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Holiday 2014 / 2015 Tempus-Magazine.com Te book, in fact, was never fnished, but that didn't stop anything. Seven years after its due date, four chapters of the "by-then-muchanticipated" Answered Prayers began to appear in Esquire, at that time the smartest magazine around. Some of it is witty, some of it is bitchy, but practically none of it is printable in a respectable magazine such as this. By the time "La Côte Basque, 1965" appeared, the Swans were furious. Te barely disguised characters of Keith, Paley, Guggenheim, Onassis, Vanderbilt, Woodward, and others were publicly dragged through the sordid lies, infdelities, abortions, indiscretions, and other abominations which, until then, they had so naïvely revealed (or cavalierly gossiped about) across restaurant tables and in drawing rooms with "that dirty little toad," "hideous fag," "snake," "monster," etc., etc. Most vowed never to speak to Capote again, and most kept their word. NEVERTHELESS, ANSWERED PRAYERS WAS NOT only the talk of the town, it scandalized a large seg- ment of the nation. For his part, Truman seemed, at frst, amused and then defensive at the reception of his work, which his publisher had foolishly com- pared to Proust. "Well, who did they think they were talking to?" he hissed. "I'm a writer." He seemed to think that, sooner or later, his Swans would get over it and all would come right again. But to his dismay—and ultimately to his horror— that did not happen, and Truman began to realize that a considerable part of his life was suddenly closed to him forever. To absorb this, he began spending more time away from the city, at his country house in Bridgehampton, which is where I encountered him for the frst time. For a young writer in the late 1970s and early '80s, "the Hamptons" at the tip end of Long Island was a golden place to live. I had left my Washington news- paper job to write a novel, and when it was well-re- ceived, I took a house in the Hamptons, where I had friends. Much of the literary world was out there then: Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, Shana Alex- ander, Joe Heller, John Knowles, Betty Friedan, Wil- frid Sheed, Willie Morris, George Plimpton, Peter Mat- thiessen, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Others, such as Bill Styron, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer, would visit. Truman morphed easily back into this old crowd, lunching again among his own kinds of people at Bobby Van's or dining at Mortimers. He was open and friendly when I met him, likely because I was a fellow Alabamian, and we struck up a casual, speaking friendship. He sometimes drank too much, and once I drove him home after he had lost his driving license. He asked merely to be dropped off at the end of his long driveway to the ocean, and I watched him lurch into the night toward home. His biographers have produced evidence that, during this period, he was inconsolable over the loss of his Swans, nearly unraveled, went into depression, and developed "writer's block." It was said that he made overtures to regain the Swans' companionship. I was personally caught up in one of them. A "beard" is an old-time New York expression used to describe a man who is actually something other than what he seems to be. On a Saturday afternoon in February 1978 I inadvertently became Truman Capote's beard. He had called me out of the blue one day in Manhattan, and asked if I could come for lunch at his apartment in the U.N. Towers the following week. Unable to think of anything else to say, I said "yes"—which soon had me wondering who else was coming, and what my role in this luncheon was to be. Part of the puzzle was solved a few days later when Truman called to see if I'd mind bringing "a girl," whom he had also asked to the lunch. Her name was Hilary Byers, and she turned out to be an attractive woman in her thirties. We arrived at Truman's apart- ment and were the only people there besides Truman and a tall Chinese butler dressed in a white cutaway. Te apartment, which overlooked the East River, was decorated entirely in white: white rug, white furniture, including a white leather sofa, and mostly white art on the walls. Te pièce de résistance was N 46 HIS BIOGRAPHERS HAVE PRODUCED EVIDENCE THAT, DURING THIS PERIOD, HE WAS INCONSOLABLE OVER THE LOSS OF HIS SWANS, NEARLY UNRAVELED, WENT INTO DEPRESSION, AND DEVELOPED "WRITER'S BLOCK." P H O T O B Y H A R R Y B E N S O N / E X P R E S S / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; P H O T O B Y P I E R R E B O U L A T/ T H E L I F E P I C T U R E C O L L E C T I O N / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; P H O T O B Y V I N N I E Z U F F A N T E / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; P H O T O B Y J A R N O U X P A T R I C K / P A R I S M A T C H V I A G E T T Y I M A G E S ; P H O T O B Y R O N G A L E L L A , L T D . / W I R E I M A G E ; P H O T O B Y S A N T I V I S A L L I / G E T T Y I M A G E S