Chapter 43

NINETEEN sixty-six was his year, and a new, or almost new, Truman greeted it. “I’ve gotten rid of the boy with the bangs,” he said. “He’s gone, just gone. I liked that boy. It took an act of will because it was easy to be that person—he was exotic and strange and eccentric. I liked the idea of that person, but he had to go.” He was no longer the comparative youth of thirty-five who had first gone to Kansas. He was forty-one, a man of substance and fame, one of the best-known writers in America.

Money had begun coming his way, first in driblets, then in a steady flow, months before In Cold Blood was published. During most of the time he was researching and writing, he and Jack had lived decently, but not lavishly, chiefly on the sale of Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Paramount (sixty-five thousand dollars), his advances from The New Yorker, and his fee for writing the screenplay of The Innocents. Added together and divided by the more than five years he had labored, it did not make a large annual income. He had had to strain to buy the condominium in Verbier and the houses in Sagaponack. His Jaguar had been his only real luxury—and one he could ill afford, at that.

Now, for the first time in his life, he possessed the options that money alone allows. He was not rich. Some of the two million dollars the newspapers had mentioned was eaten up by fees to agents and lawyers; much also went for taxes. But he had a sizable income nonetheless and began to enjoy some of life’s expensive pleasures. He traded in his Jaguar hardtop for a later model, a sporty convertible, and bought a Ford Falcon station wagon for Jack, who needed a roomier car to carry Charlie, the bulldog, and Diotima, the cat.

Brooklyn Heights, he decided, was no longer the only place to live in New York, and he purchased a two-bedroom apartment in what a fashion columnist called “the most important new address” in Manhattan, the United Nations Plaza at First Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, next to the East River and the United Nations. Many of the other tenants were heads of corporations, and the lobby was like that of a luxurious modern hotel, hushed, dignified and a little intimidating. But dignified luxury was exactly what the mature Truman Capote desired, and the sixty-two-thousand-dollar price tag, which was regarded as high in 1965, did not deter him. “He wanted to be in the thick of things,” said Oliver Smith. “At the time, the U.N. Plaza was very glamorous, the place to live in Manhattan.”

His apartment, on the twenty-second floor, was as bright as Oliver’s basement had been dark, and it had a panoramic southern view that stretched to the bottom of Manhattan and beyond. With the help of Evie Backer, who had decorated for some of his friends, Truman ransacked Third Avenue antique shops to furnish it. From Brooklyn he brought his collection of paperweights, including the White Rose that Colette had given him in 1948, and his menagerie of ornamental birds, animals and reptiles. His portrait, painted several years earlier by James Fosburgh, Minnie’s husband and Babe Paley’s brother-in-law, was hung over a sofa in the living room. Every room but one was done with elegant restraint. The exception was the library-dining room, which was a combination of dark reds; walking into it, he wrote in House Beautiful, was “rather like sinking into a hot raspberry tart—a sensation you may not relish, but I quite enjoy.”

Along with his studio in Sagaponack, his aerie at 870 U.N. Plaza was the place he liked most to be, and he never regretted moving there. “I once stayed on the top floor of the Excelsior Hotel in Naples, overlooking the bay,” he said. “You could see the shore curving around and the ferries sailing back and forth to Capri. The view from my apartment reminds me of that. I love it at all times. I love it when the sun makes everything sparkle. I love it in the fog when everything looks misty. I love it at dusk and I love it at night, when the green lights on the bridges look like strings of emeralds.”

In February, 1966, shortly after In Cold Blood came out, he joined Jack in Verbier. He flew to London in March to help publicize the British edition, and was back in America by April. Followed by a camera crew from NBC News, which was preparing a story, “Capote Returns to Kansas,” he gave a reading to an estimated thirty-five hundred students at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. The “Lion of American Literature,” the student newspaper called him. He then proceeded to Garden City—his first visit since his book was published—and seemed nervous about what reaction he might expect. He need not have worried. The municipal library placed a framed photograph of him in a prominent position and held a reception to which five hundred fans came, clutching copies for him to autograph. “Garden City Opens Arms to Capote,” read the next day’s headline in the Wichita Eagle.

