Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

The term café society appeared in the early 20th century as a way of describing the glamorous, cosmopolitan crowd of artists, intellectuals, celebrities, and socialites who frequented fashionable cafés and nightclubs in London, Paris, and New York City. Members of the café society often threw and attended elaborate parties which were photographed for magazines like Vogue and The New Yorker. They were also known for their complicated personal lives, which were breathlessly reported in the same magazines.

Leamer describes Truman as “the crown prince of café society” (294), and depicts the women he called his swans as essential participants in “an international café society in which celebrity, money, and power were enough to gain entry” (209). Café society is also the focus of Truman’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers, which is set at a fashionable restaurant and seeks to expose “the secrets and intrigues among Manhattan café society” (282). Although Truman’s primary goal is to become a part of this elite society, Leamer notes that the writer finished his life as he began it—as an outsider in this elite world. After the fallout from the publication of “Le Côte Basque 1965,” Truman was rejected by most of New York’s café society, who closed ranks against him.