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By Caryn JamesFeatures Correspondent
fake imagesA star-studded new miniseries from Ryan Murphy looks at how the author betrayed the trust of some of America’s most elite women and destroyed his career in the process.
A cartoon on the cover of New York Magazine in 1975 showed author Truman Capote as a small, barking French poodle, nibbling on the fingers of a stunned woman at a gala party. The headline read: Capote bites the hands that fed him. The article, written by gossip columnist Liz Smith, pulled back the curtain on the true identities of the society women Capote had recently betrayed in print. Babe Paley and Slim Keith, then filling the society pages and best-dressed lists, confided in him their affairs, their philandering husbands, and their insecurities, only to have their close friend mock them and reveal their deepest secrets. intimate. His thinly veiled fiction – a story called La Côte Basque, 1965 – appeared in the widely read Esquire magazine. The betrayal helped ruin his life.
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That true story of a long-lost social era and a friendship gone horribly wrong is delightfully told in Feud: Capote vs the Swans, the colorful, star-studded second installment of the Ryan Murphy franchise that began with bette and joan, about the Hollywood rivalry of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Capote, played by Tom Hollander, is well known, if not for his books (particularly Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood), then for the 2005 film Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman. But who were these women he called swans and why did he turn on them so cruelly?
fake images“They were like the original Real Housewives,” Murphy said Town and Country Magazine, but that seems like an exaggeration. None of Capote’s refined swans ever screamed and threw a table at The Ceitherte Basque, the restaurant where they usually had lunch together, like the women on that reality show did. But they did have a similar hold on the public imagination. They were stylish influencers. None of them married poor men or dreamed of having a real career. They drank, smoked and wore extravagant but tasteful jewelry. And while their style may seem boring now (Paley’s helmet hair never moves), they were the fashion leaders of their day. Paley regularly appeared on best-dressed lists.
Feud plays a little with chronology and facts, but mostly it opposes the truth. In 1975, Capote was in a different stage of his life than the one depicted in the film Capote. Those two fictional versions complement each other well. Hoffman is the serious writer researching In Cold Blood, the 1965 true crime book that made him rich and famous. Feud finds Capote at the peak of that fame. Hollander captures the countryside and wit, and also the tragedy of a brilliant and troubled man. He had achieved his lifelong dream of being accepted by high society, but he was also self-indulgent and an alcoholic. He was in and out of a relationship with John O’Shea (Russell Tovey), a married, middle-class banker whom the swans could barely tolerate. And he became seriously blocked as a writer.
LaCeitherThe Basque, along with two less explosive stories published in Esquire, were intended to be part of Answered Prayers, a novel that, he told his friends and editors, was his counterpart to Proust in search of lost time, the definitive account of the upper class of its time. No one ever accused him of having a tiny ego. But he seemed unable to finish it.
Who were the ‘swans’?
Capote’s favorite swan and best friend, a perfect Proustian specimen, was Paley (Naomi Watts), serenely perfect in her behavior and taste. Her husband, Bill Paley (played by the late Treat Williams), was the powerful boss of the CBS television network and, as she well knew, a womanizer. Watts captures the fragility of someone who needs to be perfect and the loneliness of her that made her need a sympathetic shoulder like Truman.
In the first episode of Feud, Truman convinces her not to divorce Bill after he has slept with Happy Rockefeller, the wife of the governor of New York. Paley found him cleaning Happy’s menstrual blood from the carpet in her room and he’d had enough. With crystal-clear clarity, Truman advises her to stay married, to maintain her pampered life, and to have Bill buy her a Gauguin and a Matisse in her place. But that episode also sets up the real-life conflict, with Paley’s devastated reaction to La Côte Basque.
fake imagesIn Capote’s story, a wealthy businessman named Dillon (soon shortened to Dill, so close to Bill) sleeps with the governor’s disheveled wife and then attempts to clean up a bloodstain “the size of Brazil.” Bill was Capote’s target, but Babe felt humiliated that her husband’s deception was publicized to the world. Ebs Burnough, director of The Capote Tapes, a 2022 documentary about the writer that uses never-before-heard audio interviews with people close to him, told British Fashion“This was a time when no one even talked about the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, let alone the issues that people were having, let alone as graphically as Truman did.” Paley never spoke to Capote again.
