"You didn’t hear it from me…” Delivered in a scintillating, hushed tone, these might be six of the most exciting words in the English language. They signal there’s a story coming – a juicy one. We can appeal to our better angels all we want, but who doesn’t love a dishy piece of gossip? One of literature’s loosest-lipped luminaries is having a moment right now. Truman Capote, whose mastery of the written word was well matched by his penchant for lunching and telling, is everywhere. Or, more accurately, Truman Capote and the gaggle of ultra-glam, ulta-rich women whose confidences he earned and betrayed, are everywhere.
Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans premiered last week. For the uninitiated (read: those who’d spent the previous anticipatory weeks in full abstinence from all media of every format) the series chronicles the insular world of New York’s High Society glamour mavens in the mid-twentieth century, when High Society was a demographic, and a way of life, unto itself. Capote, an acerbically charming raconteur, infiltrated that world, ingratiating himself to some of its most alluring women before engaging in a betrayal of epic proportions.
In 1976, Capote published a piece in Esquire magazine that would shock that privileged world and upend lives. He intended “La Côte Basque, 1965” as a single-chapter teaser for Answered Prayers, a novel he believed would be his magnum opus. The chapter title derives from a famous New York restaurant to which the chic ladies would sashay their impeccable suits and haute perspectives for lunch. A thinly veiled roman a clef, the piece offers up an accusation of murder, lurid details of menses-drenched adultery, and other shocking overshares about some of Capote’s nearest and dearest. Of course, it devastated and enraged its subjects.
Feud offers up a fight to the death between one of American lit’s bawdiest wits and his flock of first-doting, then-seething, Grand Dames, cast with Murphy’s eye for melodramatic camp: Naomi Watts as Babe Paley! Diane Lane as Slim Keith! Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest! Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill! It’s no wonder that Swans Mania is sweeping the nation – or, at least, the segment of the nation inclined towards rapture at watching Capote (Tom Hollander) have a drunken, hallucinatory conversation with his long-departed mother (Jessica Lange, looking fabulous for a ghost).
For the ladies of Capote’s coterie, elegance was all. Each worked a considered glam with wardrobes full of Mainbocher, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Dior, and later, Bill Blass and Halston. It’s a look Marc Jacobs’ riffed on last Friday in his masterful runway show, that featured Swan echoes aplenty – teased-to-the-roof bouffants, clean, mid-century tailoring, structured fabrics – delivered with exaggerated paper-doll proportions. Jacobs’ retelling would likely have been too unconventional for a buttoned-up, transplanted Boston Brahman like Guest, but it was still a potent, modern reminder of the joys of dressing up.
Yet sometimes, such joys are diversionary. The sordid story of “La Côte Basque, 1965” takes place over the course of a boozy lunch during which JB Jones (aka Jonesy, Capote’s fictional version of himself) learns some scandalous secrets and takes measure of the denizens of the tony circle that has welcomed him in. It makes for a fun, if nasty, read. The satire is pitched just so, with details that make even the most outlandish bits (a murderous housewife, a bloody tryst) feel deliciously lived-in. Well, they were. Capote didn’t even bother to change the names of some of his characters, including Radziwill and her more famous sister, who strikes Jonesy “not as a bona fide woman, but as an artful female impersonator impersonating Mrs. Kennedy.” Two key Swans do receive the benefit of aliases, but the fictional Lady Ina Coolbirth and Cleo Dillon are so recognizable that the author may as well have named the characters Kim Sleith and Pabe Baley.
Capote’s Park Avenue friends were outraged. Paley felt particularly wounded, as she considered the writer her closest confidant. Imagine her horror upon reading Lady Ina’s graphic yarn about a liaison between Cleo’s husband, Sidney and a former governor’s “smug hog-bottom” wife (based on Mrs. Nelson [Happy] Rockefeller?) who maliciously leaves “blood stains the size of Brazil'' all over the bed in the Dillons’ Pierre pied-a-terre. What an awful thing, having one’s dirty laundry (the Pierre’s immaculate sheets, in this case) splayed out for all to see, and by a trusted companion, to boot!
