To bump into a celebrated true crime writer while you’re fleeing suspicion of murder is bad luck, but to abuse him in the process is a plain bad idea. In 1956 Ann Woodward did both. A grand jury had recently upheld her claim that she shot dead her husband Bill by accident – it was dark, and she thought he was an intruder. But Bill was a millionaire, the marriage had been on the rocks, and in upper-class Manhattan suspicions lingered. Ann travelled to Switzerland seeking refuge, and found something like the opposite: Truman Capote, staring at her across a fashionable restaurant. Somehow, they got to arguing. Woodward called Capote a “little fag”.
Capote did revenge magnificently. “I love it! I love it! I love it!” he once exclaimed, reflecting on a plot he had set in motion against Gore Vidal. His methods weren’t exclusively literary – he was also drawn to baseball bats and arson – but it’s literary payback that interests Roseanne Montillo. In 1966, Capote signed a deal for a new novel, Answered Prayers. Random House promised a latter-day American Proust, by which they meant a roman à clef packed with grim and gossipy stories about well-heeled Manhattanites. Almost ten years after the deal, some excerpts of the work-in-progress were published. Among them was a chapter containing the story of “Ann Hopkins”, who shot her husband for his money then got away with it by saying she thought he was a burglar. Someone sent Ann Woodward an advance copy; days before publication, she took an overdose of Seconal. “That’s that”, said Ann’s mother-in-law. “She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her.” Capote died in 1984, without ever finishing Answered Prayers.
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