manhattan of the Arabian Nights, he took refuge in a hidden corner of Europe; He needed to isolate himself from his world to write and stopped in Palamós, after crossing the ocean on the ocean liner Flander with his partner, the writer Jack Dumphy, twenty-five suitcases, an old bulldog, a blind poodle and a Siamese cat. . There, in the summers of three years of his life, he wrote In Cold Blood. In his last year in the beautiful house facing the sea in Cala Senià, Babe Paley (and her husband), Gloria Vanderbilt and Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy, came to see him. The swans couldn’t go that long without Capote.
The story La Côte Basque, the legendary restaurant, appears in Prayers Attended, his latest book. It is a venomous attack by Truman Capote against the world that had made him an object of adoration. The text was previewed in Esquire magazine. In its pages appeared the characters of New York in the sixties: the writer Tennessee Williams, the actress Greta Garbo or the shipowner Stavros Niarchos, but also his protective swans, who declared a boycott, stopped inviting him and did not accept his phone. Capote experienced it with restlessness: solitude was not for him. The fifth chapter of Feud is dedicated to the intimate drama that had him on the brink of suicide.
The Capote route also takes us to the Plaza Hotel, where he organized one of the most spectacular parties ever held, on the occasion of the success of In Cold Blood, announced on the illuminated screens of Times Square. It was a self-homage that was held in 1966. Everyone had to be dressed in black and white like at the My Fair Lady Ascot party. Anyone who wasn’t on the guest list was a nobody: there were Henry Ford, Henry Fonda, Frank Sinatra, Andy Warhol, Alice Roosevelt, Lauren Bacall and Katharine Graham… Have breakfast in the same room or have tea at half-time. late is a way to pay tribute to Capote.
Nearby, on 57th Street off Fifth Avenue, was La Côte Basque, now an elegant but informal Polo Bar by designer Ralph Lauren. Opposite, the Saint Regis Hotel, Dalí’s favorite, whose cocktail bar, the King Cole Bar, often hosted the writer, who loved his Maxfield Parrish mural and his Martinis. And, in the Upper, another hotel is essential, The Carlyle, where he went to listen to music between drinks. They called his presidential suite the East Wing of the White House, because John F. Kennedy stayed there when he came to town.
The HBO series Feud takes us through that American city of wonders, which in those days became the capital of the world, where someone like him could define himself as “alcoholic, drug addict and homosexual” and be a star. Thanks to a pen as sharp as his tongue.
