‘SWAN’ SONG THAT ROCKED NY

How Capote brought '75 high society low

BY the mid-1970s, Truman Capote was an easy joke. Still riding the laurels he earned as the author of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood,” the pip-speak literary master’s legendary bon mots had warped into a cartoon bitchiness better suited to “Hollywood Squares” than a Paris Review soirée. Addled by drugs and alcohol and twisted by the suicidedeath of his social-climbing mother, Capote hadn’t published anything of real significance in a decade.

But for nearly as long, he had dangled a tantalizing promise to the press and public: a quintessentially Capote-ian “nonfiction novel,” titled “Answered Prayers,” that would tattle-tale on high society’s most salacious scuttlebutt. In 1975, the first chapter of the work appeared in Esquire under the title “La Côte Basque, 1965” (a reference to the restaurant where the swans gathered for lunch on East 55th Street).

He described the book like a weapon to People magazine: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen — wham!”

The unlucky victims of this shooting would be his closest and most influential friends, the gaggle of glamorous girls memorialized as his “Swans.” The story mocked their husband’s affairs, their sorrows and their vanity. It made them look ridiculous. It named names. It hinted at even more.

The fallout from the unfinished novel — only published posthumously after his 1984 death, from liver disease, at age 59 — is now the subject of the second installment of the FX series “Feud.”

This week, Deadline revealed the cast of the eight-episode mini-series, “Feud: Capote’s Women,” by executive producer Ryan Murphy and Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant. It’s set to air sometime next year. The story is an adaptation of Laurence Leamer’s book “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era.”

An all-star cast will play the roles of Capote’s swans, including Naomi Watts (as fashion fantastic Babe Paley), Chloë Sevigny (as Boston Brahmin C.Z. Guest), Calista Flockhart (as Jackie Kennedy’s jealous sister Lee Radziwill) and Diane Lane (as jet setter Slim Keith). “Gosford Park” and “Pride and Prejudice” actor Tom Hollander is cast as Capote.

Friends to enemies, here is a look at the lives of the socialites that made and unmade America’s loudest, smallest man of letters.