Content warning for discussion of suicide
The "millionaire's wife" is Ann Woodward, a Kansas-born New York socialite and former exotic dancer who married Billy Woodward, the heir of a banking family. On Halloween night in 1955, Ann shot and killed Billy in their home after they arrived home from a dinner party at which fellow attendees had heard them argue. The evidence seems to suggest that Ann murdered Billy. She always contended that she mistook him for the prowler who'd recently stolen cars and broken into garages in the neighborhood. Although the grand jury declined to charge Ann with a crime, she became a pariah in New York Cafe Society.
Years ago, when I watched the movie Capote starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, I said I didn't think it was factually accurate that Truman Capote was present at the executions of Richard Hickok and Perry Smith. I was wrong, as Montillo states in her book. Harper Lee wasn't there, but Capote was, with his editor Joseph Fox. (Fox edited and published the extant chapters of Answered Prayers after Capote's 1984 death.)
An insight shared by Kansas Bureau of Investigations agent Alvin Dewey and the movie Capote is that Truman Capote and Perry Smith shared and recognized similarities in one another. Both longed for their mothers' attention; both lost their mothers to suicide. Both were short-statured men, dreamy, thoughtful, and intelligent. Capote may have seen Perry Smith as a sort of dark mirror of himself.
Montillo's insight is into the ways in which Ann Woodward and Truman Capote mirrored one another. Woodward became a social outcast after the shooting of her husband. Capote was cast out of the society of his "swans," the society women who considered him a friend, in 1975 when Esquire magazine published his short story "La Côte Basque, 1965." It was transparently a fictionalized version of Woodward's story. She'd finally managed to live down her notoriety and create something of a life for herself in Europe by 1975, and the publication could do nothing for her but dredge up all of her worst traumas for a new audience. She died of an apparently purposeful Seconal overdose on October 10, 1975, around the same time the November 1975 issue of Esquire was released.
Sadly, Woodward's two sons both took their own lives as adults.
The final nine years of Capote's life saw him increasingly depend on prescription pills and alcohol. When his friend Joanne Carson found Capote dead in his bed at her home in Los Angeles, his death was thought to have been the cumulative effect of years of hard drug and alcohol abuse rather than the overdose of any particular medicine. Still, he'd spent his final years promising that the full novel Answered Prayers would be finished at any moment. In reality, a completed manuscript has never been found. His last nine years were creatively unproductive. His lonely ending was strikingly similar to Woodward's.
On Tuesday, January 7th, I listened to this episode of the Most Notorious! true crime podcast.
The guest is author Gary McAvoy. McAvoy's nonfiction book And Every Word Is True explores the theory that Hickok and Smith were hired by an unknown third person to murder Herb Clutter. I ordered it from Barnes and Noble last night.
So I will be reading more about Truman Capote and In Cold Blood in the near future.