Manhattan was no less friendly when he gave a reading at Town Hall several days later. His rich friends gave small dinners beforehand, then disembarked at the door from a flotilla of limousines. “His light and somewhat nasal voice held the audience spellbound,” said The New York Times. “In the eye of the daily beholder,” added Newsday, “Truman Capote may appear as a slight, balding man. But last night to a rapt audience of New York’s most socially prominent readers, he stood 10 feet tall.” As usual, “A Christmas Memory” was the favorite, and some still had tears in their eyes when they embraced him afterward. “It was a very moving moment for me,” said Babe.

In Cold Blood had established him as an authority on the criminal-justice system, and during the next few years he was often called upon to comment about it. He was opposed to capital punishment—“institutionalized sadism,” he termed it—and in favor of prison reforms that would emphasize rehabilitation. His opinions were generally conservative, however, and he did not subscribe to the fashionable view of the sixties that criminals were victims of society. Prosecutors across the country used the examples of Perry and Dick, who had confessed only after some artful prodding by Alvin Dewey and his colleagues, to buttress their opposition to the Supreme Court’s Miranda ruling, which severely limited the use of confessions in court. Testifying before a Senate subcommittee in July, Truman attacked the ruling, saying that it had all but handcuffed the police. “People simply will not accept the fact that there is such a thing as a homicidal mind,” he told the Senators, “that there are people who would kill as easily as they would write a bad check, and that they achieve satisfaction from it as I might from completing a novel or you from seeing a proposal of yours become law.”

A week later he was in France, on his way to Portugal with Lee Radziwill, then to Yugoslavia for a cruise down the Dalmatian coast with the Agnellis. “Have not had a genuine holiday in God knows when,” he told Cecil, “so am taking off all of August.” In Paris he proudly informed a reporter that In Cold Blood was not the only Capote book that would be published in 1966. “A Christmas Memory,” first published a decade before, would now be brought out in a special boxed edition. “Serious writers aren’t supposed to make money, but I say the hell with that. My next book will be called A Christmas Memory. It’s forty-five pages long, and it’s going to cost five dollars and be worth every cent. How do you like that for openers?”

Alexander after the Battle of Issus, Napoleon after Austerlitz could not have been cockier than Truman was after In Cold Blood. He had the golden touch, and he was already looking forward to his next triumph, a party that would end the year as it had begun—with all eyes focused on him.

The idea came to him in June, and it immediately captured his imagination. Nothing, he reckoned, could be a better symbol of the new, grown-up Truman. In one evening he could not only repay his peacock friends for all their years of entertaining him, but also satisfy a wish he had nursed most of his life. “I think it was something a little boy from New Orleans had always dreamed of doing,” said Slim. “He wanted to give the biggest and best goddamned party that anybody had ever heard of. He wanted to see every notable in the world, people of importance from every walk of life, absolutely dying to attend a party given by a funny-looking, strange little man—himself.”

Once he grabbed hold of something, he did not let it go, and until he left for Europe at the end of July, he sat by Eleanor Friede’s pool in Bridgehampton nearly every afternoon, jotting down ideas. He was not merely planning a party; he was creating one. It would have his name attached to it, and his presence would be felt in every detail, just as it was in In Cold Blood or any of his other books. Bit by bit, his scheme evolved. The date would be Monday, November 28, 1966; the place, the Plaza Hotel, which, in his opinion, had the only beautiful ballroom left in New York. To add a touch of the fantastic, he settled on a bal masqué, like those in storybooks. Until the masks came off at midnight, identities would be secret, or so he liked to think, and strangers would meet, dance and perhaps fall in love. And like Prospero, he would be the magician who had arranged those revels.

Unlike fabled gatherings from New York’s past, in which champagne spurted from fountains, live swans floated on artificial lakes, or gilded trees were hung with golden fruit, his would be a model of good taste and simplicity. Inspired by the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady, which Cecil had costumed in black and white, he decided to call his party the Black and White Ball and require his guests—the characters in his own play—to dress in nothing else. Worried that the multihued sparkle of rubies, sapphires or emeralds might destroy his austere design, he considered adding a stern “Diamonds Only” to the bottom of the invitations, but relented when Eleanor, who was one of his oldest friends, told him that if he did, she could not go. “Truman,” she said, “I haven’t got any diamonds. My tiaras have all been hocked.”

