DELIBERATE CRUELTY

How the connection between Truman Capote and a millionaire’s wife brought about their mutual destruction.

Capote took interest in Ann Woodward in 1955 after she shot and killed her husband, Billy Woodward, claiming she thought he was a burglar. When he accosted her in a restaurant a year later, the socialite angrily dismissed him as “a little fag.” Montillo, the author of The Lady and Her Monsters, among other works of nonfiction, suggests that this insult may have been one of the infamously spiteful writer’s motivations for writing "La Côte Basque, 1965,” his infamous 1975 short story. The author's fascination with Woodward and Capote is evident in her elegantly novelistic retelling of their lives and the strange connections and parallels that linked them. “Both had overcome hardscrabble, unsteady, fraught childhoods,” writes Montillo. “Both had cajoled, clawed, and charmed their way into the elite circles they sought to enter. Both were vulnerable and mean. Both were familiar with violence.” The beautiful Woodward had escaped a bleak Kansas life to become a New York showgirl. Capote left Alabama and flourished in New York City, where his brilliance as a writer was quickly recognized. After their initial encounter, Woodward would become an increasingly marginalized figure among the wealthy socialites who had never fully accepted her, while literary bad-boy Capote went on to become the “chronicler of the New York social world that…shunned” her. Capote’s obsession with Woodward only intensified, especially after he found himself unable to produce another book. His 1975 story, based on the lives of Woodward and the high-society women friends he called his "swans,” was so devastating that Woodward committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal, the drug that also killed Capote's mother. In turn, Capote was rejected by his swans for his betrayal of their confidences and sank into the drug and alcohol abuse that eventually led to his death. This engaging, well-researched book will appeal to true-crime aficionados, Capote fans, and anyone interested in a darkly intriguing story well told.

A compelling mix of true crime and literary biography.