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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The author of The Aviator's Wife returns with a triumphant new novel about New York's "Swans" of the 1950s--and the scandalous, headline-making, and enthralling friendship between literary legend Truman Capote and peerless socialite Babe Paley.
Of all the glamorous stars of New York high society, none blazes brighter than Babe Paley. Her flawless face regularly graces the pages of Vogue, and she is celebrated and adored for her ineffable style and exquisite taste, especially among her friends--the alluring socialite Swans Slim Keith, C. Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, and Pamela Churchill. By all appearances, Babe has it all: money, beauty, glamour, jewels, influential friends, a prestigious husband, and gorgeous homes. But beneath this elegantly composed exterior dwells a passionate woman--a woman desperately longing for true love and connection.
Enter Truman Capote. This diminutive golden-haired genius with a larger-than-life personality explodes onto the scene, setting Babe and her circle of Swans aflutter. Through Babe, Truman gains an unlikely entrée into the enviable lives of Manhattan's elite, along with unparalleled access to the scandal and gossip of Babe's powerful circle. Sure of the loyalty of the man she calls "True Heart," Babe never imagines the destruction Truman will leave in his wake. But once a storyteller, always a storyteller--even when the stories aren't his to tell.
Truman's fame is at its peak when such notable celebrities as Frank and Mia Sinatra, Lauren Bacall, and Rose Kennedy converge on his glittering Black and White Ball. But all too soon, he'll ignite a literary scandal whose repercussions echo through the years. The Swans of Fifth Avenue will seduce and startle readers as it opens the door onto one of America's most sumptuous eras.
Praise for The Swans of Fifth Avenue
"This moving fictionalization brings the whole cast of characters back to vivid life. Gossipy and fun, it's also a nuanced look at the beauty and cruelty of a rarefied, bygone world." -- People (Book of the Week)
"The strange and fascinating relationship between Truman Capote and his 'swans' is wonderfully reimagined in this engrossing novel. It's a credit to Benjamin that we end up caring so much for these women of power, grace, and beauty--and for Capote, too." --Sara Gruen, New York Time s bestselling author of Water for Elephants
"A delicious tale . . . Melanie Benjamin has turned Truman Capote's greatest scandal into your next must-read book-club selection." --Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
"Like being ushered into a party where you're offered champagne and fed the sumptuous secrets of New York's elite--without having to pay the price afterward." --Vanessa Diffenbaugh , New York Times bestselling author of The Language of Flowers
"Benjamin convincingly portrays a large cast of colorful historical figures while crafting a compelling, gossipy narrative with rich emotional depth." -- Library Journal
"The beautiful people of the fifties and sixties glitter in this riveting tale of betrayal and greed. . . . Irresistible, astonishing, and told with verve." --Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe
"The season's must-read guilty pleasure . . . Benjamin conjures, in vivid detail, a lost world." --Michael Callahan, author of Searching for Grace Kelly
Author Notes
Melanie Benjamin was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and attended college there. She has been an avid reader all her life and firmly believes that a lifetime of reading is the best education a writer can have.
After college Melanie married and moved to the Chicago area to raise her children, but the desire to write was always there in the background. Soon she began writing for local magazines and newspapers before venturing into fiction. As Melanie Hauser she published two contemporary novels.
Now writing as Melanie Benjamin, she's incorporated her passion for history and biography into ALICE I HAVE BEEN her first historical novel; THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MRS. TOM THUMB is her second, and was published July 2011. Her book,The Aviator's Wife, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2013. The Swans of Fifth Avenue made the iBooks best seller list in 2016.
