The Swans of Fifth Avenue

As a work of historical fiction, The Swans of Fifth Avenue dramatizes the interactions and inner lives of real people, including its two main characters, Truman Capote and Babe Paley. According to Melanie Benjamin’s “Author’s Note,” all of the main features of the novel—the closeness of Capote with both Babe and Bill Paley, the Black and White Ball of 1966, and the fallout from the 1975 Esquire piece—all took place in real life. The conversations and inner monologues are inventions, but even these hew closely to textual sources. For instance, when Capote and Bill discuss Carol Marcus in Chapter 10, her full name is always interrupted by a parenthetical, making her “Carol Marcus Saroyan Saroyan (for she’d married Bill Saroyan twice) Matthau” (232). This is essentially how Capote introduces her in “La Côte Basque 1965,” though the Esquire piece replaces “Bill Saroyan” with “him.”

Benjamin remains faithful to the biographical facts of the lives of both Capote and Babe Paley. Truman Garcia Capote, né Truman Streckfus Persons was born in New Orleans in 1924 and died in Los Angeles in 1984. He spent most of his early childhood being raised by relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, where he befriended a young Harper Lee, who went on to become the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. He lived with his mother and her second husband in New York City in the 1930s and began his career by writing short stories. He first achieved literary success with the novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, and the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was adapted into a film starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961. During the early 1960s, Capote made multiple trips to Holcomb, Kansas, to conduct research for what became his “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood. As an openly gay man at a time when many people remained closeted—sexuality is a topic of intense speculation in the early chapters of The Swans—Capote was not seen as a romantic rival by the husbands of his married female friends. In his later years, Capote struggled with money problems, as well as alcohol and drug addiction, as suggested in The Swans. His partner, Jack Dunphy, remained loyal to him until Capote’s death, even though much of their later relationship was fraught.

Barbara “Babe” Cushing Mortimer Paley was born in Boston in 1915, and died of lung cancer in New York City in 1978. She was the youngest of three sisters of a prominent neurosurgeon, and all three sisters married into leading families. At 19, she was severely injured in a car accident and had to have her face reconstructed through a series of painful surgeries. She worked as a fashion editor at Vogue in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and appeared frequently on “best dressed” lists. Her first marriage, to the oil heir Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., ended in divorce in 1946. She married William S. “Bill” Paley, the head of CBS, a year later. Both she and her husband were close with Capote, though her bond with Capote was much deeper—until their estrangement in the 1970s.

At the same time, Benjamin admires her characters’ capacity for self-invention, calling them “incurable liars” in her “Author’s Note.” While much of Capote’s inner life comes from his published works and letters, the inner lives of Babe and the other swans are the product of Benjamin’s imagination. Moreover, she allows her two main characters a more explicit reconciliation than they ever achieved in real life. According to biographer Gerald Clarke, the encounter at Quo Vadis (depicted in Chapter 22 of The Swans) did take place, but without the conversation that Benjamin imagines. Clarke writes that, “[Babe] was polite but distant as if [Truman] were someone she knew only slightly” (Capote. Carroll & Graf, 2005, p. 472). In addition, Benjamin emphasizes the roles of some swans, such as Babe, Slim Keith, and C.Z. Guest, at the expense of others, including Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was often seen with Capote in the 1960s. Her friendship with Capote was the subject of a 2023 novel by Stephen Greco, Such Good Friends.