FEUD: CAPOTE VS THE SWANS Key Art | ©2024 FX

Truman Capote was an author, screenwriter, playwright, and actor probably still most known for his nonfiction bestseller IN COLD BLOOD. The novel itself has been adapted for film, and several films were made about Capote’s writing of the book and the lingering effect it had on him.

But Capote is also famous for, among other things, his unfinished novel ANSWERED PRAYERS. Capote had entered a charmed circle of New York society women, whom he collectively called “the Swans.” These women included Jacqueline Onassis’s sister Lee Radziwill and Babe Paley. Capote kept putting off finishing the work, but sold four chapters to ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, which were published in 1975 to 1976. The true identities of the people he was writing about were far too thinly veiled for the Swans, who dropped Capote from their retinue. Capote reacted to the rejection with increased drinking and drugs, dying in 1984 at age fifty-nine of a combination of what the coroner deemed liver disease and drug intoxication.

Now, executive producer Ryan Murphy has made this the basis for the second season of his FEUD anthology series. Based on CAPOTE’S WOMEN: A TRUE STORY OF LOVE, BETRAYAL, AND A SWAN SONG FOR AN ERA by Laurence Learner, FEUD: CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS premieres the first two of its eight episodes on Wednesday, January 31 on FX, available the following day on Hulu.

Murphy sits down for a Zoom Q&A session with fellow executive producer/writer Jon Robin Baitz, who adapted Learner’s book; executive producer/director Gus Van Sant; executive producer/actor Naomi Watts, who plays Paley; executive producer/actor Tom Hollander, who plays Capote; and actors Diane Lane, who plays Slim Keith; Chloë Sevigny, who plays C.Z. Guest; Demi Moore, who plays Ann Woodward; Molly Ringwald, who plays Joanne Carson; and Calista Flockhart, who plays Radziwill.

Bates says that IN TRUE BLOOD is not discussed much in FEUD, which instead focuses on, per its title, Capote and the Swans. “This is a story of the dying fall of a man who’s in despair.”

What does Hollander think the Swans, pre-betrayal, got out of their friendship with Capote? “I think he was the greatest writer of his generation, so for a bunch of people that were very rich and [had] fancy houses but, at some level, disempowered by their marriages, to have the greatest writer of his generation in their salon – he was a dazzling accouterment on their dinner table. And maybe he would celebrate them. So maybe at some level, their vanity was flattered by having him around and him understanding them and listening to them in a way that their husbands weren’t, didn’t have time for. He was filling a great gap in their emotional lives, and he was brilliant. He was an incredibly entertaining, perceptive, clever, interesting, singular man, so I’d say that’s what they were getting out of it. Quite a lot. Until it went wrong.”

Does Murphy feel that a large part of the tragedy depicted in this season of FEUD is that, in a later era, the women would have been more able to claim their own success and not felt they needed to be in the situations that Capote wrote about? “That’s actually something Robbie and I talked a lot about when we were first thinking of doing it, and I think the tragedy of that generation, which I would include my mother in, is a generation of women sort of caught between THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW and the [birth control] pill, who were, I think, very frustrated a lot of times with the misogyny of the society.

FEUD: CAPOTE VS THE SWANS Key Art | ©2024 FX

Murphy continues, “I think all of those women in our show were so brilliant in their personal lives and so intelligent that I do think, ten years-post, they all would’ve had successful businesses or brands. You can just see that they were all so smart, particularly in the world of manners and society and beauty, and I think they all would’ve had skincare lines, I think they all would’ve had house care lines. I think they would’ve done a Kardashian thing, you know, which is a very brilliant business way of looking about selling an aspirational lifestyle. But some of them – if you look at Slim and Babe, the tragedy is [they were] behind so many incredible business deals that [they] helped put together professionally that [they were] not given credit for.”

In FEUD, Murphy feels, “The thing that we chose to show about these women was their accomplishments, but also the time that they were stuck in. That was what was moving, at least to me, and that was what was moving about the book, our source material. They were victims and also successes of their times. So, I think there was a fine line that we were trying to ride there, to be truthful and yet also be appreciative. But I felt we had great love and affection for all of those women, and I do believe that every episode almost has a monologue about how underappreciated they felt and how they were more than just how they were dressing or how they were setting the dinner table. So, I think we did justice to them in that way.” He asks Watts, “What do you think?”