Most hosts who give large balls permit their guests to bring companions of their choosing. Truman would not. His control was to be absolute. No one could walk through the door whom he did not know and like, and when he sent an invitation, it meant the named person or persons, and no one else. If he did not like a friend’s wife or husband, he dropped both. Single people were expected to come singly. “You can’t bring anybody!” he told Eleanor, who, as a widow, protested vigorously. “There will be a hundred extra men. I’ll see to it. They’ll all be marvelous.”

“Come on!” she replied. “You can keep your hundred extra men! I’m not going to get myself all dolled up and put on a goddamned mask to go to the Plaza by myself. I just won’t come. And Truman, dear, it’s not just me. I’m sure half the single women on your list won’t come either.” Afraid that she might be right, he pondered and returned the next afternoon with the solution. He would arrange small dinners beforehand, and the diners would come in groups. No woman would have to endure the humiliation of arriving by herself.

The secret of a successful party is not lavish food, expensive wine or extravagant decorations; it is the right mixture of lively guests. No one else had friendships as diverse as his, and lounging by Eleanor’s pool, he matched names as carefully as he usually matched nouns and adjectives. Marianne Moore and Marella Agnelli, Henry Ford and Henry Fonda, Sargent Shriver and John Sargent, Andy Warhol and Mrs. William Rhinelander Stewart, Frank Sinatra and Walter Lippmann, Irving Berlin and Isaiah Berlin. “I don’t know whether or not I should invite the Johnsons,” he said in a tired voice. “It’s such a bore when you have to have the Secret Service and all that. No, I don’t want the President to come. I think I’ll just invite his daughter Lynda Bird.” He did, along with the daughters of Teddy Roosevelt (Alice Roosevelt Longworth) and Harry Truman (Margaret Truman Daniel). He also wrote down the names of several princes and princesses, two dukes and a duchess, two marquises, a marchioness and a marquesa, two counts, a countess and a viscomtesse, an earl, a maharajah and a maharani, three barons and two baronesses, and two lords and a lady.

Leo Lerman joked that “the guest book reads like an international list for the guillotine.” Thinking along the same line, Jerome Robbins, the choreographer, speculated that perhaps Truman had made up a roster of those who were to be shot first by those fearsome radicals of the sixties, the Red Guards. Oh, no, said John Kenneth Galbraith, not while he was on it. Some suggested that maybe Truman was bringing them all together for some momentous announcement, such as the end of the world. But not everyone on his list of more than five hundred was rich and famous. There were many whom celebrity watchers could not begin to identify—farmer friends from Sagaponack, acquaintances from Garden City, and of course Jack and Jack’s friends and relatives.

Rarely had Truman enjoyed himself as much as he did during those hours in Bridgehampton. Many of those whose names he was inscribing in his schoolboy notebook could buy and sell great corporations, dictate fashions for millions of women, snap their fingers and cause armies of flunkies to jump up and salute. That was not the kind of power he desired. The power he coveted he held in his hand on those sun-scorched afternoons: he could put their names on his invitation list, and he could just as easily cross them out.

One of his masterstrokes was his choice of Katharine Graham, head of the family that owned both Newsweek and The Washington Post, as his guest of honor. Babe had introduced them in the early sixties, and she had immediately become one of his favorites. Kay Graham was neither beautiful nor stylish like his swans—in those days Washington wives took a perverse pride in their dowdiness—and she was shy and lacking in confidence. The suicide of her dynamic but philandering husband in 1963 had forced her to take command of the family empire, but she was still walking gingerly, step by step. Though she was in her late forties, she was, in short, ideal clay for Truman’s eager sculptor’s hands: rich, powerful and yet amenable to instruction. When her own lawyer, who also had an apartment in the U.N. Plaza, suggested that she buy there too, she said no; when Truman recommended it, she said yes. “Now, honey,” he told her, “I think you ought to have an apartment in New York, and if you can’t run it, I will!”