One wonders if the uber-sophisticated Paley approached her friendship with Capote with uncharacteristic naivete. He famously relished repeating gossip; his notoriously loose lips and seemingly omniscient knowledge of everyone’s darkest, deepest secrets were part of what made him a sought-after dinner guest. Still, Paley was wounded to the core and severed all ties with the author, a freeze-out that lasted until her death. If Paley was shattered, Keith was outraged, both by her depiction as a woman who could not be trusted to keep confidences, and as a mopey, champagne-soaked divorcée mourning the end of her marriage. She briefly considered suing Capote for libel, but ultimately opted to take satisfaction in his social exile.
The roman a clef is a risky genre by nature. Its creation is largely credited to Madeleine de Scudéry, a sixteenth-century Frenchwoman who had more in common with Capote than with the ladies who captivated him. Like Capote, she came from humble beginnings, making up in wits what she lacked in wealth. Her novels, among them, Artamène, a ten-volume, two-million-plus-word epic, disguised contemporary political and societal figures as characters from Greek, Roman and Persian antiquity. In addition to making a fun guessing game for the reader, such opaqueness provides at least a level of plausible deniability for the author. Perhaps if Jonesy had dished the socials’ peccadillos over stuffed grape leaves and wine in an ancient Athenian symposium, Capote’s social fate might have been different. Instead, the story gets told on the Upper East Side, with an accompaniment of souffle Furstenberg and too much Cristal.
Capote’s writerly gaze is almost exclusively cynical, despite tossed-off reminders of how gorgeous everyone is. A lethal nastiness runs through the unfinished Answered Prayers, published posthumously; no one, from the Swans to Dorothy Parker to Tennessee Williams (done the false courtesy of another flimsy alias) escapes unscathed. It begs questions: Did Capote secretly loathe these women whose approval and friendship he ardently cultivated? Was he so desperate for another In Cold Blood-level success that he was willing to risk everything for it? Or did he simply possess a deeply nihilistic worldview?
Though vicious, that poison-pen approach makes for a darkly fun read. It’s easy to forget, or pretend to forget, that the unrepentant bitchiness is directed at real people. For instance, Lady Ina describes an aging Greta Garbo as looking “dry and drafty, like an abandoned temple…that’s what happens when you spend most of a life loving only yourself, and that not very much.” Ditto for Jonesy’s take on playwright Williams’ fictionalized counterpart, described as a pathetic soul who, “like one of his own adrift heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total strangers.” Capote renders the betrayals and cruel judgments with his razor-sharp turns of phrase. It creates a disorienting experience, especially if, against your better angels, you find yourself having a good time.
The same can be said of Feud, which also presents the conflict of style versus substance. The show’s camp and costumery can make us careless of the potential real-life fallout. Take the tragic tale of Ann Woodward (disguised as Ann Hopkins in “La Côte Basque, 1965”). Woodward reportedly shot and killed her husband accidentally, after confusing him for a prowler, though whispers swirled that the true cause of death was not mistaken identity, but a messy impending divorce. Capote seized onto that rumor, gleefully repeating it at cocktail parties from Park Avenue to Palm Beach before sending it off to Esquire. The real Mrs. Bang Bang, as the author referred to Woodward, took her own life shortly before the Esquire piece’s publication.
Few events rival suicide for their tragedy. But even major tragedy can be repackaged for over-the-top entertainment. In a table-side conversation, Woodward, played by Demi Moore, demands to know why Capote insists on repeating his slanderous accusations about her. He offers a cutting explanation: He’d heard she called him a “f-g.” Moore, in all her big-haired glory, spits back, “I never called you a f-g, Truman. What I called you is a venomous little f----t. Now get your quotes right!” A gorgeous woman on the verge who still insists on a good fact check can override the emotional gravity of any situation.
Murphy’s soapy drama is not without moments of poignant reflection on betrayal, despair and loneliness. But each comes with an attendant of outré amusement. Watts’ Babe Paley responds to the sight of her husband attempting to scrub away the bloody, giallo-esque evidence of his infidelity with a wounded, knowingly icy, “Was someone shot in here?” And Sevigny’s C.Z. Guest provides a WASP-goddess guide to recovering from a betrayal and a funeral: “Let’s have a nice lunch, get a really good bottle of Pouilly-Fumé, and go home and sleep it off.”
With such dialogue, this telling of real humans enduring real human tragedy becomes delightful fodder for our entertainment. There’s conflict in that, just as when we engage in gossip of our own, whether delivering or receiving the dish. So we block out the true pathos and embrace the fun. Capote reveled in the dirtiest details of life, in hearing and repeating them. Maybe there’s a little Capote in all of us. But you didn’t hear it from me.