“I think they were trapped in a wrong time,” Watts responds, “but that’s how society was operating. They were uncredited for the work and the amount of time they put into making their husbands’ businesses go well, but we definitely showed it. And the resentment builds when the philandering continues, and it’s tolerated to a point. Babe is someone who’s well-callused by this point – she knows another affair here, another one there. But when she shares all of her secrets with Truman and through this bond, someone who actually cares about her well-being and she feels seen and listened to in the first time in such a deep way – her husband didn’t spend enough time appreciating her or really seeing what she needed and wanted – she fell into this relationship as if it was the deepest romance she’d ever had, minus the sex, but I think that allowed her to go deeper.

“And so,” Watts continues, “when the betrayal occurs, she just comes undone. They all do, because they trusted him. But for Babe, I think all of the wounds start coming to surface, not just the wound that he has created, but the wounds of her life. And she’s also facing her death as well through her sickness, and so a lot of big questions are coming up about the regrets and, ‘What has my life amounted to? What could I have done, what should I have done?’ That speaks to a really kind of universal language, I think, that we all can relate to.”

Murphy says, “I would just add that I think those women, for the most part, were like the original influencers, except the difference is they didn’t post about it.”

Watts agrees. “Yes!”

“So,” Murphy elaborates, “a lot of things that they did were in quiet servitude and with great dignity, and they didn’t expect to be acknowledged for them, it was a different time. Which was also very interesting psychologically – I think Robbie did such a great job and Gus did such a great job directing the quiet servitude that all of them were living. “

Baitz observes, “It must have hurt a lot, I think, to subsume or sublimate your own power for the sake of these monolithic, Stonehenge-like captains of industry that you’ve married for various reasons. But on some fundamental level, they’re being treated as props rather than passionate love of life. Yep, there’s love there I do believe Bill Paley deeply, deeply loved Babe. But it must be difficult and hurt quite a bit to know that you have somehow put a part of yourself in the deep freeze in order to do this, and you’ve made the choice to do it. I found that element fascinating, and Ryan and Gus and I talked about that a lot.”

Citing the question about why the women turned to Capote, Murphy adds, “I think that’s one of the reasons they turned to Truman, because they were all in marriages or with men who constantly put them in their place and told them they weren’t enough. And Truman was the one who said to them, ‘You’re actually smarter than your husbands, you control everything. All of these lives are because of what you’re doing.’ And there’s a baked-in sadness in that, that so many women of that generation, I think, that we wanted to write to. There’s nothing more depressing than lost potential, which I think they all really had.”

Asked what she thinks the women had in common, Moore replies, “I don’t know if I can speak for all of the women, but I think that there was a great desire of beauty and, in an interesting way, I think that there was a great desire for connection with one another. And while their life had certain limitations, I think that they were incredibly expansive in how they were living their lives.”

Does Hollander think that Capote knew what would happen once the ANSWERED PRAYERS chapters were published? “I don’t know whether he unconsciously knew that he was smashing everything up. [It’s] an interesting idea. Robbie and Ryan may know the answer to that.”

In portraying Paley, Watts explains, “Laurence Leamer’s book was our source material, but then we had these wonderful writers as well, and so we really stuck to the scripts. But with Babe, there was no footage available that I could find, recordings or visuals, so trying to create a voice and her physicality was something that I had to invent through a multitude of wonderful photographs, just how her hand was placed, perhaps, or how she held her cigarette; it was clear to me that there was never a hair out of place, never a wrong word spoken. So much effort put into her appearance and not just for her own vanity, but how she designed a dinner table, who were the guests, what would the conversations be, what would the cutlery be, how it was placed. There was just so much time and thoughtfulness put into how each event would go, and yes, plenty to find on the Internet, plenty of things to read. But there was this delicious writing that we could lean in on, so creating Babe was a complete joy for me.

How did Lane see Keith, whose background as a high school dropout from Salinas, California, was different from that of her fellow Swans? ““The word that has been bandied about is ‘ringleader,’ and I want to counter that with a little bit more nuance. I think that she saw from afar that Truman needed support and she was there for him in times. He came to her to be an agent for [IN COLD BLOOD] becoming a movie until she could find him [bigger agent] Swifty Lazar and help him to get a million-dollar deal, which at that time was pretty huge. Historically there was a lot of loss in this betrayal that we don’t see on camera.”

