Capotes Women: Understanding the doomed love of Truman Capote and his socialite swans – AL.com

Truman saw in a womans projection of beauty an assertion of a life force, a mystical, magical thing that transformed all who touched it. He liked to be near such women, and he collected his swans the way others did Faberg eggs.

In those two sentences, author Laurence Leamer does much to explain what drew Truman Capote to a coterie of ultra-privileged women known for their beauty and their trend-setting sense of fashion. They dont explain what drew the swans to him, nor do they explain the sheer clumsiness of his eventual betrayal, which cost him the friendships he had so carefully cultivated while gaining him nothing. He might as well have been a spoiled princeling smashing jeweled eggs to bits on the floor in a tantrum.

In Capotes Women, due for release Oct. 12, Leamer delves into the rest of it. Capote, who had spent his early youth in the Monroeville area and who would go on to become one of Alabamas most famous and oddest literary exports, was still climbing toward fame when he begins cultivating relationships with the women he calls his swans. They were wealthy -- usually as the result of a series of strategic marriages -- and renowned for their ability to create their own fashion or to wear the works of top designers with unmatched self-assurance. Their homes were frequent subjects of magazine photo shoots, their dinner parties provided grist for the high-society gossip columns, their travels made international news. They seemed to enjoy having an outlandish creature from Alabama in their midst. He was young and beautiful and frequently outrageous, he was a male friend who could adore them without triggering their husbands jealousy and he was a wickedly clever purveyor of gossip.

The seven at the center of this book include Babe Paley, wife to CBS executive Bill Paley; Marella Agnelli, a bona fide Italian princess; Pamela Churchill, who married a son of Winston Churchill and rapidly became famous for pursuing affairs as eagerly as any of her male counterparts; and Lee Radziwill, younger sister to Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who like Churchill cut a swath through British society in her youth. Upper-class Brits are a randy lot, Leamer drolly notes, though it is considered good form for a wife to bring forth an heir before she starts having affairs. Lee had no use for such formalities.

Leamer is a capable guide to this world, and though Capotes Women doesnt spend a lot of time on Capotes Alabama boyhood or on his mutually influential friendship with Harper Lee, its not Leamers first visit to the state. His previous works include The Lynching, a keenly reported account of the Michael Donald murder in Mobile and the subsequent trial that resulted in a groundbreaking verdict against the Klan.

There might have been a question from the beginning of who was using whom, the ambitious writer or the trophy wives in need of amusing companionship. Leamer makes clear that while Capote began enjoying the company of swans before establishing his own fame, he also came up early on with the idea of using the tales he heard from such women as the basis of his grandest literary accomplishment. By mid-1958 -- before Breakfast at Tiffanys was published, before Capote even conceived of In Cold Blood -- he had the title and the general concept of the novel Answered Prayers.

From that point on, there might have been a real component to his friendship, but he also was collecting material. It might indeed have formed the basis of the book he wanted to write, a Great Work that encapsulated an ephemeral bubble of contemporary aristocracy. But that would have required him to be in full command of his powers, and after inventing novelistic true-crime storytelling with In Cold Blood and shaking up high society with his Black & White Ball, he began to squander those gifts.

Like a Marvel ensemble superhero movie that struggles to get all the origin stories out of the way before setting up its final battle, Capotes Women takes a long time to arrive at its moment of crisis. As Leamer tracks the twin arcs of Capotes accomplishments and his capacity for self-destruction, warning signs pile up: Capote blows deadlines, makes increasingly vague promises about when Answered Prayers will be complete. Friends whove seen excerpts are horrified; one swan, given a sneak preview, cuts him out of her life.

There are indications that after a lifetime spent knowing just how far over the line he can get away with going, Capote has forgotten theres a line. He even loses his knack for dinner parties: After falling for a particularly brainless lover (Leamer describes him as the man who came to his rented house to service the air conditioner and ended up servicing Truman as well) he imposes the dolt on his high-society friends, to their dismay.

His fantasy comes crashing down in 1975, when Esquire publishes an 11,000-word excerpt of Answered Prayers full of nasty gossip, with characters constructed so artlessly that any knowledgeable reader can easily guess which story belongs to which real-world swan. Capote has deluded himself that everyone, the swans included, would love it. They cast him out. Answered Prayers was never published in completed form.

Related: Truman Capotes unfinished work at center of new documentary The Capote Tapes

Leamer includes an observation from Joanne Carson that in the aftermath Capote looked like a baby who had been slapped. Indeed, Carsons involvement as one of Capotes last friends brings several tragically comedic moments into the tale.

The break is so complete that there was little left to tell, just a few years in which Capote becomes a dissipated caricature of himself on the way to a lonely and pitiful death.

Capotes Women is a very full book, in many ways. Capote himself comes to life as an ambitious writer whose flamboyant talent is inseparable from his outsider persona and high-society aspirations. He was openly gay because he had no choice, and as Normal Mailer famously observed, that took bravery. But the signs of his capacity for self-destruction were evident early on in his sexual voraciousness and his willingness to be a pet of the rich. Leamer provides detailed mini-biographies for the swans, and by extension gives a sense of the bygone world that made their lives possible.

For all that, the book is infected by the emptiness of the lives it describes. Capote neither knew how to be fulfilled by the success he achieved, nor how to exert the discipline necessary to maintain it. When the time came to follow up on his breakthroughs, Leamer writes, Truman should have been writing as he always did, penning passages into a notebook. But he had become addicted to the easy pleasures of the rich.

As for the women, what made them special wasnt really their style. They had the status they did because they were so entirely committed to being what a certain class of entitled man wanted them to be: Stunning, flawless, pursuable, obtainable. But when it came to accomplishments of any actual substance, they tended to be dilettantes at best. Upon divorce (or with one impending) their singleminded mission was to once again marry up. The rarified circles they moved in were so small that some of them were married to one anothers exes.

Lee Radziwill exemplifies the problem: Leamer portrays her as eternally overshadowed by her older sister, long before Jackie becomes First Lady and long after. Radziwill also exemplifies the poor-little-rich-girl problem: Because shes never had to work for anything, she cant work hard enough at any of her desires, such as becoming an actress, to get any satisfaction from her attempts. (If her story seems to pop a little more than the others, it helps to know that Leamer has written three books about the Kennedys, including The Kennedy Women.)

Were the swans really superior in some meaningful way to the Kardashians and their contemporary hyper-privileged counterparts, famous for being famous? Its not an argument this reader can make. Whatever one might think of the current bunch or the proportion of pop-culture influence they wield, they do have their own brands and their own wealth. Divorce doesnt leave them scrambling to find their next keeper.

But thats not the point.

The swans existed for a short time, exemplifying an ideal that couldnt last. Truman Capote, a gifted misfit from Alabama, found an unlikely place among them, and on some level he found them genuinely inspiring. Leamer includes a tantalizing suggestion that, in some ways, Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffanys was the first swan, or at least a swan in the making.

The published fragments of Answered Prayers fell far short of the book Capote hoped to write, but he did from time to time succeed at putting into words what made that ephemeral world so captivating for so many. The book lives up to its subtitle: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era.

This is the story of an Icarus. You know how its going to end, but you know that for a while the protagonist is going to soar. Capotes Women is about the flight.

Capotes Women by Laurence Leamer will be released Tuesday, Oct. 12, by Putnam.

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Capotes Women: Understanding the doomed love of Truman Capote and his socialite swans - AL.com