A Closer Look: Inside Swan Babe Paley’s Iconic New York Apartments | The Women of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Are Birds of a Feather /

The Women of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Are Birds of a Feather

 

Famous women play the famous women in Ryan Murphy’s new period drama. In a group interview, they discuss the series and the burdens of public life.

 

Alexis Soloski

By Alexis Soloski

Jan. 30, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/arts/television/feud-capote-vs-the-swans.html

 

The first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” aired in 2017. A juicy survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo “The Crown.” Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.

 

“It’s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,” Murphy said in a an interview earlier this month. “But feuds are never about hate. They’re about love.”

 

Then Murphy read “Capote’s Women,” by Laurence Leamer, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection “Portraits and Observations,” was to offer “the imaginary portrait precisely projected.”

 

Leamer’s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, “the very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,” Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)

 

Tom Hollander (“The White Lotus,” Season 2) was cast to play Capote at the height of his “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood” fame and then long past it, stumbling over deadlines in a fog of vodka, cocaine and tranquilizers. When it came to casting the show’s bevy of Swans — Babe Paley, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill, Ann Woodward (a wannabe Swan) — Murphy had one thought: “I wanted icons to play icons,” he said. “Women who were iconic and had some degree of fame and success would understand what it was like to be Swans. I thought they would know the gravity and also the stress of being a star.”

 

He and Baitz made a list of their first choices for the roles, and perhaps because Murphy has almost single-handedly enlarged the possibilities for actresses over 40, all of those first choices agreed. (“He’s masterful at casting the stars or the fallen stars or the forgotten stars,” Van Sant, who directed six of the episodes, said of Murphy.) Which explains why, on a recent afternoon, my laptop screen was filled with a supergroup of film and television stars of the 1990s and beyond: Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart and Demi Moore.

 

“It feels like a sisterhood for actresses,” Lane, who plays Keith, said, beaming at her co-stars.

 

Watts noted that the woman she plays went to bed in full makeup and with painful false teeth because she didn’t want her husband to see her without them.Credit...Thea Traff for The New York Times

 

There is some irony, of course, in asking women who have done so much — made countless movies and shows, produced others, won a shelf of awards — to play women who did so little. Indifferent wives and dubious mothers, Paley, Guest and their ilk were famous for making best-dressed lists and hosting dinners that someone else had cooked. Women who were born into money or married it, they were celebrated for the élan with which they spent it.

 

Baitz found this poignant. “They were enslaved to their own mythology,” he said in a separate interview. “They devoted themselves to something absurd. They devoted themselves to imagery and beauty and posing and being seen and society culture. That’s a dead end. And that’s why I care about them, because they’re running into a dead end.”

 

But the actresses don’t see these characters as frivolous. “They all worked really hard to achieve this kind of status,” Watts, who plays Paley, said. “There were sacrifices made. There was huge discipline involved.”

 

Anytime these women appeared in public, they had to be perfectly dressed, perfectly coifed, perfectly made up and manicured. “It was a full-time job,” Moore, who plays Woodward, said. “There were no casual sweatpants.” Watts noted that Paley even went to bed in full makeup and with painful false teeth because she didn’t want her husband to see her without them. Recreating Babe’s look took several hours each day in the hair and makeup chairs.

 

And there was arguably more to them than beauty. They had, the actresses playing them insist, a genius for life and a talent for self-creation. “There is an art to life,” Lane said. “And they understood that. There is an art to the dance of grace.”

 

Murphy knew that the actresses he cast would be familiar with the pressure these women faced and that they could offer some of that same grace.

 

“We had a group of women starring on our show who came up in the ’90s,” Murphy said. “I don’t think people remember the scrutiny of the press and how people would write about literally how much women weighed. It was very moving to see this group of women who had survived that. Survived and thrived.” (In this regard, “Feud” is like a more glamorous “Yellowjackets,” another drama that benefits from the history and aura of its cast.)

 

Wisely, the women didn’t want to talk too much about survival. (A video call with a stranger is no place to unpack trauma.) But they did acknowledge a familiarity with the burden of having to maintain a public face. “It’s very brave to go out in the world knowing that you’re going to be judged and scrutinized and picked at,” Flockhart, who plays Radziwill, said.

 

Still Lane insisted that this was a burden that could be worn lightly. “Once you’re experienced, you know how much you’re supposed to be on duty or off duty or what’s being asked of you,” she said.

 

Capote was attractive to the Swans because he could appreciate them both on duty and off. He delighted in their public performances — his persona was also largely self-created — while also recognizing the women underneath the Hermès scarves and Mainbocher gowns.

 

“It worked for a period of time so beautifully,” Watts said. “They got to perform. They had this constant, wonderful audience member who let them be seen. And they shared more with him than they did with each other.”

 

But in November 1975, Capote betrayed that trust when Esquire published his short story “La Côte Basque, 1965.” A dishy, bitchy, wholly mediocre excerpt from his long delayed (and ultimately unfinished) novel “Answered Prayers,” the story contained unflattering portraits of many of the Swans, disguised with only the loosest veils. At the time, Gerald Clarke, eventually Capote’s biographer, had asked him if the Swans would recognize themselves.

 

“Nah,” Capote replied, according to Leamer’s biography. “They’re too dumb.” They were not too dumb.

 

Most of the Swans never forgave Capote. The women playing them were more sympathetic. They blamed it on Capote’s alcoholism, his writer’s block, even his literary gifts.

 

“Truman was attracted to power and privilege and glamour, and who isn’t, honestly?” Sevigny, who plays Guest, said. “He also knew the great lineage of literature exposing society — Proust, James, Wharton. I think he enjoyed our company, but he also wanted to capitalize on that.”

