When the November 1975 issue of Esquire magazine hit the newsstands and Truman Capote revealed therein the deepest secrets of a small group of rich, beautiful women known to history as his “swans,” reaction at the top of Manhattan’s social dogpile was swift and nearly universal.
“Ostracizing Truman became the thing to do,” Sam Kashner wrote in a recent issue of AIR MAIL. Slim Keith refused to take his calls and considered suing him for libel. “The next time I see Truman Capote, I’m going to spit in his face,” fumed Gloria Vanderbilt. Babe Paley never spoke to him again.
Ryan Murphy’s new FX series, Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, explores the writer’s falling-out with the socialites he counted among his closest friends—how he betrayed them, and how they, in return, took him down. But viewers won’t see Capote violate the trust of one woman with whom he was especially close: Katharine “Kay” Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post and Capote’s guest of honor at the Black and White Ball.
Capote met Graham through Paley, over lunch in 1961. (Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, was the fourth guest at the table.) “It’s hard to describe Truman as I first saw him,” Graham later wrote in her best-selling memoir, Personal History. “He had that strange falsetto voice…. He was very short, perfectly groomed, and coiffed…. He was a magic conversationalist—his sentences were like stories.”
“We quickly became friends,” Graham recalled.
In the summer of 1965, Capote invited Graham to join him on a chartered yacht, courtesy of his friend Marella Agnelli, wife of the Fiat chief, to explore the Adriatic Sea and the Greek Islands.
Graham hesitated; just two years earlier, her husband, Phil, had died by suicide, and she had taken over the reins of The Washington Post. “I had come a fair distance in worldliness but not that far,” Graham later recalled, “so I told Truman that I wouldn’t fit in and would feel ill-at-ease.”
Truman persisted; Graham eventually accepted the invitation, “with great reservations.”
A death in the family delayed Marella’s arrival, so Capote and Graham began the journey without their host. Capote brought with him galleys of In Cold Blood. “Sitting for hours on the back deck of the boat in the balmy air, we discussed it all in detail,” Graham later wrote.
Something besides a shared interest in true crime may have cemented their friendship. In a short story titled “Yachts and Things,” rediscovered in the New York Public Library three decades after Capote’s death, the narrator (Capote) describes a Mediterranean cruise with “a distinguished intellectual woman, whom I shall call Mrs. Williams.” One night, anchored off the coast of Turkey, they saw a party in full swing. One thing led to another, and soon 25 Turks were smoking hashish aboard the chartered yacht. The narrator and “Mrs. Williams” decided to partake.
“I had never smoked hashish before; neither had Mrs. Williams,” Capote wrote. “It hit us pretty hard.” Buzzed, they stretched out on the deck, “giggling and laughing until Mrs. Williams began to snore … ”
This vacation with Capote, Graham would later write, marked the beginning of “her new life.”
Life’s a Ball
The next summer, Capote informed Graham he was throwing a party to cheer her up. There’s no record that anything specific triggered his concern; Graham saw through the ruse. “It’s really nice of you,” she replied, “but I don’t need cheering up.”
“I was sort of baffled,” Graham said in a 1997 oral history. “But then he got rolling. I felt a little bit that Truman was going to give the ball anyway and that I was part of the props. Perhaps ‘prop’ is unfair, but I felt that he needed a guest of honor and with a lot of imagination he figured out me.”
Graham commissioned a dress—designed by Balmain—from Bergdorf Goodman. According to Deborah Davis, author of Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball, it was the first time Katharine Graham wore makeup.
On November 28, 1966, Graham and Capote stopped by the Paley apartment for a drink, then returned to a suite in the Plaza Hotel for a “picnic dinner.” Graham ordered chicken and champagne —“a bird and a bottle,” as Capote called it—from ‘21.’ She knew Truman would want caviar to go with his bubbly. “Having never lived this kind of life,” Graham later wrote, she had never bought caviar. She ordered a four-ounce jar—“barely a couple of spoons for each of us.” Graham was mortified. Capote was too excited to complain.
The party that evening was “the height of my social life then—in some ways, ever,” Graham wrote. “For me, the party was just great pleasure, maybe doubly so because it was unlike my real life. I was flattered, and although it may not have been my style, for one magic night I was transformed.”
“I felt that [Capote] needed a guest of honor and with a lot of imagination he figured out me.”
Graham’s biographer Carol Felsenthal says Capote eventually betrayed his friend, just as he had mistreated his swans. She points to an interview he gave to Washington Star reporter Lynn Rosellini in which Capote said Graham’s mother “never had a nice thing to say about Kay in her life. And then Kay married that bad number… There was something about his total non-Jewishness that appealed to her.”
In her own memoir, however, Graham makes no mention of the slight. “In the end,” she wrote, “when he had fallen out with so many of his friends, he never turned on me as he did on most of them. I think he felt protective of me.”
A Graham family confidant offered a possible explanation for Capote’s enduring loyalty: “She listened more than she talked.”
Raised by two headstrong parents, Katharine Graham learned the skill of not saying anything at an early age. While the swans poured out every detail of their lives to Capote and expected him to respect their confidences, Graham “never needed to bare her soul to anyone,” the family friend recalled.
Was that the secret to their relationship? A clue might be found in the last letter from Capote to Graham that appears in the anthology Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote, edited by Gerald Clarke.
In March 1974, Graham sent Capote flowers at the Broadmoor hotel, in Colorado Springs, where he was continuing his recovery from pneumonia. In his thank-you note, addressed to “Darling Kaysie,” he told her he would return to New York “very soon, and hope we can have a really good talk. I know you are one of the only friends I can rely on—but I think you will find my head on your shoulder less heavy.”
He signed off, “I love you, T.”
Joseph Rodota is a California-based writer and producer and the author of The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address