Once upon a time, Truman Capote flocked among the Swans.
Until, that is, they became his subject matter, the In Cold Blood author's keen eye and witty barbs no longer quite so entertaining once the salacious story—excerpted in the November 1975 issue of Esquire—was about them.
And so Capote was ruined. Not all at once, but the glamorous socialites he buttered his bread with cast him out of the fold and for various reasons his standing among the Manhattan elite—as well as his illustrious career—never recovered.
So yes, this story was tailor-made for a Ryan Murphy production. And now FX/Hulu's FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans has three nominations heading into the 2025 Critics Choice Awards, airing Feb. 7 on E!
In the Limited Series or Movie Made for Television categories, Tom Hollander is nominated for Best Actor for channeling Capote, Naomi Watts is up for Best Actress for her portrayal of ailing style icon Barbara "Babe" Paley, and Treat Williams' turn as her second husband, CBS chief executive William Paley, earned him a posthumous nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
The long-gestating second season of Murphy's Feud anthology series is based on Laurence Leamer's 2021 book Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era.
And not all that much drama needed to be introduced into the series' plot for effect, as this wild and ultimately tragic tale had so much going for it already. (Including its lavish look ripe for the recreating—the show won an Emmy in September for Outstanding Period Costumes for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie).
These are the details that made Feud: Capote vs. The Swans so fit for the telling:
Who Was Truman Capote?
Truman Capote wrote lauded fiction—his 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany's was adapted into the Audrey Hepburn classic—but his name ultimately became synonymous with new journalism and the "nonfiction novel," which he felt he pioneered.
He was also a childhood friend of Harper Lee and inspiread the character of Dill, Scout and Jem's eccentric playmate in To Kill a Mockingbird. Hence Lee traveling to Holcomb, Kansas with him to research what would become his magnum opus, In Cold Blood, about the shocking 1959 murder of the Clutter family.
Elevated to new heights upon the rapturous reception for In Cold Blood, which was also made into a movie, Capote threw his iconic Black & White Ball in 1966—considered the social event of the year—and became a full-blown celebrity. He performed on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, appeared on The Tonight Show 19 times and had a cameo in Annie Hall.
And, perhaps most consequentially, he became an in-demand guest of New York's upper crust and an especial favorite of the women who enjoyed having the irrepressibly bawdy writer as a confidante.
But despite their messy falling-out, Capote’s eventual downfall has also been linked to, first, the ethical knots he tied himself in during the writing of In Cold Blood, and then to the pressure of expectations, personally and professionally, that followed its literati-rocking success.
"In a way, the performance that he gave of being the great raconteur, who was so witty and clever and charming, became exhausting,” Hollander told Variety. "And he started to lose the discipline required to really write, where it’s just you at your desk with your typewriter. It can be a lonely life."
Who Were the Swans?
Birds of a gilded feather flock together. And Capote dubbed the well-heeled, immaculately coiffed and connected group of ladies-who-lunch that he palled around with his "swans."
Babe Paley (played by Naomi Watts in FX's FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans), the daughter of a prominent neurosurgeon, was a fashion editor at Vogue before marrying her second husband Bill Paley—who ran CBS for more than 50 years, starting when it was just a radio station—in 1947. They were together until her death from cancer at 63 in 1978.
Nancy "Slim" Keith (Diane Lane) was a Harper's Bazaar cover girl whose first husband was director Howard Hawks (and Nancy may have encouraged him to cast unknown teen Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep). But it wasn't until she wed for a third time in 1962, swapping vows with Kenneth Keith, Baron Keith of Castleacre, that she became nobility, though they separated in 1972.
Calista Flockhart had a ball playing queen bee Lee Radziwill, a woman-about-town in her own right as well as the younger sister of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Lee was married three times, but kept the name of husband No. 2, Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, and was a paramour of her sibling's eventual second husband, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
At her core, Flockhart mused to Vanity Fair, "Lee was searching for something to be extraordinary at. She was competing with her sister. She wanted to be special."
And Capote ostensibly tried to help in her quest. He hooked her up with an agent and nurtured her acting career, despite consistently unpromising reviews.
He agreed to pen a made-for-TV adaptation of the classic noir film Laura for her to star in (billed as "Lee Bouvier," her maiden name), the winning idea being that the title character doesn't show up until late in the film. But it was a tortured production and the reviews of Lee's performance effectively ended her run as an actress.
Lucy Douglas "C.Z." Guest (Chloe Sevigny) was an actress, writer and designer who, like her fellow swans, was a fixture on best-dressed lists. Ernest Hemingway was the best man at her 1947 wedding to Winston Frederick Churchill Guest and the controversial Duke and Duchess of Windsor were godparents of their two children.
Unlike the other birds, she stayed married to Winston, her one and only husband, until his death in 1982.
Also amid the nesting dolls of scandal in this crowd was widow Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) a model and actress who stamped her passport to high society by marrying banking heir William Woodward Jr. And while she hobnobbed with all the nobs, she did so under the cloud of suspicion that she had murdered her husband.
She did fatally shoot him at their Oyster Bay estate in 1955, but maintained that she had mistaken him for an intruder and his death was ultimately ruled an accident.
What Caused the Break Between Truman Capote and His Swans?
Capote's eagerly awaited follow-up to 1966's In Cold Blood, for which he'd received a $25,000 advance from Random House, was late. As in, years late.
Long before anyone read a word, it was common knowledge, thanks to Capote himself, that the book he was working on was about "the small world of the very rich," according to his editor Joseph M. Fox. And the writer had promised no less than the "greatest novel of the age."
He published short stories and magazine pieces in the meantime, as well as books largely comprising material he'd written in the 1940s and 1950s, and the original Jan. 1, 1968, deadline for his new novel kept getting pushed back, from 1973, to 1974, then 1977 and finally March 1, 1981.
