Gerald Clarke still remembers the day he warned Truman Capote that dishing dirt on “the swans”, a coterie of elite New York socialites who adored him, was really not a very good idea.
“Truman took me swimming at Gloria Vanderbilt’s house in Southampton,” Clarke recalls in phone interview. “He gave me an advance copy of ‘La Côte Basque’, which I read on the side of the pool in a chair while he was on a raft in the middle of the pool. At the end of it I said, ‘You know, Truman, they’re not going to be happy with this,’ and he said, ‘Nah, they’re too dumb, they won’t know who they are.’”
Clarke was right and Capote was wrong. When the celebrated author published a thinly veiled fictionalisation of their lives in Esquire magazine, exposing their most intimate secrets, his relationship with the swans was all but destroyed. It led to his partial banishment from high society and ultimate fall from grace.
The story of how Capote befriended and betrayed the women is told in the second installment of Ryan Murphy’s anthology, Feud: Capote vs the Swans, which is now airing on FX in the US. The eight-episode series stars Naomi Watts, Calista Flockhart, Diane Lane, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald and Chloë Sevigny, while Tom Hollander picks up the baton from Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones in bringing Capote to the screen.
Capote was an unlikely high society heartbreaker. He was raised in Monroeville, Alabama, by relatives after his parents’ divorce and did not attend college. But he wrote like a dream with works including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, later adapted into a successful film starring Audrey Hepburn, and In Cold Blood, the story of the murder of a Kansas family hailed for inventing the “non-fiction novel” as a literary form.
Standing 5ft 3in, and gay, Capote was also a bon vivant with a caustic wit and dazzling array of social connections. Clarke believes the new FX drama fails to capture this aspect of his personality. “Truman comes off as a loathsome human being, a nasty old queen, which he wasn’t,” the 86-year-old says from Bridgehampton on Long Island, New York. “Truman was lot of fun.
“I quote someone in my book who described him as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. People liked him, and not because he told nasty stories or gossiped about people. He would get gas and go to the same fellow, and they would swap jokes and stories and biographies. He was the same with waiters and waitresses and everybody.”
Clarke adds: “I would be walking along the street with him in New York in the early to mid-70s and taxi drivers would lean out the window and yell, ‘Hey, Truman, how are you, buddy?’ They had seen him on TV on the Johnny Carson show and some 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, the Black and White Ball, at New York’s Plaza Hotel, with a masquerade theme and guests including Lauren Bacall, Sammy Davis Jr, Mia Farrow, Norman Mailer, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Andy Warhol. The spectacle is sumptuously recreated on location at the Plaza in Feud.
Clarke, who knew Capote from the early 1970s until his death in 1984 and wrote a definitive biography, comments: “People came all over the world to come to Truman’s party. Everybody I’ve talked to who attended the party had a wonderful time. It was just a fabulous party and wonderful people. It cost Truman all of $16,000, which of course was a lot of money, but people would have spent millions on parties and not achieved that success or fame or had had that much fun.”
Among the guests that night were Barbara “Babe” Paley, Slim Keith, CZ Guest, Lee Radziwill, just some of Capote’s “ravishing little things” who were born into money or had married New York’s richest and most powerful men. In the FX series, an excursion into white privilege that could never be mistaken for a kitchen-sink drama, Capote describes the swans as gliding through the ponds of society but paddling furiously beneath the surface to stay afloat.
He ingratiated himself into their lives, lunching with them, yachting with them and becoming their confidante. Clarke says: “Truman worshipped style. Style in everything, particularly in writing: Truman was a magnificent stylist with words. These women had style and he loved that.
“Also he had a Pygmalion complex. For instance, with Lee Radziwill, he took her side. She was very envious of her sister Jacqueline Kennedy, who had all the attention, and Truman went out of the way to spend two years to try and make her into an actress. He got her a part in The Philadelphia Story on stage in Chicago. She was good looking, beautiful, stylish, had wonderful taste and so on, but she couldn’t act, and got terrible reviews in Chicago. But Truman persisted, and tried to get her on television, and got her to play Laura [in a TV adaptation of the 1944 film] – and again she couldn’t act. They had their falling out years later.”
Paley was particularly close and transparent with him about her life. After a car accident, she had to undergo major cosmetic and dental surgery on her mouth and jaw, which some said made her even beautiful. A former Vogue fashion editor, she was a fixture on the best dressed lists and renowned for her exquisitely elegant dinner parties.
She went to bed in full makeup and wearing false teeth so that her husband, CBS network head Bill Paley, would not see her without them. He was a notorious philanderer, and the TV drama shows Capote providing emotional comfort to Babe that her husband could not. Capote adored her in return and once wrote in his journal: “Mrs P had only one fault: she was perfect; otherwise, she was perfect.”
Keith was from a humble background but appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar magazine when she was 22. She was rumoured to have had affairs with Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway. She married film director Howard Hawks, then film producer Leland Hayward, then British banker Lord Kenneth Keith.
