David Greenspan Peers Beyond the Veil in Joey Merlo’s Eerie One-Person Show

Rachel Syme Staff writer You’re reading the Goings On newsletter, a guide to what we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. In 1966, the same year the writer Truman Capote published his masterpiece, the true-crime epic “ In Cold Blood ,” excerpted in this magazine in 1965, Capote signed a new book deal with Random House. He promised the publisher that following “In Cold Blood”—a hybrid work of fiction and reportage, about a grisly murder in Kansas, which took more than five years to complete—he would write a novel called “Answered Prayers.” He pitched it as a delectable glimpse into the barbarous world of New York high society. Capote had become a favored bauble of the moneyed Manhattan set—rich doyennes loved inviting him to dinner to regale their guests with gabby stories about their friends and enemies, which he would deliver with theatrical glee in his breathy, distinctive high voice—and he planned to use what he had learned from his aristocratic safaris in his fiction. His “swans”—the term he used to describe his core group of upper-crust gal pals, including the socialites Babe Paley, C. Z. Guest, Slim Keith, and Lee Radziwill—surely were aware that Capote was a writer, and that everything they said might one day be used as material, but they also entrusted him with their most delicate and private confessions. The situation was bound to combust, and it did: in 1975, nearly a decade late in delivering his manuscript, Capote published a chapter from his upcoming book in Esquire , and all hell broke loose. His swans felt betrayed—he changed their names, but laid out all their secrets—and vowed to destroy his social life. Between the brutal snubbing from his former friends and his excessive drinking habits, Capote began to spiral out of control, and he died, in 1984, without ever completing his book. This saga, with all its delicious twists and turns, forms the basis of the new FX/Hulu series “ Feud: Capote vs. the Swans ,” which premièred on Jan. 31. Tom Hollander is brilliant […]

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