With considerable reluctance, she had also heeded his command to join him on the Agnelli yacht in the summer of 1965. With him at her side, her fear that she would appear dull proved groundless, and she and Marella became good friends. Sailing off the coast of Turkey, she also had an opportunity to read In Cold Blood in galleys, before anyone else. “Truman wouldn’t give them to me all at once. He’d just let me read one section at a time, and then we would discuss it. It was wonderful, like going to school, and he would tell me what the people in it were like, what Kansas was like, and why he had done what he had done. Before we finished, I felt I knew all those characters.” In November, not long after their return, she gave a dance for him and the Deweys at her house in Georgetown.

“Now, don’t think you can ever hide something from me!” he told her. “Because I’ll find out about it anyway.” She laughed, but he did see a side of her she showed to few others. “She’s a very, very warm person,” he said. “And very down-to-earth. She once said that seventy percent of the men who came into her office, whether they were Senators or journalists who worked for her, made it clear one way or another that they would like to go to bed with her. ‘They just want to say that they’ve fucked a tycoon,’ she told me. But she said she would never have an affair with anyone who either worked for her or was somehow influenced by her paper.

“‘Kay,’ I said, ‘that leaves out everybody in the country, with the possible exception of some cowboy in Wyoming.’

“‘Well,’ she answered, ‘maybe someday I’ll meet a cowboy in Wyoming.’”

He liked her and wanted to pay her back for her hospitality to the Deweys. But he doubtless had other reasons as well for picking her as his guest of honor. More than Babe, Marella or any of the other swans, she would attract attention. She was arguably the most powerful woman in the country, but still largely unknown outside Washington. Putting her in the spotlight was also his ultimate act as Pygmalion. It would symbolize her emergence from her dead husband’s shadow; she would become her own woman before the entire world.

She was vacationing on Cape Cod when he called her up to tell her his plans. “Honey, I just decided you’re depressed and need cheering up, so I’m going to give you a party.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “I’m not depressed. I’m all right.”

“I’m not so sure about that, honey. Anyway, I’m going to do it very big. I’ve always wanted to give a party in the Plaza ballroom, and it will be in your honor.”

She thanked him but thought little more about it. “But as the thing gathered steam,” she said, “I was just incredulous. I was stunned by what was happening.”

Invitations, written in longhand, went out in early October.

In honor of Mrs. Katharine Graham
        Mr. Truman Capote
Requests the pleasure of your company
        At a Black and White Dance
On Monday, the twenty-eighth of November
        At Ten O’Clock
Grand Ballroom, The Plaza

What happened after that can best be described as a chemical reaction. By itself, each of the ingredients Truman had poured into his flask—the select guest list, the strict dress code, the thrill of a masked ball—might have remained inert. Together, they fizzed and gurgled, bubbled and boiled, and all of New York knew that something remarkable was soon to occur. “I’ve never seen women putting so much serious effort into what they’re going to wear,” said Halston, who was making many of the masks.

As word spread, the scenario went precisely as Truman had hoped: everyone he had ever cared about or thought to impress, from Fifth Avenue aristocrats to West Side intellectuals, was longing to come. For some reason, he had not included his old friend, the actress Ina Claire, and she telegraphed from San Francisco, asking for an invitation. No, he replied. He said the same to Tallulah Bankhead, but when she continued to beg, telling him how important it was to her, he gave in. One acquaintance told him that his wife cried herself to sleep every night because they were not on the list. His heart touched, Truman lied and told him that their invitations must have been lost and that a new set would be forthcoming. But he did not send one to his aunt Marie (Tiny) Rudisill, who, as a result, nurtured a grudge that was never to die. “I feel like I fell into a whole mess of piranha fish,” he moaned, joking that he was making so many enemies that he might as well have called his party In Bad Blood.

