Were still talking about Truman Capotes Black and White Ball 50 years later. Heres why.

Rolling out the black and white carpet: See photos from Capote’s famous ball

Celebrate its 50th anniversary with a look back at the Black and White Ball hosted by writer Truman Capote honoring Katharine Graham.

It was 1966, the best year of Truman Capote’s life.

"In Cold Blood," his sensational nonfiction novel about a murdered Kansas family, made him the best-known writer in America. He made $2million and bought a $62,000 luxury Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River. He was on the cover of Life, Newsweek, the New York Times Book Review and more.

So he decided to throw a party — a huge, spectacular gathering in New York for all his friends. It was a present to himself, the ultimate reward for his boundless ambition and need for attention. But even Capote understood that it was bad form to celebrate himself. He needed a guest of honor.

Which is how Katharine Graham, then-owner of The Washington Post and Newsweek, first became a household name. Relatively unknown outside Washington circles, Graham was the perfect choice: She was influential, undemanding and grateful to be asked.

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The night succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The Black and White Ball, held exactly 50 years ago, on Nov. 28, 1966, became the most famous party of the 20th century.

"The publicity and higher profile frightened me a little, and may have actually hurt me — and probably should have, given the serious, professional person I was trying to be," Graham wrote in her 1997 autobiography, "Personal History." But it was also a life-changing moment.

“For me, the party was just great pleasure, maybe doubly so because it was unlike my real life,” she wrote. “I was flattered, and although it may not have been my style, for one magic night I was transformed.”

The ball was the last gasp of a social elite based on exclusivity, pedigree and privilege — and the dawn of a new social order based on buzz, celebrity and self-promotion. Half a century later, it’s still imitated, dissected and mythologized.

Earlier that year, Capote called Graham to say that he was throwing a party for her.

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Her husband, Phil Graham, had committed suicide three years earlier; Capote told her that he was giving the ball to cheer her up. “I’m fine,” she told him, according to her memoir. “It’s really nice of you, but I don’t need cheering up.”

The two had met five years earlier, introduced by Babe Paley, the wife of then-CBS President Bill Paley and one of Capote’s famous “swans” — the rich, beautiful wives who ruled New York’s social world. Graham, like everyone who met the writer, was charmed: He was witty, flattering, gossipy, irreverent and exotic, with an exaggerated, effeminate manner and unbridled confidence in his own genius.

“It’s hard to describe Truman as I first saw him,” Graham wrote. “He had that strange falsetto voice for which he was so well known. He was very short, perfectly dressed, groomed and coifed. And he was a magic conversationalist — his sentences were like stories.”

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The two saw each other whenever Graham was in New York. In the summer of 1965, they found themselves alone on Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli’s yacht, where she read an advance copy of “In Cold Blood.” That fall, Graham hosted an A-list Washington dinner for Capote and Kansas detective Alvin Dewey, who had cracked the murder case. Capote and Graham were close enough that he persuaded her to buy an apartment in his U.N. Plaza building the following year.

Graham, then 49, originally thought that the party for her would be something small. Then Capote laid out his vision: the ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, with every guest wearing black or white, based on the Ascot scene in "My Fair Lady." They would all wear masks, which would come off at midnight.

When Graham realized what he really had in mind, she was overwhelmed, but she went along with the plan because she knew how important it was to Capote. “I realized that this party was more about him than it was about me,” Graham wrote. “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.”

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Why pick Graham? He couldn’t single out one of the swans without disrupting the delicate social world he had built for himself, and he enjoyed playing Henry Higgins to Graham’s Eliza Doolittle.

“Truman knew I didn’t lead the glamorous kind of life that many of his friends did,” she wrote. “He may have given the party for me primarily so I could see it all up close, just once.” She called herself a “middle-aged debutante — even a Cinderella, as far as that kind of life was concerned.”

Capote planned the ball meticulously, applying his literary mind to constructing the perfect setting, mood and cast of characters. He wrote everything in a small black-and-white notebook, adding and deleting guests like chess pieces, taunting friends and enemies: Maybe you’ll be invited, and maybe you won’t.

The ballroom of the Plaza held 540 people, and Capote’s list quickly swelled to fill it. He insisted that it include the very rich, the very famous or the very beautiful. He also threw in a group of friends from Kansas and his doorman at the U.N. Plaza. As the guest of honor, Graham was allowed to invite 20 couples from Washington.

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Capote didn’t invite President Lyndon B. Johnson, because he didn’t want to deal with the security issues. But he did invite Johnson’s daughter Lynda, as well as Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Margaret Truman.

