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Tempus-Magazine.com Holiday 2014 / 2015 45 the chairman of CBS. Into their posh salons Truman Capote swam effort- lessly: rich, famous, effeminate, brilliant, and deliciously wicked of tongue. He called them his "Swans." (Others, not so charitably, called them "fruit fies.") He was seen with them at fashionable restaurants for lunch, notably La Côte Basque. Teir husbands tolerated the fve-foot- three author—also known as the "Tiny Terror," an appel- lation bestowed on him by Aileen Mehle, the "Suzy" of gossip columns—because he amused their wives. He was sometimes also referred to as their lapdog. In 1966, Truman threw himself a huge party at the Plaza Hotel in the name of Washington Post publisher Katha- rine Graham. Called the Black and White Ball, the masked affair became the talk of the town for months over specu- lation on who would (and would not) be invited, and re- mains legendary after saturation press coverage that was almost obscene. But as sometimes happens when persons are abruptly covered with fortune and fame, weird be- havior set in, occasioning our psychobiographer to shift into high gear. To coin a phrase from my Great Uncle Marshall, a sage Southerner if ever there was, Truman Capote, basking in all his celebrity, had suddenly become a "Big Ass Pete." His drinking increased; he tried cocaine. He began to have ugly public spats with luminaries such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. He made up falsehoods about befriending celebrities such as Greta Garbo and having sexual affairs with Hollywood stars like Errol Flynn. He frequently made a spectacle of himself, drunk or stoned, on television. He was arrested for drunk driving. It was also about this time that the Answered Prayers scandal broke. Depending on which version of Truman's story you be- lieve, he had planned, at least as far back as 1958, to do a big "faction"-type book about high society, which he felt himself uniquely destined to write. In some versions of the tale it was the sole reason he had kissed up to the Swans, to get into their boudoirs and learn their innermost, dirtiest secrets. In other accounts, he merely realized at some point that there was good stuff in his private conversations with these upper-crust mavens, with whom he had become the closest of friends. Whichever it was really doesn't matter; the result was the same: Answered Prayers was argu- ably the most shocking betrayal since Judas sold out Jesus Christ. No one was spared. Te vilest, most repulsive acts were described in the flthiest language imaginable. Ann Woodward, the socialite suspected of having murdered her husband in 1955 (later immortalized by Dominick Dunne in Te Two Mrs. Grenvilles) actually committed suicide after seeing an advance copy of a chapter entitled "La Côte Basque, 1965." Truman Capote in his New York apartment.