Parties: Truman's Compote

"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...