When Truman Capote died of liver disease complicated by multiple intoxications in Bel Air in 1984, the author still had not completed Answered Prayers, the “magnum opus” he had been touting for 26 years. It was “going to do to America what Proust did to France,” the writer told one of his swans, Marella Agnelli, in one of his many conversations about his alleged masterpiece. He described it to friends, read aloud from it for small audiences, and even pressed the bulk of it into a friend’s hands—at least, that’s how it seemed. But after Capote died and no completed book was found—this, after a $1 million advance, three extensions, and over a quarter century of alleged work—those who stayed loyal to the writer through the “Côte Basque” debacle confronted the possibility that they, too, had been manipulated by the author. 

But how much of Answered Prayers was actually found? Which society women did Capote write about in the novel? And what are the chances that through the heavy haze of drugs, alcohol, Studio 54 distractions, and painful estrangement from his beloved social circle, the author actually finished the book? In anticipation of the Feud: Capote vs. The Swans finale “Phantasm Forgiveness,” we explore those subjects, as well as how Capote ended up going to auction eight years ago. 

How much of Answered Prayers was found?

Capote’s journals reveal that Answered Prayers was to be divided into seven chapters, but it appears that Capote only drafted four of them—three of which were excerpted by Esquire, and one of which was published by VF in 2012 shortly after its discovery. 

One chapter was the infamous “La Côte Basque, 1965” the thinly veiled filleting of Capote’s high-society friends, most of whom dropped him the minute the excerpt was published.

Another chapter, “Kate McCloud,” was reportedly modeled “on Mona Williams, later Mona von Bismarck, another oft married socialite friend of Truman’s whose cliff-top villa on Capri he’d visited,” according to Sam Kashner’s 2012 feature for VF. “Of Mona’s five husbands, one, James Irving Bush, was described as ‘the handsomest man in America’ and another, Harrison Williams, as ‘the richest man in America.’” A third chapter, “Unspoiled Monsters,” chronicles a gay hustler who beds men and women alike if they can further his literary career. The fourth chapter, published exclusively in VF, is titled “Yachts and Things.” It recalls a trip abroad between a narrator believed to be based on Capote and a character who, Kashner guessed, could be a stand-in for The Washington Post’s late publisher Katharine Graham. (In the story, everyone seems to do hashish.) 

Capote told potential readers that his book would be full of thinly veiled characters from his real life—and seemed to thrill in the danger of it all. “He couldn’t stop talking about his planned roman à clef,” Agnelli said. “He told People magazine that he was constructing his book like a gun: ‘There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen—wham!’”

So, what happened?

A lot. Two weeks after signing his contract for Answered Prayers with Random House in 1966, Capote’s In Cold Blood was published—resulting in a kind of fame and proximity to privilege that suddenly trumped sitting at a typewriter. Capote, then 42, closed out the year by hosting his legendary Black and White Ball, signaling his speedy ascension to the top tier of Manhattan society. By the late ’60s, Capote considered Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, one of his closest friends. 

Deadlines came and went. Capote’s unfinished novel became so legendary that, in 1979, the writer published an essay in Vogue attempting to explain the decade-plus-long lag since his last book. 

For four years, roughly from 1968 through 1972, I spent most of my time reading and selecting, rewriting and indexing my own letters, other people’s letters, my diaries and journals (which contain very complete accounts of hundreds of scenes and conversations) for the years 1943 through 1965. I intended using much of this material in a book I had long been planning, a variation on the nonfiction novel. I called the book Answered Prayers which is a quote from Saint Therese. [...] 

In 1975 and 1976, I published four chapters of the book in a magazine, Esquire. This aroused anger in certain circles, where it was felt I was betraying confidences, mistreating friends and/or foes. I don’t intend to discuss this; the issue involves social politics, not artistic merit. I will say only this: all a writer has to work with is the material he has gathered as the result of his own endeavor and observations, and you cannot deny him the right to use it. Condemn, but not deny.

Capote also declared that he was done with the book. And that this was not his fault—it was the constricting limits of his art form. 

I did stop working on Answered Prayers in September 1977, a fact that had nothing to do with any public reaction to those parts of the book already published. The halt happened because I was in a helluva lot of trouble; I was suffering a creative crisis and a personal one at the same time. As the latter was unrelated, or very little related, to the former, it is only necessary to remark on the creative chaos.[…] A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling and, in suitable instances, simultaneous application.”

