Truman Capote Cashed In on His Friends’ Secrets.
It Cost Him Everything.
The rarefied social circle that embraced Capote, and
eventually banished him, is up for re-evaluation in the new television series
“Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.”
Ginia
Bellafante
By Ginia
Bellafante
Ginia
Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics,
culture and life of New York City.
Jan. 26,
2024, 3:00 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/nyregion/truman-capote-feud-swans-fx.html
In 1979,
five years before he died and four years after his exile from the Upper East
Side’s social cockpit, Truman Capote appeared on a talk show as a friend of the
common man. The host, David Susskind, remained unpersuaded. “You are always on
people’s yachts” and in “great mansions on Long Island,” he pointed out. “The
thing in Spain with the Pamplona bull runs.” Come on.
Capote gave
up, reverting to a defense of his affection for the moneyed class. It had come
to define him as much as his written work, the output of which had notoriously
stalled after the publication of “In Cold Blood” in 1966. “I like rich people,”
Capote said, “because they aren’t always trying to borrow something from me.”
The joke
sprang from the underbrush, inadvertently poignant. If Capote was not on loan,
he was there — at the most rarefied parties and dining halls, as the favored
guest at Cap Ferrat — to be bartered. The terms of the exchange were relatively
simple: his wit and company, his brocaded stories and dazzlingly foul mouth,
traded for the devotion of the thin, beautiful, unhappily married women, up and
down Fifth Avenue, who were still wearing white gloves past Stonewall and
Woodstock, past Watergate and the fall of Saigon.
This world
and the writer’s place in it has come up for re-evaluation with the arrival of
“Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” an eight-part television series on FX. The
impressive cast includes Naomi Watts, Demi Moore and Diane Lane as women who
contained their subversions to bed, sleeping with men who were not their
husbands, and to lunch with Truman — “Tru” — Manhattan’s most celebrated gay
confidant.
Whatever
implicit contract existed among them was violated to very unhappy consequence
in 1975, with the publication of Capote’s “La Côte Basque, 1965” in Esquire
magazine. A short story that bears almost no adherence to the form, it was
meant to exist as a chapter of “Answered Prayers,” the novel that famously went
unfinished.
At just
under 12,000 words, the story is all chatter, plotless and full of vulgar
cruelties. Capote had betrayed his friends who, perhaps naïvely, did not think
of themselves as material. And he had done it in service of a piece of
literature that in language and sentiment reads like a set of story-meeting
notes for an episode of “As the World Turns.”
Those
closest to him were the angriest — Babe Paley, the wife of the CBS chairman
William Paley, and the former model Slim Keith, whose identities were barely
concealed. Some women, like Gloria Vanderbilt, were named outright. Esquire
paid Capote $25,000 for the story, but the cost to him was incalculable,
beginning with his expulsion from a world he seemed to value above all others
and ending with a descent into the drug and alcohol addiction that took his
life at the age of 59.
“His talent
was his friend,” as Norman Mailer put at the time. “His achievement was his
social life.”
There is a
challenge to watching “Feud” from the vantage of a culture in which exposure is
in such blood-sport demand, in which billionaires come at you on social media
with book-length accounts of their narcissistic wounds. It is the work of
understanding how valuable discretion remained to a certain group of people in
New York in the middle of the 1970s, as the city and country were unraveling.
What might seem like virtue can also read as oblivious self-regard.
It was
actually the women who stood outside Capote’s immediate circle who were held up
for the most damning and misogynistic appraisal in the Esquire story — for
example, the character known as “the former governor’s wife,” someone who had
had an affair with William Paley. Capote calls her “somewhat porcine,” then “a
homely beast” and then “a cretinous Protestant size 40.” While Mrs. Paley might
have conceivably leaned into the schadenfreude that would come from such a
description of her husband’s mistress, she was instead activated by the
humiliation. She died of lung cancer in 1978 never having spoken to Capote
again.
