Quick Review: Capote’s Women by Laurence Leamer

I grabbed this book at the library when I was there picking up some holds for the girls, and I am so glad that it caught my eye. Did you read Melanie Benjamin’s The Swans of 5th Avenue a few years ago when it came out? This seems to me like the non fiction version of that novel, chronicling the lives of Truman Capote and the society women that he was close with, Babe Paley, C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill and others. It’s an era that’s fascinating to me, especially the women who made being a leader in fashion and society into an art form and had their lives endlessly chronicled and photographed. The way that Capote worked to become friends with the women and to integrate into the high society world is also intriguing.

Because the book covers so many women and Capote, it tends to focus on the main events in their lives, rather than deep dive, but the author is intent on showing that many of the women “lived on the surface,” valuing style and money and appearances more than anything else, and they were willing to marry very wealthy, very difficult men in order to achieve the level of “success” that they were chasing. After they landed these men, however, they were stuck either endlessly catering to their demanding husbands, or finding new wealthy husbands when those marriages failed. Their worlds may have appeared glamorous, and some of them did find love and partners they cared for, but many of them were caught in cycle of stress and infidelity and deep loneliness.

Their pursuit of beauty was something that they had in common with Capote, as well as a love of gossip, and he worked hard to make himself endlessly entertaining and the right mix of sweet and sour so that they would take him along for the ride to their expensive homes, vacations and parties. Despite all of his success, he was wracked with many of the same demons and struggles as his swans, and the Leamer’s ability to mix the two in the book strikes the right balance. After reading this book, I was torn between wanting to do a deeper dive into the women and read all of their biographies and wanting to order coffee table books that chronicled the beautiful surfaces of their lives, so I rounded up some further reading for fun below.

Lee is one of my favorite coffee table books of all time-it’s just gorgeous and the Slim Aarons book features several of the women in it’s pages and C.Z. Guest on the cover. The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters is a great read for anyone interested in Jackie and Lee and Party of the Century is also a fun read! I haven’t read the others (besides The Swans of Fifth Avenue, which was great) but I’m dying to track them down! -Eloise