 

Sevigny was not the only one to use a pronoun like “our” when discussing the Swans, suggesting a particular identification. The actresses felt a duty to portray these women responsibly, not only because they related to much of what the women had experienced but also because the women have children and grandchildren who are still alive.

 

“It’s always tricky when you play somebody who really lived,” Lane said. “I was trying to be very gentle.”

 

 

Some of the actresses have wondered what the Swans might make of contemporary culture, in which celebrities have largely replaced society women and social media has encouraged a new openness. “Babe would be turning in her grave if she knew I was talking about menopause,” Watts said.

 

Have standards for public-facing women relaxed since the 1960s? Yes and no, Moore argued. “On one hand there seems to be room to be a little bit more human,” she said. “And then on the other hand, there’s even harsher judgment because we have so many outlets now where everybody has an opinion.” But that doesn’t matter, she added. “What matters is how we relate to ourselves.”

 

And how they relate to each other. “It was really amazing to be working with fantastic, talented actresses who are all age-mates, more or less,” Flockhart said. Even better, she said, these women weren’t playing wives and mothers. (Technically the Swans were wives and mothers, but the series, like the women themselves, often seems to neglect that.)

 

It is welcome, if still unusual, to see a prestige series centered on glamorous middle-aged women who occasionally snipe at but mostly support one another. This has come to be a specialty of “Feud,” and the actresses appreciate it. And in campaigning for the industry to continue to make more series like these, they are perhaps less polite than the Swans.

 

“It’s ridiculous, that notion that we should be all dried up and off to pasture by the time we’re 40,” Watts said. “Let’s bend and break and bulldoze those rules altogether, please.”

 

Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media. More about Alexis 

The Swan Is a Viper

Jan. 31, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET3 hours ago

3 hours ago

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/30/opinion/thepoint#feud-capote-swans

Maureen Dowd Opinion Columnist

Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill.Credit...Pari Dukovic/FX

 

I’ve trained my Netflix algorithm to search for shows about betrayal, revenge, murder and lives ruined.

 

So naturally I was intrigued by Ryan Murphy’s FX series starting Wednesday night, “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.” It spins the saga of one of the greatest betrayals in literary history, when the famous writer of “In Cold Blood” coldly turned his gimlet eye on his best friends, the stylish women who were the gatekeepers of New York society.

 

Jon Robin Baitz, who co-wrote the show with Murphy, told me that the women “clung to each other so as not to go insane. How long can you go to a private fitting with Givenchy and not begin to feel like you’re drowning in Chantilly lace? And your men are fornicating power devils and betraying you from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep every day? And you go with the flow and take comfort in the Van Cleef & Arpels apology they give you or the Pissarro that shows up on your bed.”

 

Murphy wanted to give viewers a double dose of nostalgia. “It shows us that last gasp of New York society, when women wore gloves and used finger bowls and went to four-hour lunches where they drank and smoked,” he said. “But we’re also examining another type of nostalgia for the female stars of the ’90s, who had to get through that gantlet of tremendous tabloid journalism at the time and whom we have missed and are so glad to have back.”

 

I wasn’t sure which swan to request an interview with for The Times’s Styles section. They were all fascinating veteran actresses: Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart and Molly Ringwald. (And then there are Demi Moore and Jessica Lange, who are swan adjacent.)

 

I chose Flockhart because she had been a big part of my life — from afar. I loved her hit shows, “Ally McBeal” and “Brothers and Sisters.” The latter was created by Baitz, and he said the holiday columns about my politically divided family had helped inspire it.

 

When I asked for the interview, Flockhart’s publicist called to say she wanted to make sure I knew that the 59-year-old actress’s character wasn’t the lead swan. (Watts plays Swan No. 1, that epitome of elegance Babe Paley, the wife of the longtime CBS chief Bill Paley. Flockhart plays Lee Radziwill.)

 

Very unusual to play down your role, I thought.

 

When I interview celebrities, I’m prepared for them to be glamorous creatures from another planet. But Flockhart seemed like someone you’d want to hang out with here on Earth.

 

“She’s not a Hollywood actor,” Baitz said. “She’s a strange salamander that lives in her own rainforest. She has a strangely rich, quiet inner life.”

 

Murphy was thrilled with all his swans and happy that Flockhart emerged from her private rainforest to be part of his show. The Master of Macabre gave her his highest compliment: She makes a very, very good viper.

Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era Kindle Edition

by Laurence Leamer (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

 

New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers—the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his "swans."

 

“There are certain women,” Truman Capote wrote, “who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich.” Barbara “Babe” Paley, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy’s sister)—they were the toast of midcentury New York, each beautiful and distinguished in her own way. Capote befriended them, received their deepest confidences, and ingratiated himself into their lives. Then, in one fell swoop, he betrayed them in the most surprising and startling way possible.

 

Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer delves into the years following the acclaimed publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958 and In Cold Blood in 1966, when Capote struggled with a crippling case of writer’s block. While en­joying all the fruits of his success, he was struck with an idea for what he was sure would be his most celebrated novel…one based on the re­markable, racy lives of his very, very rich friends.

 

For years, Capote attempted to write An­swered Prayers, what he believed would have been his magnum opus. But when he eventually published a few chapters in Esquire, the thinly fictionalized lives (and scandals) of his closest fe­male confidantes were laid bare for all to see, and he was banished from their high-society world forever. Laurence Leamer re-creates the lives of these fascinating swans, their friendships with Capote and one another, and the doomed quest to write what could have been one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.