Gerald Clark still remembers the day he warned Truman Capote that it wasn’t actually such a good idea to smear the “Swans,” his fellow New York elite socialites who worshiped him. remember.
“Truman took me swimming at Gloria Vanderbilt’s house in Southampton,” Clark recalled in a telephone interview. “He gave me an advance copy of La Côte Basque. I read it sitting on a chair by the pool while he rode on a raft in the middle of the pool. I said, “Truman, they’re not going to be happy about this,” and he said, “No, they’re too stupid, they’ll win.” I don’t know who they are. ”
Clark was right, Capote was wrong. When a famous author publishes a thinly veiled novelization of their lives in Esquire magazine, revealing their most intimate secrets: the swan-to-swan relationship. almost destroyed. This led to his partial exile from high society and ultimately his fall from grace.
The story of how Capote befriended and betrayed women is told in the second installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology, Feud: Capote vs the Swans, currently airing on FX in the US . The eight-episode series stars Naomi Watts, Calista Flockhart, Diane Lane, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Chloe Sevigny, and Tom Hollander stars alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones. He took over the baton and brought Capote to the screen.
Capote was an unlikely high society mistress. He was raised by relatives in Monroeville, Alabama after his parents’ divorce and did not attend college. However, his works include Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was later made into a successful film starring Audrey Hepburn, and In Cold Blood, the story of the Kansas family murders that was hailed as the invention of the “nonfiction novel.” I wrote it like a dream. € as a literary form.
Capote, who was 5 feet 3 inches tall and gay, was also a handsome man with a dry wit and a dizzying social network. Clark doesn’t think this side of his personality is well represented in the new FX drama. “People think of Truman as a disgusting person, a mean old queen, and that’s not what he was,” says the 86-year-old, speaking from Bridgehampton, Long Island, New York. “Truman was a lot of fun.
“I quote someone who described him in my book as: pack In a midsummer night’s dream. People didn’t like him because he told nasty stories or gossiped about people.. He would pump gas and go to his comrades and exchange jokes and stories and biographies. He was the same with waiters and waitresses and everyone. ”
Clark added: “In the early to mid-’70s, I was walking down the street with him in New York, and taxi drivers would lean out their windows and yell, ‘Hey Truman, how’s it going, buddy?’ ™ They’ve seen him on TV johnny carson show He was on a few other shows and he was funny.People really liked Truman Capote, and Truman Capote really liked people.
In 1966, Capote threw the party of the century. black and white ball, a masquerade-themed show at New York’s Plaza Hotel featuring guests including Lauren Bacall, Sammy Davis Jr., Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Andy Warhol. did. This scene is lavishly recreated in Feud Square.
Clark, who knew Capote from the early 1970s until his death in 1984 and wrote his definitive biography, commented that “people came from all over the world to come to Truman’s parties.” Everyone I spoke to who attended the party had a great time. It was a great party and great people. It cost Truman $16,000, which of course was a lot of money, but people spend millions of dollars on parties and don’t get as much success or fame or have as much fun. There probably wasn’t. ”
Among the guests that night were some of Capote’s “charming little people,” including Barbara “Babe” Paley, Slim Keith, CZ Guest, and Lee Radziwill, who became wealthy. They were either born or married to some of the wealthiest people in New York. the most powerful men. In the FX series, an adventure into white privilege that can never be mistaken for a kitchen sink drama, Capote portrays a swan gliding through society’s pond, but beneath the surface rowing furiously to stay afloat. It is described as being.
He entered their lives, had lunch with them, went on yachts with them, and became their best friend. Clark said, “Truman worshiped style. Style in everything, especially in writing: Truman was a great stylist of words. They had style, and he loved it.
“He also had a Pygmalion complex. For example, with Lee Radziwill, he stood by her. She was so jealous of her high-profile sister, Jacqueline Kennedy, that Truman went out of his way to He spent two years trying to make her into an actress. He got her. Part of the Philadelphia Story On stage in Chicago. She had good looks, beauty, good style, and great taste, but she couldn’t act and received terrible reviews in Chicago. But Truman persisted in trying to get her to appear on television. I asked her to play Lola. [in a TV adaptation of the 1944 film] And once again she was unable to act. They had a falling out after a few years. ”
paley She was especially close and transparent with him about her life. After her car accident, she had to undergo extensive cosmetic and dental surgery on her mouth and jaw, which some say made her even more beautiful. A former Vogue fashion editor, she was a regular on her best-dressed lists and was famous for her extremely elegant dinner parties.
She wore full make-up and false teeth to bed, so her husband, the head of the CBS network, bill paley, I wouldn’t be able to see her without them. He was a notorious playboy, and television dramas show Capote providing Babe with the emotional comfort that her husband did not. Capote adored her in response and once wrote in her diary: “Mrs. P. had one flaw. She was perfect. Other than that, she was perfect.”
