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‘Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans’ shows writer’s betrayal of friends, squandering of talent
Bulldog Persons was not called “Bulldog” because of his tenacity. It was a cruel nickname, bestowed for the boy’s imagined resemblance to the animal. Squatty and snubby, and decidedly common, he tried to fight the bigger kids who called him that when his parents — the people who collaborated in his making — would take him to Mobile, Ala., on the weekends.
Augustus Archulus “Arch” Persons Jr. wasn’t much interested in fatherhood; his child was, at best, an inconvenience to him. From his shabby, genteel old family (his father was a school superintendent), he received manners and an education, but he meant to strike it rich and, in the meantime, sold boat excursions on the Mississippi River to churches and fraternal organizations.
He sold other things, too, desperate dreams mostly, but bootleg hooch as well, and managed the Great Pasha and Madame Flozella, a bizarre touring carnival act that consisted of a married couple who allowed themselves to be buried alive.
Arch handled money with a certain unearned aplomb. This got him in trouble regularly; he was jailed for passing bad checks in 1931 and 1932, and in 1934 was convicted of forging a postal money order, a felony that could have landed him a three-year stretch in the federal penitentiary. Somehow he talked his way into a suspended sentence.
Arch married Lillie Mae Faulk in 1923. He was 28 and she was a teenager — probably 17 or 18, though some sources say 16. The conventional story is that she married Arch because she was eager to escape small-town Alabama, though looking back from a cen
tury’s distance it is hard to say how she might have thought marrying Arch would help her accomplish that. In any event, Bulldog was born in New Orleans on Sept. 30, 1924.
Maybe it was like this: She was pretty, and he presented as rich and worldly with cosmopolitan dreams. He had a car. She soon realized the mistake she’d made — on their honeymoon he ran out of money and sent her home to live while he screwed things together.
Still, she stayed married to Arch for a while, as he tolerated her dalliances. Since everyone involved is dead, we might imagine he pimped her out and used the connections she made. He engaged one of her lovers, the former heavyweight champion of the world Jack Dempsey, to referee a prize fight he staged. (The fight flopped, though Dempsey’s presence drew nearly 3,000 curious souls. Arch had been hoping for 12,000.)
“Between Arch’s schemes and Lillie Mae’s affairs,” Gerald Clarke wrote years later, “there was little time for [Bulldog]. When he was with them, they would sometimes lock him in their hotel room at night, instructing the staff not to let him out even if he screamed, which, in his fright, he would often do.”
Children know only their own experience. Bulldog’s childhood was not unusual to him.
“She once went to bed with a man in St. Louis,” Bulldog wrote of his mother. “We were in his apartment, and I was sleeping on a couch. Suddenly they had a big fight. He went over to a closet, pulled out a necktie, and started to strangle her with it. He only stopped when I became hysterical.”
Beginning in 1928, Bulldog was more and more often deposited with relatives while Arch and Lillie Mae pingponged around the country, sometimes together, more often separately. In 1930, just before his 6th birthday, he was more or less permanently installed with Lillie Mae’s distant cousins — three sisters and a brother — who lived together in Monroeville, Ala. She lit out for New York City.
Bulldog made friends with a neighbor named Nelle, who later based a character on him in a novel she wrote. In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” that character is described as a “pocket Merlin” whose ‘“hair was snow-white and stuck to his head like dandruff … whose head teemed with eccentric plans, strange longings, and quaint fancies.”
Bulldog was 10 years old when Lillie Mae finally divorced Arch; she gained legal custody of Bulldog, changed her name to Nina, and in 1932 married a wealthy Cuban immigrant named Joe Capote, who had an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Connecticut. They sent for Bulldog in 1933. In 1935, Capote officially adopted the boy.
Bulldog Persons of Monroeville was now Truman Garcia Capote of 76 Orchard Drive, Greenwich, Conn.
DADDY DEAREST
I remember seeing Truman Capote on the “Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” sometime in the ’70s. He was talking about what a good shot he was, and what a good driver he was, and how fast he would sometimes drive. I cannot find any corroboration for this memory on the internet; that does not mean it did not happen. Capote was a frequent guest on the “Tonight Show.”