The
greatest emotional damage seemed to accrue to Ann Woodward, a showgirl of the
World War II era who had married into a prominent New York banking family. She
was only an acquaintance of Capote’s and one he did not especially like. In the
fall of 1955, Mrs. Woodward shot and killed her husband at their estate in
Oyster Bay, in the middle of the night, believing that he was a burglar.
A Nassau
County grand jury determined that it was an accident. Capote decided it was
not, even though someone eventually pleaded guilty to trying to rob the
Woodward house on the night of the shooting. The tragedy had receded, but “La
Côte Basque” sent it right back into circulation 20 years later, with an
account of a woman, “Ann Hopkins,” whom Capote characterizes as “brought up in
some country-slum way,” an ex-call girl and bigamist who murders her husband
after he discovers that they were never technically married and she realizes
she would end up with more money as a widow than as a divorcée.
In
mid-October, just as Capote’s story was set to drop, Mrs. Woodward killed
herself in her uptown apartment. While she had had a difficult life and there
was no way to know why she did it, many speculated about the correlation.
Esquire
editors had no sense of the impact “La Côte Basque” would deliver. “They just
didn’t know what they had,” Alex Belth, who curates the magazine’s archive,
told me recently. This was clear in the choice of cover for that issue, which
featured the comedian Rich Little.
When
Esquire bought the story in the summer of 1975, it was reasonable to assume
that it would not resonate. There was a lot going on. In June, police officers
started showing up at New York airports to hand out “Welcome to Fear City”
pamphlets, which warned the newly landed not to take public transportation or
walk around after 6 in the evening. On Oct. 17 came the morning news that the
city would face bankruptcy in a matter of hours if it could not come up with
the $453 million it owed creditors. The national unemployment rate was around 9
percent.
It would
have been easy to forget, two years after the birth of People magazine — at a
time well into the sexual revolution when formality had been widely
decommissioned, when union leaders were celebrated, when the once-dominant
social hierarchies were being democratized, when Elaine’s supplanted
established French restaurants as the place to be seen — that “society,” in the
most sclerotic sense, persisted no matter how irrelevant it seemed beyond a
very narrow field.
“Feud,”
written by the playwright Jon Robin Baitz and directed by Gus Van Sant, relies
almost entirely on interior shots, presumably because the realities of the
outside world would seem confoundingly intrusive, jeopardizing the possibility
of sympathy for the grievances and obsessions of people who seemed to have so
little engagement with it. Capote may have alienated his friends
unintentionally, believing that they would find his account of their banter
hilarious. Or that at least they would be game enough to forgive him if
offended.
It was also
possible that he wrote the story as an act of revenge. The portrayal of the
women in such shallow terms conveyed the attraction-repulsion to big money that
generations of literary figures have had. As much as Capote craved the
attention of these women, he saw them ultimately as indifferent, terrible
mothers.
Regardless
of Capote’s motivation, the story around his painful banishment, already the
subject of books, documentaries and a library of reported pieces, endures. At
its heart it suggests the limits of a certain kind of inclusion. As a bounder,
you might make it to the top, but really you’re always on probation. Capote
used to pride himself on being able to see so many things at once, observing
lives and worlds from every angle. When he missed, he couldn’t live with his
error.
Ginia
Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City
columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also
been a television critic. She previously worked at Time
magazine. More about Ginia Bellafante
Feud: Capote vs the Swans: How a scandalous
Truman Capote story exposed the secrets of US high society
By Caryn
James
26th
January 2024
A star-studded new miniseries from Ryan Murphy looks
at how the author betrayed the confidence of some of America's most elite women
– and destroyed his career in the process.
A
caricature on the cover of New York Magazine in 1975 depicted author Truman
Capote as a yappy little French poodle, nipping at the fingers of a stunned
woman at a black-tie party. The headline read: Capote Bites the Hands That Fed
Him. The article, by the gossip columnist Liz Smith, pulled back the curtain on
the real identities of the society women Capote had recently betrayed in print.
Babe Paley and Slim Keith – who at the time filled the society pages and
best-dressed lists – confided in him about their affairs, their philandering
husbands and their insecurities, only to have their close friend mock them and
reveal their most intimate secrets. His barely-veiled fiction – a story called
La Côte Basque, 1965 – appeared in the widely-read Esquire magazine. The
betrayal helped ruin his life.
