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 12-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “Only Maids Fall in Love”
In the late 1950s, Truman meets Marella Agnelli in New York City. Married to Gianni Agnelli, heir to the Fiat auto fortune and the former lover of Pamela Hayward, Marella flatters Truman’s belief that he is a great writer. He begins collecting details about her life and her husband for his new novel, Answered Prayers.
Marella is born into a noble Neapolitan family. After the global stock crash of 1929, her father is forced to work for the first time and becomes a diplomat, moving the family around Europe and exposing Marella to different worldviews. Marella studies art in Paris, then moves to New York, where she works as a model. She meets Agnelli through the machinations of his sisters, who are desperate to stop him from seeing Pamela. She marries him despite knowing he is not a good man.
Agnelli’s grandfather became a partner in the company that would eventually become Fiat in 1899. During the First World War, Fiat produced vehicles for Mussolini’s fascist forces, increasing the family’s fortune. Born in 1921, Gianni Agnelli is raised knowing he will inherit the company but is reluctant to work hard for his fortune. He is known for his womanizing and narcissism—things that remain unchanged by his marriage and the birth of his children. In order to try to satisfy her husband, Marella transforms the gardens of Villar Perosa, his ancestral home, into a carefully designed park. Thrilled by the project, she begins renovating the couple’s 10 homes.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Divided Lives”
In 1959, Truman is distracted from his work on Answered Prayers by a brief story in The New York Times about the murder of a family in Kansas. Along with his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee, Truman travels to Garden City, Kansas, to report on the murder for The New Yorker. In Kansas, Nelle helps the flamboyant Truman to connect with the conservative locals, enabling them to visit the home where Herbert William Clutter, his wife Bonnie, and their children Nancy and Kenyon were brutally murdered. Investigators quickly arrested the killers, Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith, drifters who had been incarcerated together and believed that the Clutters were wealthy. Truman and Nelle take hundreds of pages of notes, and Truman signs a contract to write a book about the murders.
Meanwhile, Marella becomes consumed with jealousy over her husband Gianni’s affairs with prominent women like actress Anita Ekberg and Marella’s own friend Laudomia Hercolani. Despite her growing reputation as one of the most beautiful and fashionable women in the world and her efforts to be the perfect wife, Marella cannot keep her husband’s attention.
Truman travels to Spain with Jack Dunphy to work on the Kansas novel, now called In Cold Blood, and returns several times to visit Hickock and Smith on death row. Desperate for an ending to his novel, he hopes for an execution while promising Smith to help their defense. Rumors swirl that Truman is in love with Smith. After witnessing the executions, Truman returns to New York, visibly devastated by what he has seen in Kansas.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Princess from an Ancient Realm”
In Cold Blood becomes a huge success after its publication in January 1966, and Truman becomes one of the most famous authors in America. The book takes its place as the defining example of narrative nonfiction, a literary genre that combines elements of narrative fiction with nonfiction reporting. After five years of researching and writing the project, Truman is emotionally exhausted but has no time to recover as he is quickly swept into celebrity life. In order to capitalize on his success, he throws an extravagant Black and White ball at the Plaza Hotel, ostensibly in honor of Washington Post publisher Kay Graham, whom he met through the Agnellis. All of the swans attend the ball, including the newest, Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Truman’s friend Jackie Kennedy Onassis. The ball catapults Truman into the public Imagination as a glamorous celebrity.
Despite the fact that he hasn’t written much of the new novel, Truman talks at length about Answered Prayers and sells the film rights for $350,000 ($2.65 million today). He arranges a lunch with all of the swans, upsetting Marella, who is insulted at being seated with her husband’s former mistress. When photographers appear, she feels used. When Truman reads excerpts of Answered Prayers to Marella, she’s horrified, comparing it to a gossip column. Marella soon grows tired of Truman’s vicious gossiping and ends their relationship. When Truman arranges to meet with her through Lee Radziwill, she denies cutting him out, but they never speak again.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Fairy Tales”
When Truman meets Lee Radziwill in 1962, he is shocked by her deep and obvious jealousy of her older sister, former First Lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Despite the fact that she’s married to a Polish prince and has many luxurious homes, Lee cannot help comparing herself to her sister.
