Revisit Truman Capote’s 1976 AD Spread Before His Personal Treasures Hit the Auction Block

“You’ll have to wait to see what happens, but it’s going to be a lot of fun. It has a great cast—Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, Myrna Loy, Eileen Brennan, Peter Falk, David Niven, Madeline kahn, James Coco, Nancy Walker—and I have the lead part!”

He plays Lionel Twain, an eccentric millionaire living in a gloomy Victorian mansion in New England, who is a foremost authority on detective fiction. He thinks his casting is “perfect,” given his interest in crime and his best-seller In Cold Blood.

He is a collector, and he knows it. There’s a wonderful photograph taken several years ago by society photographer Slim Aarons of a youthful Capote perched on a Victorian sofa surrounded by many of his favorite things. “I like to collect things, Victorian things, and mix everything together. I enjoy looking for and at all of them. I’m not sure I need them. I’ve got too much, and I haven’t edited myself lately!”

He designs his own interiors. “For me, it’s a bore to use a decorator. I know exactly what I want. I just don’t care to have someone come in and tell me what I need to live with. I know.”

His philosophy of good interior design? “Something that’s not immediately offensive when you walk into a room. Of course it may be, eventually.”

In a brightly painted and comfortably arranged setting in the living room, the author wrote at this round wicker table. A pack of loose yellow unruled Sphinx paper, some notebooks, a photograph of Capote and his glasses share the space with an open copy of In Cold Blood.

Photography by Jaime Ardiles-Arce

Born in New Orleans and raised in the South, he began Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his famous classic, with the line, “I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and the neighborhoods.” Sagaponack, in many ways, reminds him of home. “I moved around so much as a child, I never had a sense of home. Maybe I did when I was 11 and I lived in a rural town in Alabama.”

Eyeing a hat rack above his bricked fireplace, the writer capriciously points to his assortment of rumpled panama hats.

“Home is where I hang my hats,” he laughs. “However, I keep leaving them when I go visit people. I don’t have as many as I used to because I don’t recover them all. People always promise to send them back, but they don’t.”

This article originally ran in the January/February 1976 issue of Architectural Digest.