By GUY TREBAY
What if you gave a party
and everybody came? That is precisely what occurred on the drizzly night of
Nov. 28, 1966, when 540 of Truman Capote’s nearest and dearest turned out for
what the writer insisted on calling his “little masked ball for Kay Graham and
all of my friends.”
The evening survives on
film and in the recollections of the guests who are still alive 50 years later.
It was a party of a kind we are unlikely to see again, given that it allowed
for a then unheard-of, but now more common, coming together of disparate social
spheres.
“There will never be
another first time that somebody like Andy Warhol could step into a room with
somebody like Babe Paley,” said Deborah Davis, the author of the 2006 book
“Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and the Black and
White Ball,” referring to one of Capote’s so-called swans — the socialite wife
of William Paley, who built the CBS network.
Before the Black and White
Ball, no one had ever imagined, let alone attended, a formal party with a guest
list so wildly catholic that it brought into one room the poet Marianne Moore
and Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lionel Trilling, Lynda Bird Johnson
and the Maharani of Jaipur, the Italian princess Luciana Pignatelli (wearing a
60-carat diamond borrowed from Harry Winston) and the documentary filmmaker
Albert Maysles.
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When Capote summoned his
pals for a night of dancing (and spaghetti and chicken hash at midnight), he
was as famous as he would ever be, and flush with the profits from his
critically acclaimed best-selling nonfiction book “In Cold Blood.”
In the Grand Ballroom of
the Plaza hotel, starting at 10 o’clock that night, European aristocrats rubbed
elbows with novelists and scholars; social register blue bloods drank Taittinger
Champagne with the denizens of Hollywood and Broadway; the stolid middle-class
citizens of Garden City, Kan., who had played host to Capote during the years
he had spent researching his masterpiece, danced to the Peter Duchin Orchestra
alongside the photographer and film director Gordon Parks, who would later joke
that he — along with Harry Belafonte and Ralph and Fanny Ellison — represented
“the black of the Black and White Ball.”
In the half-century since
that Monday evening just after Thanksgiving, countless other parties have
evoked, interpreted or outright copied Capote’s ball.
The scene at the Plaza
hotel. Credit Elliott Erwitt/Magnum
“There are probably more
Black and White Balls at this point than Civil War re-enactments,” Ms. Davis
said.
Most memorably, perhaps,
the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs used the party as a template for a 29th-birthday
wingding he tossed for himself in 1998, reportedly spending more than $500,000
to furnish Cipriani with a translucent monogrammed dance floor and Plexiglas
go-go booths for the amusement of a collection of celebrities, among them
Martha Stewart, Ronald Perelman, Sarah Ferguson and Donald J. Trump.
Now it is difficult to
recall a time when the borders between society and celebrity were sharply
delineated and seldom crossed. And in an era when many celebrities attend
parties because they have been paid to do so (and post the evidence later on
Instagram), it is startling to remember a time when people went to parties to
have fun.
A certain indulgent
pleasure can be had in reliving the innocent wonder that inspired Capote’s
Black and White Ball, a party its host had in some ways begun to plan as a
precocious, lonely 8-year-old in Monroeville, Ala., but did not have the social
power to pull off until the year of his huge literary success.
“Truman had always had a
fantasy of the grand world, the smart world, the literary world, each of which
was in some ways precious to him,” said Robert Silvers, a founder and editor of
The New York Review of Books.
“It was tremendously
important to Truman to be a star in all of those worlds,” he added, referring
the elites of heredity and of accomplishment Capote cultivated with equivalent
ardor. “The mixture of all those groups was so obviously an emanation of
Truman’s dream.”
Even after a half-century,
the party retains a dreamlike aura, one supported by photographs and newsreels
that show the guests in black tie and monochrome couture dresses, masks by
Adolfo and a young milliner who went by the single name Halston.
Truman Capote said that he
paid 39 cents at F.A.O. Schwarz for the mask he wore at his Black and White
Ball in 1966. Credit Barton Silverman/The New York Times
Sometimes buried in the
retellings of the Black and White Ball myth is its guest of honor, Katharine
Graham, whose family owned Newsweek and The Washington Post. After the suicide
three years earlier of her husband, Philip Graham, Ms. Graham, who would go on
to run the newspaper for two of the most noteworthy decades in its storied
history, seemed thrust into a role for which she had little preparation, said
one party guest, the psychotherapist Gillian Walker.
