The Canadian bombshell that lobster is now half the price of halibut plus the widespread discounting of (French) Champagne in all markets except SA confirms the devastating effect the global financial crisis is having on parties. Still it is encouraging to note that Henry Conway, one of the Independent’s People to Watch in 2010, lists his occupation as “party promoter.”

London Party Promoter Henry Conway

The most notorious party of the last century was a black and white masked ball for 540 celebrities thrown by society scribbler Truman Capote at the Plaza Hotel in New York at the end of November, 1966. It was very much a Paris Hilton affair – an event famous for being famous and as such, has gone down in the annals of gossip as the social event of the 20th century. But then Capote was very much a Paris Hilton character himself – more famous for being a famous writer than for his books.

Deborah Davis’ Party of the Century: the fabulous story of Truman Capote and his black and white ball (Wiley, 2007), is a social masterpiece, written in a Proustian pointillist style where a succession of tiny details, thickly applied, unite to produce a convincing painting – which is most appropriate as Capote thought of Marcel Proust as “a kind of secret friend.” Both writers were obsessed with the mores and behavior of high society and both wrote while reclining in their tiny beds.

The details are fascinating: invitations were printed by Tiffany’s, who managed to misspell the name of the person and more importantly, the address, to which acceptances or not should be sent. Each one was laboriously corrected by hand.

The price for the party was right – $16 000, a figure Capote could well afford as he made a reputed cool two mil from his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood that year, described by the normally staid New York Times as “the hottest property since the invention of the wheel.” Although he did misremember the cost later as variously $75 000 and $155 000. An abstemious 450 bottles of Taittinger Champagne were popped. Spaghetti with meatballs and chicken hash were the gastronomic options.

In Cold Blood would turn out to be Capote’s high water mark. And while he would often recount how he stumbled upon the subject matter – the Clutters, a rural Kansas family, murdered by a pair of psychopathic drifters – by accident in the New York Times, Davis reveals reality to be more somewhat more prosaic. New Yorker magazine had suggested two topics for a feature: the Clutter case or following a New York City cleaning woman on her daily rounds.

It is mundane details like these that deflate Capote’s celebrity bubbles like so many morning after balloons. Take his observation that it is tiny vegetables that separate the rich from the truly rich, for example: “serving the tiniest most expensive vegetables at a time when they were rare was a surefire way to establish social superiority.”

In the months preceding the bash, Capote terrorized le tout New York with a 102 page notebook labeled “ball” in which the select 540 were named. As Capote wryly noted, the ball made him 500 friends and 15000 enemies. But even more impressive than those who came, headed by the maharaja and maharani of Jaipur (which sounds like the start of an Edward Lear nonsense couplet), were the refuseniks. The exotic Indians were late additions, invited the very day of the ball – making a mockery of Capote’s months spent assembling his Almanach de Gotham - yet they mysteriously appeared on the list of invitees the New York Times printed the next day. Of course Capote denied leaking.

Literary lions Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder and Christopher Isherwood sent their apologies. As did Jacqueline Kennedy, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Mayor John Lindsay and high ranking figures from the Johnson administration although the president’s daughter did accept. Even such stellar freeloaders as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and actors Elizabeth Taylor and husband Richard Burton, regretted. The largest ego to front up was Frank Sinatra and Capote had to beg ol’ blue eyes not to bail early (2:45am) and head off to Jilly’s, his favourite hole-in-the-wall, aborting the affair before it got into tabloid heaven. Frank tipped his waiter $100.

Style diva Diana Vreeland of Vogue met Capote halfway – she attended a pre-ball dinner party, posed for photographs and then slipped away quietly, home to bed. Capote never knew. The shallowness of Capote’s world is summed up by society and fashion reporter for the Herald Tribune, Eugenia Sheppard, invited to document the event for posterity. “For all her insights, Sheppard did not have good eyesight. She preferred to see the world on the blurry side, rather than spoil her carefully composed look with unsightly glasses. Sometimes, she had to depend on her companions for descriptions of what was strutting down fashion show runways.”

And of course some of the celebrities in her blurry sights were of dubious pedigree to start with: Michael Hohenzollern, a sales rep for Pan Am whose dad worked on a Ford production line but whose great-granddad was Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The book is part Capote biography, part biography of his coterie of “swans” – Manhattan ladies who lunch, lean and leggy wives of masters of the financial and industrial complex – and part social record. As the aging swans inexorably depart on their final migrations, the black and white ball withdraws into the depths of history, like those murky images of the Titanic ballroom, chandeliers askew and baby grand silent.

Of course the ball itself was a frippery, the guests mostly vain and silly but to note that while they tripped the light fantastic the US Air Force was putting on some amazing deadly lightshows in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia, is to miss Davies’ point. The black and white ball was the first overwhelming proof, in true shock and awe fashion, that the cult of celebrity had become the dominant cultural expression in the western world. Celebrity was the new aristocracy. Capote had arranged a private entrance to the ballroom by which camera-shy guests could enter and depart unobserved by the paparazzi and crowds of lookie-loos. Not one of the 540 guests used it.

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