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 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Gloria in Excelsis”
In February 1964, Truman attends a boxing match with his friend Gloria Guinness. The pair attract almost as much attention as the fight itself. Like most of Truman’s female friends, Gloria is very wealthy; she is also witty, although some in her circle find her jokes abrasive. When Truman visits Gloria at her home in Palm Beach, he inspires the jealousy of C.Z. Guest, another friend, who insists that Truman stays at her home instead. Truman agrees to split his time in Palm Beach between the women. Gloria throws a huge party while Truman is with her, and does not invite C.Z. or her husband.
Gloria is born in 1912 and is raised to believe her beauty is her most important asset. After a brief marriage to a Dutch colonist at age 20, she moves to Paris at age 22, where she becomes a popular model and socialite. In 1935, she marries a German count, and gives birth to two children. As World War II begins, Gloria and her husband are swept into Nazi society. She begins an affair with an SS officer named Walter Schellenberg, who arranges for her to divorce her husband—still actively fighting in the war. In order to leave the country safely, she marries the son of an Egyptian ambassador. They divorce three years later, and she quickly marries banking heir Loel Guinness, who has himself been married twice previously.
Chapter 9 Summary: “She Is”
Gloria works hard to establish a social life after marrying Guinness, despite her close history with Nazi war criminals. Gloria and her husband become close friends with the Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII, King of England) and his wife Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. The presence of the Duke and Duchess at Gloria’s parties makes them automatically important, boosting Gloria’s social status.
Meanwhile, Truman lives simply in Taormina, focusing on writing. He adapts his novel The Grass Harp for Broadway alongside Tony-winning producer Arnold Saint Subber, but the show fails. Undeterred, Saint Subber convinces Truman to adapt one his short stories, “House of Flowers.” Hollywood producer David Selznick also hires Truman to rewrite the scripts of two of his films. Truman’s mother dies in New York, and Truman and his partner Jack Dunphy return to handle her estate, settling in Brooklyn.
Gloria develops a reputation as a fashion icon and a deadly wit. As Truman is developing his works for Broadway, Gloria writes a play of her own that a producer agrees to produce in London. Gloria’s husband forbids it, jealously insisting that it will take Gloria’s attention away from him. Gloria begins to feel as if she is merely a visitor in her own life—a life run by her husband. In the mid-60s, she begins to write a quarterly column in Harper’s Bazaar, in which she criticizes the youth-focused fashion of the age.
Chapter 10 Summary: “A Guest in the House”
In 1956, Truman meets C.Z. Guest at the intermission of My Fair Lady, the hottest new play on Broadway. Born Lucy Douglas Cochran in 1920, C.Z. is raised as a member of the elite of Boston society. As a result of her family’s wealth and insular community, she is raised believing that she can have anything she wants with very little work. Her debut into the social world of Boston causes scandal when her mother—a wealthy outsider from New York—throws her an elaborate coming-out party, breaking with tradition. C.Z. causes further scandal when begins attending professional hockey games with her sister and is rumored to be dating one of the players. When World War II begins, she joins a volunteer women’s brigade. This opens the door to other forms of work, and she signs with a theatrical agent, but has little success.
Truman also struggles on Broadway: House of Flowers opens to poor reviews, with critics taking personal digs at Truman’s sexuality. Truman takes an assignment reporting for The New Yorker on an American company of Black actors performing Porgy and Bess across Russia. The piece is a success, and is later published as a short book, cementing Truman’s role as a leading writer of narrative nonfiction.
When C.Z.’s career as an actress fails, she moves to Mexico City, where she meets Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, heir to the Phipps steel fortune and president of a Mexican airline. Like C.Z., Guest is generationally wealthy and does whatever he pleases. The couple are married at Ernest Hemingway’s estate in Cuba in 1947.
Chapter 11 Summary: “A Time of Reckoning”
Although C.Z.’s quick wit and natural beauty make her the center of attention wherever she goes, her new husband Winston Guest—a member of the Anglo-American elite—hates attention and resents her obvious desire to be a celebrity. Despite a few public fights in their first years of marriage, C.Z. and Guest settle into a comfortable marriage, based on their mutual understanding of the importance of their public persona. C.Z. becomes a style icon by working almost exclusively with American-born designer Main Rousseau Bocher, whose brand Mainbocher skyrocketed in popularity as a result. An award-winning equestrian, C.Z. is approached to design riding gear, but Guest rejects the idea.