“People were really carrying on,” recalled Diana Trilling. “There was a woman who lived in Europe who was absolutely incensed that she hadn’t been asked. Oh, there was a great to-do! I never heard anybody who was so voluble about not having been invited to a party! She was so wildly, ludicrously offended that Leo Lerman tried to intercede. For my own part, my dressmaker, a terribly nice man I’m devoted to, said, ‘You couldn’t possibly get me an invitation, could you? It’s the one thing in this whole world I want to go to.’ He was so desperate that I wanted to give him mine.” But she could not have surrendered it even if Truman had permitted: her husband, Lionel, the most glittering ornament on Columbia’s literary faculty, was also eager to attend.

Hearing the commotion from her house in Nyack, Carson McCullers, who was not among the chosen, became increasingly agitated. She had bitterly resented the success of In Cold Blood, and she was so tortured by the prospect of a second Capote triumph that she began talking about giving a party of her own, but bigger and better in every way. “I’ll invite Jacqueline Kennedy,” she told her cousin Jordan Massee.

“Do you know Jacqueline Kennedy?” Massee inquired.

“No, but she’ll come. I’ll see to it that she comes. And if she comes, you can be certain everyone else will come.” Ill and an invalid—she was to die less than a year later—Carson did not give a ball. But the following March she did have an ambulance deliver her to the Plaza, where she celebrated her fiftieth birthday as a steady stream of admirers came to her suite to pay court.

Truman did not stop at dictating the makeup of his own party; he arranged the preball dinners as well, pairing hosts and guests like a general placing his regiments along the line of battle. “He ordered his friends to give preliminary dinner parties,” said Glenway Wescott, “and he told me whom I had to have.” He changed those guest lists too, juggling names from one group to another. The Haywards were given a show-business contingent that included Claudette Colbert and Frank Sinatra and his new wife Mia Farrow; the Paleys were presented with the Deweys, the Agnellis and Cecil, who had made a special trip from England to see what his My Fair Lady design had inspired. Kay and Joe Meehan—he was a leading figure on Wall Street—were assigned some of their society chums, including Elsie Woodward, the mother of poor Bill, whose shotgun death had caused such a scandal in 1955. And Glenway was entrusted with such eminent geriatrics as Thornton Wilder, Katherine Anne Porter, Virgil Thomson, Anita Loos and Janet Flanner, who had been The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent since the twenties. In her excitement at being asked, Katherine Anne forgot that she had heartily disliked Truman ever since their summer at Yaddo. “The pimple on the face of American literature,” she had called him. Now, cooing to Glenway, she declared, “Oh, I like Truman. I always have.”

For a few tense weeks, however, it appeared that Glenway’s Rich Amelia (minced veal) might never leave the oven. Wilder said he would be in Berlin on November 28, and a variety of ailments finally confined Katherine Anne to her house in Washington. Flanner, who was preparing to fly in from Paris with the first long dress she had purchased in nearly thirty years, was ruffled because Natalia Murray, her best friend and New York hostess, had not received her expected invitation. Flanner asked Glenway to drop Truman “a blackmailing note” saying that unless Murray came, she would not come either. “Without her,” said Flanner, “it is inconceivable that I should go and dance with a merry heart—I don’t dance at all anymore, actually.” Glenway did as he was bidden and was soon pleased to report that she could keep her long dress and plane ticket. “Piping away like Blake’s little devil in the cloud,” he told her, Truman had sworn that Murray’s invitation had merely been misplaced. “He sounded innocent,” Glenway said, “and in any event, having had our way, we’ll never know. My general principle about him is that it isn’t necessary to like him as much as one admires him.”

Others of the appointed dinner hosts doubtless witnessed similar scenes of comedy and consternation. “This city’s normally blasé social set is flapping like a gaggle of geese over a not-so-private party being thrown by author Truman Capote for 500 guests here Monday night,” a reporter for The Washington Post wrote a few days before the momentous night. “The magic Capote name—immortalized by his recent blockbuster nonfiction book, In Cold Blood—coupled with a guest list that reads like Who’s Who of the World, has escalated his party to a social ‘happening’ of history-making proportions. The New York newspapers are calling it variously the party of the year, the decade or the century.”

