The Vindication of Truman Capote
At his death in 1984, just shy of 60, in the Bel Air home of one of Johnny Carson’s ex-wives, Truman Capote was conspicuous less for his literary output than for his ubiquitous guest spots on late-night talk shows. Wallowing in performative agony, he was intoxicated by his own celebrity—to say nothing of alcohol and drugs—as he confided to the likes of Carson and Dick Cavett, in his trademark simpering squeal, how his apparently never-finished novel-length sendup of Manhattan high society, Answered Prayers, prompted his closest confidants, the rich and elegant ladies he called “my swans,” to cut and shun him forever.
Capote was devastated most of all by his banishment by top swan Babe Paley, his closest friend in New York and the wife of CBS mogul William Paley.
The nadir of his public appearances—an enduring image of late-stage Capote—occurred in July 1978, when the fact that he could barely speak, word-slurring and glassy-eyed after 48 hours of vodka- and chemical-addled carousing, didn’t dissuade the diminutive storyteller from appearing live on New York’s The Stanley Siegel Show.