Bold. Super stylish. Intelligent. Luxuriously made and unhurried, it’s hard to watch Feud: Capote vs the Swans without reaching for hyperbole. In an age of algorithm-inspired amphetamine-laden mass market TV, this eight-part, eight-hour series feels like one from a bygone Hollywood era.
And the cast is full of surprise delights. Tom Hollander, in yet another performance of a lifetime, Chloë Sevigny, Demi Moore, Calista Flockhart, Russell Tovey, Molly Ringwald.
Based on the late great American writer Truman Capote and his complex friendships with his ‘Swans’ — New York’s coterie of elite Manhattan socialites — the story begins with Capote, widely considered the finest author in America at the time, basking in the glory and acclaim of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his true-crime masterpiece In Cold Blood, while privately struggling with alcohol issues and writer’s block.
Meanwhile, he is cementing his status as the centrepiece of a set which includes Babe Paley, the wife of the powerful chairman of television network CBS, Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Kennedy Onassis and an aspiring actress and socialite, as well as Slim Keith, Ann Woodward, CZ Guest, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli and Pamela Harriman. All immensely rich, beautiful, formidable women and regulars on the best-dressed list.
Desperate to produce something that will replenish his floundering reputation, Capote decides to betray them by publishing an excerpt from his unfinished novel Answered Prayers in a 1975 issue of Esquire magazine.
The piece, a thinly veiled fictionalisation of their lives, was called La Côte Basque, after the Midtown restaurant where the ladies would often lunch. It exposed their most intimate secrets — and precipitated his social downfall.
With In Cold Blood, Capote was wise enough to publish after his subjects had been executed. Here they are very much alive, and violently close ranks. “He will have no one,” says Keith, “Nothing. Everyone will see it. Everyone will watch. He will have no door open to him. He will have no oxygen. And then he will die.”
Hollander, fresh from a star turn in the second series of White Lotus, embodies Capote with total mastery in a performance that will surely win him many, many awards. His intonation, his high-pitched voice and eccentric mannerisms are all performed with such skill that at times as the viewer you don’t know if you’re watching Hollander or library footage.
And it’s not just the comportment and voice he captures, but the tragedy of a man who knows his demons have demolished his gifts. “Tell me how to be Truman Capote again,” he says poignantly, “and I’ll do it.”
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Every actor shines in this series. Babe Paley is played to brittle perfection by Naomi Watts; Tovey is utterly convincing as Capote’s brutish boyfriend; Moore is pitch-perfect as the unhinged Ann Woodward.
The show is also full of unforgettable one-liners: “You may be at a dull table in life. I do sympathise,’’ Capote murmurs. Then later, “Keep the Rolex and think of me as time goes by.”
The series is as pleasingly daring and experimental as you would expect from the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist writer Jon Robin Baitz and director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Milk).
The themes of aging, alcohol and drug abuse, sex, self-sabotage, the predatory relationship between writer and subject, who owns the narrative and the complicated co-dependent bond between gay men and straight women are all cleverly interrogated to the backdrop of old Hollywood glamour and insanely glamorous costumes. It’s expansive — spanning the Sixties right through to 1984.
The third episode is a fictional film by documentarians David and Albert Maysles, riffing on the brothers’ real-life short film With Love From Truman, who are imagined to have filmed the Black and White Ball that Capote threw at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 where 500 socialites, movie stars, politicians and artists gathered to enjoy the soirée of a lifetime.
Other episodes feature sequences in which Capote writes the — as far as we know non-existent — later chapters of Answered Prayers, (named after the apocryphal quote often attributed to St Teresa of Avila: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”) and the women on whom his characters are based are seen playing out his fictional scenarios: Guest road-trips through New Mexico, in another Keith tells off the disloyal narrator.
My only criticism of the show is that because Capote is portrayed in such an unfavourable light there is a certain coldness to the series. Every biography I’ve read portrays him as huge amounts of fun, whereas in this he’s somewhat toxic and embittered — which lends the show a slight acidity.
But then the subject-matter is melancholy, as it focuses on the curdling of Capote’s brilliance as a writer, and the melancholy of a golden era coming to an end — what happens to the people at the centre of the party when the lights come up. This is a must-watch.
Feud: Capote vs The Swans is streaming now on Disney+