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.
Themes
Marriage as a Business Arrangement
Throughout Capote’s Women, Leamer suggests that the marriages of the elite, upper-class women Truman Capote called his swans were deeply unhappy and rooted in inequality. He paints a picture of elite society in 20th century New York in which women viewed marriage to upper-class men as the only path to secure their own wealth and build a place for themselves in a world that privileged white, male power. In keeping with this image, Leamer describes the swans’ husbands as men who believed that their wealth entitled them to treat their wives as objects and status symbols. Leamer attributes this attitude to the widespread misogyny of mid-20th century America. He positions Bill and Babe Paley as exemplary of this kind of transactional relationship. Leamer writes that Bill’s willingness to fund Babe’s extravagant lifestyle was “not generosity but a shrewd investment so she would play the role he married her to play”—that of beautiful, obedient wife (35). Truman repeats this idea directly to Babe, telling her, “Bill bought you […] Look upon being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job” (48). Although Truman encouraged Babe to celebrate her “job” as Mrs. Paley, Leamer acknowledges that Babe had little say in the arrangement in a world governed by white, male patriarchy: “Bill was penny-pinching to Babe, doling out money to his wife like a child’s allowance (12). The use of financial terms such as “investment” “job” and “dole” in these passages underscores the significant financial inequality in the Paleys’ relationship, as Bill has full control over Babe’s financial life.
Leamer further suggests that Bill’s financial contributions to Babe’s life were his only meaningful attempt to connect with her, and that he treated her largely with indifference. Babe herself notes that she “was just another acquisition” in her husband’s life (46). Rather than seeing Babe as an emotional partner, Bill viewed her as “akin to a splendid piece of art that he laboriously acquired and set out on his drawing room wall” (35). Leamer invokes the word “acquire” in various forms in these passages to emphasize that Bill Paley saw his wife an object to be obtained.
Leamer attributes these attitudes not purely to personal failings on the part of men like Paley, but to a widespread culture of misogyny. In such a culture, Leamer asserts, a beautiful woman like Babe “was obviously placed on earth to amuse and comfort [Bill], as decorative and unimportant as the dumb girls who aid the magician to do his tricks on the stage” (217). This passage reflects the ubiquitous nature of two misogynistic (and conflicting) beliefs of the time: first, that women should serve men by amusing, comforting, and aiding them, and second, that women were inherently inferior and thus comparatively unimportant.
Parenting Among the Social Elite in Mid-Century America
Leamer’s depiction of mid-20th-century family life in Capote’s Women centers on the parenting of the social elite. Leamer does this to highlight how the misogyny, paternalism, and transactional nature that governed the lives of the elite also shaped the worldviews of their children. Leamer suggests that although wealthy couples loved their children, their primary focus was often their business endeavors and social lives, and that parents were “not going to let [children] disarrange [their] fast-paced life” (85). For example, Leamer argues that, for Babe and Bill Paley and other upper-class Americans in the mid-20th century, “children were simply not a central focus of their lives” (43). He asserts that wealthy families “shuttled the children into the arms of nannies and private schools, out of sight and, often, out of mind” (43). Pamela Harriman’s son Winston—grandson of Winston Churchill—was not raised in his mother’s household but was “brought up largely by his nanny” (112). The repeated references to nannies and other carers throughout Leamer’s text indicate that the work of raising these children was not done by parents, but by outsiders paid to do so.
While Leamer writes about such parental disinterest using neutral language, his tone turns particularly critical when discussing women who abandon their children for men. For example, he describes Truman’s mother, Lillie Mae, as being notorious for bringing “a never-ending parade of men, men, men” into the home around her young son. At age four, she began “locking him in hotel rooms and leaving for the evening” (20). Leamer frames the image of a mother locking her four-year old son in a strange place so she can meet men as a striking condemnation of mid-century parenting. Similarly, he describes how Pamela Harriman “dumped young Winston off on a friend and set off alone” (116) to seduce Gianni Agnelli, despite the fact that “young Winston […] would be deemed illegitimate if his mother got an annulment so she could become Gianni’s Catholic wife” (119). The repeated references to her son as “young Winston” in these passages demonstrates the child’s vulnerability and highlights Leamer’s view of Pamela as abandoning her parental responsibilities. Leamer does this without extending equal criticism to the fathers of the children.
Self-Presentation as an Art Form
In Capote’s Women, Leamer suggests that Truman was drawn to the women he called the swans because of their highly curated fashion and beauty. Although other men dismissed these pursuits as trivial, Leamer believes Truman saw these crafted public personas as an intentional attempt to make the body a work of art, and that he valued fashion because he knew his female friends wielded it as a tool to powerful effect. Leamer believes that Truman recognized immediately on meeting the swans that their famous charms were “carefully cultivated” and that it took “discipline and focus” for the women “to create such [personas] and maintain [them] decade after decade” (4). The emphasis in these passages on cultivation, discipline, and creation suggests that fashion, etiquette, charm, and beauty are intentional, cultivated skills necessary for success in their world. Leamer describes high fashion as “a mystical, magical thing that transformed all who touched it” (50). As an example, he discusses the formerly-disgraced Duchess of Windsor, who used “fashion and the image she created as the engine of her advance” in American society, underscoring the image of fashion as a tool used to transform and transport an individual into an icon (158).
Throughout the text, Leamer echoes Truman in referring to the swans and their intentional fashion as “a kind of living art” (5). He refers to Babe Paley as “an artist who had created herself as an inspired work of living sculpture” (10) and describes her talents in “all the decorative arts, the most important work of art being herself” (13). In the same way, he describes Pamela’s post-divorce makeover as “an act of self-creation that […] should be honored as an artistic achievement” (123). The repeated references to art and artistry in these passages suggest that Truman understood the artistic value of fashion, and saw his friends as artists worthy of respect.
Leamer asserts that Truman inherited his value of fashion from the swans, absorbing their own values as his own. For women like Babe Paley, fashion was “not just smooth lacquer painted onto the surface of life but the very essence” of life itself (13). Fashion was so important to Babe that, before her first marriage, she briefly worked as a fashion editor at Vogue. Although such a job was not expected of a woman of her status, Leamer notes that she took the role because “fashion was her skin, her real skin, and she adored the whole process” (18). Leamer believes that Truman understood how important fashion was to the swans’ social success and followed them in valuing it as an artistic pursuit.
