Ryan Murphy’s finishes what Truman Capote started

WE meet Babe Paley in 1968. She’s called Truman Capote uptown to rage about her husband Bill’s latest affair — he’s screwing Happy Rockefeller, the governor’s wife. Truman (Tom Hollander) quietly surveys the crime scene and tells Babe (Naomi Watts) to calm down. “Be the great lady you are,” he whispers, urging her to get her revenge with a Van Gogh or Gauguin. Her pride is wounded, but she’ll get over it.

Indeed, she tells him, “the only person who could ever really hurt me is you.” Hurt her he will, with the gory details he gathers that very afternoon.

Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the long-awaited sequel to 2017’s camp-tastic hit Feud: Bette and Joan, follows Capote as he blows up his world by publishing an excerpt from his never-to-befinished novel, Answered Prayers, in Esquire in 1975. “La Côte Basque” described a gossipy lunch shared by thinly veiled versions of himself and his “swans,” the wealthy women in his circle. It aired some of their dirtiest laundry. Overnight, he was banished from high society.

The Swans

In any feud — particularly a famous feud — the fight is beside the point. The grudge is the intriguing bit: why and how people can nurse a resentment until it consumes them entirely. It takes tremendous effort to never forgive someone, as Capote vs. the Swans illustrates with a brutally neat metaphor. Too proud to apologize, Capote drinks himself to death; Paley, clinging bitterly to her anger, chain-smokes her way into lung cancer.

The show offers lots of spiteful scenery along the way to this rock bottom. Capote is no mere court jester — he’s an assassin. From the moment the Paleys meet Capote, they ought to have known what they were in for. Bill Paley, the chairman of CBS (Treat Williams, in his final role), mistakenly invites the writer along on a jaunt to Jamaica in 1955. (The series does a lot of time traveling.) Soon he’s regaling them with salacious gossip about a woman in their set who he insists murdered her husband.

Slim Keith (Diane Lane), the famous exwife of Howard Hawks and Leland Heyward, professes shock when the story comes out in 1975, asking, “What animal in nature pretends to love you and then tries to eat you?” By that