Raised in elite Washington
circles, Ms. Walker was a childhood friend of Ms. Graham’s children and thus
had a singular perspective on how power was distributed in those pre-feminist
years.
“For all those women, those swans, however
fancy they were, or whatever, they were still wives,” Ms. Walker said,
referring to Ms. Graham, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Vanderbilt and Gloria
Guinness. “Because of the complexities of his own life, Truman as an outsider
understood these women. And what he did for Kay was such a great thing, giving
her this party that brought her into the larger world she had left behind when
she met Phil.”
The reserves of compassion
that were characteristic of his best writing were deeply ingrained in Capote’s
nature. Or they were, at least, in the days before his big party, which some
consider the writer’s unintended swan song, a final golden moment before he
began a descent into drugs and drink.
“People forget Truman was
very gracious,” said Ashton Hawkins, for decades the senior counsel to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, who was a lawyer on the way up in 1966. He recalled
the host taking him by the arm and steering him toward a corner of the
ballroom, where Rose Kennedy was stranded alone.
“I thought that was fun,
that you could sit down with the mother of the president,” Mr. Hawkins said.
“Everybody talked to everybody and just sat down where they wanted to sit.”
The relatively loose
atmosphere led the bandleader Peter Duchin to later characterize the ball as
having “closed an era of elegant exclusiveness and ushered in another of media
madness.”
“It was a marvelous party
because there was such a mixture of people, all kinds, all ages,” said the
jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane, who, at 34, was among the younger attendees. The big
moment of the evening for him, Mr. Lane said, was being walked to a gilded
settee where the actress Tallulah Bankhead sat holding court and furiously
smoking.
“I talked to her for about
three minutes, but then could say I’d met Tallulah Bankhead,” Mr. Lane said
with a laugh. “In the old days, it wasn’t a publicist society, and now it’s all
publicists. People then had publicists to keep their names out of the papers,
and nobody’d ever been to Kardashia.”
From the first, Mr. Capote
had a canny understanding of fame and a prescient sense of celebrity’s untapped
potential. Limiting press attendance inside the party to four hand-selected journalists
— including one, Charlotte Curtis, from this newspaper — he heightened its air
of exclusivity while managing potential criticism about the affair’s overall
modesty.
European guests familiar
with, say, the heady opulence of Carlos de Beistegui’s 1951 masked ball held at
the Palazzo Labia in Venice, were heard to snipe about Capote’s modest supper
menu and candles-and-balloons décor. Yet, in a sense, they were missing the
point. Capote understood that the ball’s true ornaments were its boldface attendees,
even going so far as to provide The Times with a guest list, which the
newspaper published the following day.
Never mind that some of
those listed, like Greta Garbo, were not actually at the party. The effect had
been achieved. Before The Times published a “List of Those Who Were Invited to
the Party at the Plaza Hotel,” that distinction had been reserved mainly for
White House dinners and the like.
In many ways, the Black and
White Ball served as a signpost pointing the way to Kardashia, that mythical
land where accomplishment is largely optional and fame is an end unto itself.
And it also served to help blur forever the lines separating public from
private.
Of the attendees wearing
masks, “There was something radically democratic in the notion of inviting
these very famous people to a party and then telling them to hide their faces,”
Ms. Davis said. At the last minute, though, the canny host had someone announce
each of the guests as they arrived.
Almost until that night 50
years ago, said the editor and publisher Jason Epstein, New York society
observed the rigid caste-based system it had followed since the Knickerbocker
days, one dominated by a handful of families not much different from those
depicted by Edith Wharton and Henry James.
“Then here came this
out-of-town gay fellow who conquered society to the extent that he gave that
party,” Mr. Epstein said. “Truman created this new class of talented,
good-natured, funny people, and that lasted for quite a long time. Who really
knows what is society in New York anymore?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/fashion/black-and-white-ball-anniversary-truman-capote.html