Between 1968 and 1972, Capote spent most of his time "reading and selecting, rewriting and indexing my own letters, other people's letters, my diaries and journals" kept from 1943 through 1965, he wrote of his still-unfinished work in the preface to his 1980 story collection Music for Chameleons.
He called the book Answered Prayers, he explained, from a quote by St. Thérèse: "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." And, he noted, the characters were based on real people and he "hadn't invented anything." His intentions were "to remove disguises, not manufacture them."
However, he paused working on it in September 1977, he continued, not because he had rethought the personal subject matter, but rather, he wasn't happy with "the texture of the writing itself."
His critics circa 1975 had agreed.
Fox tried to dissuade Capote from publishing excerpts in Esquire, to no avail. A piece called "Mojave" came out first and got people talking. (It was intended to be the second chapter of Answered Prayers, but was instead published as an individual story in Music for Chameleons.)
But when it appeared in the magazine's November 1975 issue, the snarky "La Côte Basque, 1965"—reading more like a brazen tell-all than a snippet of a novel by one of the most esteemed writers in America— "produced an explosion which rocked that small society which Truman had set out to describe," Fox wrote in an Editor's Note at the beginning of Answered Prayers' 1987 second edition.
Esquire paid $25,000 for the exclusive, which ultimately couldn't cover the cost of what Capote lost.
"Virtually every friend he had in this world ostracized him for telling thinly disguised tales out of school," Fox wrote, "and many of them never spoke to him again."
What Did Truman Capote Write About the Swans in "La Côte Basque, 1965"?
Slim Keith, then Lady Keith of Castleacre, inspired the character of "Lady Ina Coolbirth," a "big breezy peppy broad" who, meeting Capote's stand-in "P.B. Jones" for lunch at La Côte Basque (a real Manhattan establishment), orders a meal that will take awhile to prepare, the better to get drunk on Cristal champagne while they're waiting.
Ina tells P.B. she's on her way to Mexico to get a divorce and, while she admittedly must have a man in her life, she can also see why "a woman my age" would settle down with another woman for the "comfort and admiration."
Ann Woodward, as "Ann Hopkins," got the brunt of the nastiness: Lady Ina calls her a "tramp" and a "murderess," being positive, despite his death having been ruled an accident, that she had killed her husband "with malice aforethought." And she goes on about it.
Meanwhile, P.B. describes Lee Radziwill (using her real name) as a "perfect" specimen, and Lady Ina compares her favorably to her enigmatic older sister.
Capote didn't bother renaming "Mrs. William S. Paley," who was lunching with her sister in the scene. But while he refers to the "former governer's wife" who walks into the restaurant as a "homely beast," it's also revealed that the former first lady had an affair with Mr. William S. Paley. (Though he was dubbed "Sidney Dillon.")
Also referred to by her real name is Glorida Vanderbilt (who was married to her fourth and final husband, Anderson Cooper's father Wyatt Emory Cooper, at the time). Capote's alter ego eavesdrops on her lunchtime conversation with actor Walter Matthau's second wife Carol Marcus Saroyan Saroyan Matthau (his cheeky way of noting she'd been married twice to writer William Saroyan). The two clucked about, among other things, Charlie Chaplin's decades-younger wife Oona O'Neill Chaplin being pregnant again.
"What did they expect?" a defiant Capote later said of all the spilled tea, per Fox. "I'm a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?"
Did Truman Capote and the Swans Ever Make Up?
Babe Paley never spoke to Capote again before she died in 1978, according to numerous accounts of the aftermath of his laundry-airing.
Slim Keith still saw him out and about but, as she told George Plimpton for an oral history on Capote, per Vanity Fair, "never looked up at his face again." (She remained a devoted friend to Babe, and there's no evidence that Slim's affair with her BFF's husband Bill, as depicted in Feud, happened in real life.)
Ann Woodward took her own life in October 1975, the month before "La Côte Basque, 1965" was published.
Otherwise, C.Z. Guest, who died in 2003, was the only one to forgive Capote for his sins in his lifetime.
Lee Radziwill, portrayed less tawdrily than some of her fellow swans, told Vanity Fair in 2012 that really it was Capote who'd been taken advantage of by the women who dropped him.
"I just don't think he realized what he was doing, because, God, did he pay for it," she reflected. "That's what put him back to serious drinking. And then, of course, the terrible fear that he could never write another word again. It was all downhill from then on."
They drifted apart, Lee added, because of his drinking. "We just forgot about one another," she said. "I mean, I never forgot about him, but we didn't see each other, because he wasn't making any sense whatsoever. It was pitiful." She died in 2019.
What Happened to Truman Capote?
Alcohol and drug abuse hastened Capote's death at 59 on Aug. 25, 1984.
Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald), the second of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson's four wives, was a close confidante who provided a refuge for Capote (who never really considered her a swan anyway) at her home in Los Angeles when his East Coast world imploded. He died in her guest room.
Capote never finished Answered Prayers—or any other novel—after the "La Côte Basque" affair, though the three chapters Random House could find (he claimed to have written more) were published posthumously in 1986.
Fox theorized in his 1987 Editor's Note that Capote couldn't write another word of the book because he really was "devastated by the public—and private—reaction to those chapters, perhaps partly because he came to realize that it would never achieve those Proustian standards he had set for himself."
While he remained a celebrity for the rest of his life, and was still welcome in plenty of circles, people close to Capote speculated he preferred the more civilized (outwardly, at least) days of luncheons at La Côte Basque.
"In the long run, the rich run together, no matter what," Capote said in a 1980 Playboy interview. "They will cling, until they feel it's safe to be disloyal, then no one can be more so."