Never trust a novelist. They are all traitors, viewing life as a first draft of art and appraising family, friends and lovers as models for their characters. Truman Capote is said to have invented the nonfiction novel in his true crime story In Cold Blood, but every novelist fictionalises facts and shamelessly fibs about doing so. Capote was slicker than most when practising his deceptive trade: he always had a pair of dark glasses handy because they made lying easier, and he even teasingly established what he called “the Holly Golightly Sweepstakes”, taking bets on the original identity of the flighty, homegrown geisha in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The serially adulterous, insatiably mercenary Manhattan socialites who lunched with Capote at East Side restaurants such as La Côte Basque were outraged when he betrayed their secrets in Answered Prayers, his doomed attempt to equal Proust’s chronicle of upper-class manners.
In Cold Blood should have warned them that treachery was Capote’s mode of operation. He ingratiated with the two condemned killers who had wiped out a family on a Kansas farm during a bungled robbery, and may have even bribed prison guards to let him copulate with one of them on death row, but he raged at the appeals that gained them a stay of execution, because they deprived him of his final scene at the gallows. Although his title referred to the prosecution’s claim that the murders were premeditated, not impromptu, it applied as well to Capote’s lethal sang-froid.
The hapless drifters were eventually hanged, which allowed Capote to complete In Cold Blood. The bejewelled and bouffant-haired hostesses who were his source for Answered Prayers proved less obliging. Although they invited him to their parties, flew him in their jets and took him cruising on their yachts, they regarded him at best as an acid-tongued court jester or a gnomic household ornament. “I’m an object, not a figure of love,” he complained in his whiniest voice, seemingly unaware that he had objectified his supposed friends by treating them as sitters for his verbal portraits. The muses were unamused by his indiscretions; when excerpts from his novel appeared in Esquire, they instantly ostracised him and left him to die in groggy, drug-addled despair.
To judge from the dated gossip that Laurence Leamer regurgitates, Capote’s women were a coven of witches sleekly adorned in haute couture. CZ Guest, a supercilious blonde with as much human warmth as a vanilla sorbet, went for walks on the beach accompanied by a pack of dogs that included a one-eyed labrador, a three-legged Mexican hairless and an obese Pekingese: they could have been her familiars, or cast-off lovers she had transmogrified into beasts. Even creepier were the miniaturised vegetables she served at her dinner parties. The baby corn and cuticle-sized lima beans on his plate looked, Capote said with a delicious shudder, “almost unborn”. Were her guests daintily feasting on embryos? Asked about the children she palmed off on nurses and nannies soon after delivery, CZ denied being an absentee mother. “Of course I saw them,” she bridled. “I went fox hunting with them.”
Capote overfondly thought of his women as artistic virtuosi, who “fuse material elements into fantasies that are both visible and tactile”. Gloria Guinness, raised by Mexican nuns, revised the Bible to make expenditure a religious vocation. “God created Eve,” she opined, “so that men could create money, and it is through the wants of Eve that the world has kept on moving.” Her wardrobe was a vestry: she considered it a “desecration” to iron clothes, which only needed to be hung up in a damp, warm room. Pontificating about her personal creed, she declared that it was chic to be “immoral but not obscene”, though she strayed into outright obscenity after her interim marriage to a German count when she caroused with Nazis during the Third Reich. “It was a fascinating time to be living in Berlin,” gushes Leamer. “The worse it got, the wilder the nightlife grew.”
Capote’s most rapturous tribute to these sacred monsters likened them to “swans gliding upon waves of liquefied lucre”, and Richard Avedon illustrated the metaphor by bleaching Marella Agnelli’s skin and elongating her neck “beyond anything possibly human” when developing his photograph of her. Pamela Harriman was less exquisitely avian. Her first husband, Randolph Churchill, viewed her as a broodmare; having supplied him with an heir, she went on to distribute her favours far and wide, causing a wit to remark that if she had as many pricks sticking out of her as had been poked inside, she’d qualify as a porcupine. Despite her reputation as a courtesan, Harriman disliked the sweaty hydraulics of sex: it was the one domestic chore she couldn’t delegate to the servants.
Leamer’s aim, he reveals unwisely, was to write his own nonfiction version of Answered Prayers, which Capote never completed. Some hope, I’d say. Leamer is a woeful stylist, who relies on trashy adjectives such as “upscale” and “humongous”, confuses “cachet” with “cache”, ridicules Bostonians who “effect” British accents, and thinks that an aristocratic crone Capote called Lady Ina Coolbirth must be “royal”. Before Capote defiled his women he deified them, presiding over their revels like a prince of Araby supported on a Fabergé cane. Without the benefit of such a myth-making imagination, Leamer can only grub up the sad, sordid facts, which are a reminder of why we need fiction.
• Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Ambition and Betrayal by Laurence Leamer is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
