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"View Slideshow\n\nIt is virtually impossible to find his Long Island home in the Hamptons, but that\u2019s exactly the way he wants it. Hidden behind scrub pine, privet hedges and rows of hydrangea bushes is Truman Capote\u2019s two-story, weathered-gray beach house near Sagaponack on the South Fork.\n\nHe lives in the heart of the Hamptons\u2014a stretch of rolling potato fields and lush farmlands married to the nearby Atlantic Ocean. A year-round farming community and a summer place for city people, it is here that antique farmhouses vie with modernistic glass houses for the dunes and fields. Mr. Capote once called Sagaponack \u201CKansas with a sea breeze.\u201D\n\nIt has actually become a rural Montparnasse with the likes of James Jones, Willem de Kooning, Marya Mannes, Jean Stafford, Joseph Heller and many other artists and writers living in the area. It is also the kind of sleepy sentimental town where the local bar\u2014Truman Capote often lunches here or has a drink with fellow writers John Knowles or Willie Morris\u2014runs an ad in the biweekly newspaper wishing him happy birthday. He can come and go as he pleases.\n\nThe best way to find Mr. Capote\u2019s secluded house is with him at the wheel of his deep-green Buick. Then it is a short but bumpy ride down a dirt lane first opened back in 1670, a quick turn into a gravel driveway past a natural bird sanctuary and a friend\u2019s cottage built on his property, before he jerkily pulls up in front of his box-shaped, flat-roofed wooden house. Wildflowers are still blooming, and the smell of the potatoes, almost ready for harvest, is pungent on the salty Atlantic Ocean air.\n\n\u201CI own these fields,\u201D he says proudly, sweeping his left hand like a plantation owner over the six acres he has owned since 1962, when he had the house built to his specifications \u201Cby a local carpenter who\u2019s dead now. He did it to my directions. It\u2019s exactly the way I wanted it. I work at this untended look. It\u2019s intentional. You can see how quiet it is here because you can barely see the top of another house. This is a place to be alone.\u201D\n\nOnly a few friends have ever ventured up the overgrown path to the house hidden in the dune grass, and they have all been invited first.\n\n\u201CI\u2019m here to work. I come here a lot in the autumn and winter, and I see almost no one. I don\u2019t care for the Hamptons in the summer\u2014it\u2019s gotten too crowded. I don\u2019t understand the way some people come out here and run themselves ragged every night. I just don\u2019t think some of these writers are working.\u201D This may seem an odd remark from Mr. Capote, who knows everyone from prisoners to princesses, socialites to sailors, and who simultaneously holds the reputation for being one of America\u2019s greatest prose writers and another for being a social butterfly.\n\n\u201CI spend most of my time out here reading, writing, going for walks with my dog and talking on the telephone. I see people in New York; I don\u2019t see New York people out here. I hardly see anyone when I\u2019m here. In the past 14 years, since I\u2019ve had this house, I\u2019ve gone out six times for dinner. Now that\u2019s quite a record for someone known for being so social, isn\u2019t it? Besides, whom would I entertain? I only know about four people I\u2019d really have over!\u201D\n\nEntering his house through the back kitchen door, he removes his loafers Japanese-style and walks into the living room. The barefoot Mr. Capote picks up a rag mop as delicately as Fred Astaire tapped his dancing cane and starts to dust the marine-blue floor, still not quite dry from its recent coat of boat deck paint.\n\n\u201CI\u2019ve just had it repainted, and this humidity doesn\u2019t help it dry. You should see this room at night. The floor floats like a big blue-green lake.\u201D\n\nThe author describes his house as a \u201Craincoat,\u201D referring to the method of its construction. Built with the exterior walls exposed to reveal vertical studs and horizontal bracings, the skin of the building protects the inside, just like a raincoat.\n\n\u201CI wanted a rustic house. I really think of it as one big room. Completely winterized, it\u2019s been designed to look unfinished. I call it \u2018run-down comfort.\u2019 I like the effect of texture in rooms\u2014the rawness of the wood plus the mirrors that line one end.\u201D\n\nA floor-to-ceiling window with divided panes lets in the glorious morning sun and allows a view of the sea and sand some 200 yards beyond the house. A spiraling steel staircase leads to a balconied second-floor study lined with red sofas, wicker chairs and hassocks and a famed Ren\u00E9 Bouch\u00E9 sketch of Capote. Here he works or reads.