The biggest tragedy of Truman Capote’s altogether tragic life was that he never got to write Answered Prayers, the novel of high society shenanigans that he and the rest of the world knew would be his masterpiece. He envisaged it as his response to Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, but squeezed into a single volume and set mostly in postwar New York city.
The main characters in Answered Prayers would be a group of high-society women whom Capote referred to in real life as his “swans”. They included Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Slim Keith and CZ Guest, as well as Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli and Pamela Harriman. They were immensely rich, clever if not intellectual, better with horses than children and never off the best-dressed list. They all also adored Truman Capote, the tiny, camp southern journalist who loved nothing better than a bibulous lunch at Elaine’s or La Côte Basque larded with some vicious gossip, typically concerning whichever swan had just left the table to powder her nose.
Capote had all the ingredients assembled for his masterpiece, but he just couldn’t make it. He had always been better as a miniaturist – the magazine feature or short story was his happy place. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his major achievement in fiction, was a sylph of a book. The only time he wrote successfully at length was with In Cold Blood, a true-crime triumph that anticipated today’s passion for the genre by more than half a century.
The more he tried, the less the words came. In 1975 Capote decided in desperation to publish some completed chapters of Answered Prayers in Esquire as both a guarantee and appetiser for what was to come (his advances from both the publisher and Hollywood had been enormous). Not only did the magazine extracts appal in their candour – the name changes fooled no one – but they revealed that his previously effervescent wit had evaporated, leaving only a sludge of spite. He summed up his supposed best friends as “charmingly incompetent adventuresses”. The swans not only dropped Capote immediately but they made sure everyone else did too. Seven years later he was dead at the age of 59, having hurtled into a drink- and drug-hazed despair at his spectacular own goal.
In his acknowledgements Laurence Leamer explains that he decided to write the book that Capote never managed. It isn’t a roman à clef but a properly sourced (mostly to published biographies) nonfiction account of what life was like as a member of Capote’s girl gang. Almost at once, though, he runs into a problem – perhaps the same one that Capote did. These women, being the lucky owners of second, third and fourth homes, were permanently shuttling between the Hamptons and Venice by way of Paris. While they may have shared couturiers and even husbands, they were seldom all in the same place at the same time.
Given the lack of crossing points, all Leamer can do is give us a set of discrete and essentially parallel portraits of the swans. There is Lee Radziwill, who grew up in the shadow of her sister Jacqueline Kennedy. While Jackie appears tenacious and disciplined, Lee frittered her life away on alcohol and making sure that she was always a little bit thinner than her big sister. Or what about CZ Guest, who rode a white horse into the ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria in 1955, decades before Bianca Jagger tried the same stunt at Studio 54? Pamela Harriman is the most interesting of the bunch, marrying Winston Churchill’s son to graft herself into the English aristocracy and then, after ditching him, ending up as the US ambassador in Paris in her own right.
Leamer works hard to squeeze every last bit of excitement and glamour from these ingredients. There are portraits by Cecil Beaton, dresses by Courrèges, champagne by the bucket. But just as Capote struggled to make this material sing when stretched out to book length, so Leamer has his job cut out keeping us invested in the gilded desolation of it all.
• Capote’s Women is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
