Truman Capote’s Ultimate Weapon

Early in FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the titular author (played by Tom Hollander) bursts into the palatial apartment of a high-society doyenne. “Tell me everything, from the beginning,” Truman Capote proclaims. A tearful Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) shares that her husband, the CBS impresario Bill Paley, has committed a grave indignity. Not only did he bring one of his flagrant affairs into their home, but his menstruating lover also left behind obvious evidence of her presence on the bedsheets. Capote lends Babe an ear and a shoulder to weep on, ultimately advising her not to get a divorce. The two have a laugh and Capote hands her a Valium to wash down with scotch.

This scene sets up the central tension of Feud: Capote’s friendship with, and layer betrayal of, Babe and other wealthy women he’d become close with. Published in Esquire in 1975, Capote’s novel excerpt “La Côte Basque, 1965” divulged a trove of secrets that he’d been told by these women—the so-called Swans. The article fractured polite society and permanently ostracized the writer from elite circles, and the series indicates that this banishment may have factored into his eventual death. (Capote died in 1984 of liver disease and other complications, with his final novel unpublished.) The series, which aired its finale last week, portrays the falling out between Capote and Babe like a breakup between two soulmates, both aching from the love they still share even as they struggle with addiction and terminal cancer, respectively.

[Read: In search of the real Truman Capote]

Though this scandal lends the series its engine, Feud (based on Laurence Leamer’s book Capote’s Women) is more simply a cautionary tale about the dangers of curiosity. Attention, the show suggests, can be used to comfort and connect—but also to wound.

Feud arrives at a time when debates about the attention economy rage on, particularly where social media is concerned. Discussing this phenomenon in the 1990s, the writer Michael Goldhaber argued that “obtaining attention is obtaining a kind of enduring wealth, a form of wealth that puts you in a preferred position to get anything this new economy offers.” Scrolling through Instagram is not the same as eavesdropping at La Côte Basque—the opulent haunt where Capote often gabbed with wealthy women at the room’s center table—but the point stands. Attention has long been a coveted asset that people of all backgrounds will go to great lengths to attain.

Even as a teenager, Capote gravitated toward white women of a certain pedigree, Leamer writes. Unlike the Swans, Capote hadn’t been born into a life of privilege and ease. This proclivity eventually led him to surround himself with well-heeled socialites such as C. Z. Guest, a descendant of the Boston Brahmin set, and Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Status aside, Capote was drawn into the Swans’ orbit because of their unmatched meticulousness and artful lifestyle. During one Feud episode memorializing Capote’s Black and White Ball—the ultraexclusive shindig he threw in 1966 following In Cold Blood’s success—he runs every minute detail by Babe. “Invitation paper must always be 100-pound premium matte stock,” she tells him.

Feud pointedly connects Capote’s upbringing and his captivation with these women, arguing that because he’d lacked loving parental care as a young man, he’d grown into someone with a near-pathological need for it. His mother, Nina (Jessica Lange), was a complex figure, someone who destroyed Capote and then hovered over his shoulder from beyond the grave. Throughout the series, her ghost occasionally materializes to both taunt and guide her son.

The show also posits that Nina had sought approval from this rarefied world and never quite got it, so Capote’s entrance into the upper class was a way of spiting her. And his turning on the Swans later became a way of avenging her. In the final episode, one Swan tells Capote that with “La Côte Basque, 1965,” he’d had a hand in decimating high society altogether. “Perhaps it was a subconscious final gift to your mother,” she says. “And to yourself, for never feeling like you truly belonged.”

Fabulously wealthy and lonely, the Swans also craved Capote’s regard. The Feud episode about the Black and White Ball notes that each woman was convinced the author would choose her as the belle of the ball that night. Their kinship provided each party with a certain recognition missing in their life. With Capote on their arm, these upper-class women could go places without their husband—and Capote could walk into rooms he otherwise wouldn’t have been invited to as a gay man. Yet this tenuous pact was essentially held together with a parched glue stick. When Capote spilled everything in print, the transactional agreement he and the Swans shared disintegrated.

[Read: When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him]

In the Feud finale, which imagines what might have happened had Capote made amends with the several Swans he betrayed, one confides that her hurt stemmed from him showing a limited portrait of who the women were. “You cheapened the nuance of our lives … You understood how imprisoned I felt in my life. Trapped,” she says. “And what you wrote didn’t acknowledge any of that.” In this way, Feud functions as a warning about how attention can be less a gift than a commodity.

Although some Swans eventually forgave Capote, Babe died of cancer without ever reconciling with him. It’s unclear whether the larger social rupture exacerbated Capote’s later struggles, which he attempted to mask by partying. But by all accounts, he never quite got over the sting of losing that particular friendship. “Truman enjoyed it all, but I think that deep down he wished that he could have just gone to lunch with Babe Paley,” Bob Colacello, who edited Capote at Interview magazine, told Vanity Fair in 2012.

Capote was apparently shocked by the backlash to his story. After the dishy Esquire excerpt was published, Capote frequently said: “What did they expect? I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?” Yet his indiscretion would have plenty of company in today’s media ecosystem. It’s not unusual for TikTokers who overheard a gossipy conversation to beam this juicy story out into the world, and for people to feed blind items to the likes of DeuxMoi. Like Capote, perceptive people can use their powers to earn some visibility of their own—and maybe a couple of bucks too. But there are some voids that no amount of attention can fill.