Melanie Benjamin on “The Swans of Fifth Avenue,” February’s #1 Indie Next List Pick

Booksellers across the country have chosen The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin (Delacorte Press) as their top pick for the February 2016 Indie Next List. Cindy Pauldine of the river’s end bookstore in Oswego, New York, said, “This fictionalized account of the meteoric rise and very public fall of Truman Capote, entwined with his deep friendship with Babe Paley and his ultimate betrayal of her and the rest of the swans, will slake your thirst for gossipy, breezy, scandalous details. Take off your wrap, pour a highball, and enjoy!”

Melanie Benjamin recently spoke to Bookselling This Week about her work and the influence of indie booksellers on her success.

“I definitely think indie bookstores have been important in my success as an author, starting with Alice I Have Been, my first historical novel,” said Benjamin, whose other titles include The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb and The Aviator’s Wife (all Delacorte Press). “Indies are so good at getting books to book clubs, so with my books, that has been one of their greatest roles.”.

As with her earlier historical novels, The Swans of Fifth Avenue is based on “unlikely affairs of the heart,” Benjamin said. Set amongst the decadence, elegance, and scandal of 1950s Manhattan, her new book explores the intimate and ultimately disastrous friendship between the charismatic, eccentric, and talented gay writer Truman Capote and Babe Paley, the wife of CBS head William S. Paley. Babe was the unparalleled socialite of her time, whose fashion sense and perfectly made-up façade were seen as the epitome of taste, but beneath her public persona was a suffocated soul yearning for true connection and love.

“I’ve always been interested in the high society of Manhattan,” said Benjamin. “I grew up in the Midwest, as far away from that as possible, so I always loved the idea of being a New Yorker…The Truman Capote I knew was the one from his later years in the 1970s — a man so bloated from alcohol and drugs who would show up on The Tonight Show from time to time, but Babe was simply a name to me. I did not know anything about her as a person.”

The book evokes Capote’s entrée into Paley’s rarified life and his ultimate betrayal of her in exchange for fame. As their friendship grew, Capote also became part of the lives of Paley’s socialite “friends”: Slim Keith, Pamela Churchill, Gloria Guinness, and C.Z. Guest, the always fashionable but sometimes backstabbing trophy wives of businessmen, politicians, and royalty, whom Truman nicknamed “the swans.”

The idea for The Swans of Fifth Avenue was born when Benjamin, looking at her bookshelf for inspiration, picked up a copy of Answered Prayers, a slim volume by Truman Capote. One of the stories — “La Cote Basque 1965” — triggered a vague memory of a huge literary scandal that exposed the dirty laundry of New York’s social elite in Esquire in 1975.

In fleshing out her story, Benjamin researched online magazine archives for back issues of Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country to identify names and faces, read biographies of Capote and other figures involved in the scandal, and reread Capote’s books and stories, including his nonfiction masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Benjamin also reread Party of the Century by Deborah Davis (Wiley), which goes behind the scenes of Capote’s famous Black and White Ball in 1966.

But when it came to the actual writing of The Swans of Fifth Avenue, Benjamin said the book’s structure arose out of the characters and the story they told.

“The story speaks to me in the way it wants to be told. I don’t mean to sound frivolous or mysterious, but I gave myself permission to kind of bust out of those constraints…It’s like when you’re at a party listening to all these different snippets of conversation, so sometimes I’m in Truman’s head, sometimes I’m in Babe’s,” Benjamin said.  “I hope people will enjoy this book. It’s a fun book and I think it is really important to enter into it with that spirit; that it’s a fun, kind of gossipy read. At the same time I really tried hard to undercover the real history behind the events.”

In a way, Benjamin said, Truman Capote’s “swans” can be seen as the very first Real Housewives of New York: “Beautiful women whose job was to stay beautiful and to be seen, and who certainly cultivated the publicity to do it.”

That Truman and these high society women each sought to control how they were viewed by others, Benjamin said — whether it was their literary legacy or in the society pages — was a boon to her as a writer. It gave Benjamin the license to get into her characters’ heads and extrapolate their true feelings, thoughts, ambitions, and insecurities.

“What was fascinating to me about this book was that these are all people who reinvented themselves in more than one way throughout their lives and all of them would choose only certain elements of their life to talk about,” she said. “They just didn’t want to reveal certain parts of themselves, which was really attractive to me as a writer to have me so much freedom.”

“The fact that today everything is Instagram-able kind of reminds me of these women back then,” Benjamin added. “They craved publicity but they wanted to control it.” Unfortunately, by publishing “La Côte Basque 1965,” Truman took this control away.

According to Benjamin, although the 1950s were a misogynistic time in urban life, when the fate of an eligible, attractive woman depended on how much money her husband made, there is one thing she wishes still remained of the era: its beauty.

“The way everyone dressed: people dressed up to go on airplanes, people dressed up to go out to lunch. Everything was about grace and sophistication and that’s a quality I really do miss today,” she said.