Deliberate Cruelty

September 12, 2022
In this engrossing account, research librarian Montillo (Atomic Women: The Untold Stories of the Scientists Who Helped Create the Nuclear Bomb) recreates a tragic cause célèbre. On November 15, 1955, Billy Woodward was shot to death in his Long Island home by his wife, Ann, who later insisted that she had mistaken him for a burglar. Her story, which had more than a few holes in it, was persuasive enough that a Nassau grand jury declined to charge her with murder. Montillo punctiliously reconstructs Ann’s painful life, including her failed attempt at becoming a movie star like her role model, Joan Crawford, and her troubled marriage to a philanderer, who may have been bisexual and whom she had wed after having a sexual relationship with his father. In addition, the author details the life of author Truman Capote, who planned to write an epic novel, Answered Prayers, “that would rival Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” inspired by Ann’s killing of her spouse. That never happened, but Capote’s publication of a purported excerpt from it led Ann to die by suicide in 1975. True crime fans particularly interested in bloodshed among the upper classes will enjoy this dark look at two intertwined and unhappy lives. Agent: Rob Weisbach, Rob Weisbach Creative.

September 15, 2022
How the connection between Truman Capote and a millionaire's wife brought about their mutual destruction. Capote took interest in Ann Woodward in 1955 after she shot and killed her husband, Billy Woodward, claiming she thought he was a burglar. When he accosted her in a restaurant a year later, the socialite angrily dismissed him as "a little fag." Montillo, the author of The Lady and Her Monsters, among other works of nonfiction, suggests that this insult may have been one of the infamously spiteful writer's motivations for writing "La C�te Basque, 1965," his infamous 1975 short story. The author's fascination with Woodward and Capote is evident in her elegantly novelistic retelling of their lives and the strange connections and parallels that linked them. "Both had overcome hardscrabble, unsteady, fraught childhoods," writes Montillo. "Both had cajoled, clawed, and charmed their way into the elite circles they sought to enter. Both were vulnerable and mean. Both were familiar with violence." The beautiful Woodward had escaped a bleak Kansas life to become a New York showgirl. Capote left Alabama and flourished in New York City, where his brilliance as a writer was quickly recognized. After their initial encounter, Woodward would become an increasingly marginalized figure among the wealthy socialites who had never fully accepted her, while literary bad-boy Capote went on to become the "chronicler of the New York social world that...shunned" her. Capote's obsession with Woodward only intensified, especially after he found himself unable to produce another book. His 1975 story, based on the lives of Woodward and the high-society women friends he called his "swans," was so devastating that Woodward committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal, the drug that also killed Capote's mother. In turn, Capote was rejected by his swans for his betrayal of their confidences and sank into the drug and alcohol abuse that eventually led to his death. This engaging, well-researched book will appeal to true-crime aficionados, Capote fans, and anyone interested in a darkly intriguing story well told. A compelling mix of true crime and literary biography.

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October 1, 2022
Celebrated author Truman Capote and flamboyant socialite Ann Woodward had far more in common than their shared Manhattan milieu would suggest. Both rose from rural poverty and parental neglect to reinvent themselves in New York's caf� society, Ann by marrying banking heir Billy Woodward and Capote through his career as a best-selling author. That their paths would cross was inevitable, yet the circumstances that ultimately united them involved them both in a notorious crime and libelous betrayals. Woodward was accused of her husband's murder, allegedly mistaking him for a prowler on their Long Island estate. It was a tale no one believed but one too tantalizing for Capote to ignore. Just as he had been cataloguing the personal secrets of his coterie of "swans," such elites as Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and Lee Radziwill, for a self-proclaimed "magnum opus, Capote also exploited the Woodward murder to titillating and tragic effect. Montillo's deeply researched expos� of the untimely downfall of glittering icons haunted by fundamental insecurities and entrenched demons is a dishy true-crime, literary critique mash-up.

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