‘Answered Prayers’: Was it worth it for Truman Capote to write about his society friends’ secrets?
Readers were bemused – what was Capote hoping to achieve by besmirching the reputations of those closest to him?
In November 1975, Truman Capote, the proudly gay author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, unveiled the hotly anticipated second instalment of his unpublished novel, Answered Prayers. It was published in Esquire magazine.
To say it caused a scandal would be a gross understatement. Reputations were trashed and real harm was caused. Capote ended his days a social pariah in his former New York society circles, incapacitated by a lifetime of prodigious substance abuse. The unprecedented moral and social uproar that stemmed from the scandal has captured the attention of many writers and is now the subject of the new anthology television series, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.
The story to blame, La Côte Basque, 1965, takes its title from its setting: an achingly fashionable French restaurant in Manhattan. Industrial quantities of expensive champagne are consumed over lunch. All of a sudden, everyone in the room starts to stare and whisper:
Mrs Kennedy and her sister had elicited not a murmur, nor had the entrances of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Cornell and Clare Booth Luce. However, Mrs Hopkins was une autre chose: a sensation to unsettle the suavest Côte Basque client.
As her all-black attire suggests (“black hat with a veil trim, a black Mainbocher suit, black crocodile purse, crocodile shoes”), Mrs. Hopkins is in mourning....
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