Guest, described by Capote as a “cool vanilla lady”, was skilled at riding horses and gardening and was painted by artists including Salvador Dalí, Diego Rivera and Andy Warhol. She married Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, second cousin of the British prime minister, at Hemingway’s estate in Havana, Cuba.
But in 1975 Capote blew it up when Esquire published his short story La Côte Basque, 1965, a reference to a Manhattan restaurant where the swans gathered for lunch. It was a bitchy, malicious excerpt from his never-to-be completed novel Answered Prayers with damning, barely disguised portraits of several swans.
Capote made sport of the extramarital affairs of Paley’s husband. The article refers to a one-night stand that power broker “Sidney Dillon” has with the New York governor’s wife, which results in a menstrual blood stain on his bed’s white sheets. This was based on a real incident involving Bill Paley.
Clark says: “The ordinary reader, even sophisticated readers, wouldn’t have known who it was. He was a rich man, but you wouldn’t have known it was Bill Paley unless you had heard the story before. The story had been told by Bill Paley himself, apparently, to certain people, and it got around to everybody except his wife. When she read the piece, she called someone up and said, ‘That’s not Bill he’s talking about, is it?’”
Keith, restyled as “Lady Ina Coolbirth”, is characterised as “a big, breezy, peppy broad” from the west. In a blatant allusion to Ann Woodward (“Ann Hopkins”), a would-be swan who shot dead her husband in what was ruled an accident because she mistook him for a burglar, Coolbirth observes: “Of course it wasn’t an accident. She’s a murderess.”
The article sent shockwaves among the elites and created a schism from which Capote never entirely recovered. Paley, who had lung cancer at the time, never spoke to him again. He was not invited to her funeral.
Clarke adds: “The one that really hurt was breaking up with Babe Paley, particularly since she was diagnosed at that time, or shortly thereafter, with lung cancer, from which she died in 1978. He wanted to be with her. He wanted to console her as she was in her last days but she wouldn’t let him.”
Keith also cut him off. Woodward, whom Capote nicknamed “Mrs Bang Bang”, took her own life at her apartment three days before the article was published. Clarke comments: “Whether she got advance word of the piece or not, no one really knows. The timing seems kind of curious and that became part of the scandal.”
Guest, who was not mentioned in the article, continued to associate with Capote after its publication. Feud: Capote vs the Swans depicts her coming under pressure from the other women to spurn him – she duly disinvites him from a Thanksgiving dinner – and starves him of the social oxygen he craved.
Indeed, despite having warned Capote of the trouble he would stir, Clarke was surprised by the breadth and depth of the backlash in Manhattan social circles. He recalls meeting Capote for lunch one day at a French restaurant.
“I arrived first and sat down, and sitting at the banquette next to me was Jerry Zipkin. He was a ‘walker’, a gay man who escorted women and gave them fancy 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.”
Clarke describes another incident. “A woman trying to get into high society, but wasn’t in the group, came up to him and said, ‘Oh, how could you do that?’ She walked away but then came up to him and kissed him. It was a cult to hate Truman. It became the thing to do.”
The TV drama depicts a bereft, isolated Capote sinking deeper into addiction, unable to regain his former creative glories. When he died shortly before his 60th birthday at the Los Angeles home of Joanne Carson, his rival Gore Vidal quipped that it was “a wise career move”.
Laurence Leamer, author of the book Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, on which the FX drama is based, says: “He had such an ego, he could never admit how much this hurt him, but he began drinking heavily and taking drugs and falling apart. He missed their company. They were the centre of his life – more than they should have been.”
In a phone interview from Palm Beach, Florida, Leamer, 82, adds: “Jack Dunphy was his longtime lover but the swans became his surrogate family. He loved money, he loved to be around the rich, he loved to be in their yachts and flying their planes, and that took him away from the world in which you and I live.”
What did the swans see in him? “He was the entertainer. When he came to your dinner party, he was the wittiest, and he was just a nasty, funny man with gossip about everybody. As long as he did that, he was invited to the tables. The day he wasn’t funny and was silent, he would not be invited back any more, and he knew that.”
The swans’ husbands were fine with the arrangement, too. Leamer comments: “He was charming, and he took the wives off their hands, which is what they often wanted, because they were going off sleeping with other women.”
The actors in the TV drama are mostly in their 50s or older, carrying a grace and gravitas that Capote appreciated in his female friends. “It was like a rose when the petals are about to fall, and you’re at your most beautiful at that point,” Leamer observes. “And that’s what the swans were.”
Feud: Capote vs the Swans is airing in the US on FX and available on Hulu with a UK date to be announced
• This article was amended on 16 February 2024 due to corrected agency information. In the second photo, the person on the left is Jean Murray Vanderbilt, not Gloria Guinness. And in the main image, the “unidentified woman” who Truman Capote is dancing with is actually Wendy Vanderbilt.
