‘Capote vs. The Swans’: Writer skewers his friends
When a biography of Truman Capote was published in 1997, a review that ran in the Denver Post distilled his singular place in pop culture to its essence: “The uneducated arriviste from Monroeville, Ala., sneaked into the postwar jet set as court jester, raconteur, father confessor, partygoer and giver, scandalmonger and manipulator. And decades before gay liberation, he wore his homosexuality like a flamboyant badge of honor. It’s easy to forget that he actually wrote books.”
Those books included “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood.” His final (and ultimately unfinished) work is at the center of the FX series “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.”
After the massive success of “In Cold Blood,” Capote turned his professional attention to his friends, the women of New York’s wealthy elite — his Swans, as he called them. The book was to be a lightly fictionalized but savage tellall. Esquire magazine ran early chapters in the mid-’70s and the result was a scandale. The high-class avian excrement hit the fan and the Swans ejected him from their social circles. Capote’s world fell apart.
The book project was an albatross and Capote was plagued by writer’s block, in part because he was drowning in a pill and alcohol addiction. But also: An exposé only works if you’re willing to reveal the ugliest truths and let the chips fall where they may. Capote was pained — baffled even — by that bargain, and he lived to regret it.
This is the thied season of the “Feud” anthology series for FX, which premiered in 2017 and focused on the fraught relationship between Hollywood stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Ryan Murphy is executive producer once again, but this time out Jon Robin Baitz is the showrunner and writer of all eight episodes, and he brings a smart and vividly piquant energy to the series.
That brilliance dissipates in the final two episodes, when death comes for Capote and one of his Swans. Like the show’s central character, perhaps Baitz lost his nerve in the end. Even so, everything that comes before is some of the best television of recent memory.
On the big screen, Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for 2005’s “Capote.” A year later Toby Jones played him in the film “Infamous.” But the FX series feels like the definitive version with British actor Tom Hollander. (His credits include everything from “Gosford Park” to the Italy season of “The White Lotus.”)
Hollander captures all the right outward traits — Capote’s look, his nasally voice and distinctive carriage — but also a sense of his soul. He plays Capote as a man with real self-awareness of his flaws. It’s a performance that also understands the power of a flourish, bringing a cigarette to his mouth and taking a drag before removing it with the other hand. (Fidelity to the era means everybody is lighting up constantly; the cigarette budget for the show must have been eye-popping.)
Baitz has surrounded Hollander with actors who understand the subtle camp and teeth-gritting entitlement of the Swans as they lunch at La Côte Basque and hold court like dull but popular girls in the high school cafeteria, forever jockeying for status.
Naomi Watts is the faux serene, helmet-haired perfectionist Babe Paley (wife of media exec William S. Paley), who was the queen bee and Capote’s favorite. Diane Lane is the beautiful but grudge-holding Slim Keith. Chloë Sevigny is C.Z. Guest, who is more than meets the eye, with her bouncy blonde hair and days spent gardening and horse riding.
Calista Flockhart is the elegantly brittle Lee Radziwill (trapped in a toxic rivalry with her sister Jackie O) and Demi Moore is Ann “Bang Bang” Woodward, who shot her husband when she mistook him for a burglar, but was rumored to have killed him on purpose. (Capote was only too eager to fan the flames of that speculation.)
These names will be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s and ’70s, and to regular readers of Vanity Fair magazine. For everyone else, the show offers a delicious opportunity to fall down internet rabbit holes looking up backstories. These wives of tycoons created stylized personas for themselves, which in turn requires stylized performances from the cast, and yet they remain grounded in realism. The result is some of the best work of their careers.
Despite his adoration, Capote sees the Swans for who they are. Boring. Vapid. Catty. Uninformed about the world. Terrible to their children. Desperate to keep up appearances.
That comes into focus when he spends a day with the author and fellow straight-shooter James Baldwin, who arrives to shake Capote out of his self-pitying stupor.
“My swans would never do this — have lunch alone with a Black man,” Capote says.
“I am aware, this is not news,” Baldwin replies, pressing him to talk about the racism and classism of this world he idolizes. Capote doesn’t need much prodding. Then he pauses. “I spend so much time with them, how can I not be guilty as well?”
“Well, you are, of course,” Baldwin replies. “The question is how you address it.”