Although Paley was the most hurt by the story, the main character of La Côte Basque is the fictional version of Slim Keith. Of all the actresses who play swans, Diane Lane may be the most fun to watch, giving her character a bold directness. Keith’s first husband was film director Howard Hawks, who, legend has it, used her as a model for Lauren Bacall’s tough, seductive character in To Have and Have Not, also called Slim. The second was the producer Leland Hayward, and the third was the British businessman Kenneth Keith, whose knighthood made her Lady Keith.
LaCeitherThe Basque turns her into Lady Ina Coolbirth, “a big, cheerful girl” who has lunch with Capote’s replacement, PB Jones, a writer and sometimes con artist. It is Ina who reveals her friends’ secrets, mentioning Ernest Hemingway (in fact, a friend of Slim’s) and remembering the time Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s father, raped her (Kennedy Sr. was already dead, so could not sue). Capote for slander).
In Feud, Keith insists that the swans ban Truman from society for his betrayal, a fate that for him was almost worse than death. “We will destroy it,” he says. Years later, the real Slim Keith told Capote biographer Gerald Clarke of his horrified reaction to Lady Ina. “She looks like me, she talks like me, she is me!” she said. Of Capote, she said: “she adored him and was so horrified by his use of friendship and by my own bad judgment.”
CZ Guest (Chloe Sevigny, coolly understated in a major role) was also a close member of their group, a socialite and a noted gardener, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1962 under the line “What Society Is Like Today.” . . Maybe because she didn’t appear in La C.eitherAs a Basque, she continued seeing Capote afterwards. She and her husband even took him to rehab when he was at his worst, slurring his words like a drunk on TV shows. His recovery did not last long.
fake imagesLee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart) is in La Côte Basque, without costume and having lunch with his sister, Jacqueline Kennedy. In the show, she joins the other Swans in ousting Capote, although in life they remained friends for years. It probably helped that, in her fiction, Ina and PB agree that Lee is much more beautiful and elegant than Jackie.
Jon Robin Baitz, who wrote the show, said E.W.: “This story exists at this point where a world of elegance, ritual and class is being supplanted by youthful fervor: the disco, Studio 54, the drugs.” When the middle-aged Capote, fired by his swans, embraced that drug-fueled disco world, he seemed more desperately sad than exciting.
The greatest mystery
Why he published La Côte Basque in the first place is the subject of many theories. Clarke, Capote’s friend and biographer, wrote that he warned him that his society friends would react badly. Capote’s response, he said, was “No, they’re too stupid. They won’t know who they are.” Liz Smith wrote in that 1975 article that the swans considered him “his favorite domestic pet,” there to amuse himself. It was the CeitherDo you want his revenge? Capote had a standard response to the debacle, heard in his own voice on The Capote Tapes: “What did you expect? I’m a writer. I use everything.”
That may have been brave. Joseph M. Fox, in an editor’s note to the book published posthumously in 1986 as Answered Prayers (which simply collects the three Esquire stories), said of the reaction: “There is no doubt that he was moved by the reaction.” Fox believed that was one of the reasons he stopped working on the novel. Capote kept telling his friends that he had written much of the book and had even read excerpts, or at least pretended excerpts, aloud. But after his death in 1984, no trace of a manuscript ever appeared. Babe Paley died of cancer in 1978. One of Capote’s greatest regrets was never forgiving him.
The swans are now having their moment, and not just for the show. daily women’s clothing He recently called them “fashion icons whose influence still resonates today,” and noted that Radziwill and Paley inspired Lanvin’s spring/summer 2020 collection. The Washington Post featured the program in a article titled “Ladies Who Lunch Have Become Unexpected Fashion Icons of 2024.”
But it’s the real-life drama that remains fascinating. In his preface to Music for Chameleons, his 1980 collection of short pieces, Capote addressed the beginning and end process of writing Answered Prayers and explained – perhaps with a touch of fabulism – why he had no trouble remembering the details. . “All the characters were real,” he wrote. “I hadn’t invented anything.”
Feud: Capote vs The Swans premieres January 31 on FX in the US and will be available to stream on Hulu starting February 1.
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