Beauty lasts longer than talent. The images of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn are still as present in the culture as they were in their heyday, three-quarters of a century ago. Monroe and Hepburn are now-- that dreadful word--icons, but their co-stars have withered into fuzzy old black and white trees covered in lichen. Don Murray? Arthur O’Connell? Sterling Hayden ? Louis Calhoun ? Tom Ewell? You have to be old to tell Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis apart . Even the most dazzling male stars have drifted from their fame. Mid-20th century achievements in art, music and literature dwindled down to niche subjects in expensive Liberal Arts Colleges
But female beauty endures, and as goes Hollywood, so goes society. So the premise of Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans , the latest iteration of his Feud anthology series that sets Truman Capote against the society ladies he called his swans is a little unbalanced. Spoiler: the swans won. Image beats talent.
The search engines are full of photos of Capote’s two favorite ladies, Babe Paley and C.Z. Guest, stylish socialites magnified into legend by photographers who captured their allure for the glossy magazines. Babe Paley , the famously perfect wife of the founder of CBS, was regularly and consistently immaculate in Vogue with her upswept hair, doe eyes and long neck, a look that any semi-savvy 20-year-old stylist can recognize.
C.Z. Guest is ubiquitous on the web, platinum-blonde, horsy-yet-thin, posed by the photographer Slim Aarons wearing shorts, standing with a child by the Grecian temple of her Palm Beach swimming pool; an image that was once confined to the pages of Town & Country is now a pictograph meaning ‘very rich , very white American, in white.’
Today, the two main swans are fashion icons from the lost world of indoor cigarettes, but Truman Capote is almost forgotten, as hazy to the zeitgeist as his backup swans-- Slim Keith, Lee Radziwill , and Joanna Carson. To know Capote, you have to read him, and though his style made his words flow easily past the eye, reading is still more work than looking at pretty pictures.
To situate Capote, I’ll begin with the pretty picture.
In 1948, when Truman Capote became famous with the publications of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, his unsettling 23-year-old elf face stared from the back of its stern blue cover, a blond Puck of impossible grace and delicacy, lounging in a checked vest, defiantly beautiful, bug-eyed, oddly proportioned. In Other Voices, Other Rooms, he describes his hero Joel as “Too pretty, too delicate and fair skinned; each of his features was shaped with a sensitive accuracy, and a girlish tenderness softened his eyes, which were brown and very large.”
Photos that weren’t portraits revealed how very short he was, and the weird imp effect was magnified when he was interviewed on television, his voice a whiny high-pitched squeak.
Between 1948 and his death in 1984, Truman Capote was one of America’s most famous writers, along with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Philip Roth. Vidal was the erudite, petty insider who wielded a poisonous condescension, Mailer was the war-veteran Brooklyn he-man who saw writing as a prize fight, and Philip Roth was the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, the novel that legalized masturbation.
What Truman Capote had was a mesmerizing style, singing-Southern-Gothic-dark-torn-open-to-the-sky. A master of the evanescent, he described the gossamer, the not-quite-real—fancies, ghosts, beauties-- and pulled you into a world that kept breaking into tiny shards of light, swoops of apprehension, rotting fruit, beating feathers. His words wound into spirals, stroked, shattered, and went places you didn’t expect in the middle of a sentence.
All writers want to be defined for posterity by one masterpiece, maybe two. After two collections of pulsating, sensitive stories— The Grass Harp and A Tree of Night—and many magazine essays, Capote’s fame was sealed in 1958 with the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which soon became the iconic film starring the iconic Audrey Hepburn as the iconic Holly Golightly, a stylish escapee from Texas who lives off the favors of men, but is not technically a prostitute.
Capote was stuck in immaterial pretty shallows, and had to prove his mettle with an unpretty subject. Before Breakfast at Tiffany’s became a film, Capote set off for Kansas to research the murder of the Clutter family and write what he declared would be “the first non-fiction novel”.
It took six years. In Cold Blood was published in 1966 , hugely praised, sold millions, and made him rich. He’d lost his looks, but he’d conquered the non-fiction novel, and invented what we now call the true-crime genre
He plunged into the applause and the appreciation, the limelight, the talk show appearances. The invitations turned his writing days into lunches at La Côte Basque and drinks and dinners and holidays with the thin ladies of high society he called his swans, and he gave a masked ball at the Plaza Hotel.
Maybe it was idle frittering, maybe he thought it was research.
He never wrote another novel.
In the seventies, after In Cold Blood had established the non-fiction novel, fiction began fucking with fact. Writers were tearing at the walls, feeling the naughty thrill of feeding real people into made-up stories—Ed Doctorow’s 1975 novel “Ragtime” threw in among his characters the real Booker T Washington, Houdini, JP Morgan and others, including Freud, who sighs to Jung that “America is a giant mistake”.
In 1970, Capote’s rival Gore Vidal had published “Two Sisters”, ‘A Novel in The Form of a Memoir’ , a mean-spirited half-story that featured an Anais Nin who wasn’t Anais Nin , incestuous twins, and digs at his stepsister once removed, Jackie Onassis , whom he described as “the ci-devant tragic empress of the West”.
It’s easy to imagine Truman Capote in the grip of post-success writer’s block, addled by fame, booze and pills and pulped by a bad boyfriend, wanting to expand the territory he’d won and mark it as his own by turning his everyday reality into another non-fiction novel that could be his second masterpiece. And this one not based on Kansas strangers and killers, but on his intimates, the ladies who giggled with him and told him their secrets and those of their best friends and those of the women they didn’t like.
