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All literature is gossip,” Truman Capote as soon as proclaimed. The creator was definitely excellent at each: by the mid-Seventies, he was not simply lauded because the creator of the groundbreaking In Cold Blood, however the proud possessor of probably the most star-studded contact books in New York. His wild anecdotes and deliciously bitchy quips, dished out in distinctively high-pitched Southern tones, made him a fixture on each visitor record, the diminutive courtroom jester of excessive society. But Answered Prayers, the novel he pictured as his reply to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, would show that literature and gossip is also a really poisonous mixture.
On an autumn morning in 1975, Babe Paley, the darling of New York excessive society and considered one of Capote’s finest pals, picked up the cellphone and dialled the quantity for fellow socialite Nancy “Slim” Keith. “Have you seen Esquire?” she requested, imploring Keith to name again as soon as she had learn the November concern. Why was the normally cool, even imperious Paley so shaken? Because inside the journal’s pages was a chapter from Answered Prayers, and it was much less a brief story than the literary equal of a grenade.
In La Côte Basque, 1965, named after a New York restaurant the place the rich went to see and be seen, Capote had revealed the secrets and techniques of his “swans”, a coterie of wealthy, stunning New York ladies. He’d spent a long time cultivating their friendship, solely to parade their confessions for public consumption. Paley, who had thought-about Capote her closest confidante, was completely humiliated: considered one of La Côte Basque’s gossipy anecdotes appeared to mock her husband Bill’s infidelity. It was a devastating act of betrayal – and for Capote, it was the start of the top. What made the well-known author stab his closest pals within the again? Almost half a century later, this literary scandal has been delivered to life in Feud: Capote vs The Swans, a TV collection from FX primarily based on Laurence Leamer’s guide Capote’s Women. Produced by Ryan Murphy and airing right here on Disney+, it stars Tom Hollander as the author and Naomi Watts as Paley.
Born in New Orleans in 1924, Capote grew to become obsessive about wealth and sweetness as a baby: lots of his biographers have traced this again to his fraught relationship together with his social-climbing mom Lillie Mae, who despatched him off to reside with household in Alabama. At the age of 24, he revealed the semi-autobiographical Other Voices, Other Rooms, the story of a boy in search of the daddy who deserted him. It ended up staying on the bestseller record for 9 weeks, and he’d go on to work on screenplays and theatre scripts, constructing a community of glamorous friends as he went.
Capote launched Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958, with the well-known movie adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly following three years later. But it was his 1965 work In Cold Blood that made him a bona fide movie star. Hailed as a revolutionary piece of narrative non-fiction, it explored a infamous Kansas homicide case, together with the next investigation and trial. The creator had spent years interviewing native residents and police; he’d additionally controversially ingratiated himself with the suspects. The finish product was like nothing that had been revealed earlier than, laying the groundwork for contemporary true crime. Everyone wished a bit of the creator: on TV and radio reveals, in magazines and at fancy soirées. Capote cemented his place on the pinnacle of excessive society by throwing a lavish occasion of his personal, christened the Black and White Ball, on the Plaza Hotel in 1966.
The guest list was a mix of cultural heavy-hitters and elegant socialites. In the latter category were the women Capote referred to as his “swans”, the group of dazzling, impeccably turned out (and staggeringly rich) women who were practically American aristocracy. His favourite was Babe Paley, a former Vogue fashion editor and best-dressed list mainstay who was married to Bill, the president of the broadcasting network CBS. Capote called her “the most beautiful woman of the 20th century” and said that she had only one flaw: “She was perfect. Other than that, she was perfect.”
Through her, he would meet Slim Keith, played by a poised Diane Lane in Capote vs The Swans; as a young model in Los Angeles, she mixed in starry circles, eventually marrying director Howard Hawks and launching Lauren Bacall’s career (Keith showed Hawks a copy of Harper’s Bazaar with a young Bacall on the cover, or so the story goes). She’d go on to marry hotshot producer Leland Hayward (who brought The Sound of Music and South Pacific to Broadway) and a British banker, Kenneth Keith, who also happened to be a baron. Other fixtures in Capote’s inner circle were Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy who was obsessed with getting out of the first lady’s shadow, and CZ Guest (Chloe Sevigny), a wealthy, Boston-born WASP. She’d lived a scandalous youth, appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and posing naked for the artist Diego Rivera, before settling down to marry a polo champion.
Capote had grand plans for his next fiction project, a novel he titled Answered Prayers. In a note sent to his publishers as early as 1958, he described it as “my magnum opus”; later, he boasted that it was “going to do to America what Proust did to France”. But after the in-depth, harrowing reporting process required for In Cold Blood, Capote was creatively spent – long boozy lunches and parties with the swans seemed more appealing than hours at the typewriter. He missed deadline after deadline, managed to negotiate bigger and bigger contracts with Random House despite this, and made correspondingly grandiose claims about the novel he believed would secure his status as an all-time great.
