The fallout was swift: Keith and Babe Paley quickly dropped Capote as a friend, with Keith even consulting with a lawyer about whether she could sue Capote for libel. Others, like Gloria Vanderbilt, followed suit: “I think Truman really hurt my mother,” CNN journalist and newscaster Anderson Cooper told Sam Kashner in 2012.
Gossip columnist Liz Smith chronicled Capote’s sensational social ousting in a 1976 issue of New York magazine. “Society’s sacred monsters at the top have been in a state of shock,” she wrote. “Never have you heard such gnashing of teeth, such cries for revenge, such shouts of betrayal and screams of outrage.”
Capote, for one, felt the reaction was unfair. “What do they expect?” he told the Chicago Daily News a few months later. “A writer writes about what he knows. I was the only one who could write this book.” (All the same, as the reporter astutely wondered, hadn’t Capote “presented these characters in a mean, gossipy way? And shouldn’t he expect to lose friends that way?”) By July 1976, less than a year after “La Côte Basque” had gone to press, Capote had landed in rehab for alcohol abuse. Smith published his admission in the papers.
In April 1978, he opened up about the status of his friendships with the Swans to Newsday magazine. Of Slim Keith, he said simply that she was “one of the three people who used to be a friend but is no longer—her decision, not mine.” Yet he seemed generally saddened by the loss of Babe’s companionship: “I’ve seen her several times en passant, and she’s been cordial, but you must remember we were practically best friends before,” he told the interviewer. “She’s a great beauty, she has great taste, and she’s one of the most generous people to her friends. I admire her kind of beauty—anyone can look good at 30, but when you’re getting on to 60, looking beautiful is a real accomplishment. She’s very well-read.” When Babe died in 1978 from cancer, Capote was not invited to her funeral.
Still, in December 1979, he doubled down on his decision to publish “La Côte Basque” in an essay for Vogue. The story, he admitted, “aroused anger in certain circles, where it was felt I was betraying confidences, mistreating friends and/or foes. I don’t intend to discuss this; this issue involves social politics, not artistic merit,” he wrote. “I will say only this: all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and you cannot deny him the right to use it. Condemn but not deny.”