His father would still have been alive at the time. He worked for the Dixie Coin Scale Co. in Shreveport and lived in a 1,400-square-foot ranch house on West College Street. He was old and bald with a face like a bulldog. He died on June, 7, 1981; his grave marker notes only that he was “Husband of Blanche Herrin Persons,” his third wife.
It is presumed Arch and Truman had no relationship after Truman’s move to New York.
NEVER SATISFIED
Lillie Mae/Nina could not be satisfied. She fretted over Truman’s sissy mannerisms and shipped him off to military school. She told her suburban friends she would have preferred a dumb football-playing son to the one she had.
Even as Truman’s literary star was rising — he landed a job as a copy boy for The New Yorker’s cartoon department when he was 18; by the time he was 21 he was publishing fiction in Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar and working on his first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” which was published in 1948 — she refused to forgive him his homosexuality, which he camped up, affecting a whiny lisp and an attention-begging feyness.
Then, in 1954, when (Nina could pick ’em) Joe turned out to be as much a con as Arch and couldn’t talk himself out of being sent to SingSing after being convicted of embezzlement, on the eve of being evicted from their Park Avenue apartment, certain of being ostracized from even the minor level of New York society she had attained, she washed a bunch of pills down with vodka and died.
Truman was living in Europe at the time. He was 29. For the rest of his life he carried her photo with him. If you want to know about Lillie Mae Faulk/Nina Capote, read “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” She is Holly Golightly. Audrey Hepburn carried a bit of her in the movie, but the real sadness is in the book.
FAMILY FEUD
In Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” Lillie/ Nina appears as a ghost, or as a hallucination. She is portrayed by Jessica Lange, who is something of a mainstay in Murphy’s productions, and is sometimes a withering horror and comforting presence in Truman’s life.
She bids him to come join her in the afterlife, suggesting he lie down in Joanna (Johnny’s ex-wife) Carson’s spare room with a bottle of Stoli and some pills. She wants reconciliation and reunion.
It is nitpicking to point out that Capote’s mother was 49 years old when she died and that Lange is 74. Lange is lovely, and the scenes between her and Tom Hollander, who plays Truman, are delicate and lacerating, scalpel-drawn little vignettes that reveal the shriveled heart of an artist who, despite his undeniable gifts, had a lot of the con man Arch Persons in him.
“Capote vs. The Swans” is based largely on Laurence Leamer’s 2021 book “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era,” though it diverges from the text in significant ways. The show, as befits a story about Capote, who was a master of the so-called “nonfiction novel,” is a sometimes fanciful recounting of how Truman Capote self-destructed; how he murdered first his talent and finally himself.
He died in 1985, a month shy of his 60th birthday, in the bedroom Lillie/Nina suggested, from what his death certificate called “liver disease complicated by phlebitis and mild drug intoxication.”
Gore Vidal called his death a “wise career move.” Meow.
“Swans” focuses on Capote’s ostracization from New York society after the publication in Esquire of an excerpt from his (never-finished) novel “Answered Prayers” in 1975. The story was a chapter in the book titled “La Côte Basque 1965” (named for the upscale French restaurant where Capote’s “Swans” often lunched; it closed in 2004) and was a thinly veiled recounting of several salacious stories about high-society women (and their husbands) that Capote had befriended.
The women recognized themselves. Capote changed most of the names, but the characterizations were unmistakable, and cruel. “Cleo Dillon” was Babe Paley, the fabulous wife of media magnate “Sidney Dillion” (Bill Paley, whose Jewishness was a barrier to his ever achieving genuine acceptance by the WASP upper crust).
The much-married “Lady Coolbirth” was Slim Keith. Sidney’s one-night stand with the vengeful wife of a New York governor — “The Swans” pegs her as Happy Rockefeller, wife of Nelson, though “Capote’s Women” suggests its was Marie Harriman) leads to a crisis that can only be resolved by the bestowing of expensive gifts.