Tina Brown called Capote’s high-minded explanation “humbug, of course,” in her New York Times review of the version of Answered Prayers that was published after Capote’s death. “The Capote of this period was adept at inventing elaborate highbrow Angst as a red herring when in fact his creative problem was simple…. Capote knew he had that material but he also felt it was unpublishable. Even if he managed a path through the libel laws, his revelations would kiss goodbye the ladies who lunch.”

Capote felt like he had to choose between his career and his social life. But ultimately, he lost both—thanks in part to his depression and alcoholism. He attempted other writing projects in the post–In Cold Blood period, but those were shortsighted: The author drafted an adaptation of The Great Gatsby for Paramount Pictures that the studio passed on. The writer also failed to fulfill an assignment for Rolling Stone. 

What are the prevailing theories about the book?

1. Capote never finished it. Capote himself told Vogue in the above excerpt that he stopped work on the book in 1977. Capote’s long-term partner Jack Dunphy believed that the writer may have put the book down even earlier, in 1976, eight years before his death.

2. Capote finished it, but then destroyed it himself. This is what filmmaker Ebs Burnough became convinced of while making his documentary The Capote Tapes. Burnough’s theory is that “one night [Capote] got really smashed and something happened to the rest of it,” he told The Guardian in 2021. “I can easily imagine that, after those excerpts were published, and after the phone stopped ringing, he might have woken after a wild night and seen pieces of it in the fireplace. That’s what addiction can do to people.” 

Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott, who based her 2018 novel Swan Song on Capote and his swans, agrees that this seems like the most likely outcome. “My theory is he did write it and it didn’t meet his standards, so he destroyed it,” she told Penguin. “When you’ve worked 20 years on a book, you’ve lost your entire social circle, who are essentially your family, over it? Those aren’t standards that are easily met. It would have to have been the Holy Grail of novels to have been worth what he lost.”

3. Capote finished it and the manuscript remains intact in a mysterious location. Capote’s friend Joanne Carson, who was hosting the writer at the time of his death, believes what she says Capote told her—that the manuscript is “in a safe-deposit box in a bank in California,” according to Kashner’s  feature. Carson said that the writer gave her a key to the box but not its location, telling her, “The novel will be found when it wants to be found.” Joe Petrocik, one of Capote’s closest friends in his later years, believed that the manuscript was actually sitting in a Greyhound bus depot that Capote passed through during his 1978 college tour. 

After Capote’s death, the writer’s lawyer, biographer, and Random House editor—all convinced that there was a manuscript—searched his homes. They didn’t find the finished version of Answered Prayers.

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans ends with a combination of theories 1 and 3, with its Capote (Tom Hollander) never able to complete the work of literary genius he envisioned and advertised. Another finale scene floats a more noble fantasy: that Capote set his full manuscript on fire in order to atone for his sins, at the insistence of the ghost of Demi Moore’s Ann Woodward. “The book or your soul,” says the swan who was reportedly driven to suicide by Capote’s thinly veiled account of her in “La Côte Basque, 1965.” “It’s up to you.”

What really happened to Capote’s ashes?

In 2016, 32 years after Capote’s death, the writer’s ashes were put up for auction. This postscript to Capote’s death is recreated in the closing moments of the Feud finale, with the ghosts of Capote’s swans attending the auction. They seem more scandalized by modern folks’ choice of footwear than the fact that their former friend’s remains are being sold off to the highest bidder.

At the time of the auction, Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions explained that Capote had left some of his ashes to Joanne Carson. When she died in 2015, “the estate didn’t know what to do with them,” Julien said. Asked about the ethical implications of selling Capote’s remains, Julien replied, “We contemplated doing it, but because they are Truman Capote’s, this is probably what he would have wanted,” said Julien. To The Guardian, he further explained, “Truman told Joanne that he didn’t want his ashes to sit on a shelf. So this is a different way of honouring his request. It is just furthering the adventures of Truman Capote.” 

On Feud, Capote’s young protégé Kate Harrington (Ella Beatty) tries to buy the ashes herself but is ultimately outbid by a mystery buyer. (The ashes went for $45,000.) 

When VF reached out to Harrington recently, she said she is not commenting on Feud. “I am deeply ensconced completing my own memoir on my life with Truman,” she wrote in an email. “It has a very different story to tell about who Truman really was.”