That true
story of a long-lost social era and of friendship gone wildly wrong is
deliciously told in Feud: Capote vs the Swans, the colourful, star-filled
second instalment of Ryan Murphy's franchise that began with Bette and Joan,
about the Hollywood rivalry of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Capote, played by
Tom Hollander, is well known, if not for his books (notably Breakfast at
Tiffany's and In Cold Blood), then for the 2005 film Capote with Philip Seymour
Hoffman. But who were these women he called his swans, and why did he turn on
them so viciously?
"They
were like the original Real Housewives," Murphy told Town and Country
magazine, but that seems like hype. None of Capote's refined swans ever
screamed and tossed a table at La Côte Basque, the restaurant where they
regularly lunched together, the way the women in that reality show have. But
they did have a similar hold on the public imagination. They were elegant
influencers. None of them married poor men, or dreamed of having a real career.
They drank, they smoked, they wore extravagant but tasteful jewellery. And
although their style can seem stodgy now – Paley's helmet hair never moves –
they were the fashion leaders of their day. Paley was regularly named on
best-dressed lists.
Feud plays
with the chronology and facts a bit, but mostly holds up against the truth. In
1975, Capote was at the different stage of his life from the one depicted in
the film Capote. Those two fictional versions complement each other well.
Hoffman's is the serious writer, researching In Cold Blood, the 1965 true-crime
book that made him rich and famous. Feud finds Capote at the height of that
fame. Hollander captures the campiness and wit, and also the tragedy of a
brilliant, troubled man. He had achieved his lifelong dream of being accepted
by high society, but was also self-indulgent and alcoholic. He was in and out
of a relationship with John O'Shea (Russell Tovey), a married, middle-class
banker who the swans barely tolerated. And he was seriously blocked as a
writer.
La Côte
Basque, along with two less explosive stories published in Esquire, were meant
to be part of Answered Prayers, a novel that he told friends and editors was
his counterpart to Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the definitive account of
the upper class of his day. No one ever accused him of having a tiny ego. But
he seemed unable to finish it.
Who the 'swans' were
Capote's
favourite swan and best friend, a perfect Proustian specimen, was Paley (Naomi
Watts), serenely perfect in her demeanour and taste. Her husband, Bill Paley
(played by the late Treat Williams), was the powerful head of the CBS
television network, and as she well knew, a womaniser. Watts captures the
brittleness of someone who needs to be perfect, and the loneliness that made
her need a sympathetic shoulder like Truman's.
In the
first episode of Feud, Truman convinces her not to divorce Bill after he has
slept with Happy Rockefeller, the New York governor's wife. Paley has found him
scrubbing Happy's menstrual blood from their bedroom carpet and has had enough.
With razor-like clarity, Truman advises her to stay married, keep her pampered
life, and make Bill buy her a Gauguin and a Matisse instead. But that episode
also sets up the real-life conflict, with Paley's devastated reaction to La
Côte Basque.
In Capote's
story, a wealthy businessman named Dillon – soon shortened to Dill, so close to
Bill – sleeps with the governor's frumpy wife and later tries to scrub away a
bloodstain "the size of Brazil". Bill was Capote's target, but Babe
felt humiliated that her husband's cheating was publicised to the world. Ebs
Burnough, the director of The Capote Tapes, a 2022 documentary about the writer
using previously unheard audio interviews with those close to him, told British
Vogue, "This was an era when no one even talked about the fact that
Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, let alone the affairs people were
having, let alone as graphically as Truman did." Paley never spoke to
Capote again.
Although
Paley was the most injured by the story, the main character in La Côte Basque
is the fictional version of Slim Keith. Of all the actresses playing swans,
Diane Lane may be the most fun to watch, giving her character a bold
directness. Keith's first husband was the movie director Howard Hawks, who,
legend has it, used her as the model for Lauren Bacall's tough, seductive
character in To Have and Have Not, also called Slim. Her second was the
producer Leland Hayward, and her third was the British businessman Kenneth
Keith, whose knighthood made her Lady Keith.
