- Truman Capote and the Swans
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- The International Nomads, Jet Age Society, Who It Is & How, Why & Where It Functions (Black and White Ball, Elsie Woodward)
The International Nomads, Jet Age Society, Who It Is & How, Why & Where It Functions (Black and White Ball, Elsie Woodward)
Rasponi, Lanfranco. The International Nomads, Jet Age Society, Who It Is & How, Why & Where It Functions. First Edition. 1966. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition.
As this author, a powerful New York press agent, notes in this cheeky book, upward mobility has existed as long as society itself, but it took the modern passenger jet to expand its boundaries into the stratosphere. As such, the archaic laws of society didn’t stand a chance. Mrs. Astor’s ballroom was passé. Instead, everyone clamored for an invitation to Truman Capote’s Black and White ball. There was at least one person on Truman’s guest list who was around at the time of Mrs. Astor—Elsie Woodward, mother-in-law of the mariticidal Ann. Elsie’s secret was that the killing of her son and her alleged suppression of the case against her daughter-in-law boosted her own social desirability (even as it diminished Ann’s). Since marriage to William Woodward Sr., Elsie had been A-List, but it took murder to make her a hot ticket. And she liked it, so much that she hired Lanfranco Rasponi as her press agent. And he knew his stuff. This book is an indispensable record of the era. There is a helpful appendix, a directory of jet set members from A to Z, including many who were invited to Capote’s ball (held in the year of this book’s publication).
“In Geneva, a diplomat and his wife who invited me to dinner, told the guests entering the dining room not to speak English. ‘We have a brand-new butler,’ they explained, ‘a very nice Jamaican drummer out of a job. Whenever we speak English, he invariably joins the conversation, and we don’t dare tell him not [to] do it. He might get offended and leave us.”
--Lanfranco Rasponi