In his heyday, there was no brighter star in the Hamptons social orbit than Truman, but after the serialization in Esquire magazine of his thinly veiled satire Answered Prayers, the writer entered a darker phase, in exile by the shore, taking solace in a bottle. The devastating impact of Capote's fall came swiftly. According to John Knowles, "he was completely unstrung" by the reaction and fell into an irrevocable depression. "Towards the end, of course, he was drinking too much," Clarke recalls. In July of 1980, Dunphy found Capote collapsed on the steps of his cottage with broken glass all around him. Dunphy rushed him to Southampton Hospital, where Capote told him, "I drink because it's the only time I can stand it." Three summers later he was dead. These days, it's fittingly that another creative figure, artist Ross Bleckner, resides in Capote's storied cottage, having preserved the compound now adjacent to protected lands, never to be overshadowed by the McMansions Capote would have despised. And what would Capote have made of the Hamptons today? "There was a different sort of society out here then," says Clarke, "and it was so much quieter. Who's out here now? Rock stars, movie stars... It's a publicity society." On second thought, Clarke muses, perhaps it would have suited Truman just fine. In the '70s he hobnobbed with Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones. "Who knows? If he were still alive today, he might have been at the center of P. Diddy's latest party, making little asides...taking it all in."