Keith came from a poor family, but at the age of 22 he appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. She was rumored to have had affairs with Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway. She married film director Howard Hawks, then film producer Leland Hayward, and then British banker Sir Kenneth Keith.
Described by Capote as a “cool vanilla lady,” Guest excelled at horseback riding and gardening, and was painted by artists such as Salvador Dalo, Diego Rivera, and Andy Warhol.she got married Winston Frederick Churchill GuestAt the home of Hemingway, another cousin of the British Prime Minister, in Havana, Cuba.
However, in 1975, Capote published a short story in Esquire magazine, which caused an uproar. La Côte Basque, 1965, a reference to a Manhattan restaurant where the swans met for lunch. It was a wicked and sinister excerpt from his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, with hideous, barely disguised portraits of several swans.
Capote made fun of Paley’s husband’s extramarital affair. The article mentions that power broker “Sidney Dillon” had a one-night stand with the wife of the governor of New York, resulting in menstrual blood stains on the white sheets of his bed. This is based on a real incident involving Bill Paley.
Clark said: “An ordinary reader, even a sophisticated reader, would not have known who it was.” He was a wealthy man, but if he had not heard the story before, You wouldn’t have known it was Bill Paley. This story was apparently told by Bill Paley himself to certain people and spread to everyone except his wife. When she read this piece, she called someone and said, “He’s not talking about Bill, is he?”
Restyled as “Lady Ina Coolbarth”, Keith is characterized as a “big, crisp, feisty broad” from the West.with a blatant insinuation Ann Woodward It is ruled an accident because she mistakes her husband for a robber, but the wannabe Swan (“Ann Hopkins”) observes, “Of course it wasn’t an accident.” she is a murderer ”
The article shocked the elite and caused a schism from which Capote never fully recovered. Paley, who was suffering from lung cancer at the time, never spoke to him again. He was not invited to her funeral.
Clark further added, “What really hurt me was breaking up with Babe Paley, especially since she was diagnosed with lung cancer at that time or shortly after, and she died from lung cancer in 1978. He was with her… “I was so excited,” he added. He wanted to comfort her like it was her last day, but she wouldn’t allow it.–
Keith cut him off too. Ms. Woodward, whom Capote nicknamed “Mrs. Bang Bang,” took her own life in her apartment three days before her article was published. Clark commented: “Whether or not she was informed about this work in advance, no one knows. The timing seems a little strange, but it became part of the scandal.”
Although not mentioned in the article, Guest continued to associate with Capote after its publication. Feud: Capote vs Swans It shows how she is pressured by other women to reject him and is not formally invited to Thanksgiving dinner, starving him of the social oxygen he so desperately needs.
Indeed, even though Clark had warned Capote of the trouble he would cause, he was surprised by the breadth and depth of the backlash in Manhattan’s social circles. He recalls meeting Capote one day for lunch at a French restaurant.
“I arrived first and sat down, but the person sitting on the chaise lounge next to me… jerry zipkin. He was a “walker,” a gay man who escorted women and gave them lavish presents. Truman came in and sat down with me. Jerry Zipkin got up and very ostentatiously went to the head waiter and asked for another table away from Truman. Truman laughed. He thought it was funny. ”
Clark describes another incident. “A woman who was trying to get into high society but wasn’t part of that group came up to him and said, ‘Oh, how can you do that?’ She left, but then she came to him. and she kissed him. It was a cult to hate Truman. That became the thing to do.–
The television drama depicts the lonely and isolated Capote, unable to regain his former creative glory and sinking deeper into addiction. When he died at Joan Carson’s home in Los Angeles just before his 60th birthday, his rival Gore Vidal quipped, “It was a smart move.”
Lawrence RiemerThe author of Capote’s Women: Love, Betrayal, and Swan Song in an Era, the book on which the FX drama is based, says: This hurt him so much that he drank heavily, took drugs, and began to fall apart. He missed being with them. They were the center of his life, more than they should have been.
Reamer, 82, added in a phone interview from Palm Beach, Florida:jack dunphy was his longtime lover, but Swan became his surrogate family member. He loves money, he loves being around rich people, he loves riding on their yachts, he loves flying their planes, and that keeps him away from the world you and I live in. It was done. ”
What did the swans see in him? “He was an entertainer. When he came to your dinner party, he was just a mean, funny guy who was the wittiest and gossiped about everyone. As long as he did that, he was at the table. He was invited. The day he was not funny and was silent, he wouldn’t be invited anymore, and he knew it.”
Swan’s husbands were also happy with this arrangement. “He was attractive and kept his hands off his wives, which is what they often wanted because they were trying to sleep with other women,” Riemer said.
The cast of the TV drama is Most are in their 50s It has the grace and dignity that Capote admired in his female friends. “It’s like a rose that’s about to shed its petals, and that’s when it’s at its most beautiful,” Riemer says. “And that was the swan.”