Indeed, nearly everyone in the five boroughs seemed to be watching the flutter overhead. When Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, arrived at Kennedy Airport, a cabdriver noticed his wife’s feathered headpiece and said, “Hey, you gonna go to Truman’s party, huh?” Guests came from all parts of America—eleven from Kansas alone—as well as from Europe, Asia and South America.

“The ladies have killed me,” said Halston, who had been busy for six weeks designing the masks for which he charged as much as six hundred dollars. One woman, he said, had come in eight times, taking an hour each time to have hers fitted. “I think I’ve lost my mind, and it’s just too much,” added his rival, Adolfo. By the twenty-eighth, the furor had reached Kenneth’s, Manhattan’s elite hairdressing salon. Arriving that afternoon, Kay Graham automatically went to the second floor, where ordinary customers were sent, rather than the third, where the smart set went. “But I didn’t know Kenneth, didn’t know anybody,” she said. “I had never really done my hair much. I had never made up my face. I hardly knew how to do it! We didn’t lead that kind of life in Washington. Then, while I was on the stairs, a wonderfully funny, Cinderella-ish thing happened.

“‘Oh, Mrs. Graham,’ one of the hairdressers said. ‘We’re all so busy with this Black and White Ball! Have you heard about it?’

“‘You won’t believe it, but I’m the guest of honor.’

“‘You are? Well, who’s doing your hair?’

“‘I don’t know. I was just trying to find out.’

“‘Kenneth has to do it,’ she said. And so I went to Kenneth himself. But I had to wait while Marisa Berenson had curls placed all over her head. I was the last one in and the last one out.”

Many of those expensive coiffures unraveled a few hours later, in a chill, end-of-November rain—Truman had arranged everything but the weather. As the Caens were leaving the Regency Hotel for their dinner, the bell captain whispered, “Boy, is this town full of phonies. Do you know there are people hanging around here in black-and-white clothes who ain’t even going to Truman’s? Whoo—eeee!” At Eleanor Friede’s, where soft background music was playing on the radio, a newscaster interrupted to say that crowds were already beginning to gather outside the Plaza to watch the guests arrive. Eleanor’s group, mostly editors and publishers, were amused, but still did not realize how fascinated people were by what seemed, after all, like only a dance. Truman and Kay Graham had drinks at the Paleys’, then went to the Plaza for a supper for two, in the suite he had taken for that purpose. But they also were late, not arriving until 9:10, and had time only to enjoy a few bites of caviar before taking up their posts at the ballroom door, alongside a man in white tie and tails, who was to announce each guest to them.

Television cameras had been set up in the lobby, and almost two hundred still photographers and reporters jostled for position, stepping on the delicate toes of every fashion columnist in the city. Security guards had been stationed in the kitchen to keep out gate-crashers, and black-tied and black-masked detectives waited to mingle and watch for jewel thieves. A dozen Secret Service agents came along to look after Lynda Bird Johnson; like it or not, Truman was forced to endure the boredom of Government agents. Four bars had been set up to dispense four hundred and fifty bottles of Taittinger champagne, and chefs were preparing a simple midnight buffet: chicken hash, spaghetti bolognaise, scrambled eggs, sausages, pastries and coffee. (As such things go, Truman spent relatively little on his fete: about sixteen thousand dollars, part of which he was able to deduct from his taxes.)

At 10:15, the ballroom was all but empty. Onlookers began to mutter that there were more reporters and photographers than guests, and it appeared that Pamela Hayward might have been right in fearing “that with all the publicity, the party might flop.” But that, of course, was an impossibility. At 10:30 masked faces began emerging from the rain. “Your names, please,” intoned the man in the white tie and tails, who then turned to Truman and Kay and announced, “The Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur.”

