The end of romantic love or a marriage is a recurring theme in dramatic fiction. It is assumed to be a vital turning point for a person: like someone who boards an ocean liner and, when it begins to sink, discovers that there are no lifeboats. But the breakup of a friendship can be just as or more traumatic, especially when the lost person was an emotional support that helped soften the blows. This is what happened to Babe Paley, fashion editor of Vogue magazine and key figure of the New York elite, after two decades of confidences with Truman Capote.
They met on a private jet by mistake: William S. Paley, the director of the CBS channel and Babe’s husband, believed he had invited Harry Truman, the former president of the United States, when a short, mannered and charismatic man appeared. expansive. He verbally seduced his wife in the back seats and became his right-hand man: he served to entertain parties, as a travel companion and to combat loneliness in the face of William’s constant infidelities.
In 1975, when she had just been diagnosed with lung cancer, Mrs. Paley saw her private life published in Esquire magazine. They were found in some false fiction stories titled La côte basque 1965, the restaurant where socialites met, and signed by Capote. She needed him and he, determined to create a work as relevant as In Cold Blood, used it to attract attention in the media and literary circles.
Feud: Capote vs the swans, which airs on HBO Max, tells the story of this friendship with the authenticity of not rewriting the betrayal as a consequence of quarrels, grudges and unfinished business. Between cocktails and elegant tableware, he dissects the consequences of a miscalculation marked by narcissism, desperation and alcoholism of a man who had lost his sense of professional discipline and inspiration.
The series firmly observes hurt feelings, the impossibility of forgiveness and mourning the loss of a person who still exists. This is where the series finds its strength: in transmitting, as writers like Laurence Lemer and Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott portrayed, the importance of those friendships and the blow it was for those affected, including a Capote who did not calculate that his charisma did not exempt him. of sins.
Babe Paley, here played by Naomi Watts, is just one of the swans (that’s what Capote called his friends) who fell victim to the writer’s sharp pen. There’s also Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, muse of Warhol and Dalí; Diane Lane as Slim Keith, Howard Hawks’ ex-wife who discovered Lauren Bacall; Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill, jealous of his sister Jackie Kennedy; or Anne Woodward, protagonist of a high society scandal when she killed her husband supposedly by accident. In the shoes of the writer who dug his social grave, a Tom Hollander fresh from the Sicilian hotel of The White Lotus.
Ryan Murphy, author of Nip/Tuck, American horror story, Glee or the season of Feud focused on the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, here only acts as producer. Jon Robin Baitz, creator of Five Brothers, signs the scripts for the eight episodes. It’s a key fact: he explains why Capote vs the Swans resists the temptation to elevate the toxicity of female dynamics, a Murphy specialty, to treat the swans from a serene empathy.
And, with the help of Gus Van Sant in the direction, in the first episodes he shows a reverential interest in the forms and rituals of the upper class of the time, without any feeling of guilt for the privilege they represented.