Inside Truman Capotes vicious Feud with his swans

At just 5-foot-3, Truman Capote was standing tall in 1966. For the past five years, the “tiny terror” known for his caustic wit and amusingly pipsqueak timbre had suffered the yokels of Garden City, Kan. (pop. 11,811), where he chased the aftermath of the Clutter family murders. His sabbaticals from Manhattan society had paid off. He had written “In Cold Blood” and was hailed for the invention of a new literary form: “the nonfiction novel.” The New York Times called it “a masterpiece — agonizing, terrible, possessed, proof that the times, so surfeited with disasters, are still capable of tragedy.” It paid off literally, too. He reportedly received $2 million in book, magazine and film payments for the work (roughly $19 million in today’s dollars). Never mind that the subjects who had gifted him so much material — convicted murderers Richard Eugene “Dick” Hickock and Perry Edward Smith — had been executed by hanging at about 1 a.m., April 14, 1965. It was time for a party.

Capote’s Black and White Ball filled New York’s Plaza Hotel with the most effervescent names in America — and snubbed those without fizzle. Andy Warhol and Lady Bird Johnson, Brooke Astor and Sammy Davis Jr., Gloria Steinem and Gloria Vanderbilt: In all, 540 made the cut. Frank Sinatra gabbed with Claudette Colbert while Mia Farrow did the twist. Even arch-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. condescended to cut a rug, as Norman Mailer, dressed like a private dick in a trench coat, leered. Washington Post owner Katharine Graham was the guest of honor, draped in a white wool crepe Balmain gown and a matching bejeweled mask by Halston. Capote wore a tuxedo and a 39-cent mask from FAO Schwarz. The most beautiful and influential society women in America, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness and Lee Radziwill — Capote’s gaggle of confidantes, the “ravishing little things” he called his “swans” — scintillated. Capote ordered more than 400 bottles of vintage Taittinger Champagne and a midnight supper of chicken hash and spaghetti Bolognese. It was the singular social event, not merely of fall 1966, but forevermore — doomed to be imitated ad infinitum.

Capote’s “little masked ball” is richly re-created on location at the Plaza Hotel in the second installment of “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” Ryan Murphy’s eight-episode miniseries. The first two episodes premiere on Wednesday at 10 p.m. on FX. Directed in part by Gus Van Sant, and starring Tom Hollander as Capote, the series dramatizes the true story of the author’s fall from grace and social banishment.

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“When you are re-creating something where it happened, it brings about a certain reverence,” said Diane Lane, who plays fashion icon Keith and co-stars alongside Naomi Watts (Paley), Chloë Sevigny (Guest) and Calista Flockhart (Radziwill). “To be in the Plaza, standing in the same spots where these women were photographed, was very impactful. Like the Edwardian era, this was a bubble, a moment between two times when smart, quick-witted people with literary acumen rose to the top.”

Lane’s character, Keith, exemplified that era. Ex to Howard Hawks and Leland Hayward, wife to Kenneth Keith, Baron Keith of Castleacre, she was credited with discovering Lauren Bacall and known for palling around with Ernest Hemingway in Havana. Of humble origins, she was street smart and stylish. She schmoozed with William Randolph Hearst and kept an amorous Clark Gable at arm’s length. She knew how to market herself and appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar at age 22. In many ways, her life mirrored Capote’s, and perhaps because of that, she sat squarely in the bull’s-eye of his pen.

Read Lili Loofbourow's review of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’

“It all started with the publication of ‘La Côte Basque, 1965’ in Esquire,” said Laurence Leamer, author of “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era,” which is the basis for this season of “Feud.”

A reference to the restaurant on East 55th Street where the swans gathered for lunch and published in 1975, it was an installment of “Answered Prayers,” Capote’s long-awaited, gossip-rich work that promised to expose the dirty truth about society. Capote touted it as the “greatest novel of the age.”

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It’s “a large novel, my magnum opus, a book about which I must be very silent, so as not [to] alarm my ‘sitters’ and which I think will really arouse you when I outline it (only you must never mention it to a soul),” he wrote to Bennett Cerf at Random House in 1958. “The novel is called, Answered Prayers; and if all goes well, I think it will answer mine.”

But in the decade-long period following the zenith of his ball, Capote struggled to produce much beyond magazine articles and society-sheet mentions. He had never fully recovered from the suicide of his mother in 1954 or his abandonment as a small child. He was raised in meager circumstances by relatives in Monroeville, Ala. A misfit, he formed a lifelong friendship with his neighbor, “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee. But a small Southern backwater couldn’t contain Capote. His debut novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” foisted him into New York literary circles in his early 20s. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” secured his position. But even in this more accepting milieu, the discomfort of being an openly gay man in an intolerant era was draining. He drank and used cocaine — his “grande nuits blanche” (grand white nights).

