Now that Netflix’s The Crown has finally come to an end, one of the most expensive and elaborate TV series around is Feud, created by Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen, and Michael Zam and aired on FX and Hulu. Its first season, Bette and Joan (2017), was an eight-episode account of the tensions between Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) on the set of the 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. The very idea of devoting eight or so hours to this less than earth-shaking subject seemed, of course, a major case of overkill. But for some fans of Golden Age Hollywood, at least, the scenes in which Davis and Crawford bared their claws against each other — not to mention those in which we saw first-rate actors like Stanley Tucci and Judy Davis delivering bravura performances as, respectively, Jack Warner and Hedda Hopper — made it a whale of a watch.
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Now, seven years later, Feud has returned with eight new episodes about an entirely different story. Entitled Capote vs. the Swans and written by Jon Robin Baitz, with all but two episodes directed by Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting; My Own Private Idaho), season two of Feud explores the battle between Truman Capote (1924–84) and the upper-crust Manhattan wives — he called them his “swans” — who were among his closest friends beginning sometime in the mid-1950s. Most of those friendships ended abruptly on a single day in 1975, when Esquire published a Capote story, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” that betrayed many of the swans’ private confidences — some of which they’d shared with him at the snooty (and now defunct) restaurant of that name on West 55th Street that is one of the show’s major settings.
The whole season revolves (and revolves and revolves) around that crucial day — which came at a time when Capote’s finest work was behind him. His 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I’ve described elsewhere as “a small, exquisite gem, the work of a writer determined to serve up nothing less than le mot juste,” confirmed his role as “the postwar generation’s … F. Scott Fitzgerald — elegiac, lyrical, a pitch-perfect literary stylist.” His “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood (1966) was a masterwork — and a blockbuster. But “La Côte Basque, 1965,” and three other Esquire stories of the mid-1970s that were promoted as excerpts from a forthcoming novel entitled Answered Prayers were, as I wrote in a 1985 New Criterion essay, “the work of a man grown lazy and self-indulgent” — cheap (if well-written) gossip about people whom Capote found enthralling but whom few Americans, even then, knew or cared about.
Of course, Capote has been depicted frequently on stage and screen. Jay Presson Allen’s Tru (1989) was one of those one-man plays in which a famous person (played, in this case, by Robert Morse) recounts his own life story. The films Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006), the former of which won the late Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar for his performance in the title role, both covered the seven-year-period during which Capote researched and wrote In Cold Blood, about the brutal slaughter of a family in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote’s immersion in that gruesome event and its aftermath left him with something not unlike PTSD — in the years that followed, he did a lot more drinking and drugging than he did writing — and his exclusion from the swans’ circle only made him double down on his self-destruction.
Capote vs. the Swans, which dwells on this sad third act, benefits from a fine cast. Capote is played by Tom Hollander (who was unforgettable as George III in the John Adams miniseries, and who is mostly successful here at suppressing his British accent), while the roles of the swans are filled by a lineup of first-rate actresses: Diane Lane, Calista Flockhart, Chloë Sevigny (who looks here, as Capote once said about Jacqueline Susann, like a truck driver in drag), and — best of all — Naomi Watts, who is consistently mesmerizing as the swan whom Capote loved most of all, Babe Paley. Joe Mantello is Capote’s longtime (and long-suffering) companion, Jack Dunphy; Jessica Lange is the ghost (yes) of Capote’s mother, who tells him that by writing “La Côte Basque, 1965,” he’s “avenged” her against the society women who’d excluded her from their ranks; and the late Treat Williams is credible, comical, and commanding as Babe’s randy but (in his fashion) devoted husband, legendary CBS honcho Bill Paley.
Then there’s Russell Tovey as John O’Shea, a married (and, at times, physically violent) Long Island banker to whom Capote developed an unhealthy attachment and who, after Capote takes him along to a déjeuner with the swans, proffers the fateful advice: “Write about the world you’re showing me. That lunch was gold. Nobody can show us these women, Truman, how they really are.” Thus, apparently, was born the idea for Answered Prayers, which, Capote bragged for years on talk shows, would be his masterpiece, right up there with Proust. Alas, what survives of Answered Prayers just gave us gossip, whereas Capote vs. the Swans, for all its flaws, showcases these socialites’ relationships with Capote and with one another and, hence, gives us something that, at least intermittently, resembles drama.
