Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood,” the pip-speak literary master’s legendary bon mots had warped into a cartoon bitchiness better suited to “Hollywood Squares” than a Paris Review soirée.
Addled by drugs and alcohol and twisted by the suicided-death of his social-climbing mother, Capote hadn’t published anything of real significance in a decade.
But for nearly as long, he had dangled a tantalizing promise to the press and public: a quintessentially Capote-ian “nonfiction novel,” titled “Answered Prayers” that would tattle-tale on high society’s most salacious scuttlebutt.
In 1975, the first chapter of the work appeared in Esquire under the title “La Côte Basque, 1965” (a reference to the restaurant where the swans gathered for lunch on East 55th Street).He described the book like a weapon to People magazine: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet.
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