Carrington House friends in the community, including Truman Capote. In 1957, Capote developed a novella there that would become "Breakfast at Tiffany's". Other guests included New York City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kerstein, fashion designer Bill Blass, actor Henry Fonda, actress Gertrude Lawrence, and actress Katharine Hepburn. Carrington owned the house for almost fifty years, then sold it to the US government as part of Fire Island National Seashore under the condition that he be able to live there for the rest of his life; he died on July 3, 1975. National Park Service Ranger Bob Freda lived there for the next twenty
Truman Capote of the film. Another work described by Capote as "nonfiction" was later reported to have been largely fabricated. In a 1992 piece in the "Sunday Times", reporters Peter and Leni Gillman investigated the source of "Handcarved Coffins", the story in Capote's last work "Music for Chameleons" subtitled "a nonfiction account of an American crime". They found no reported series of American murders in the same town which included all of the details Capote described – the sending of miniature coffins, a rattlesnake murder, a decapitation, etc. Instead, they found that a few of the details closely mirrored an unsolved case