Nine years after Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, in November 1975 , Esquire carried one chapter of the novel he said he’d been working on during that eternity since the publication of In Cold Blood.
“La Côte Basque, 1965” was set at the restaurant so dear to the ladies of the New York elite that every weekday, Women’s Wear Daily posted a photographer outside to catch them exiting in their Halston shirt-dresses and their Elsa Peretti snake belts.
The chapter nothing more than one Lady Ina Coolbirth and the narrator ‘Jonesy’ at lunch, exchanging a haphazard assemblage of gossip as sour as acid reflux about other ladies in the room. Some names were real, others not. There were minor shocks and major ones. Gloria Vanderbilt failed to recognize her first husband, a man named Pat de Cicco. One Ann Hopkins had shot her husband.
Late in the chapter, Lady Ina Coolbirth told a “really vomitous” piece of gossip. One Sidney Dillon, a well-hung rich man described as “conglomateur, adviser to presidents” with a “twinkle-grinning tough-Jew face”, is inexplicably horny for the “homely beast” wife of a former governor. And while Dillon’s own beautiful wife Cleo is at a wedding in Boston, he lures the homely governor’s wife back to his pied-a-terre to admire his Bonnard, and into his marital bed. The homely governor’s wife demands the lights stay off. The deed done, he discovers she’s left the sheets covered in stains “the size of Brazil”.
Capote saw the blood on the Dillon marital bed as an expression of contempt. “She has mocked him, punished him for his Jewish presumption.”
The notion of vengeful menstruation calls forth Maenads , harpies, she-wolves and bad jokes.
Capote, awed— I venture, horrified— by women’s bodies, and consumed with calculations about status, retold the gossip about bloody sheets as proof of the patrician scorn he so dreaded. His interpretation could be read as a bold denunciation of WASP anti-semitism.
The chapter blew up Capote’s tight web of swans, which never recovered, caused grave offense and precipitated one suicide, that of ‘Ann Hopkins’, the wealthy widow Ann Woodward, who killed herself three days before the Esquire appeared. Everyone knew that Sidney Dillon was Bill Paley, founder and head of the almighty TV channel CBS, husband of the legendary Babe.
So, to the TV series: Feud: Capote VS. the Swans.
Ryan Murphy and the scriptwriter Jon Robin Baitz chose to open the first episode with a bloodier version of this story. They cleansed it of Capote’s view of how WASPs regard an uppity Jew, and made it an act of menstrual revenge on a par with smearing feces on the car of an ex. Bill Paley, played by the late Treat Williams, breaks off his long affair with Happy Rockefeller, who insists on a goodbye tryst while Babe is on her way back from Paris on the Concorde. Happy Rockefeller leaves staggeringly immense pools of blood on the sheets, on an ottoman, and on the front of her own white petticoat which she wears while announcing that this is revenge, because he ruined her life. Paley gets on his hands and knees to scrub away the blood, but Babe walks in the door.
Let me rewind here. The story isn’t what counts in Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans, which jumps between the 1960s and the 1970s, with a bit of 1984, in the fine homes of the rich and famous dead. There are chronological and factual errors— the Concorde would not fly for another ten years, but never mind, they name the wrong governor’s wife—it was Marie Harriman, not Happy Rockefeller— there’s a mad invention about James Baldwin wasting a day trying to save Capote from himself and get him back to work, another invention about the Maysles brothers filming the ball, but none of that is the point.
The point is that a gifted writer fell into the trap of social life.
The point is that Ryan Murphy, the director Gus Van Sant, and the writer Jon Robin Baitz create a version of this social life that is as soothing and narcotic as the the safety of their proudly luxurious fortresses must have been to Capote. Much of it is very good. Great décor , good clothes, a pleasing veneer ease with which to forget the present, tailored clothes and coiffed hair, and most of all the reassuring, utterly luminous beauty of Naomi Watts, the 5’5” Australian who is transformed into the willowy, towering yet tapered Babe Paley. She is so entrancing as the most beautiful, agreeable, and kindest of women that you want to become her lapdog. Tom Hollander is excellent as her lapdog Capote, Joe Mantello perfect as his exasperated yet constant long-time lover Jack Dunphy, in time-capsule in aviator glasses and shearling coat.
The other swans— Diane Lane as senior swan Slim Keith, Chloe Sevigny in a bad wig, as loyal swan C.Z Guest, Calista Flockhart as bitter swan Lee Radziwill, a fleeting Molly Ringwald as last-ditch swan Joanne Carson, merge into a lunching Swan Lake Corps de Ballet, smoking and drinking champagne through marital betrayal, humiliations, and lung cancer. Set at the same time as Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, with the same kind of people, its female leads share the same fate.
And because most series have to have a ghost, Jessica Lange haunts here as Capote’s dead mother, his enabler, muse, critic, and the Angel of his Death.
Which is a wink at Bob Fosse’s film All That Jazz, in which Jessica Lange played the same role for Roy Scheider, who was playing the movie version of Bob Fosse. The in-crowd winks and nods continue with the surprise casting of Vito Schnabel, the gallerist son of the artist and director Julian Schnabel, playing the hunk air-conditioner repairman from Palms Springs who becomes Capote’s lover, and once hauled to back to New York and La Côte Basque, who lectures Slim Keith and Lee Radziwill about Freon.
Seven of the eight episodes are a delight; the eighth, which is to do with the unfinished manuscript, would probably best have been left unwritten.