Personal History

I was puzzled by the whole idea and not sure if Truman was serious, so I didn't think about it much, but when [my friend] Polly [Fritchey] and I joined Truman for lunch at ""21'' soon afterwards, I realized that this party was more about him than about me. I think he was tired from having written ""In Cold Blood'' and needed to be doing something to re-energize himself. I was a prop.

In any case, the excitement began to build. Truman's ""Black and White Ball,'' as it became known, was the height of my social life then--in some ways, ever. The gossip columns quickly went into action about who was and wasn't asked for the November 28 event. In the weeks before the party, whole pages of magazines and newspapers were devoted to the young beauties from New York and around the world who would be attending--their dresses, their hairdos, their masks. Truman spent hours developing the list of invitees. At one point, he was quoted as saying, ""I decided that everyone invited to come stag had to be either very rich, very talented, or very beautiful, and of course prefer-ably all three.'' The list included people from New York, Kansas (scene of ""In Cold Blood''), California, Europe, Asia, South America; from stage and screen and the literary and artistic worlds; business executives; and the media world--all friends of Truman's. The guests included Janet Flanner (The New Yorker's GenEt, correspondent from Paris), Diana Trilling, Claudette Colbert, Frank Sinatra and his new wife, Mia Farrow, Glenway Wescott, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Anne Porter, Virgil Thomson, and Anita Loos. I was allowed to invite twenty couples from Washington.

I had a French dress--a Balmain design, copied at Bergdorf Goodman. It was plain white crEpe with slate-colored beads around the neck and the sleeves. The mask was made to match, also at Bergdorf's, by Halston, who was then still making hats. The only direction I gave Halston was to remind him that I was five feet nine inches tall and didn't want something that would stick up too far. I also told him that Truman and I would be receiving the partygoers, so I couldn't have a mask on a stick that had to be held. I had begun going to the salon of the hairdresser Kenneth when I was in New York, but no one knew me there; I didn't have anyone special who did my hair, and I had never had makeup put on. I certainly didn't know how to put it on myself! I was leaving Kenneth's the night before the ball when a woman who worked there said, ""We're so busy, Mrs. Graham, with the hairdos for the Black and White Ball. Have you heard of it?''

""Yes,'' I replied. ""It seems funny, but I'm the guest of honor.''

She gasped and asked who would be doing my hair. I wasn't sure, and I knew I had no appointment for makeup at all. She swung into action and insisted that Kenneth himself do my hair. In fact, she led me to him straightaway, and I was given the last appointment at the very end of the next day. I sat watching while he pinned curls all over the beautiful Marisa Berenson's head, one by one. Finally, he got to me, and the wait was worth it: I wound up looking my very best. Of course, in that company, compared with the sophisticated beauties who blanketed the ballroom, my very best still looked like an orphan.

Why was I the guest of honor? Who knows? Truman and I were good friends, but we were on a less intimate basis than he was with Babe Paley or Marella Agnelli, probably the two most famous beauties in the world. In discussing who was more beautiful, Truman once said, ""If they were both in Tiffany's window, Marella would be more expensive.'' He was also great friends with Slim Keith and Pamela Hayward and Lee Radziwill. In the end, however, when he had fallen out with so many of his friends, he never turned on me as he did on most of them. I think he felt protective of me. Truman knew I didn't lead the glamorous kind of life that many of his friends did; he may have given the party for me primarily so that I could see it all up close, just once. I also think I was appropriate for the occasion because I really was a sort of middle-aged debutante--even a Cinderella, as far as that kind of life was concerned. I didn't know most of these people or their world, and they didn't know me. He felt he needed a reason for the party, a guest of honor, and I was from a dif-ferent world, and not in competition with his more glamorous friends. One of Truman's biographers, Gerald Clarke, conjectured: ""She was arguably the most powerful woman in the country, but still largely unknown outside Washington. Putting her in the spotlight was also his ultimate act as Pygmalion. It would symbolize her emergence from her dead husband's shadow; she would become her own woman before the entire world.''