“In madras pajamas and ratty pink cardigan, the ageing wunderkind sees less the literary lion, less still the social barracuda of public perception. Alone in the darkened room, stripped of bravura, he looks like what he is – ‘just a pissant rug rat from Monroeville, Alabama, shit-scared as ever.'”
Whether it was a good idea or not to read Swan Song, Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s 450-page long tour of Truman Capote’s downfall after 1975 before actually reading any Capote is definitely to be queried. Because the fact is that after turning the last page of Swan Song, I struggled to get past Capote’s despicable, incessant gossip, social climbing and vitriol. Prior to reading this, when I thought of Capote I thought of a kind of finger-clicking cool – the commended writer behind big hits like In Cold Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the dreamy work of Southern Gothic I’d been dying to read, Other Voices, Other Rooms. He lived in that age I so loved to see pictures of, was publishing in the fifties and sixties whilst Bogie and Bacall rode the trail they blazed in the noirs of the forties. In her book, Greenberg-Jephcott exposes him to me as he truly was: for the most part, an insufferable man with Mummy-issues, a dangerous spreader of tittle-tattle who couldn’t be trusted even by those closest to him.
Slim Keith 
Babe Paley 
C.Z. Guest
The story is told through a number of different chaptered ‘Variations’, hyperbolising the very gossip Capote was so well known for. One omnipotent, collective voice recalls what ‘the boy’ told ‘us’, as in, his Swans, but also the voice allows for other re-tellings and often goes over the same event two or three times. I understand what the author’s doing here, but after the first time – I get it. Nonetheless, it adds to the murky past and unreliable reality that surrounded the network of Bright Young Things whose epicentre seemed to be in New York at the time. The humble, quite tragic beginnings of one lonely and misunderstood Truman Streckfus Parsons with a sole friend, “Nelle” – who it transpires is Harper Lee – is made all the less tragic by the biting and scornful narrative voice. It leaves little room for sympathy, straining to convince a listener that this is all part of Truman’s fictional symphony. In fact, the voice tells us that “Nelle alone – never one of us, being armed with too much knowledge and too little beauty – knows the truth. And for that very reason he has kept her separate from our flock, for fear that she’d trumpet a definite gospel.” She’s kept out of the elite circle because of the very authority her truth holds. The voice is nameless – outside, yet still somehow deeply inside, entrenched as one of the Swans without an identity, guiding us through the lives of each. The voice is less one defined person and more the collective consciousness of the six women who decided to share their lives with Truman: betrayed and eager to paint Capote in his worst light. A strange choice from the author, who so clearly adores Capote – but I learnt that Swan Song is decidedly less about the The Tiny Terror than the imposing women who shaped his life.
Jackie Kennedy 
Lee Radziwill with Capote
Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Lee Radziwill and his beloved Barbara “Babe” Paley. Real, vibrant women with huge personalities and rich lives – all of whom I’d never heard of despite them being such critical figures in their age. These swans and their comparatively dull, philandering husbands stand alongside others I recognised on the star-studded cast list: Bacall, Bogie, Sinatra, Mia Farrow, the Kennedys, Pam Churchill, Howard Hawks, John Huston, Jerry Robbins. Greenberg-Jephcott brings life, salacious gossip and tragic realities to the black and white photos of an era I already loved. She immortalises and reveres the strength of the six women closest to Truman, telling in glorious detail of a dinner he threw for them all and each husband – all of whom had had affairs with that ‘bottle-blond’ ‘bitch’ Pam Churchill, who walks in last, mortified, with her most recent husband Leland Hayward. True, Truman would do anything for his Swans, but Greenberg-Jephcott lets us know that he’d go just as far the other way, too, spilling their dirty laundry all over the pages of Esquire in the name of a Proustian-standard epic.
As mentioned, the author evidently loves Capote and this story. She happily dotes on the minutiae of the entire circle’s – inner and outer – experience. She experiments with time, form and voice, framing Truman’s immediate reaction to Babe’s death in Kübler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief model. She has Slim – who discovered young Betty Joan Perske – and Leland’s interactions reshaped into a Bogie-Bacall script straight from To Have and Have Not. In an airplane hurtling towards Hazelden for rehab, C.Z.’s transformation story from Lucy Cochrane is told as a classic five-act play. Perhaps most strangely, she has Gloria Guinness retell hers from ‘ugly-duckling’ Gloria Rubio in Veracruz to the dizzy heights of Europe’s elite in ballad form, with stretched rhymes and sometimes trite lines. Most of this is fun, dazzling, funny, but the evident truth is that the author throws in this divergence from straight prose to get around the fact that she’s included too much. The narrative drags in parts as she really fleshes out each swan to elicit the most authentic emotional response from a reader regarding Truman’s betrayal of them. On the jacket of Swan Song, there’s a quote from The Times that says it ‘zips along’ – I found that rather, it lingered. But despite the drop in pace every now and again it’s a vibrant and poignant portrayal of the real lives of the incredibly rich and famous in the era from Kennedy to Nixon. Their gilded excess is matched by Greenberg-Jephcott’s doorstop of a book, Capote’s comparatively uncouth Southern drawl taken to its absolute limit and exaggerated by those who came to resent them to their death beds.
I took great delight in spending hours googling the swans – the inconceivable and separate beauty of each. The elegance of Marella’s neck, the smile and cheekbones of Babe that demand a room, Slim’s effortlessly cool androgyny, the timeless, ethereal blonde beauty of C.Z., Gloria’s pinched nose and striking femininity and of course, the slightly saddened eyes of Lee Radziwill – longing for what could’ve been. The doctored snapshots in Italy of Jackie Kennedy and Gianni Agnelli to which JFK replied with a clipped telegram: Less Gianni, more Caroline. J. The masquerade masks of Capote’s famed Black and White Ball that are detailed – I mused over the stories that swam behind them, hints of what would unfold in the night to come. Was it before, or after the picture? Perhaps most alarming, the availability on Youtube of some of Capote’s lowest points. I heard that squealing voice for the first time, saw him in the blue jumper and the panama hat on Stan Siegel, drunk and high out of his mind. It was this viewing of Capote, without the Greek chorus of scorned Swans behind me, that elicited the most sympathy from me – and even then, it wasn’t an awful lot. Soon after, he went back to Siegel with the plan of destroying Lee Radziwill after she told Liz Smith over the phone he was nothing but a ‘little fag’. He could give as good as he got, if not better.
I can only applaud Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s monumental feat with Swan Song. One sees every second of the ten years she spent researching and the four years writing her debut. It’s in the nuances of each Swan, the minute, seemingly innocuous occurrences that influenced how Capote acted for years afterwards. It’s in the sprawling knowledge of dates, friendships, trysts, rivalries, the weight of Truman’s English bulldog and the anecdote of the snake bite he bagged back in Monroeville as a boy. The six chickens that were promptly decapitated by his neighbours, their blood rubbed into the wound. His mother nowhere to be seen. But mostly, I think it’s in how much the author knows Capote. She can embody not only him but those who loved him and hated him and she made me believe every word, with all the contradictions and variations. There can be no redemption, she knows, for Truman – only the moving song of his Swans to be told and re-told, the power of his stories read and re-read.
Initially, I ordered Swan Song because Vogue boasted its author was ‘the new Donna Tartt.’ I don’t think Greenberg-Jephcott is quite Tartt – a writer as Southern and densely descriptive in imagery and metaphor as her own Truman – most of her debut is, of course, a work of non-fiction. But she has a flair of her own, which really does delight at times. I was lost in Swan Song, moved to dream of glittering lights, clinking ice cubes and buffed, almond-shaped, oxblood nails.
hbiswriting 