The masks did not actually hide many faces, but then, despite Truman’s fantasy, they were not really supposed to. Many of the women, like Marella Agnelli and Rose Kennedy, attached theirs to elaborate feather headdresses. Others wore fur around their eyes. Candice Bergen’s mask was topped by giant rabbit ears; Frank Sinatra’s had cat’s whiskers. Mrs. John Converse, Gary Cooper’s widow, wore black velvet, from which sprouted a gardenia tree bearing live blooms. Breaking Truman’s rule that men wear black, Billy Baldwin had engaged a Tiffany craftsman to make him a golden unicorn’s head. “Oh, Billy, that’s fantastic!” exclaimed Truman. Princess Luciana Pignatelli had also cheated by painting her mask on her face. She made up for it, however, by attaching to her feathered headdress a sixty-carat diamond, which bobbed above her pretty nose like a piece of bait on a fish line.

In a gesture that hinted of reverse snobbery, the host himself proudly announced that he had paid only thirty-nine cents for his simple Halloween mask. Hearing that, Alice Roosevelt Longworth was even prouder to say that she had bought hers for only thirty-five cents. Whatever they cost, most were removed long before midnight. “It itches and I can’t see,” complained Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt.

At 11 o’clock, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, was asked if it was a good party. “It’s too early to tell how it’s going,” he judiciously answered. “History is made after midnight.” So it was, and most of those who were there talked about it afterward the way they might have a cherished childhood Christmas. There were no spectacular scenes, but there were dozens of memorable ones: Lauren Bacall and Jerome Robbins holding the floor to do one of the best dance numbers since Top Hat, the daughters of three Presidents exchanging White House anecdotes, Kay Graham dancing with one of the doormen at the U.N. Plaza, who thanked her for the happiest night of his life. “It was always shimmering,” said David Merrick, the Broadway producer, who was not usually given to praising other people’s productions. “It was never still, nor was there a static moment.” Even Jack, who had resisted coming, had a good time. “It was formidable vraiment,” he told Mary Louise Aswell, who had elected to stay home in New Mexico. “Extra!”

Across the country the party made front-page headlines. “Splendor Runs Over at Capote Ball of Decade,” said the Houston Chronicle. “Capote’s Big Bash Was Just That,” added the Fort Lauderdale News. Some who had not been there grumbled that such frolics had also attended the fall of the Roman Empire. Pete Hamill wrote an outraged column in the New York Post that contrasted what Hamill thought were silly comments from the merrymakers with grisly scenes from the Viet Nam War. A soldier in an Army training camp sent a letter to Time objecting to being called upon to protect “this fat, lethargic, useless intelligentsia.” To which another correspondent, who said he had spent seven years on active duty, responded: “So Truman Capote had a blast. So what? Must we read the trite analogies about the Roman Empire and the U.S. every time somebody has a [party]?”

Truman himself heard few complaints. One came indirectly from Gloria Guinness, who said that she had made a terrible mistake in adorning her elegant neck with not one, but two heavy necklaces, one of rubies, one of diamonds. Their combined weight had exhausted her, she said, and she would have to stay in bed all the next day to regain her strength. Another came from an actress who had taken a handsome stranger home for the night. She had assumed that he was also a guest, but when she woke up in the morning, she discovered, to her vocal dismay, that he was just one of the detectives in black tie.

“So?” Truman inquired. “What’s wrong with that? You had a good time with him, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I did.”

“Well, then, what are you complaining about?”

On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Joe Meehan’s friends lined up to quiz him about what had happened. A few days later Russell Baker, the resident humorist of The New York Times, said that “sociologists are still debating whether it was the most important party of the Twentieth Century.” Baker’s own thought was that “writers surely will experience an instant inflation of self-esteem from the knowledge that one of their colleagues has seized Mrs. Astor’s former role as social arbiter.” Diana Trilling, an amateur sociologist herself, declared the party “a very complicated social moment in this country’s life.”

Those who study such things agreed that something important had occurred—exactly what, no one could say. The Museum of the City of New York assembled masks and souvenirs, which were placed alongside memorabilia from such other social moments in the city’s history as George Washington’s first inaugural ball and a gala tribute to General Lafayette in 1824. Also taking her cue from My Fair Lady, Suzy Knickerbocker, the gossip columnist, all but burst into song when she told her readers: “He did it. He did it. We always knew he’d do it—and indeed he did.”