Naomi Watts on Babe Paley’s death and whether she and Capote rekindled

Naomi Watts as Barbara ‘Babe’ Paley in ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’

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(This story contains spoilers for episode seven of Fight: Capote vs. The Swans.)

American socialite and former magazine editor Babe Paley was married to CBS founder William S. Paley for 31 years. But according to Naomi Watts, who plays her in the Ryan Murphy film Fight: Capote vs. The SwansHer relationship with Truman Capote was the deepest romance she ever had, minus the sex.

“Babe gave herself over to this man and all his secrets,” Watts says. The Hollywood Reporter in the conversation below. “She really trusted him, thinking that they were such close friends that he would never dare expose them.”

It’s for that reason that Truman’s actions lead Babe to “just fall apart,” the star and executive producer had explained earlier in the season to reporters, including also THR. As shown in the second season of the FX anthology series, Capote (played by Tom Hollander) reveals the most intimate details of the lives of Babe and the women in his social circle, namely “the swans”, Slim Keith ( Diane Lane). , Ann Woodward (Demi Moore), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart) and CZ Guest (Chloë Sevigny), in a series of essays published in Don magazine.

“I think all the wounds are starting to come to the surface, not just the wound that he has created, but the wounds of his life,” he added at the time. “She also faces death through her illness, so it raises a lot of important questions about regrets. What has my life come to? What could she have done? What should I have done?”

Those questions came to a head in the penultimate episode of Fief, “Beautiful Babe,” which shows the wife and mother succumbing to lung cancer after a four-year battle. It is during the final days of her life that Babe finds her voice to tell her husband Bill (the late Treat Williams) the toll her decades of womanizing have taken on her and her family. . However, it is only in a dream sequence about death that she reunites with Capote, her true love.

“Personally, it’s sad for me to think that resentment would consume you and that forgiveness was impossible, given how much you loved each other,” Watts says in a follow-up conversation with THRnoting that there are conflicting stories about whether Babe and Capote ever rekindled their friendship in real life after his betrayal.

Below she speaks about her physical and emotional transformation to become Babe Paley and why it’s a role she’ll never forget.

What off-script materials did you use to inform your portrayal of Babe Paley?

You collect all these wonderful images where so much of the story is told, not just in the clothes and the outfits, but also in how she held her hands and where her eyes were looking. You simply had to fragment as much information as possible from a bunch of images. There’s a lot to read about her, and I did a deep search for anything audiovisual or visual in terms of recordings because creating the physicality and vocal tone of her was going to be interesting. There were many things available from the other women around her, from the other swans.

Tom Hollander said that you were both “as nervous as 6-year-olds in a school play” during your first rehearsal because he was revealing his Capote voice and you were showing off your dentures. Why was that an important characteristic for playing Babe?

He was in a car accident, we knew that, when he was very young and had false teeth. And of course, when they made her new teeth, they were actually pretty perfect teeth. And I certainly don’t have perfect teeth, and while my teeth aren’t terrible, we really wanted to try to make them as close to hers as possible. But you don’t want to look silly, you don’t want to sound strange, and when you’re working with any type of prosthetic, you don’t want to be drawn into those kinds of details. You still want to be able to tell the story as truthfully as possible. So we did it once with an upper and lower set, and people who saw the photos or heard me taking videos of them during the rehearsal period said, “Oh, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. “That’s risky.” And I said, “Look, before we throw out this idea, let’s see if we can tone them down a little bit, make them a little smaller,” and we did.

I really had to work very hard to get rid of any lisp because you have to learn to talk with them in your mouth. It’s a completely new sensation and your tongue is positioned differently because of them. My dialect coach who helped me get the accent right, Liz Himelstein, who I’ve worked with for over two decades. She was nervous, but I still wanted to make sure to try to see if she could take it to a place where it was believable and what we decided in the end was to wear the top outfit until the episode “Beautiful Babe.” where it goes, because it created a kind of more haggard expression on her face and something a little bit harsher on her at the end of her life. And I’m actually very glad I fought for it because there were a lot of nerves, including my own, that I had to work through. But I think she really elevates it. She gives him that feeling of a sophisticated woman. And every time I see them in certain photos, I feel closer to her.

In the episode “Beautiful Babe”, Babe expresses her desire to see her daughter before she dies and her husband, Bill Paley, tells her that he doesn’t want to see her because she is “cold.” Is that how you would characterize her?

Well, she had times where she was removed and had to disengage, certainly when it came to that relationship, because God knows she had to endure a lot of pain with all her womanizers. So she had to steel herself and keep her presentation straight, keep moving forward through life, despite all the humiliations she had right under her nose. And I guess she built up some strength, her skin continued to thicken. But deep down, I think as she neared the end of her life, she was a little angry that she had endured it that way and had some regrets and questions about what my life had meant and should I have left it a long time ago? I think she wanted to bond with him. It seemed like there was true love at first, and she certainly tried to make it work. But the what-ifs occurred to her as she neared the end. What would her life have been like if he had let her go?

We see that Babe is finally able to say what she wanted to say to these two men who hurt her, Bill and Truman, in that episode. How satisfying was it for you as an actress to be able to express what Babe had been holding back for so long in the series?

Babe’s arc was really unique to the books and to me. Honestly, I’ll never forget that experience, not just reading the material and playing the character, but also sharing the creative space with all these talented, heavyweight people across the board. Not just the actors, but all the people behind the scenes, Gus (Van Sant) and Robbie (Jon Robin Baitz), and obviously Ryan for bringing us all together and his delightful writing. I feel immense gratitude for being able to play that arc with all those emotions. Yes, she had moments where she bristled and appeared cold and prickly, but there is also real fragility beneath those appearances. She was a very elegant but hurt woman. It’s incredibly satisfying as an actress to be able to convey that kind of humanity.

There’s a scene where CZ Guest tells Capote that his essays “cheapened the nuances of our lives.” How does this series try to undo what it did?

Babe gave herself over to this man and all his secrets. She really trusted him thinking that they were such close friends that he would never dare expose them. It’s easy for me to sit here with all the distance and time of this story and maybe say, “Oh, isn’t there some naivety in that?” But at the same time, if I’m really in his shoes, I can understand his need for that relationship, this hole in his life of not having that real closeness with anyone, not even his friends, to a certain extent. Ironically, there was something very unthreatening about this man. There was no sexual tension, just pure friendship, interest and mutual fascination. They both came from certain tragedies in their backgrounds, and they both needed each other and there was also something strangely transactional about it, but I think there was something really special about Babe and Truman. That they were like peas in a pod, like brother and sister and that they needed each other, but the more their friendship progressed, which was successful for a couple of decades, as he became more idolized by alcohol abuse and drugs, that’s when I think. Wrong moves and liberties were taken that, in Babe’s opinion, were unforgivable.

Speaking of Babe’s friendships, do we know if Slim Keith really had an affair with Bill Paley as depicted in the series?

We do not. That’s an interpretation we stick with. There have certainly been things that have led us to believe that, but I don’t want to be obligated to say that’s how it was. This is storytelling.

Throughout the series, Babe seems to want to forgive Capote and reunite with him, although he never does. Why do you think it’s him?

I think she wanted to do it, but as she got closer to the end and got sicker and sicker, she became more fragile, and Slim stopped her and didn’t want to stray too far from the group. I think she was definitely conflicted about whether she should or shouldn’t do it. She certainly softened and she certainly missed him deeply, but it was a really difficult decision for her to not forgive and not return.

Fight: Capote against the swans drops its final episode on FX next Wednesdays at 10 pm and airs the next day on Hulu.