“La Côte Basque” also recounted the story of how a gold-digger called “Ann Hopkins” (but understood to be Ann Woodward) murdered her rich husband and got away with it. Woodward died by suicide three days before “La Côte Basque” was published. There are rumors, never verified, that someone had sent Woodward an advance copy.
After Paley, Keith and their extensive circle of friends cut him off, Capote became increasingly depressed and unstable, and it has been suggested that he never wrote another serious word. He began an abusive affair with a Long Island bank manager who beat him up (though probably not, as “The Swans” suggests, in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner at Joanna Carson’s BelAir mansion). While he maintained a relationship with his longtime companion, writer Jack Dunphy, they spent most of their time apart.
He drank more and tried to dry out periodically. He used a lot of cocaine. He never finished “Answered Prayers” (a version was published posthumously) and his 1980 collection of stories and essays “Music for Chameleons” mostly consisted of pieces written and published before “La Côte Basque.”
For the last decade of his life, Capote was a camp figure, a caricature of a diminutive gay artist. A joke.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He had conceived of the novel “Answered Prayers” as early as 1958; he’d written a complete outline and even an ending. He took the title from a quote by 16th-century Carmelite nun St. Teresa of Avila: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”
Capote saw it as a long roman à clef about a manipulative gigolo from the South that would “do to America what Proust did to France” — alter the trajectory of the literary tradition and would “come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen — wham!”
After “La Côte Basque 1965,” Esquire published two more chapters of the book “Unspoiled Monsters” (May 1976) and “Kate McCloud” (December 1976). In his journals, Capote wrote it would consist of seven chapters. He said he’d written the concluding chapter first. He allegedly showed the manuscript to a handful of people — none of whom ever read it.
After his death, there was a frantic search for the manuscript. It never turned up. Joanna Carson, who died in 2015, said Capote probably left in in a safe deposit box in some Southern California bank. He didn’t say which one. He did say the story would be found when it wanted to be found.
SWAN SONG
I am enjoying “Capote vs. The Swans” in the same mild way I enjoyed “The Crown.” It is not history; the writers have no way to reconstruct conversations between long-dead characters that no one ever overheard, and though the names are real, the producers are under no obligation to stick to the facts. (“Art and truth are not necessarily compatible bedfellows,” Capote wrote in 1972.)
I admire most of the performances — Naomi Watts as tragic Babe Paley, Diane Lane as formidable Slim Keith, Calista Flockhart as the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy, Lee Radziwill — though I think Chloë Sevigny might be slightly too young to play C.Z. Guest. (On the other hand, with Sevigny’s pedigree as a ’90s “It Girl” and fashion icon, the casting adds a layer of verisimilitude to the show — the Swans were the “It Girls” of the ’60s and ’70s.)
Hollander is excellent as Capote, and it is good to see the late Treat Williams, in his final role, grant some dignity to Bill Paley.
But it’s disappointing that this story devolves into pure entertainment. “Capote vs. The Swans” is fun, sometimes affecting, and even ambitious (while I didn’t care much for the execution of the third episode, which imagined Capote’s famous “Black and White Ball” as seen through the lenses of documentarian brothers David and Albert Maysles, it was an inspired idea) but it’s not serious. It’s camp.
This Capote is a burned-out blowhard, which might be accurate but doesn’t do justice to his place as one of the finest American writers of the 20th century. The real tragedy of Capote is not that he was shunned by his society friends, but that he cultivated those friends instead of attending to the real work before him. Capote squandered his very real gift, opting to become a celebrity and a society lapdog.
He may, as the series suggests, have turned on his patrons out of a longing for revenge for his never-quite-ready-for-prime-time mother, but he was capable of so much more than spinning gossip into literature.
Bulldog Persons was not a happy child; he started writing when he was 8, not from any example or encouragement but “[o]ut of the blue, uninspired by any example.”
“I’d never known anyone who wrote; indeed, I knew few people who read,” Capote once wrote.
Bulldog was a miracle; he gave us two genre-defining works, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood,” along with a handful of wonderful short stories. But he’s remembered — rightfully — for betraying his potential, as a supernova that collapsed into a needy, swishy black hole, sucking away all light and joy; for pouting when his fancy friends shunned him.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com