Fall from Grace

Way before we had social media, even before we had The Ugly Bunch, you could destroy a life with a juicy-penned story in poisoned ink.

When “La Cote Basque 1965” came out Truman Capote proceeded not only to betray the trust of his closest friends, but lost Babe Paley, his priciest Swan and pushed another acquaintance to suicide.

Were the stories fabricating fact, fiction and gossip really so appalling? Well, yes.

Two stories are especially lethal, one literally.

Fifty years later the tingle of horror and the huge embarrassment can still be felt.

Bill and Babe Paley

The first one features someone called Dillon, a business mogul and the spitting image of Bill Paley CBS big honcho, having a one night stand at The Pierre Hotel, while his lovely wife, none other than the exquisite Babe Paley and Truman’s choicest Swan, is out of town. The mogul attends a gala where he hits on “the governor’s wife” –supposedly Nelson Rockefeller´s missus- a woman he finds so unattractive he assumes “she wears a tweed bra”. But she is a WASP and Dillon/Paley is a Jewish boy who´s never been completely accepted. This is not a story of lust but of social revenge. The tryst takes place in utter darkness and ends in unabated catastrophe.

Next morning, with the lady gone and his wife about to arrive, the philanderer wakes in a bed with sheets sporting “stains the size of Brasil”. The culprit spends the next hour frantically on his knees washing the sheets in the hotel’s bathtub. One has to bow to the Terrible Menace, a.k.a. Capote’s, talent. Once read the scene is impossible to forget.

A few days after publication, Truman calls Paley to find out what he thinks of “La Cote Basque”. “Something terrible happened. I had just started to read it when the maid took the magazine and threw it away”. Capote immediately offers to send another copy to which Paley tells him not to bother, his wife is very sick and he has no time to read. Talk about getting even. Babe died three years later.

The Paleys never saw or spoke to Truman again.

The second anecdote makes no bones about the fact that it deals with the cause celebre of Ann Woodward a New York socialite who mistaking her husband for an intruder, shot him dead one night in their Long Island home. She was found innocent with the help of her powerful mother-in-law who stood by her side. Society was not so sure.

In Capote short story she shoots her husband in the shower. Six times. A few day before the magazine hit the stands Ann Woodward took cyanide and killed herself.

Her formidable mother in law declared: “My daughter-in-law killed my son, now Capote has killed her”.

Ann Woodward

My mother knew Ann Woodward.

The used to play cards together; they also shared an uncanny resemblance.

People would often confuse them.

I found this proximity to scandal and crime, with no underlying danger, most titillating and strange

My mother