Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (147 page)

The most skilled mask-makers in Europe and America were working overtime to create masks. Halsted, the designer, charged $600 for one of his “off the rack” masks—and often a lot more, depending on the concept and its design.

For his own mask, Truman strolled down to F.A.O. Schwartz, where he bought an ordinary black domino for 39¢. Later, he heard that one of his guests had commissioned a black velvet mask for $38,000.
[Inspired by
“Mephistopheles,”
it was crafted to resemble acanthus leaves and adorned with marquise-shaped diamonds.]

The most renowned hairstylists in Manhattan were booked for appointments during the crucial hours before the event. The most sought-after was Kenneth Battelle, the “Mr. Cool of Haute Coiffure.” He “teased, tamed, and twisted” some of the most expensive female heads on the East Coast, adding hairpieces whenever he deemed it necessary.

Reflecting on the French Revolution, Leo Lerman joked, “The guest list, which includes such names as Henry Ford’s, reads like an international list for the guillotine.”

Before it began, Truman told Paley, “A hundred years from now, people will still be talking about my event. It will become part of my legend.”

—Truman Capote

Although the weather was windy and rainy on the night of November 28, the international press and
paparazzi
converged outside The Plaza Hotel tophotograph and call out questions for the parade of celebrity guests. As demanded, most of the men dressed in tuxedos, the women in black and/or white gowns or costumes. Extra security was added for the safeguarding of a vast fortune in furs and gemstones.

In advance, Truman had designated a phalanx of women designated as “hostesses” for groupings of between twelve and sixteen of his party guests, with the understanding that they’d supervise pre-party dinners at chic restaurants located near The Plaza. He not only designated these women as hostesses, but he specifically pre-designated the guests they were to entertain.
[Also, whereas he paid the dinner tabs of his hostesses, he did not volunteer to pay the dinner tabs of anyone else in their respective groups.]

That evening, immediately prior to the debut of the party, which had been scheduled for 10pm, Truman with his guest of honor, Katharine Graham, shared drinks with William and Babe Paley, and then sequestered themselves alone within Graham’s suite at The Plaza, where she’d arranged a private dinner for two
[caviar and roasted chicken]
catered by “21.”

After their pre-ball dinner, they went downstairs to take their place at the door to greet their parade of 500 guests. Except for a slippage here and there, most of the gate crashers were turned away.

At ten o’clock, nobody had shown up. Graham expressed her fear that the ball would be a flop. But by 10:15pm, the first guests arrived to have their hands shaken and the air around their cheeks kissed.

By 10:30pm, a long and glamorous line had assembled at the entrance to the ballroom.

Outside, reporters shouted questions at the arriving guests. New York State Senator Jacob Javits arrived wearing a domino equivalent to something from a Hollywood Western. An effeminate young man, standing with three other similar young men, yelled out to Javits: “Here comes the Lone Ranger.”

“Thank you, ladies
,”
Javits responded.

Studio executive and movie producer Darryl Zanuck was asked by a reporter: “Are you someone important?”

“If you don’t know, you shouldn’t be here,” the movie mogul snapped.

Although he slipped up here and there, Truman seemed to know each of his guests. When he didn’t, he cleverly concealed it by pretending that the masks obscured everyone’s features. He’d say, “Now who is this hiding behind the mask?”

The parade was dazzling, although, as to be expected, some guests out-shone the others.

Oscar and Françoise de la Renta arrived, looking startling in soft, feathery headdresses inspired by the beaks of marabou.
[i.e., birds that resemble storks or ibises]
. On their heels, the social doyenne of New York City, Brooke Astor, wearing a white lace gown, looked as if she’d stepped out of a Goya painting.

Since the Black and White Ball had been inspired by Cecil Beaton’s “Ascot scene” in
My Fair Lady
(1964), Truman expected Beaton to show up in a spectacular disguise. But to his disappointment, “He wore a simple Halloween mask tied with a little black bow at the top,” Truman later lamented.

As an acknowledgement of the role he had played during Truman’s research of the Clutter murder case, Truman invited Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. As Norman Mailer later remarked, “Here he was, Alvin Dewey, the delegate from the Grain Belt, a real salt-of-the-earth guy surrounded by all these glamorous, bedecked pussies. I liked him.”

Truman frequently referred to some of his closest women friends as “my beautiful swans.” Each of them glided in from the rain outside, making spectacular entrances. His favorite, Babe Paley, poised in a dress of the sheerest white chiffon, looking dazzling. She wore an original by the Spanish fashion designer, Antonio Castillo, a sleeveless pillar of white zibeline faced in cardinal red. For some reason, perhaps fearing robbery, she opted to leave her jewelry in a safe at home, adorning herself instead with a simulated ruby-and-diamond paste necklace, also a creation of Castillo. She seemed to have adopted the Duchess of Windsor’s advice: “You can never be too thin or too rich.”

Lee Radziwill dazzled in a body-clinging gown of silver paillettes, a creation of Mila Schön, the Italian designer. Later in the evening, Radziwill would have a wardrobe misfortune on the dance floor, when beads from her gown came loose, and showered across the floor, creating a hazard for some of the other dancers.

Marella Agnelli joined the parade of
fashionistas
. Truman described her later as if she’d just stepped out of a portrait by Richard Avedon.

Jack Dunphy, Truman’s longtime lover—by now mostly a companion—hated parties, but had nonetheless been ordered to attend. Although still friends, he and Truman were living in separate houses on Long Island. When Truman spotted him, he ushered him aside for a private reprimand: “That mask of yours is disgusting.” Then he ordered Dunphy to take it off before he introduced him to Graham. Dunphy then infuriated Truman when he told Graham, “I don’t usually attend these events. I leave it to Truman to brownnose high society.”

