It happened on a Monday and ended at 4 AM.
Truman Capote spent three months carrying a black-and-white composition notebook. In it, he added names. He crossed them out. He added them back. He crossed them out again and added them back five minutes later. He agonized over this list with the intensity of someone planning a military campaign. Which, honestly, isn't that dramatic of a description.
The Black and White Ball, held on November 28, 1966, at the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, is the most legendary party of the twentieth century. Not the most expensive. Not the most elaborate. Not the most photographed. The most legendary, which is its own, rare thing. And Capote understood the distinction like no one else.
The premise
Capote had just published In Cold Blood, his account of the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. It had made him rich, famous, and the most talked-about writer in America. A child of humble roots, at age 42, Capote finally had the financial resources to throw the party he had been planning in his head since 1942. Lore says he apparently told someone at a writers' colony that one day, when he was famous, he would throw a party for all his rich and famous friends. The time had come.
But, he needed a guest of honor who wasn't himself. Throwing a party for himself would have been viewed as vulgar and kind of embarrassing. He decided on Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, who at that point was mostly unknown outside Washington D.C. "Truman called me up that summer and said, I think you need cheering up," Graham later wrote. She was somewhat confused, but she showed up.
The dress code
The theme came from Capote's obsession with the Ascot Gavotte scene in the 1964 movie My Fair Lady. All of those chic women in black and white, moving through a garden. He went with a strict black-and-white dress code. Masks were required, but had to be removed at midnight.
And you know a party is iconic when the drama starts way before the event date. The masks became the social drama of the weeks leading up to the ball. Some guests commissioned one-of-a-kind creations from Adolfo, then a Cuban milliner working at Bergdorf Goodman. Princess Luciana Pignatelli decided the mask thing wasn't for her and instead borrowed a 60-carat diamond from Harry Winston that draped across her forehead. Princess? More like Queen behavior. Gloria Guinness flew her mask in from Paris, I'm assuming first class. Candice Bergen wore a mink bunny-ear mask by a then-unknown milliner named Halston. And while commanding opulence from his list, Capote bought his own mask at FAO Schwarz for $.39. Which is one of the most underratedly iconic parts, quite frankly.
The decor: humans
Which was basically nothing. No flowers at all, which I personally find both offensive and fascinating. Capote's designer, Evie Backer, covered the tables with red cloths and accented with gold candelabras with white taper candles, covered in winding greenery. That was it. When asked about the absence of flowers, Backer told the New York Times, "The people are the flowers."
I kind of hate how correct she was. The 540-person guest list was a masterpiece of social architecture. Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Lauren Bacall, Lee Radziwill, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lynda Bird Johnson, the Maharaja of Jaipur, Norman Mailer, Jerome Robbins, Cecil Beaton, Oscar de la Renta, Harper Lee, and a Kansas detective named Alvin Dewey, who had investigated the Clutter murders and whom Capote genuinely loved. Also invited: Capote's doorman at his United Nations Plaza apartment and a group of citizens from Garden City, Kansas, whom Capote had befriended while researching the book.
Nobody had ever put these people in the same room before. That was the point.
The menu: eclectic
A buffet of scrambled eggs, sausages, biscuits, pastries, chicken hash, and spaghetti and meatballs. 450 bottles of Taittinger champage popped and at midnight. The chicken hash was a Capote signature, served because he loved it.
The aftermath: iconic
Women's Wear Daily covered the party with the intensity normally reserved for war. The New York Times published the full guest list, something usually only for White House state dinners. Gloria Guinness and Marella Agnelli were declared best dressed. Norman Mailer was declared the worst.
Katharine Graham wrote years later that the party had "relaunched her into society" and she became one of the most powerful people in American journalism (OH HI PENTAGON PAPERS AND WATERGATE). Capote's biographer later said that putting her in the spotlight that night was his "ultimate act as a social engineer." And speaking of engineering social lives, the party also triggered an immediate upsurge in masquerade parties across New York and has consistently been labeled a pinnacle of New York's social history.
The Black and White Ball and its construction of Capote's social world is actually a perfect story about the nature of really incredible parties. They create peak moments in time and space that can never happen again. The party can be imitated but never perfectly duplicated. Christie's recreated the ball in 2006 at Rockefeller Center, following the menu and schedule exactly. And while God Bless, I'm sure it was totally lovely, you cannot recreate what the original was, which was a specific moment in time when one very small, very strange man had assembled everyone worth knowing in the same room and understood exactly what to do in his own way.
Nine years later, Capote published an Esquire excerpt from his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, in which he was very clearly inspired by his real-life Swans (Graham, Radziwill, Paley, the whole gang of socialites) and revealed a lot of their private life drama. The entire group cut him off. He never recovered socially or professionally. The party was the peak. The excerpt was the fall. Everything after was kind of a bummer.
So the lesson here is, throw incredible parties no one will ever forget, and also keep people's secrets.
