Today the second season of Feud premieres on HBO Max, the drama by Ryan Murphy (creator of Glee) which, as an anthology, deals in each installment with a legendary confrontation in the history of the American tabloids.
If in 2017 he revived the disputes between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who during the filming of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) even came to blows (it is said that Crawford demanded to use doubles for the scenes of violence, lest Davis take advantage of them), now he recovers an even more morbid fight, that of Truman Capote with a group of New York socialites spiteful with the one who had been his friend. To play “the Swans,” as the writer called them, Murphy repeats the strategy that already worked for him in Feud: Bette and Joan, bringing together an extraordinary cast of actresses.
Naomi Watts is Babe Paley (1915-1978), powerful fashion editor and the second wife of the founder of CBS; Diane Lane plays Slim Keith (1917-1990), married to Howard Hawks in the first marriage, to a movie magnate in the second and to an English aristocrat in the third; Chloë Sevigny (star of Big Love) is C. Z. Guest (1920-2003), actress, columnist, hockey player and fashion designer; Calista Flockhart (remembered from the ’90s series Ally McBeal) is Lee Radziwill (1933-2019), Jackie Kennedy’s sister; Molly Ringwald (icon of eighties cinema) plays the model Joanne Carson (1931-2015); and Demi Moore gives the face to Ann Woodward (1915-1975), a dancer of humble origins who entered high society through marriage.
It is too early to know if this season will be as successful as the first, but, of course, the story from which it is based is well supplied with ingredients: there is glamour, vanity, imposed puritanism, a lot of sex, betrayal and even a supposed murder.
We must go back to the sixties, when, after reaching the zenith of literary prestige with In Cold Blood (1966), a pioneering true crime novel about the brutal murder of a Kansas family, Capote had allowed himself to be seduced by the entertainment of the world, which he liked so much. Although some of them were genuine friends, most of the Swans were part of that chorus of sycophants that accompanied him in a life dedicated to indolence, parties, sex, drugs and alcohol.
In 1966 he received the offer that could have saved him, a contract with Random House for a novel that he had been planning for some time and that he wanted to be the American version of In Search of Lost Time by his idolized Marcel Proust.
With a title that evokes a supposed quote from Saint Teresa of Ávila (“More tears are shed for answered prayers than for those that remain unattended”), Attended Prayers was going to be a portrait of the upper classes based on her own memoirs, while Proustian style.
But, unlike the Frenchman, who locked himself in his apartment on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, Capote was not able to abandon himself to his profession. After a very long delay with the delivery date agreed upon with the publisher, in 1975 the first two chapters – the only ones he had written – ended up being sold to Esquire magazine. The first (Mojave) came out without pain or glory, but the second (La Côte Basque, 1965), which was about high society characters with dysfunctional lives, caused a great stir. Not because of its literary quality, because, although brilliant in style, the plot was too hollow to be a tribute to Proust.
The controversy was that, although supposedly fictitious, the characters in La Côte Basque, 1965 were the literary alter ego of their friends, the Swans. She didn’t use her real name, but it was easy to deduce. On some occasions, because the shame she aired was in the public domain, and on other occasions, due to circumstantial elements that allowed the character to be identified. Even worse in the latter case, since she was revealing secrets to which she had had access through friendship.
That Sidney Dillon who takes advantage of the fact that his wife is out of town to sleep with the wife of an important New York politician was actually William S. Paley, Babe Paley’s husband, and the Ann Hopkins who murders her husband in cold blood, Ann Woodward.
In the novel, Hopkins decides that she will end her husband when he asks for a divorce. She then hatches a Machiavellian plan that begins by cultivating a rumor that robberies are taking place in the neighborhood, her excuse to claim that she mistook him for an intruder when she shot him.
Capote was especially cruel in telling it this way, because, yes, Woodward had shot her husband in 1955, and yes, she said she had taken him for a thief, but the jury exonerated her and there was never any compelling reason to believe she was lying, beyond of gossip The new scandal turned into a disaster when, shortly afterwards, Woodward, who was suffering from recurrent depression, committed suicide by taking some cyanide pills.
For the author of the story – the “murderer”, as Woodward’s mother-in-law called him – the publication of La Côte Basque, 1965 did not bring anything good either. The Swans began a campaign against him that undermined his prestige and led to his expulsion from elitist circles. He was one more link in a self-destructive spiral that ended with his death from a narcotic overdose in 1984.