Born Caroline Lee Bouvier, Lee is raised in a luxurious apartment in New York City and spends her summers at an estate in the Hamptons. Her father, Jack, is a rakish Wall Street executive 16 years older than his wife, Janet, whose wealthy family secretly funds their extravagant lifestyle. After her parents’ divorce, Lee and her sister Jackie are sent to prestigious girls’ schools where they are frequently compared, instilling a deep jealously in Lee. When her mother remarries and has more children, Lee feels abandoned. She channels her resentment and anxiety into a severe eating disorder. Feeling more confident in her slimmer body, she has a public debut that rivals her sister’s.
Lee briefly studies art at Sarah Lawrence, but drops out in order to study singing in Rome. After a few months, she stops her lessons and spends the year traveling. She then takes a position as an editor at Harper’s Bazaar in New York before marrying publisher Michael Canfield at age 20. Dissatisfied with his life in New York City, Lee pushes her husband to take a new job in London, where she meets Stanislaw “Stas” Radziwill, a former Polish prince with a real estate fortune. After a very public affair, Lee and Radziwill divorce their spouses and marry each other in 1959, when Lee is pregnant with Radziwill’s child.
Chapters 12-15 Analysis
In this section, Leamer positions Answered Prayers as emblematic of Truman’s simultaneous fascination with and disdain for the swans. While Truman celebrates their ability to use Self-Presentation as an Art Form, he also delights in exposing the scandalous secrets their glossy personas obscure. Leamer’s depiction of the swans’ elite families reveals the many ways they disguised financial and personal crises through displays of opulence. Many of the women’s families put on the appearance of wealth to disguise their financial losses. Both the swans and their families see marrying wealthy men as the key to solving their financial problems and preserving their social capital, underscoring the text’s thematic interest in Marriage as a Business Arrangement. Before her marriage to Gianni Agnelli, Marella’s family is “running out of money,” and her father is forced to take a job for the first time in his aristocratic family’s history. Leamer notes that the family shared this problem “with many European aristocrats” (211). Similarly, Lee’s father, Jack, disguises his financial distress by secretly accepting money from his wealthy father-in-law to pay their rent. Jack “never acknowledge[s] that he [is] not paying for the place, instead strutting in and out of the building as if he owned it” (255). In both instances, the patriarchs of the families disguise their financial problems behind a glamorous, aristocratic exterior, underscoring the disconnect between the veneer of wealth and power and the reality beneath it.
Leamer makes this disconnect explicit by focusing on ways the swans present a united front in their marriages despite rampant infidelity and private struggles. For example, Leamer dedicates pages to describing Gianni Agnelli’s infidelity to his wife Marella, then notes that, “when Gianni and Marella went out together, they were a splendid couple” (230), hiding their marriage problems from the world. Lee Radziwill’s maternal grandparents offer a similar example: Because “it would not have done for the Lees to divorce or even separate,” Lee’s maternal grandparents “simply lived on different floors” in one of their buildings (255). Their story offers further evidence of the ways appearance lived at odds with reality in elite circles: “To the world they appeared to be together, but they rarely had the unpleasant experience of seeing each other” (255). These examples reflect Truman’s view of the lives of the social elite as both opulent and empty, and hint at a larger critique of elite social privilege in mid-century America.
Leamer structures his descriptions of the swans and their lives to highlight their greatest flaws and insecurities. As he introduces the character of Lee Radziwill, the last of Truman’s swans, Leamer describes her jealousy of her older sister Jackie Kennedy Onassis as “the most painful secret of her life” (253). Leamer’s depiction of Lee throughout these chapters subtly and negatively compares her to her sister. Leamer notes that the first time Lee feels confident in herself is at her older sister’s debut; Lee arrives in a “stunning strapless pink gown of her own design” and draws attention to herself (259). Leamer notes that Jackie “ha[s] no great interest in clothes” but instead “projected a natural beauty and wore little makeup” (259). Although the anecdote introduces Lee, the comparison plays up Lee’s greatest insecurities when judged against her sister. In another instance, Leamer describes how Lee’s first husband Michael Canfield “hauled her off to parties up dank staircases to grubby apartments where poorly dressed writers drank cheap wine” (263). Again, Leamer compares Lee unfavorably to her sister, noting that “while Jackie would have found such excursions a worthy adventure […] Lee found them disgusting and far beneath her standards” (263). Leamer’s framing of Lee affirms what he identifies as Lee’s deepest fear: her inadequacy compared to her sister Jackie.