\n\nNone of the furniture or furnishings have \u201CDon\u2019t Touch\u201D signs. His possessions are comfortable, attractive and appear to be used rather than looked at. A priceless Tiffany lamp peeks over the shoulder of a worn yellow velvet easy chair. Upholstery has a few sun-faded patches, but the clusters of paperweights are shiny and sparkling. The wick-er chairs and tables come from inexpensive import shops, or else they are rare antiques\u2014like the round, claw-footed table downstairs where Mr. Capote writes. Needlepoint pillows done by friends are scattered about, as are silver-framed photographs of Lee Radziwill, an elegant-looking lady sitting primly in a bumper car, and Maggie.\n\nAlthough she has left pale blond hairs around, Maggie\u2014Capote\u2019s celebrated English bulldog\u2014is nowhere in sight.\n\n\u201CShe\u2019s next door visiting,\u201D explains the writer, who loves to talk about his \u201Csweet, quirky and huggy\u201D pet who once ate Joanne Carson\u2019s pink satin slippers and Charlotte Curtis\u2019s poinsettias and who periodically raids picnickers\u2019 baskets along Gibson Beach.\n\n\u201COh, she\u2019s very munchy all right,\u201D concedes Mr. Capote, pushing his Windex-blue-tinted prescription glasses up on his nose, shrugging and letting out his trademark, high-pitched giggle.\n\nOff the enormous living room is a small screened-in porch, similar to ones in many southern homes, filled with his beloved wicker furniture. He uses it as a summer room when the breezes blow mildly from the sea. His bedroom, near the kitchen, is so stark and sparsely furnished it resembles a summer camper\u2019s tent. Near his cot-size bed are a stack of detective magazines, a reducing machine and the usual pile of favorite books.\n\n\u201CI like to have my own things around me. Even when I travel to my other houses in Switzerland and in California, I take things of my own with me,\u201D says Mr. Capote, whose permanent base is a sleek apartment in the U.N. Plaza in Manhattan.\n\n\u201CI\u2019m a great houseguest. I only appear at mealtimes. However, I really don\u2019t like people staying with me. It\u2019s interrupting.\u201D\n\nHis Sagaponack schedule is uncomplicatedly regular. \u201CI get up around 7:00 a.m. and work until 11:00, stopping to read the papers. I work again until 1:00 p.m., when I have my lunch. Then I drive to the post office, do my errands, go for a walk. I fool around in the evenings, reading, walking Maggie. I have my dinner by 7:00 p.m., and I\u2019m usually in bed around 9:30 with a book.\u201D\n\nCurrently at work on his long-awaited novel, Answered Prayers, the author recently finished his first film role, in Murder by Death, a Neil Simon script.\n\n\u201CYou\u2019ll have to wait to see what happens, but it\u2019s going to be a lot of fun. It has a great cast\u2014Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, Myrna Loy, Eileen Brennan, Peter Falk, David Niven, Madeline kahn, James Coco, Nancy Walker\u2014and I have the lead part!\u201D\n\nHe plays Lionel Twain, an eccentric millionaire living in a gloomy Victorian mansion in New England, who is a foremost authority on detective fiction. He thinks his casting is \u201Cperfect,\u201D given his interest in crime and his best-seller In Cold Blood.\n\nHe is a collector, and he knows it. There\u2019s a wonderful photograph taken several years ago by society photographer Slim Aarons of a youthful Capote perched on a Victorian sofa surrounded by many of his favorite things. \u201CI like to collect things, Victorian things, and mix everything together. I enjoy looking for and at all of them. I\u2019m not sure I need them. I\u2019ve got too much, and I haven\u2019t edited myself lately!\u201D\n\nHe designs his own interiors. \u201CFor me, it\u2019s a bore to use a decorator. I know exactly what I want. I just don\u2019t care to have someone come in and tell me what I need to live with. I know.\u201D\n\nHis philosophy of good interior design? \u201CSomething that\u2019s not immediately offensive when you walk into a room. Of course it may be, eventually.\u201D\n\nBorn in New Orleans and raised in the South, he began Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s, his famous classic, with the line, \u201CI am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and the neighborhoods.\u201D Sagaponack, in many ways, reminds him of home. \u201CI moved around so much as a child, I never had a sense of home. Maybe I did when I was 11 and I lived in a rural town in Alabama.\u201D\n\nEyeing a hat rack above his bricked fireplace, the writer capriciously points to his assortment of rumpled panama hats.\n\n\u201CHome is where I hang my hats,\u201D he laughs. \u201CHowever, I keep leaving them when I go visit people. I don\u2019t have as many as I used to because I don\u2019t recover them all. People always promise to send them back, but they don\u2019t.\u201D\n\nThis article originally ran in the January/February 1976 issue of Architectural Digest."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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