‘Have you seen Esquire?! Call me as soon as you’re finished,” New York society doyenne Babe Paley asked her friend Slim Keith over the telephone when the November 1975 issue hit the stands. Keith, then living at the Pierre hotel, sent the maid downstairs for a copy. “I read it, and I was absolutely horrified,” she later confided to the writer George Plimpton. “The story about the sheets, the story about Ann Woodward . . . There was no question in anybody’s mind who it was.”

The story they were reading in Esquire was “La Côte Basque 1965,” but it wasn’t so much a story as an atomic bomb that Truman Capote built all by himself in his U.N. Plaza apartment and at his beach house in Sagaponack, Long Island. It was the first installment of Answered Prayers, the novel that Truman believed would be his masterpiece.

He had boasted to his friend Marella Agnelli, wife of Gianni Agnelli, chairman of the board at Fiat, that Answered Prayers was “going to do to America what Proust did to France.” He couldn’t stop talking about his planned roman à clef. He told People magazine that he was constructing his book like a gun: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen—wham!”

But he had unwittingly turned the gun on himself: exposing the secrets of Manhattan’s rich and powerful was nothing short of social suicide.

He had been a literary darling since the age of 23, when his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was published. Seventeen years later, in 1965, In Cold Blood, his extraordinary “nonfiction novel” about the brutal murder of the Clutters, a Kansas farm family, brought him international fame, sudden wealth, and literary accolades beyond anything he’d experienced before.

But trying to write Answered Prayers, and its eventual fallout, destroyed him. By 1984, after several unsuccessful stays at dry-out centers such as Hazelden and Smithers, Capote seemed to have given up not only on the book but on life. Abandoned by most of his society friends, locked in a brutal, self-destructive relationship with a middle-aged, married, former bank manager from Long Island, Truman was worn out. Or heartbroken.

After “La Côte Basque 1965,” only two more of its chapters were published, both in Esquire: “Unspoiled Monsters” (May 1976) and “Kate McCloud” (December 1976). (“Mojave,” which had appeared in Esquire in June 1975, was initially intended to be part of Answered Prayers, but Truman changed his mind about its inclusion.)

Truman had recorded in his journals the outline for the entire book, which would comprise seven chapters. The remaining four were titled “Yachts and Things,” “And Audrey Wilder Sang,” “A Severe Insult to the Brain” (which according to urban legend was the cause of death on Dylan Thomas’s death certificate), and “Father Flanagan’s All-Night Nigger Queen Kosher Café,” the provocative title for the teeth-rattling concluding chapter. Truman claimed in his journals he had actually written it first.

But was the novel ever completed? A number of Truman’s friends, including Joanne Carson (the second wife of television host Johnny Carson), say that he had read various unpublished chapters to them. “I saw them,” Joanne recalls. “He had a writing room in my house—he spent a lot of time here because it was a safe place and nobody could get to him—and he had many, many pages of manuscript, and he started to read them. They were very, very good. He read one chapter, but then someone called, and when I went back he just put them aside and said, ‘I’ll read them after dinner.’ But he never did—you know how that happens.”