49 pages • 1 hour read
Laurence LeamerCapote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Answered Prayers”
In the summer of 1975, Truman Capote is one of the most famous authors in the world. His hit novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) had been adapted into a Hollywood movie starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961, catapulting him to fame. In 1967, a film adaptation of his wildly popular true-crime book In Cold Blood (1966) was released, cementing his place in popular culture. He is also a frequent guest on late-night talk shows, where he tells stories about his extraordinary life among the elite of New York City society.
For years, Truman has been at work on a new novel, Answered Prayers, which he believes will be the defining work of his career. The novel focuses on the exploits of a group of wealthy, beautiful women as they navigate New York’s elite social scene. It is very loosely based on the lives of Truman’s real friends, known as “the swans”: Barbara “Babe” Paley, considered the most beautiful woman in the world; Nancy “Slim” Keith, the quintessential California girl; Pamela Hayward, a much-married Englishwoman; Gloria Guinness, a brilliant Mexican-born beauty; Lucy Douglas “C.Z.” Guest, a stubborn elitist; Marella Agnelli, an Italian princess; and Lee Radziwill, the sister of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Truman is drawn to each of these women not only for their beauty and style but for their tenacity and ambition. He is also disturbed by their arrogance and ignorance of the real world.
After reading an excerpt, Truman’s biographer and friend Gerald Clarke warns that the swans will recognize themselves in the novel and resent him. Truman dismisses his concerns.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Babe in the Woods”
Babe Paley and Truman meet by chance and immediately become fast friends. Truman is drawn to her beauty, which he recognizes as a consciously constructed work of art. He sees that, despite having a perfect life, Babe is not happy: She’s anorexic, and her husband, Bill Paley, is strict and controlling. Babe teaches Truman how to move among the elite, and he introduces her to the literary world, especially Edith Wharton, whose work resonates with her. Like Wharton’s heroines, Babe has been raised to find a wealthy husband. Her sister Betsey marries the son of future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and hosts parties at the White House that introduce Babe to eligible men. Although she briefly works as an editor at Vogue, Babe feels her only real job is to marry rich.
Babe and Truman bond over their complicated relationships with their mothers. Capote’s mother, Lillie Mae, an ambitious 17-year-old when she married his father, Arch, in 1923, gives birth to Truman a year later, despite her desire to have an abortion. Arch, a shiftless and unfaithful man, disappears for months at a time. In her husband’s absence, Lillie Mae has a series of affairs. When Truman is six, she leaves him with her cousins in Monroeville, Alabama, indefinitely. Truman’s aunts and his neighbor Nelle Harper Lee (future author of To Kill a Mockingbird) encourage his imagination and storytelling.
In 1940, Babe marries Stanley Mortimer, the wealthy but manic-depressive grandson of a founder of Standard Oil. When Mortimer joins the Navy after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Babe briefly follows him to Florida before returning to her life in New York City. By the time the war ends in 1945, they are divorced, and Babe is eyeing her next husband.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Lilies of the Valley”
While still married to Mortimer, Babe begins pursuing Bill Paley, the charismatic founder of the CBS network. Paley has a reputation for womanizing that stretches to his youth. In 1931, Paley meets Dorothy Hart Hearst, who immediately divorces her husband John Randolph Hearst in order to marry him. Dorothy transforms Paley from a rough bachelor to a sophisticated New Yorker. A few years into their marriage, Paley begins having affairs, including one with Pamela Churchill, the daughter-in-law of the British prime minister. Paley and Dorothy divorce in 1948, and Paley and Babe are married four days later. The marriage is largely a business arrangement: Paley gets a beautiful wife and acceptance into New York’s elite social circles in exchange for funding Babe’s extravagant lifestyle. Together, they work hard to build an opulent and beautiful life. The marriage appears happy, but Bill’s infidelity and insistence on perfection make Babe’s life miserable. She confides in Truman, who nevertheless encourages her to stay in the marriage and enjoy the benefits of being Mrs. Bill Paley. Truman gossips about the Paleys behind Babe’s back.
In 1933, nine-year old Truman moves to New York to join his mother, now using the name Nina, and new stepfather Joe Capote, who adopts Truman and gives him his last name. Nina resents Truman as a reminder of her first marriage, and tries to cure him of what she believes is the disease of homosexuality. Nina and Joe send Truman to a military school in upstate New York, where he is sexually assaulted by fellow students. In 1939, the family moves to Greenwich, Connecticut, where Capote begins to study the habits of his wealthy neighbors.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Slim Pickings”
One of Babe’s best friends is Nancy “Slim” Hayward, the quintessentially-Californian wife of producer Leland Hayward. Truman ingratiates himself with Slim by slowly revealing tragedies to earn her trust. Born Nancy Raye Gross in 1917, Slim was raised in Salinas, California by a cruel father and loving but timid mother. In 1928, Slim’s young brother Buddy is accidentally killed in a fire, permanently marring her parents’ relationship. When they divorce, Slim’s father asks her to testify to her mother’s unfit behavior. Slim refuses, and never sees her father again. After graduation, she spends two months in Palm Springs, where she encounters men from Hollywood for the first time.