Clarke, Capote's friend and biographer, allegedly
warned him that his society friends would react badly to the story. Capote's
reply was "Nah, they're too dumb. They won't know who they are"
La Côte
Basque turns her into Lady Ina Coolbirth, "a big breezy peppy broad"
who lunches with the Capote stand-in, PB Jones, a writer and sometime hustler.
It is Ina who spills her friends’ secrets, name-dropping Ernest Hemingway (in
fact, a friend of Slim's) and recalling the time Joseph P Kennedy, JFK's
father, raped her (Kennedy Sr was dead by then so he couldn't sue Capote for
libel).
In Feud,
Keith insists that the swans freeze Truman out of society for his betrayal, a
fate that to him was almost worse than death. "We will destroy him,"
she says. Years later, the real Slim Keith told Capote's biographer, Gerald
Clarke, of her horrified reaction to Lady Ina. "She looks like me, she
talks like me, she's me!" she said. About Capote, she said, "I had
adored him, and I was so appalled by the use of friendship and my own bad
judgment".
CZ Guest
(Chloe Sevigny, cooly understated in a major role) was also a close member of
their set, a socialite and notable gardener, who appeared on the cover of Time
Magazine in 1962 under the line, "What It's Like in Society Today".
Perhaps because she did not appear in La Côte Basque, she continued to see
Capote in the aftermath. She and her husband even took him to rehab when he was
at his worst, drunkenly slurring his words on television talk shows. His
recovery didn't last long.
Lee
Radziwill (Calista Flockhart) is in La Côte Basque, undisguised and lunching
wih her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy. In the show she joins the other swans in
casting Capote out, although in life they remained friends for years after. It
probably helped that, in his fiction, Ina and PB agree that Lee is so much more
beautiful and elegant than Jackie.
Jon Robin
Baitz, who wrote the show, told EW: "This story exists at this point where
a world of elegance, ritual and class is being supplanted by a fervour of
youth: disco, Studio 54, drugs." When the middle-aged Capote, dismissed by
his swans, embraced that drug-fuelled disco world, it seemed more desperately
sad than thrilling.
The greatest mystery
Why he
published La Côte Basque in the first place is the subject of many theories.
Clarke, Capote's friend as well as his biographer, wrote that he warned him
that his society friends would react badly. Capote's reply, he said, was
"Nah, they're too dumb. They won't know who they are." Liz Smith
wrote in that 1975 article that the swans regarded him as "their favorite
house pet", there for their amusement. Was La Côte Basque his revenge?
Capote had a standard response to the debacle, heard in his own voice in The
Capote Tapes: "What did they expect? I'm a writer. I use everything."
That may
have been bravado. Joseph M Fox, in an editor's note to the book published
posthumously in 1986 as Answered Prayers – which simply collects the three
Esquire stories – said of the backlash, "There's no doubt he was shaken by
the reaction." Fox believed that was one reason he stopped working on the
novel. Capote kept telling friends he had written much of it and even read
excerpts, or at least pretend excerpts, aloud. But after he died in 1984, no
trace of a manuscript ever surfaced. Babe Paley died of cancer in 1978. One of
Capote's great regrets was that she never forgave him.
The swans
are having their moment now, and not just because of the show. Women's Wear
Daily recently called them "fashion icons whose influence still resonates
today", noting that Radziwill and Paley inspired Lanvin's 2020
spring/summer collection. The Washington Post featured the show in an article
titled, "Ladies Who Lunch Have Become 2024's Unexpected Fashion
Icons".
But it is
the real-life drama that continues to be spellbinding. In his preface to Music
for Chameleons, his 1980 collection of short pieces, Capote addressed the
start-and-stop process of writing Answered Prayers, and explained – perhaps
with a dash of fabulism – why he had no trouble remembering the details.
"All the characters were real," he wrote. "I hadn't invented
anything."
Feud:
Capote vs The Swans premieres on 31 January on FX in the US and will be
available to stream on Hulu from 1 February.
No comments:
Post a Comment