Truman of Arc
With Answered Prayers, Truman Capote said it all. Capote vs. the Swans has nothing to add.
“I love women!” exclaims Bowen Yang in character as Truman Capote in a February episode of SNL. “They’re what dolls are based on.”
It’s an apt critique: if there’s one thing the endless media adapting Capote’s personal life can seem to agree on, it’s that the author had a woman problem. Best known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the self-described “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, there’s no question that Capote’s biting wit and pioneering approach to genre put him among the most innovative and significant of American authors. But, naturally, what interests audiences even more than the salacious novels that made him an icon are the salacious real-life circumstances that led to his lesser-known final novel, Answered Prayers. And for all its appeal, Answered Prayers is nothing if not a series of Capote’s problems with women.
Unfinished during Capote’s lifetime, Answered Prayers was first published in 1986 as a collection of four largely disparate chapters: “Unspoiled Monsters,” “Mojave,” “Kate McCloud,” and “La Cote Basque 1965,” each of which had been published in Esquire throughout the 1970s. The chapters loosely follow the partial-self-insert P.B. Jones, a young, scrappy, sexually fluid writer, orphaned at birth and now sleeping his way through New York society in an effort to become an established author. Jones is ostensibly worse off than the real Capote, though for much the same reason: he has tried to make his way in the world of Manhattan’s wealthiest and most envied socialites and found himself ostracized through misadventure. By the time we meet him, Jones is alone, unloved, and even homeless. But as the novel progresses, we also come to know him as the socialites did: amoral, single-minded, and more than willing to do anything for artistic glory.
In Answered Prayers, the woman problem that haunted Capote’s personal life becomes all the more apparent. The chapters are, after all, thinly veiled exposes on his “Swans,” those real-life Manhattan socialites who once counted Capote as part of their inner circle. In Answered Prayers, and particularly in “La Cote Basque 1965,” Capote reveals with unmatched vitriol the dirtiest of the women’s dirty laundry. He outs William Paley—husband of his most beloved Swan, Babe—for having numerous affairs, and even relays a story in which Second Lady of the United States Happy Rockefeller has sex with Paley and intentionally leaves his sheets covered in menstrual blood. (Even Babe herself isn’t free from Capote’s pen—she’s implicated just as much for her refusal to leave her high-powered husband, even after finding his bloody sheets.) Capote later accuses another Swan, Ann Woodward, of murdering her husband after he asked for a divorce, a rumor which her family maintains led to the socialite’s suicide the same year “La Cote Basque 1965” was first published in Esquire.
But the novel is equally vicious to the women without secrets to expose. Capote writes Gloria Vanderbilt as a self-obsessed bimbo, and Jackie Kennedy as “unrefined” to the point of looking more like a drag queen impersonating a society woman. Slim Keith, one of Capote’s closest Swans, is implicated in having relayed all this gossip in the first place—he even exposes her own story, told in confidence, of sexual assault. Several women aren’t even granted pseudonyms. Still, some of the novel’s harshest, if most nuanced, criticisms are aimed at P.B. Jones himself. If his life is tragic now, it’s because he, like Capote, has made it that way. The book is at once gleeful in its misogyny and regretful; it’s the story of a man who hates women, but loves his women, and misses them desperately.
The publication of Answered Prayers, and particularly the Swans’ response, is what Feud: Capote vs. the Swans—the second installment of one of Ryan Murphy’s myriad anthology series—attempts to adapt. (Though Murphy nabs a credit as creator, the series’ sole writing credit goes to playwright John Robin Baitz.) Theoretically inspired by Laurence Leamer’s 2021 biography Capote’s Women, the series begins with Capote coasting on the rapid success of In Cold Blood, suddenly finding himself earning the favor and trust of Manhattan’s elite. Truman’s wit and irresistible charisma quickly make him a favorite confidante among the Swans—chief among them, Babe Paley—though his non-threatening, cautiously-presented queerness certainly helps. All the while, his drinking habit grows while his writing falls on the back burner. By 1975, he’s stalled his editors for the better part of a decade without ever turning in a full draft of Answered Prayers, his controversial public antics (the result of severe alcohol and drug dependencies) have weighed down his star on the rise, and he’d even been forced to return his advance. Then, that fall, he publishes “La Cote Basque 1965” in Esquire, and the feud begins.