“He had lovers, but he didn’t have any real family,” Leamer said. “The swans were his family, and I don’t think he quite realized that until he lost them.”

Capote didn’t just lunch with his swans — the wives of New York’s richest and most powerful men — for two decades; he yachted with them in the Mediterranean and lounged in their beds as they did their nails. He called Keith “Big Mama” and meant it. Paley told Capote everything. Guest fascinated him, and he her. He preferred Radziwill’s beauty and intellect to her more famous sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which flattered her to no end.

“He paid for his meals,” Leamer said. “When it came to dinner, he had to be entertaining, and he knew that if he wasn’t entertaining, he would be disinvited. That’s the way these people were. They needed to be amused, and he was an unbelievably b----y guy. He would be with one and tell terrible stories about the others. He did it with all of them.”

In “La Côte Basque, 1965,” he wrote as he spoke: with a cool volubility, peppered with amusing and cruel invective. He mocks the extramarital affairs of Paley’s husband (a “well-hung Jew”), including, as noted in Leamer’s book, “the tawdry details of his supposed one-night stand with what was obviously the very real Marie Harriman” (wife of New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman, though others have pointed to Mary Rockefeller). Women like Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Matthau (the inspiration for Holly Golightly in “Tiffany’s”) and Jackie Kennedy were insulted without the use of pseudonyms. A thinly veiled Keith, dubbed Lady Ina Coolbirth, is described as “a big breezy peppy broad” from the American West who makes quips too offensive to quote here. “Of course it wasn’t an accident,” Coolbirth says, an obvious reference to society fixture Ann Woodward, who shot her husband in what was ruled an accident, adding: “She’s a murderess.” The ladies call Woodward “a jazzy little carrottop killer” who was “brought up in some country-slum way” and “a call girl for a pimp who was a bell captain at the Waldorf.” It goes on like this for some 11,000 words.

“Truman took déclassé and made it sordid,” Lane said. “These women deserved better than that.”

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The fallout was instantaneous. Paley, who had lung cancer at the time, never spoke to Capote again. When she died in 1978, he was not invited to the funeral. A wounded Keith cut him off, while the punchline of the piece, Woodward (played by Demi Moore in “Feud”), who Capote nicknamed “Mrs. Bang Bang,” took her own life at her apartment at 1133 Fifth Ave. shortly before its publication. It was such a spectacular disaster that when Capote died in 1984 at the home of Joanne Carson (played by Molly Ringwald) from decades of drug and alcohol abuse, Gore Vidal quipped that it was “a wise career move.”

“These women were sophisticated enough that, had it been the quality of an Edith Wharton novel, they would have had no trouble with it,” Leamer said. “But it was nothing but gossip and nasty stories. He didn’t realize it would have this enormous impact. It’s like when someone is in an automobile accident. They pretend they aren’t hurt right away, they get up and start walking, and then they fall down. That’s the way it was. Truman tried to pretend he wasn’t hurt, but he was terribly hurt.”

Although many have speculated that Capote’s motive was self-destruction, that “Answered Prayers” was his death-drive — that’s not what the author said. “They’re too dumb,” Capote told his biographer, Gerald Clarke. “They won’t know who they are.” There’s reason to think that’s what he really believed. He was used to telling these stories around Manhattan lunch tables and had been for years. “In that sense he had already betrayed them,” Leamer said. One further betrayal simply didn’t register. The better question might be: Were these women really so shocked, or had it all become less amusing?

Capote never finished “Answered Prayers,” and its fragments were published posthumously.

In the early 1980s, shortly before he died, David Patrick Columbia, the founder of New York Social Diary, encountered the washed-up, addled but still vivacious Capote.

“I went to pick up Truman from the airport,” Columbia said. “When I met him he was already s---faced. He was old. He was finished. He was a druggie. He had become part of the Studio 54 crowd. I liked him, but I felt sorry for him.”

During the ride to the Beverly Wilshire hotel, Columbia remembers Capote as an affable drunk who never stopped talking. “You’ll have to ex-cuse me …” he said, “but I’ve been up for sheh-ven-dee-too-ahh-whirrs with two dozen of theee moss-bee-yu-ti-ful drag queens you have everseeeeeen.”

“‘I took him up the elevator to his floor and all the rooms were named after vineyards. He looked around and said, ‘I see that we’re on the alcoholic’s floor,’” Columbia recalled. “He spoke in this little high voice, but when he told a story and laughed, his voice would drop to a deep basso. The world was a stage for him.”

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