Parties: Truman's Compote

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"They just don't understand," said Novelist Truman Capote, not deigning to identify "they." "This is purely and simply a party for my friends." The trouble was that no one could quite believe that Truman's 540 most intimate friends could be composed of the likes of Averell Harriman and Sammy Davis Jr., Walter Lippmann and Frankie Sinatra, William Baldwin, James Baldwin, Tallulah Bankhead and the Marquis and Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. Yet the fact is that he possesses an almost endless entrée into the world of the great and the glamorous; as he modestly puts it: "I have an awful lot of friends all over the world."

When in London, he puts up with U.S. Ambassador David K. E. Bruce; in Manhattan he lunches at the St. Regis with "Babe" Paley, wife of the CBS board chairman. And when time comes to cruise the Greek isles, he goes shipmate with Gianni and Marella Agnelli, Prince Adolfo Caracciolo and Kay Graham, the peripatetic but serious-minded owner of the Washington Post.

A Mess of Piranhas. Capote's friends are nothing if not loyal—in fact, some of them feel he has changed their lives forever by opening new vistas. When his latest book came out, Kay Graham threw a big party for him in Washington and he promised her last spring, "I'm going to give a party for you because you gave one for me." The place would just have to be the Plaza Hotel, "because it has the only truly beautiful ballroom left in New York." And the decor would be straight out of Cecil Beaton's Ascot scene in My Fair Lady; everyone must come in black and white.

Most fun of all for Capote, who has played at giving fantasy parties since childhood, was to decree that everyone should wear a mask. The whole point of a bal masqué, he explained, "is to ask anyone you want to dance and sit wherever you want, and then, when the masks come off at midnight, you can find out who your new chums are, or join your old chums." In October the invitations went off, and suddenly Capote was swamped with pleading messages from those whom he had left out. "I feel like I fell into a whole mess of piranha fish," he moaned to Women's Wear Daily. Supposing someone tried to crash? He would have bouncers to throw them out.

Came the Deluge. For days preceding the party last week, jets from London, Paris, Rome, Washington, Los Angeles and Garden City, Kans., flew in the guests.* All day before the ball, fashionable East Side hairdressers fought off nervous breakdowns, and the 16 hosts and hostesses who had volunteered to give pre-ball dinners simmered on the verge of hysteria. Capote and Kay Graham had a quiet little "bird and bottle" picnic supper in his Plaza suite. As the hour for the party approached, Capote's chums became as anxious as he. Said Mrs. Leland Hayward: "We're so dearly fond of Truman, and we were afraid that with all this publicity, the party might flop."

There was no need to fret. Shortly after 10 p.m., the deluge came. By the droves, masked figures ducked in out of the rain, past the reporters and TV lights in the lobby, pushed their way into elevators, and passed the two check-in tables on their way to greet Truman and Kay at the ballroom door.