Hampton Style - August 15, 2008

To hear him tell it, Truman Capote's home of 23 years was created with seclusion in mind. Certainly the surrounding six acres of land-including a bird sanctuary, long gravel driveway and endless vistas of scrub pine, wildflowers and potato fields-would support this idea, but biographers and surviving friends tell a different story. Accounts of Truman enlivening local cocktail parties and dinners are legion, and writer Bob Colacello offers, "Truman was a great storyteller, and as the margaritas flowed, the stories got better and better." That said, Bob admits that Truman was more likely to turn up at a friend's pool than to entertain at his own home.

"Of course Truman was invited out, but he also used this home as a retreat," says Gerald Clarke, the executor of Truman's estate and one of his biographers. He continues, "Truman would wander around in shorts and not cater to anyone in particular; he loved it because it was not Manhattan. It was not a pretentious sort of place.

You could hear the roar of the ocean, 200 yards away, from the screened-in porch." Floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room offered views to accompany the ocean soundtrack.

Capote commissioned the two-story, flat-roofed, saltbox studio near Gibson Beach in 1961. He liked to emphasize that he decorated the home himself: "For me it's a bore to use a decorator...I just don't care to have someone come in and tell me what I need to live with. I know." He would remove his shoes upon entering the house, trying to preserve the highly-polished floor coated with blue boat-deck paint. "Truman had his own style," continues Clarke, "he liked to combine very elegant things with sort of absurd bric-a-brac that caught his fancy. It was characteristically eclectic." The second-floor study is where Truman liked to read and write during the day. It was a comfortable room with wicker furniture and photographs and painted portraits. By contrast, his bedroom was very stark, with a small bed and table accessorized by little other than a stack of books.

Truman moved in shortly after the release of the film version of his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's. He already had friends in the area, including Lee Radziwill and Gloria Vanderbilt-both were among the handful of women who inspired the story's heroine, Holly Golightly. Truman would seek out their company, but he also used the home for concentrated bouts of writing. It was here that he penned his factual murder account, In Cold Blood, and the now infamous guest list for his Black and White Ball. His longtime companion Jack Dunphy also resided here on Daniel's Lane, in a spartan cottage Truman later built for him 75 yards from his own residence.

On the day In Cold Blood was published, Jack Dunphy taped a note on Capote's door, reading simply: "Le Beau Jour." And indeed, many of the days that Capote passed with Jack were good days. In the mornings, Truman might walk on his empty stretch of sand with his bulldog, while Jack, ever the athlete, swam in the ocean, well into October. Most evenings, Jack would cook a simple dinner for them; nighttime at the cottages proved an antidote to the social whirl of Gin Lane and Park Avenue. If there was work to be done, the morning schedule became much more rigid. According to Capote, he would rise at 7am and work for four hours, stopping only to read the papers. He resumed work again until 1pm when he would stop for lunch. Then he would drive into town and do errands and walk the dog. Dinner was at 7pm and he would be in bed by 9:30, retiring with a book. Work or no work, if the sun became unbearable, Truman would drive over to Southampton and have a swim in Gloria Vanderbilt's pool-whether or not she was in residence.

Truman's "touring car" was a dark green Buick, in which he frequently tore down the local lanes at warp speed. At 5'3" feet tall, Capote could barely see over the steering wheel. Gerald Clarke remembers those madcap drives with Truman fondly. "I'll tell you," he says, laughing, "Truman was a terrible driver stone-cold sober, and he barely comprehended the rules of the road." But the writer with the "stiletto-sharp tongue" loved racing through the nearly empty byways which cut through the potato fields, headed, perhaps, to lunch at Bobby Van's, where he frequently dined. After lunch with the likes of John Knowles, Truman would often drive over to Bob Keene's bookstore in Southampton. Though Keene was known to be crotchety, according to Clarke, Truman had disarmed him, just as he had done with many an icy socialite in years past.

In his heyday, there was no brighter star in the Hamptons social orbit than Truman, but after the serialization in Esquire magazine of his thinly veiled satire Answered Prayers, the writer entered a darker phase, in exile by the shore, taking solace in a bottle.

The devastating impact of Capote's fall came swiftly. According to John Knowles, "he was completely unstrung" by the reaction and fell into an irrevocable depression. "Towards the end, of course, he was drinking too much," Clarke recalls. In July of 1980, Dunphy found Capote collapsed on the steps of his cottage with broken glass all around him. Dunphy rushed him to Southampton Hospital, where Capote told him, "I drink because it's the only time I can stand it." Three summers later he was dead.

These days, it's fittingly that another creative figure, artist Ross Bleckner, resides in Capote's storied cottage, having preserved the compound now adjacent to protected lands, never to be overshadowed by the McMansions Capote would have despised. And what would Capote have made of the Hamptons today? "There

was a different sort of society out here then," says Clarke, "and it was so much quieter. Who's out here now? Rock stars, movie stars... It's a publicity society." On second thought, Clarke muses, perhaps it would have suited Truman just fine. In the '70s he hobnobbed with Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones. "Who knows? If he were still alive today, he might have been at the center of P. Diddy's latest party, making little asides...taking it all in."