49 pages • 1-hour read
Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era
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Index of Terms
Café Society
The term café society appeared in the early 20th century as a way of describing the glamorous, cosmopolitan crowd of artists, intellectuals, celebrities, and socialites who frequented fashionable cafés and nightclubs in London, Paris, and New York City. Members of the café society often threw and attended elaborate parties which were photographed for magazines like Vogue and The New Yorker. They were also known for their complicated personal lives, which were breathlessly reported in the same magazines.
Leamer describes Truman as “the crown prince of café society” (294), and depicts the women he called his swans as essential participants in “an international café society in which celebrity, money, and power were enough to gain entry” (209). Café society is also the focus of Truman’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers, which is set at a fashionable restaurant and seeks to expose “the secrets and intrigues among Manhattan café society” (282). Although Truman’s primary goal is to become a part of this elite society, Leamer notes that the writer finished his life as he began it—as an outsider in this elite world. After the fallout from the publication of “Le Côte Basque 1965,” Truman was rejected by most of New York’s café society, who closed ranks against him.
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American author whose works explored the intricate social dynamics and moral constraints of upper-class New York society during the Gilded Age and early 20th century. Born into a wealthy, socially prominent family, Wharton had an insider’s understanding of the rigid hierarchies and unspoken codes that governed elite society. In The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton depicts elite Marriage as a Business Arrangement—pragmatic transactions reflecting the compromises demanded by a patriarchal and status-obsessed culture. Wharton’s female protagonists grapple with the moral and emotional costs of insisting on autonomy in a society that defines their worth by their marital prospects and adherence to decorum. Her keen insight into Gilded Age culture in The Age of Innocence earned her the Pulitzer Prize in fiction; she was the first woman to receive the award.
Wharton appears throughout Capote’s Women as both a model for Truman’s Answered Prayers and a lens for understanding the lives of his female friends. Truman explicitly compares his work-in-progress to the books of “Marcel Proust and Edith Wharton [who] had written classic novels focused on the elite of their ages” (2). Truman’s explicit identification of himself with Wharton’s iconic works suggests that he believed Answered Prayers would be a literary success. Leamer also uses Wharton’s work as a lens for understanding the lives of women like Babe Paley, writing that “The Age of Innocence was published in 1920, but all these decades later, the social ambience for elite women in New York City high society had not radically changed” (14).
Mid-Century Magazines for Women
In the mid-20th century, American magazines for women like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and The Ladies’ Home Journal were a powerful force in shaping the nation’s intellectual and cultural landscape, pointing to the text’s thematic engagement in Self-Presentation as an Art Form. Although women’s magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue were best known for their emphasis on fashion, these venues also published commentary from literary icons like Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion on contemporary culture and issues facing women. Leamer suggests that Truman intentionally sought out women’s magazines for his early publications because “they were publishing the most exciting new short fiction in America” and that he “did not seem to care or even notice that much of mainstream media looked down on these magazines as serving a decidedly secondary audience: women” (79). Leamer’s depiction of Truman’s early career positions women’s magazines as essential to his success.
Women’s magazines also offered an opportunity for women to achieve career success in a male-dominated world. Although elite women of their age were not expected to work, Babe Paley worked as an editor for Vogue, Gloria Guinness wrote columns for Harper’s Bazaar, and C.Z. Guest wrote columns on gardening and landscaping for The Ladies’ Home Journal. The fact that all these women took positions in women’s magazines provides evidence for Leamer’s description of the editorial offices of these magazines as “overwhelmingly female worlds where an upscale woman […] felt comfortable making her way” (18). Although none of the swans built lengthy careers in women’s magazines, they used their positions to make connections and build confidence that benefited their social status.
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