Swan Dive: The Capote in Me

Left: Truman Capote at Random House, 1969 (Getty)
Right: Me at Hecks Café, 2024 (Purton)

Capote's #1 Swan: 
Mrs. William S. "Babe" Paley, 1963 (Getty)

The current TV miniseries Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, reminds us that, long before Stephen Sondheim penned “The Ladies Who Lunch” for the 1970 musical Company, Truman Capote and his coterie of rich society wives were already making an art form out of the midday meal. 

The swans convened at New York’s see-and-be-seen mecca La Côte Basque at 60 West 55th Street. They wore fabulous clothes and gossiped and betrayed one another by cheating with each other's husbands. They had first names like Babe, Slim, and CZ, and last names that could be found on buildings and executive stationery.

The November 1975 issue of Esquire

Capote’s betrayal -- the one that got him banned from high society and led to his eventual demise from pills and alcohol -- was his revelation of their secrets in a 1965 Esquire excerpt from his never-to-be-completed novel Answered Prayers. (I worked at the male-dominated Esquire for three years and no one ever even mentioned the historic Capote issue. I now find this odd.)

Reading the book that inspired the TV miniseries, Capote’s Women by Laurence Learner, I am as entertained by all this midcentury mischief as I am inspired by the notion of a lunching class. Like Truman Capote, I aspired to be one of this jet set. 

Not La Côte Basque:
Oakwood Club's Dining Room

It all started with my step-grandmother, a functioning alcoholic who would treat me to sporadic lunches at Oakwood Country Club in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Naomi was Cleveland’s answer to a swan. Beautifully dressed, a painter and reader of French and Italian Reader’s Digest, she went out to lunch every day and began nursing her two initial Canadian Clubs ("CC's") on the rocks around noon. Whiskey was too stiff for me, but I always joined her in imbibing something. 

My Step-grandmother and Cleveland
Swan Naomi Koblitz Schumann, circa 1978

Writing of CBS wife and queen swan Babe Paley, author Learner asks: "In an era when soup cans and scribbles on canvas were high art, why couldn’t Babe be seen as the ultimate piece of performance art?”

Oakwood Country Club was not La Côte Basque and Naomi Schumann was a steel industry wife and not exactly Babe Paley. But at lunch with her, I saw enough of her and Cleveland’s other swans in action to appreciate that the ritual of lunch – dressing for it, ordering it, being seen at it – was indeed performative. Lunch provided an expressive milieu and outlet for the wives of our city’s Rust Belt potentates. They all dressed the part, and I liked what I saw. 

As I entered the workforce, there were many lunches – some while I worked at Capote's publisher, Random House, some at fabulous New York restaurants like Michael's, Café des Artistes, and once-trendy Trattoria Del Arte. My Esquire working lunches even involved martinis. 

But they lacked Swans. Without even knowing about Capote and his women, and possessing a decidedly less mordant wit than his, I still sensed that the best lunches with the best gossip were taking place elsewhere and among females only.

Today I have regular, luxuriously long lunches with two female ex-colleagues. If alcohol is consumed, it is by the single glass. There is none of the cattiness that characterized the scene at La Côte Basque and nothing scandalous to publish in Vertes’Verities.

But hey, it's a start. We'll get there.

I like to fancy my retirement as a potential canvas for a never-ending series of marvelously witty and urbane lunches with my own cadre of cosmopolitan table mates.

I am at this moment taking applications for more swans. If you’re interested, you know where to find me.

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