Melanie and her family still live in the Chicago area where she enjoys writing, taking long walks, and gardening.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1975, a clique of Manhattan socialites discover that literary lion Truman Capote revealed their dirtiest laundry to the world in a story published to great fanfare in Esquire-a real-life event that inspires this novel. As the women (the metaphorical swans of the novel's title) face his perfidy, they attempt to untangle an intimacy with Capote that dates back to 1955. Though Marella Agnelli, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, Pamela Churchill Harriman, and Slim Keith all feel betrayed, it's style icon Babe Paley who suffers most. Unconventional, brilliant, and voraciously ambitious, Capote seems an unlikely confidante for a woman celebrated solely for marrying, living, and looking well, but the loneliness and insecurity the two both hide forges a deep bond. Babe trusts "True Heart" enough to reveal shameful secrets, from her false teeth to her powerful husband's sordid philandering; tragically, if predictably, Capote's desperation for writing fodder proves more powerful than love. Benjamin's (The Aviator's Wife) fact-based narrative captures the era's juiciest scandals and wildest extravagances, but readers expecting the sympathetic protagonists of her earlier books may be disappointed by the diffuse and chilly cast of characters here. With an unabashed delight in bitchy gossip and lavish lifestyles, the novel's themes are sober ones: the double-edged power of telling our stories, the ways we test and punish those we love, and the psychic cost of life lived by the mantra "appearance matters most." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Class, cliques, and cattiness converge in this New York fable based on the lives of Truman Capote and his greatest fan, Babe Paley. As it happens, Benjamin (The Aviator's Wife, 2013, etc.) puts more honey than vinegar in her rendering of the disarming palship between the openly gay author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and his much-married "Bobolink"Barbara "Babe" Cushing Mortimer Paley, the outwardly towering, inwardly cowering Upper East Side matron he squired around town for a quarter century. A chorus of the couple's BFFs provides commentary on their history, as Benjamin spirals chirpily through the hedonistic '50s, '60s, and '70s, cherry-picking scenes of their first, chance weekend together at the Paleys' compound in Jamaica ("So many wanted to catch him at it! Watch as genius burned!"), thick as thieves over lunch at Le Cirque, or swapping confidences about their narcissistic mothersmore craved than kissesat slumber parties in the Hamptons, all the way through to the publication of Capote's masterpiece, In Cold Blood, and his infamous Black and White masquerade ball. The event that allegedly drove them apartwhen Truman mauled Babe and her set in thinly disguised printhas been raked over repeatedly by critics, filmmakers, and biographers (including Babe's friend Slim Keithone of the Kenneth-coiffed swans alluded to in the title), so it's no surprise when the novel re-creates some iconic moments leading up to the rift: such as when Truman notices for the first time that Babe's husbandCBS executive William S. Paleysmiles "like a man who had just swallowed an entire human being." (Capote recognizes a keeperand files it away "in his photographic memory, to be used at a later date.") The character Benjamin takes most imaginative liberty with, naturally, is Babethe cool cucumber in Mainbocher who (the chatter went) could brush off her husband's wolfishness with practiced ease and neither bleeped a word against nor spoke to her literary pet again after he published "La Cote Basque 1965." Elegant Babe's thoughts, if not her lips, are unsealed at last. Those unaware of the scandal get CliffsNotes; and everyone else gets a chance to judge whether a swan's muteness can be more interesting than her gripe. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Benjamin (The Aviator's Wife) here fictionalizes the relationship of writer Truman Capote with fashion icon Babe Paley. Through Babe, he meets other society women whom he calls his swans. He convinces Babe and her high-class friends that each is special and he is devoted to her. This does not stop him from using personal information and gossip gathered from each swan in his writing. When Esquire publishes his short story "La Cote Basque 1965," he is shunned by his upper-crust friends and begins the downward spiral that ultimately led to his death several years later. Cassandra Campbell brings Babe to life, and Paul Boehmer does the same for Truman, though having two narrators can be distracting as they have different vocal interpretations. VERDICT Recommended for fans of historic fiction, New York society, and Truman Capote. ["Benjamin convincingly portrays a large cast of colorful historical figures while crafting a compelling, gossipy narrative with rich emotional depth": LJ 9/1/15 starred review of the Delacorte hc.]-David Faucheux, -Lafayette, LA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.