“La Côte Basque 1965,” the first published excerpt from Truman Capote’s unfinished novel, *Answered Prayers,* contained thinly disguised portraits of many of his friends in high society.

Swan Song

Truman Capote’s social suicide by novel: the story behind the new mini-series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans

By Sam Kashner

“Have you seen Esquire?! Call me as soon as you’re finished,” New York society doyenne Babe Paley asked her friend Slim Keith over the telephone when the November 1975 issue hit the stands. Keith, then living at the Pierre hotel, sent the maid downstairs for a copy. “I read it, and I was absolutely horrified,” she later confided to the writer George Plimpton. “The story about the sheets, the story about Ann Woodward … There was no question in anybody’s mind who it was.”

The story they were reading in Esquire was “La Côte Basque 1965,” but it wasn’t so much a story as an atomic bomb that Truman Capote built all by himself in his U.N. Plaza apartment and at his beach house in Sagaponack, Long Island. It was the first installment of Answered Prayers, the novel that Truman believed would be his masterpiece.