Truman Capote And The Secrets Of The Affluent

One book that should be optioned for a motion picture, if it hasn't already, is The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin (Delacorte Press, 2016). This page-turner, which gives the reader a fly-on-the-wall view of events, is a fictionalized account of Truman Capote's befriending and betrayal of five wealthy Upper East Side women-- he called them his swans-- including Barbara "Babe" Paley, the wife of William Paley, the founder of the CBS broadcast network, and the swan with whom Capote had the closest relationship.

Capote wrote  a short story called " La Cote Basque, 1965" that was published in 1975 in Esquire magazine. The story revealed the secrets of the aforementioned women. These secrets were told to him with the belief that he would keep them confidential. When he didn't, they felt hurt and betrayed and as a result they shut him out of their lives. Capote never recovered from this ostracism.

It's too bad the late Philip Seymour Hoffman isn't around to reprise his portrayal of Capote in a possible film adaptation of The Swans of Fifth Avenue.

Note: The New York Times ran a story by Joseph Berger with the headline, "Cote Basque, A Society Temple, Is Closing" (September 18, 2003) that described the restaurant as "the high-society temple of classic French cuisine [located in Manhattan] that became the setting of a catty and thinly veiled excerpt from an unfinished novel by Truman Capote...."