Drama, that is, without very much at all in the way of dramatic structure. In Bette and Joan, the story was told in chronological order. Not here. In the first episode alone, we jump from 1968 to 1955 to 1975. It’s easy to get lost. Baitz’s script circles back through some material over and over again. Certain points are made repeatedly — often at unnecessarily excruciating length, and, increasingly, in dream sequences and fantasy sequences, by turns campy and cartoonish, that utterly stall the action until, in the last episode, the thing goes totally off the rails into pure, self-indulgent absurdity. But the script problems are there from the very beginning, with its structure (or lack thereof) making it impossible for the characters to deepen or the conflict to build; every time the swans meet for a lunch date at La Côte Basque, it feels like Groundhog Day. Baitz could easily have omitted, without any real loss, the entire episode about Capote’s ridiculous 1966 Black-and-White Ball, which for some reason was the hot ticket of the decade, and on which he wasted much of his once-in-a-lifetime In Cold Blood haul. It’s mind-boggling to watch famous, accomplished grown-ups actually fret about who will or won’t get invitations to a party. (It’s also irritating to learn that years after his big ball, Capote thought about throwing another one — and this time inviting Fidel Castro.)
Yes, there are illuminating human moments here: We see how Capote used flattery and humor to win Babe’s friendship — and how she ended up being dependent on him for moral support, insights, and advice. When Babe — whom he praises as “the most perfect woman ever made” — cries on his shoulder about Bill’s infidelity, Capote tells her that she isn’t really hurt: “It’s your ego. It’s your pride.” She agrees: “You’re right. The only person who could ever really hurt me is you.” There are powerful moments, such as the surprisingly affecting scenes between Babe and Bill when she’s diagnosed with cancer. There are moments of true recognition, as when Babe admits to her fellow swans over lunch that in “La Côte Basque, 1965,” Capote “got it all right about most of us but especially me.” And there are ugly moments, as when Capote, mourning his lost swans, tells James Baldwin (Chris Chalk) that, far from being “truly interesting people,” they’re actually “dull”: They “don’t know what’s going on in the world,” don’t possess “one ounce of empathy or feeling or compassion,” and are all “horrible mothers.” (So much for Babe being “the most perfect woman ever made.”) And there are improbable moments: Does anyone really believe that Babe fantasized about Capote — whom she’d dismissed, after his betrayal, as a “court jester” — on her deathbed? Or that, after her death, Capote lay down on her grave and talked to her?
Up to a point, it’s all diverting enough. But the more this season drags on, the more a viewer may find himself scratching his head: How could a man with Capote’s intelligence and literary brilliance have spent so much time cultivating so many superficial women? How could he have imagined that their idle conversation was the stuff of great literature? Or, as I wrote in my New Criterion essay, “why … would anyone want to spend a decade of his life reproducing [the swans’] silly chatter and collecting their gossip—or, for that matter, keeping them company?” I asked that question way back in 1985; I learned the likely answer four years later from Gerald Clarke’s splendid biography of Capote. For all his early literary success, explained Clarke, Capote’s mother, a vapid social climber who died in 1954, had been ashamed of her effeminate son; since all that had really mattered to her was her own desperate (and failed) attempt to break into the Manhattan beau monde, Capote’s decision to become “a society ‘pet’” seems to betoken a pathetic attempt to triumph at something she had valued. As I wrote in a Wall Street Journal review of Clarke’s book: “Capote always was two individuals in one: a mature, sensible artist and an erratic, love-starved child, wounded by his mother’s neglect. Following In Cold Blood, the child increasingly had the upper hand.”
And the Capote we get to know in FX’s show is indeed a child — self-pitying, petulant, and wildly undisciplined. One thing that Bette and Joan had going for it was that its protagonists were two women of substance and grit — evenly matched adversaries whose deep mutual hostility had something tragic about it. Why tragic? Because they actually had a good deal in common. They might have become friends — good friends, even — and provided each other with much needed company and comfort as they headed together, post–Baby Jane, into what for both of them would prove to be a lonely and largely disappointing old age. What Capote and the Swans gives us, however, isn’t tragedy but pathos — buckets full of it.
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