FRIENDSHIP AND BETRAYAL
Capote and the socialite
It’s one of those moments that defines a book — setting the stage for a scandal that would shake New York society more than four decades ago and become the stuff of which mythology is made.
Picture, if you will, the spectacle of Truman Capote — diminutive, gay, narcissistic, desperately in need of love, an enormously gifted writer — wriggling with delight as the woman he adores as his best friend confesses her own inner torments to him and regales him with the latest gossip about her wealthy East Side friends.
Such confidences will eventually bring both their worlds crashing down.
The woman is Babe Paley, the quintessential Manhattan socialite of the day and — as the spouse of chauvinistic CBS founder William S. Paley — the quintessential trophy wife. And Capote, her dearest friend, will prove to have an devastating impact on both their lives because of his self-absorbed and self-destructive behaviour.
Theirs was a star-crossed friendship, says author Melanie Benjamin, who chronicles its disastrous course in her richly entertaining new novel, The Swans of Fifth Avenue, published in Canada by Delacorte.
“Life in a gilded cage is not all that it’s cracked up to be,” Benjamin says from her home in Chicago. But although her novel bristles with moments of malicious comedy, she herself always had compassion for her real-life characters — even Capote, whose conduct, by any definition, was odious.
The novel is essentially about the betrayal of a friendship. In 1975, Esquire magazine published La Cote Basque, 1965, an excerpt from Capote’s eternally unfinished novel, Answered Prayers.
It invites the reader to eavesdrop at a drunken luncheon presided over by the garrulous Lady Ina Cool-birth, who diverts her fellow Fifth Avenue matrons with scurrilous gossip about Manhattan’s smart set. But the real-life women who had allowed their twinkly little friend, Truman, into their privileged world were horrified to see themselves re-created in Capote’s fictionalized gossip and turned into tabloid fodder.
“As a writer, I’m always drawn to the story first,” Benjamin tells Postmedia. And here, she would be dealing with “a delicious, headlinemaking literary scandal.”
So she began exploring the social culture of New York in 1960s and 1970s. “From Mad Men on, we’re fascinated by that era, so that was very interesting to me.” And then the human dimension, in all its often messy absurdity, started intruding — “and that really sucked me in because they were all amazing, unique individuals ...”
Babe Paley, the wife her mogul husband always expected to represent perfection to the outside world, first met Capote in the 1950s, when the baby-faced literary genius hitched a lift on Paley’s private plane.
For Babe Paley it was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship that saw Truman ingratiating himself into the favour of the upper classes and Paley treating him — in Benjamin’s words — as “her analyst, her pillow, her sleeping pill at night, her coffee in the morning.”
All this was shattered the day in 1975 when Paley, by this time stricken with cancer, read her beloved Capote’s Esquire story, and recognized herself and her world. With mounting horror, she read the sordid saga of a womanizing TV tycoon named Sidney Dillon and his efforts to get rid of the sordid evidence — stained bedsheets and all — of a one-night stand before his wife returns home.
She never spoke to Capote again. Indeed, Capote suddenly found himself cut off entirely from a society whose admiration and friendship he coveted.
“I guess what people should take away from this book is — don’t trust the storyteller in your midst,” Benjamin says. “I also hope readers have sympathy for these women — the ‘swans.’ That’s how Truman christened them.”
Benjamin reserves her greatest sympathy for Paley. As a novelist, she’s fascinated by women who have become “lost in history or overshadowed by other people.”
This sparked her previous bestseller, The Aviator’s Wife, a novel dealing with the private anguish of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh. Earlier, it led to two other acclaimed novels — Alice I Have Been, about the child who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, and The Autobiography Of Mrs. Tom Thumb.
In the case of her latest book, Benjamin believes the megalomaniacal William S. Paley married Babe because he wanted a beautiful trophy wife who would constitute some kind of statement to a culture that — in spite of his power and prestige — often shunned him because he was Jewish.
And she did give him what he wanted — providing him with the perfect home, presiding over the perfect dinner parties, ensuring them the perfect social life and making certain he would never see her in the morning until she had achieved perfection in wardrobe, coiffure and makeup.
“Babe didn’t choose her life,” Benjamin says. “Her mother raised her to be this trophy wife, I think. The way she presented herself to the world — that was the only outlet she had.”
And what of Capote, who died in 1984, a drug-sodden travesty of his former self? Benjamin says she al- ways wants to find sympathy in every character she writes about. But her portrait of the world-famed author of In Cold Blood is frequently merciless.
“A lot of his personality was selfloathing,” she says bluntly. “Truman’s childhood was so tragic and heartbreaking. Everything he does comes back to that childhood — that thirst and hunger for unrequited love.”
But Capote had a tragic capacity for self-deception. He expected further lionization after Esquire published his notorious story.
“Instead, he was completely devastated by the consequences of writing it,” Benjamin says. “It never occurred to him that his friends would react as they did.
“I think ultimately he wasted so much goodwill and kindness and talent in the end — and that was hard for me to understand.”
I guess what people should take away from this book is — don’t trust the storyteller in your midst.