the last book I ever read (Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles, excerpt nine)

from Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles by Mark Rozzo:

Nick and Lenny’s anniversary party was a sparkling moment in early-sixties Hollywood. Dancing with everyone, Truman Capote stole the show. The writer was staying with the Selznicks on Tower Grove Drive; at a dinner there, he told Curtis Harrington how much he’d loved Night Tide. It was a year before In Cold Blood appeared in The New Yorker, but Capote brought along Alvin Dewey, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent who had solved the 1959 Clutter family murder case, to the Dunnes’ party. Dewey and Dennis, whose grandparents had leased land from the Clutters, would have had much to discuss.

Two years later, Capote hosted a black-and-white ball of his own at the Plaza Hotel in New York—and over-the-top exercise in exclusivity that was impossibly glamorous and grossly anachronistic, like something out of the Gilded Age. Leland and Pamela Hayward went (they shared a table with Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow), as did Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler, along with five hundred-something other celebrities, swans, and alpha personalities, from Tallulah Bankhead to Norman Mailer. Brooke had zero doubt that Capote had gotten the idea for his famous black-and-white ball from her friends Nick and Lenny Dunne—whom he had not invited.