Truman pitches the idea for Answered Prayers in secret, naming C.Z. as one of the potential subjects. Meanwhile, he finds commercial success with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a novella about a young girl desperate to find a rich husband. Leamer argues that Truman’s depiction of Holly Golightly’s dissatisfaction and yearning anticipate the critiques of patriarchy found in feminist works like Betty Freidan’s The Feminist Mystique.
Despite her growing social schedule, C.Z. is happiest at Templeton, the Guest country estate on Long Island. In 1962, she is photographed at the estate for the cover of Time magazine. As the 60s progress, C.Z.’s place in the fashion world declines as youth and individuality are increasingly celebrated. In 1967, the Guests are forced to auction off a number of the family’s possessions in order to pay their debts. They sell the family estate and move to a smaller property, which they name Templeton.
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
In this section, Leamer depicts the later years of socialites Gloria Guinness and C.Z. Guest to emphasize the cultural changes in 1960s and 70s New York. Gloria and C.Z. both became style icons by leveraging their fortunes to influence elite social circles and establish social trends, highlighting the text’s thematic exploration of Self-Presentation as an Art Form. Truman describes Gloria as an “artist of an odd variety” who uses her wealth to “fuse material elements—from food to fine motors—into fantasies that are both visible and tactile” (141). He describes the luxurious parties thrown by Gloria and her husband as deliberate “creations” (143), and her love of fashion as a “ceremony of presenting herself to the world in the best possible light” (164). These passages contribute to the depiction of Gloria as an artist intentionally using her wealth to build a life that functions as a work of art in order to inspire others.
Similarly, Leamer depicts C.Z. Guest as an artist intentionally shaping her life as performance art distinct from the world around her. Raised in the elitist and old-fashioned world of the so-called Boston Brahmins, C.Z. longs for “an inviting world beyond the gates of old Boston” (177). As a young adult, she develops “a certain theatrical energy” that distinguishes her from her cohorts in the Boston social scene. These passages suggest that C.Z. possesses a theatrical creativity that separates her from the rest of her old-money community. When she marries Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, she obtains the capital to transform her creative visions into “the most intriguing dinner parties of the era,” underscoring Leamer’s thematic interest in Marriage as a Business Arrangement (195). Leamer argues that C.Z. is “able to draw on an artistic world that her husband barely acknowledged,” and that her husband doesn’t recognize that she has “done so much to create” a beautiful life and home for them (195). As with his depiction of Gloria Guinness, Leamer’s depiction of C.Z. Guest suggests that she intentionally uses her wealth to create a beautiful life that others tried to emulate.
Leamer argues that as youth culture and the political spirit of the 1960s democratized culture, stylistic influence transferred from women like the swans to younger icons with new ideals. In the 1950s and early 1960s, American and European culture was largely influenced by wealthy socialites like Gloria Guinness and C.Z. Guest. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, American culture experienced a profound shift as “legions of youth came prancing onstage carrying their psychedelic banners […] declaring that the only true fashion was fashion forged in the street” (170). The reference to protest banners and street culture reflects the growing influence of counterculture forces in the 1960s, as “young women no longer looked to copy the clothes of the elite,” foreshadowing the declining cultural impact of the swans (204).
Leamer’s framing of the swans’ actions in the face of this cultural shift as petty and vitriolic evokes Truman’s own complicated relationship to these women, who recognized the decline of their own relevance as a loss of social capital and power. Leamer suggests Gloria Guinness and C.Z. Guest’s struggle to adapt to this new reality by highlighting their attempts to discredit the influence of the emerging social and cultural elite. For example, rather than celebrate the new generation of fashion icons that were building artistic lives in the same way she had once done, Gloria writes vicious essays against young women in fashion, including one called “Damn Those Young Girls!” (170). She expresses pity for “the younger ones—the ones that will have to face the seventies amidst all the glittering moral squalor that has become so fashionable” (171). C.Z. Guest is similarly horrified by what she sees as “slovenly hippies showing up at black-tie events in clothes that were a direct assault on anything classy and respectable” (204). The contrast in these passages between elite, upper-class culture and the new youth movement reflects cultural changes in 1960s and 1970s New York.