Dunphy later said, “I’d never seen such ghettoizing, no group at the ball mixing with any other group. They seemed scared shitless of one another. When I asked Babe Paley to dance, this old Jew who sat next to her said, ‘Don’tgo away now,’ and he started clawing all over her. I did dance with Gloria Guinness. She told me, ‘Jack, you cut a mean rug.’ She was unaware that I used to be a professional dancer on Broadway.”

The Kennedys had turned down Truman’s invitation, with one exception, the clan’s 76-year-old matriarch, Rose Kennedy. “She’d been attending balls since before the Civil War,” Truman cattily remarked. “She wore a gown that she’d picked up in Paris wholesale. I introduced her to Brendan Gill,
[the editor of The New Yorker]
, who whirled her around the dance floor. As I noticed throughout the evening, she was constantly applying more makeup.”

Truman had told Babe Paley that he didn’t plan to invite President Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, “because I find all those Secret Service men too boring.” However, he did invite the elder of the president’s daughters, Lynda Bird Johnson, who arrived with a dozen masked Secret Service men. “I changed my mind when I saw one of them,” Truman said. “He was gorgeous, looking like a blonde-haired version of Robert Wagner.”

“Where is George Hamilton?” he asked Linda Byrd, who at the time was dating the perpetually suntanned actor. Her escort for the ball was Robert Stein, editor of
McCall’s
magazine, for which Lynda Bird was working at the time.

When she passed by and was out of earshot, Truman told Graham: “George Hilton and another George, George Masters, have worked their magic on this former ‘turd blossom’
[a Texas wildflower that grows in cow manure]
and transformed her into what the press now calls ‘Lovely Lynda.’”

Truman also invited two more daughters of former presidents. One of them was Margaret Truman Daniel.
[She told Truman, “I wish the books I wrote about murders sold as well as yours.”]

The other was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter. For her, at least, the evening had a disastrous after-effect. During her time at Truman’s party, her residence in Washington, D.C. was burglarized.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. showed up wearing a black executioner’s hood, similar to the one Marie Antoinette faced at the guillotine. He told Truman, “I decided to come only after hearing that Dietrich wasn’t going to be here. She’s still angry at me for dumping her so long ago.”

“Perhaps you’ll find Candice Bergen enticing instead,” Truman told him.

When the columnist Peter Hamill arrived, Truman chastised him. “You should have brought Jackie.”

After having pleaded so long and so passionately for an invitation, Tallulah Bankhead showed up, a vision in white. Her all-white mask was one of the most stylish of the evening.

Later at the ball, Truman brought her together with her old nemesis, the playwright Lillian Hellman. Tallulah had starred on Broadway in one of Hellman’s plays,
The Little Foxes
. Each of the women at various times had publicly referred to the other as “A dyke bitch.”

But they embraced, Tallulah saying, “You know, Lillian, you and I should have a relationship like Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in
Old Acquaintance.”

Before the night was over, Tallulah picked up Jesse Levy, who became her paid escort, steward, handler, and secretary for a tumultuous period of several months.

When Lauren Bacall and choreographer Jerome Robbins took to the dance floor together, the other dancers made room for them. At one point, they did a fantastic jitterbug. In reference to one of their dances, Truman said, “I thought Fred and Ginger were out there on the floor.”

Producer David Merrick noticed that Bacall and Frank Sinatra gave each other wide berth. Bacall apparently was still nursing a wound from the night Sinatra deserted her after discussions of marriage in the wake of the death of her first husband, Humphrey Bogart.

Sinatra had brought Mia Farrow, with her hair closely cropped from the movie she’d starred in,
Rosemary’s Baby
, but didn’t dance with her. So Farrow found younger dance partners, such as Christopher Cerf, the producer who at the time had recently graduated from college.

Earlier in the evening, after Truman had introduced her to the guest of honor, Farrow had asked Sinatra, “Who in the hell is Katharine Graham?”

Peter Duchin and his small band provided the dance music, occasionally playing numbers for the younger guests, including “Twist and Shout” and “Up and Down.” Farrow found Duchin’s music “intoxicating.”

The waiter who had been assigned to Sinatra’s table at The Plaza during Truman’s party, Joe Evangelista, placed a bottle of Wild Turkey in front of the singer instead of a bottle of champagne.

Sinatra bored quickly and wanted to leave the party early. He invited everyone at his table to Jilly’s, his favorite hangout. Truman spotted him leaving and tried to block his exit. “Please stay,” Truman pleaded.

“We’ll be back,” Sinatra told him.

“No, you won’t—you won’t come back,” Truman said. “I know you won’t come back.”

Truman was correct in his assessment. Farrow remembered that before the night was over, she and Sinatra, along with some cronies, ended up eating chow mein in some joint.

The scene stealer at the party was seventeen-year-old Penelope Tree. The
ingénue
appeared “half naked,” dressed in a flowing black tunic and form-fitting tights designed by Betsey Johnson. Jean Harvey Vanderbilt defined her outfit as “stark, like a Halloween ballet costume.” Claudette Colbert thought her black hip-hugger briefs could be mistaken for underwear, and that “this Penelope looks like a hooker at a stag party.”

Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon disagreed, finding Penelope mesmerizing. Her appearance at Truman’s party on the arm of Ashton Hawkins launched her career as a cover girl on fashion magazines.

With her Vanderbilt hawkeye, Jean Harvey finally proclaimed that Truman’s ball was “something out of the court of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. The guests promenaded around the room in all their finery, checking each other out, sometimes making bitchy remarks about another party once out of earshot.”