“Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” Is a Simulacrum of a Scandal

Truman Capote couldn’t have fully appreciated his good fortune while writing the true-crime masterpiece “In Cold Blood.” By the time his so-called nonfiction novel was published—with its many creative licenses—the two killers whose lives he’d dramatized had been executed; they couldn’t talk back. He wasn’t so lucky with his next major project, “Answered Prayers,” which he claimed would be his magnum opus. In one of its chapters, published in Esquire under the title “La Côte Basque, 1965,” he exposed close-held secrets of the friends and muses he called his swans: a set of graying socialites who’d achieved fashion-plate fame. They quickly closed ranks—and, in the decade between the excerpt’s release and his death, in 1984, Capote failed to complete “Answered Prayers,” or any other book-length manuscript. His exile from Manhattan high society, and his accompanying artistic decline, is the subject of the new season of the Ryan Murphy anthology drama “Feud,” subtitled “Capote vs. the Swans.” Capote’s 1948 début novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” with its queer characters and famously naughty author photo, introduced him as a convention-flouting wunderkind. Those days of youthful defiance are long gone by the time “Capote vs. the Swans” opens, in the late sixties, with Capote (Tom Hollander) suggesting to his closest confidante, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), that there’s no higher happiness than material comfort. After discovering that her husband, Bill, is engaged in his umpteenth affair, Babe is contemplating divorce, but Capote discourages it, citing her age and Bill’s stature as the chairman of CBS. “You have a great life,” he reminds her. “You have a house in Bermuda, a mansion in Coral Gables, the thing in London.” He hands Babe a pill to knock back with some Scotch. Their conversation, which began with his entreaty to “tell me everything ,” ends with her cradled in his arms. It won’t be the last time we see Capote’s attraction to—and minimization of—female pain. In the 2021 book “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era,” Laurence Leamer theorizes that it was a combination of style, beauty, wealth, […]

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