Like Slim, Truman struggles in school, focusing instead on building a robust social life. He meets and becomes lifelong friends with rich socialites like Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Oona and Gloria are the first women Truman knows who marry rich older men at a young age. Meanwhile, Truman takes a job at The New Yorker but struggles to fit in at the magazine. He loses the job when he accidentally insults the poet Robert Frost at a writer’s conference.
Slim’s beauty, confidence, and wit make her an enormously popular socialite in Los Angeles. From the moment she meets director Howard Hawks, she is determined to be his wife, despite the fact that he is already married. After their marriage in 1941, however, Hawks resumes his womanizing ways, leading her to be hospitalized multiple times for emotional exhaustion.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The opening chapters of Capote’s Women establish the complicated friendship dynamics between Truman and the swans by characterizing Truman as both loving and cruelly manipulative towards his friends. Leamer suggests that the basis of Truman’s relationships with the swans is his ability to see them “as they truly were” (3). In particular, Truman understands their dedication to living beautiful, opulent lives “as a kind of living art,” introducing the text’s thematic interest in Self-Presentation as an Art Form (5). Although other men dismissed the swans’ interest in fashion and beauty as “trivial and self-indulgent,” Truman understood that “it took discipline and focus […] to create such a persona and maintain it decade after decade” (4). Truman describes Babe as “an artist who had created herself as an inspired work of living sculpture” (10). As an artist himself, Truman sees and values the work the swans put into fashioning their opulent lives, viewing their constructed personas as works of art. Leamer suggests that this mutual recognition and respect between Truman and the swans is the foundation of their relationships.
Leamer juxtaposes Truman’s admiration and disdain for the swans to demonstrate the complex nature of his relationship to wealth and fame. Although Truman respects the swans for building beautiful lives, he’s often cruel and disloyal to them, gossiping about them to each other and asserting that “they’re too dumb” to recognize themselves in his work (7). He helps Babe’s husband, Bill Paley, attempt to cheat, “blithely betraying Babe, the woman who was his closest friend” (46). Babe’s manicurist reports that when she visits Babe’s home, she often finds Truman “lying on the bed telling savage tales about the other friends” (47). Later, when visiting another woman in the circle, she finds Truman “there too, sprawling out royally on the bed, telling the same mean-spirited tales, only this time Babe was in the mix” (47). These anecdotes suggest that, despite Truman’s apparent devotion to Babe, his behavior reveals an equally strong contempt for her. The tension between Truman’s intimate understanding of his friends and his propensity for cruelty remains essential to his characterization throughout Capote’s Women.
Truman’s fascination with the swans’ marriages and affairs reflects the book’s thematic interest in Marriage as a Business Arrangement. In the opening pages, Leamer explicitly identifies the swans’ marriages as a financial achievement: “They did not come from grand money but had married into it, most of them multiple times” (1). Leamer’s thematic engagement with the financial benefits of these elite marriages is explicitly defined in the narrative of Babe Paley. Babe spends her early adulthood searching for a wealthy man to marry, leading her into an unhappy marriage with Bill Paley. Leamer believes that Paley’s “largesse toward her was not generosity but a shrewd investment so she would play the role he married her to play” (35). Truman repeats this idea directly to Babe, telling her that “Bill bought [her]” and encouraging her to “look upon being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job,” reframing marriage as a mutually beneficial financial transaction rather than a romantic partnership (48).
Truman’s perspective on society marriages, as told by Leamer, also points to his view of Parenting Among the Social Elite in Mid-Century America, suggesting that if it was a socialite’s job to marry a rich man, it was a parent’s job to equip them to do so. Babe’s mother, Katherine Cushing, believed that “matrimony was a serious game” that Babe and her sisters were “raised to play astonishingly well” (14). To Katherine, it was “a long-term game,” and the “trophy at the finish line” was “immensely rich men” to marry each of her three daughters (17). The repeated framing of society marriage as a game in these passages reflects the cultural norms of elite, white, New York society in the 20th century that viewed the marriage market as a place of winners and losers. The pressure Katherine placed on her daughters—“not just the aspiration but the necessity that they marry rich, socially prominent men”—defines the arcs of several of the swans in Leamer’s text (19).