Lane continues, “I got the wonderful cheat of having access to her memoir, so I have an extra amount of compassion for the amount of anger that she is accountable for in this story, because she did empower him and nurture his growth and was there for a lot of his formative time. They traveled the world together. She did seem to have a sixth sense about not trusting him with too much of her secrets, so when she was chosen to be the person quoted about other people’s indiscretions in the infamous ANSWERED PRAYERS article in ESQUIRE, as though she were the one betraying the ladies who lunch and everyone else, I think she was really baffled.”

Flockhart had been one of the stars of the 2006-2011 series BROTHERS & SISTERS, which Baitz had created. She relates that, even before that, she and Baitz had worked together in theatre in New York. “I was excited to do this with Robbie, because I admire and love his talent, his intelligence, and also his sensitivity and humanity.”

Sevigny relates that the cast didn’t get to socialize with each other as much as they might have normally, because, “We were still in the throes of COVID, we had to eat alone, we couldn’t even all eat together in the cafeteria, so we were kept kind of separate from one another. Even in the hair and makeup trailer, we were six feet apart, so the most intimate we were was when we in [the restaurant set for] La Côte Basque.”

As an openly gay man, Capote was a rarity in the era covered by FEUD. His women friends seemed mostly accepting, but were capable of using anti-gay slurs. Murphy relates, “We talked a lot about the use of those words, particularly ‘f**’ or ‘f****t’ and how it was depicted in the show. In the scene where Demi confronts him, obviously it’s a word none of us like, none of us use, and we had a lot of conversation about it, but it was so important to him. It was the thing that he claims that she did and also that Lee did to him that broke his heart and broke his soul because he thought that was such a betrayal. When he talks about Demi’s character, it is the thing that he references where he decided to go after her. And in the case of Lee, it’s an offhand remark that she made about a lawsuit he was in, and he was so stunned and hurt.

“So, Murphy continues, “for us, as difficult as it was to articulate, it was about being true to the characters, and the time, and the power of words. We researched that quite heavily, and we had a lot of conversations about ‘Should we leave it in? Should we take it out?’ But ultimately, we did [leave it in]. And as a gay person who that word has been used about since I was three years old, I really understand the wound of it and the pain of it and how it really can turn your life upside-down.”

How did Hollander capture Capote’s distinctive voice? “Honestly, I just listened to it a lot and I was helped enormously by the most brilliant voice coach called Jerome Butler, who was there with me every day. And then Truman himself [in recordings] was on my phone in my ear before every take, and so I could be with him whenever I wanted to and remind myself what he sounded like. It’s not something that you get and then you’ve got it and then you can hold on to it. You have to keep going, keep working at it.”

“Good answer,” says Ringwald. She observes that her Carson “is not a Swan. She was really like his last friend. But I feel that it was such a betrayal because they adored him so much. And I think even though they knew he was a writer, I feel like they [thought that] they were going to be immune to what writers do, which is use material in their lives and fictionalize it. I think it was pretty self-destructive, what he did. I don’t think he wanted to lose their friendships either. I think one of the reasons why Joanne Carson stayed friends with him – because he wrote things about her too – but she was in love with his genius. As a writer, I think he was a genius, and I think all writers need somebody in their lives saying, ‘You can do this, you’re great.’ I don’t know, I feel like there was maybe a little bit of anger on his part from being a little bit of a court jester.”

Holland offers his take. “I think maybe they didn’t really think he was one of them. And he didn’t believe that he was one of them, either. He knew that, at some level, he was a tourist in their world and, at some level, they thought he was lucky to be there. So, when he turned, or when they felt he turned, they were vicious. ‘From you? You were the adornment in our house. You are not our equal.’ And I think at some level he probably knew that, which is why it’s why he writes ‘Côte Basque’ in the way that he does, because at some level he’s enraged at his own position. I will defer to Ryan and Robbie, if that’s wrong. But that was my instinct.”

“I think that is right,” Murphy affirms.

Baitz concurs. “That’s it.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview: Creators and stars chat about new FX limited series FEUD: CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS

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