I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all these people think I was there just to entertain them?
Truman Capote
He had high society in his crosshairs: after spending years dredging old scandals from his diaries, Capote sold one chapter of Answered Prayers, “Mojave”, to Esquire. It was greeted with little fanfare. The next instalment, La Côte Basque, 1965, was crammed with blatantly obvious (and none too flattering) fictionalisations of his friends. Reading a draft shortly before its publication, Capote’s biographer Gerald Clarke warned the writer that the story was unlikely to go down well. “Nah, they’re too dumb, they won’t know who they are,” came his response. Capote had wildly underestimated his friends – La Côte Basque’s publication would prove utterly explosive.
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The story dramatised a long lunch at the restaurant, with writer (and Capote surrogate) PB Jones trading gossip with Lady Ina Coolbirth, “a big breezy peppy broad” who was blatantly Slim Keith. One anecdote concerned the philandering Sidney Dillon and his affair with the dowdy wife of a New York governor; after sleeping together, Dillon realises her menstrual blood has left a stain “the size of Brazil” on the mattress, and frantically attempts to scrub the sheet (and even dry it in the oven) to prevent his house-proud wife Cleo from noticing. The Dillons, it was obvious to anyone familiar with New York’s upper social strata, were the Paleys: hence Babe’s panicked call to Slim on that autumn morning.
They weren’t the only ones skewered by Capote. Socialite Gloria Vanderbilt was painted as too stupid to recognise her ex-husband. “Lady Ina” mouthed off about a tedious dinner with Princess Margaret (“Her mother’s a darling, but the rest of that family!”). But it was Ann Woodward who was perhaps portrayed most cruelly. A former radio actress and chorus girl, she had married into a wealthy banking family, but the union was unhappy. In 1955, after attending a dinner party held in honour of Wallis Simpson, Ann shot and killed her husband William Woodward Jr.
There’d been rumours of a prowler lurking in their Long Island neighbourhood, and Ann said she’d mistaken William for an intruder. A grand jury concluded that the death was an accident, but rumours swirled, insinuating foul play. Capote approached her on a trip to St Moritz the following year, but she dismissed him with a homophobic slur. He had his revenge on “Mrs Bang Bang” by putting her in La Côte Basque – and claiming that her literary alter ego, the calculating “Ann Hopkins”, had “got away with cold-blooded murder”. Just a few days before Esquire was published, Woodward overdosed on sleeping pills. There were rumours that she’d seen an advance copy (although there was no hard evidence to back this up).
The fallout was seismic. Paley, horrified at seeing her private pain used as literary fodder, never spoke to Capote again; she was terminally ill with lung cancer at the time, and the author wasn’t invited to her 1978 funeral (an event she had planned meticulously, specifying food, wine and flowers). Keith reportedly considered suing her former friend for libel. But Capote remained bullish, at least in public. “What did they expect?” he said. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all these people think I was there just to entertain them?” The only swan who didn’t ostracise him was Guest. “Of course he was going to use the material sooner or later,” she said. “[But] I never told Truman anything of importance.”
Cast out from the swans’ gilded world, Capote doubled down on drink and medicines, swapping posh lunches for debauchery at Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s manufacturing unit. None of this was conducive to ending off the guide he’d touted as a masterpiece within the making. Two additional chapters of Answered Prayers, “Unspoiled Monsters” and “Kate McCloud” have been revealed in Esquire, however after that? Nothing however a collection of rumours and myths. Some of his remaining pals have claimed Capote would carry a completed manuscript to events, regaling friends by studying aloud. “He had many, many pages of manuscript, and he started to read them,” Joanne Carson (performed by Molly Ringwald within the TV present) would recall. “They were very, very good.”
There are many tales about what occurred to Answered Prayers. Capote would declare that his lover John O’Shea had run off with one of many chapters (he tried to sue him, however ultimately dropped the case). Some students imagine he could have destroyed the manuscript in a drunken match of pique – or that he by no means really completed it within the first place. Carson, who was with Capote when he died in 1984, mentioned that he had hidden it in a security deposit field in a secret location: “The novel will be found when it wants to be found,” he informed her, eager to foster a mystique even on the very finish.
When his editor, lawyer and biographer searched Capote’s home shortly after his dying, they discovered no hint of Answered Prayers (though in 2012, one other chapter, titled “Yachts and Things”, was found in an archive on the New York Public Library). Perhaps it’s lurking someplace within the United States, ready for somebody to make the invention of a lifetime. Or possibly Capote by no means obtained past writing that handful of chapters. Either approach, the guide – and the betrayal it necessitated – weighed closely, even painfully, on Capote’s thoughts till his remaining moments. His final phrases, in line with Carson’s account? “Beautiful Babe” and “Answered Prayers”.
Feud: Capote vs The Swans is on Disney+ from 17 April
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