New York newspapers began speculating who would make the cut. Old friends hounded Capote for an invitation. Some loudly told friends that they were crushed to miss the party because of a previously scheduled trip overseas. One man called to say that his wife was threatening to commit suicide if they weren’t invited. Capote, whose mother had killed herself, put the couple on the list.

"There was a slight note of insanity about the party," Graham told Vanity Fair magazine in 1996. "There is just no rational reason why the whole situation escalated."

Blame social insecurity, the gnawing fear of not being good enough. Everybody who was anybody was going, and everybody else was a nobody.

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The competition for the most glamorous gowns and masks began in earnest, with custom designs by Adolfo and a newcomer named Halston, who created a white mink bunny mask for 20-year-old actress Candice Bergen. Some women ordered two or more masks, and some of the uninvited ordered masks to save face.

Graham commissioned Bergdorf Goodman to copy a Balmain design: a long, white crepe gown with hematite beads around the neck and sleeves, with a mask made to match by Halston. On the day of the ball, she showed up at the salon of Kenneth, hairdresser to New York’s most fashionable. The place was a madhouse; one employee asked Graham whether she had heard about the already-famous party.

“Yes,” she replied. “It seems funny, but I’m the guest of honor.” The embarrassed employee insisted that Kenneth himself would take care of her hair, and someone else would do her makeup. “I wound up looking my very best,” wrote Graham, but compared with the legendary beauties at the ball, “my very best still looked like an orphan.”

Much has been written about the party, thanks primarily to the striking black-and-white photos of the famous people who attended. The ball's timing, just before Vietnam and the Youthquake of the 1960s split the country into Past and Future, serves as a convenient touchstone for meditations on class, fame and modern culture.

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“I felt as if we were in Versailles in 1788,” writer John Knowles told fellow author George Plimpton. “People were applauding on the street as we walked in. We had our masks on. I thought, next year it’ll be the tumbrels taking us out to Herald Square, but at the moment, we were the last of the aristocrats.”

Held on a rainy Monday night, the ball began at 10 p.m. Capote ordered his swans to host dinners beforehand, and he and Graham went to the Paleys for cocktails before slipping back to the Plaza, where they posed for photographers and took their place in the receiving line.

Guests made their way through a phalanx of 200 photographers — more than had shown up when the Beatles stayed at the hotel in 1964. In a precursor to today’s red-carpet coverage, CBS sent Charles Kuralt to anchor a live feed of celebrity arrivals: Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Henry Fonda, Norman Mailer, Rose Kennedy, Andy Warhol, Claudette Colbert, Oscar de la Renta, Tallulah Bankhead, and the Maharajah and Maharani of Jaipur.

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Capote and Graham stood greeting guests for two hours, most meeting her for the first time. There was music by Peter Duchin; Capote danced with Graham, Lee Radziwill and Graham’s daughter, Lally Weymouth. Lauren Bacall entranced the crowd when she waltzed with choreographer Jerome Robbins. Mailer threatened to beat up former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy over the Vietnam War. The crowd was served a midnight buffet of chicken hash, spaghetti Bolognese and 450 bottles of Taittinger champagne. The last guests stumbled out at 3 a.m.

“I thought it was incredibly glamorous,” remembers Weymouth, who was a young bride at the time.

The party cost Capote $16,000, although the amount grew larger and larger every time he reminisced about the ball.

The party was national news, with stories in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Women’s Wear Daily and dozens of other publications.

Capote leaked the guest list to the Times, which published the names of all the invited — even those who did not attend, including Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It was really a knife twist to all those who had foolishly announced that they were invited but unable to attend. It wasn’t enough for Capote to exclude the impostors. He wanted public humiliation, revenge for every slight, every unkindness real or perceived.

There is a Shakespearean irony to all this: Capote's fall was swift and unsparing. After the party, he wrote little of significance. He was bitter when "In Cold Blood" failed to win the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize, which he thought he deserved. All his hopes turned to what he thought would be his masterpiece: stories about the very rich called "Answered Prayers."

In 1975, Esquire published the chapter “La Côte Basque 1965.” The thinly veiled excerpt was so damning that one of the socialites depicted in it committed suicide; Capote was ostracized from New York society after his adored swans refused to take his calls. He was shocked by the response, mostly because he thought his society friends would forgive anything he did.

Graham was spared, mostly because Capote had always had a soft spot for those he saw as vulnerable. But their friendship became strained; Capote spent most of his time drinking, doing drugs and appearing on talk shows. He died in 1984 at 59, shunned and broken.

Graham famously went on to preside over the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the coverage of the Watergate scandal. She lived until 2001, acclaimed for her storied career and her Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography.

The Black and White Ball, at least the myth of it, survives them both.

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