In classic mean-girl fashion, the Swans are determined to ensure Capote is completely ostracized—they cut him off (almost) entirely, and do what they can to convince the rest of the social world to follow suit. In turn, Truman, perceiving himself as entirely alone despite the lovers, friends, and colleagues who still surround him, falls deeper into his tragic circumstances, spiraling into severe alcoholism and depression. He appears desperate to win the forgiveness of the Swans, or at least of Babe—just not quite desperate enough to do anything about it.
In Feud’s season finale, which aired on Wednesday, Truman insists that Answered Prayers, the finished version, will be his “apology” to the Swans. And in many ways, the text itself—what we have of it—supports that notion; the abject tragedy in which Capote sets P.B. Jones feels as much like self-pity as self-flagellation. He has been maligned, yes, but not quite unfairly.
But if Answered Prayers really was an apology, Feud: Capote vs. the Swans seems to think it a miscarriage of justice that Capote ever felt the need to apologize in the first place. No, instead, Capote vs. the Swans is interested in imagining Capote another way: as literature’s Joan of Arc, a martyr burned at the stake for the sake of great art by vapid women who could never understand.
To be fair, this idea takes a while to reveal itself. For its first several episodes, Capote vs. the Swans does indeed appear to be a series about both Capote and the Swans. It isn’t until episode five, when we’re greeted by the sudden appearance of James Baldwin (and the near absence of any Swans), that things start to click: Feud isn’t interested in doing something new with Capote’s legacy. Instead, it’s interested in rehashing the same problems Capote himself had already worked through in Answered Prayers, and reminding us that a long-celebrated genius is a long-celebrated genius. If we take Feud at its word, even a critique as realistic and supported as his own friends taking offense at his work is far too much historical malignment for that genius to bear.
The appearance of Baldwin in the first place is one of the show’s most puzzling decisions. Baldwin is entirely removed from the conflict, existing only to comfort his persecuted friend. He starts out his brief appearance by telling Truman he’s been more than unfairly maligned by the Swans’ anger, but shouldn’t let this injustice stifle his creativity when the world needs it so. The pair wonder if Truman’s exposure of his friends was ever really that bad, after all—a thematic pivot toward which the series has been building all along. (In a later episode, even C.Z. Guest, a Swan herself, begs Truman: “You’ve sacrificed so much for this book—just finish it.”)
The women are, after all, no strangers to microaggression, Truman reasons. Their racism and classism are rampant, their homophobia occasional. “It’s subtle, and it’s meant to convey one thing,” he explains to Baldwin (whom we are apparently to assume is unfamiliar with these patterns of oppression). “‘I am a privileged wealthy white woman, and I am better than you.’”
This proselytizing continues throughout the series. In what feels like every other scene, Truman laments the Swans’ homophobia to his own queer loved ones as if their bigotry is news. In another bizarre conversation, two Swans preach to each other about the importance of “respecting the homosexuals,” given all they’ve done to support women. “There’s a way one can be in their company that’s different than how you have to be with other women,” she explains. “You can finally drop the armor.” Then again, Capote and his Swans are nothing if not out of touch.
Never mind Truman’s own misogyny, which only the already-discounted Swan Slim Keith seems to note. The women are cruel to each other, and even crueler to an ailing Truman after “La Cote Basque 1965.” Or perhaps he’s excused because the whole world is already watching them—Truman is only showing readers what they want to see. Either way, the Swans’ cruelty—be it bigotry, interpersonal conflict, or betrayal—has become a viable excuse for his own. Eventually, in a paltry defense, Truman offers to Baldwin, “I was trying to go after the men.”
It’s a defense that falls on welcoming ears; Baldwin is a fellow man of letters, but more importantly, he’s a fellow man. That Baldwin, as a Black queer man, might approach the world from a different subjectivity than Capote seems inconsequential to Baitz; as the character tells Hollander’s Truman early on in the episode, he’s not there to talk about himself. And so even this, a conversation between two literary titans, becomes not one about the ever-present struggle between literature and personal life, but a pity party for a man who has ruined his own life. Perhaps that’s the point.
In fairness, there are elements of the feud that Baitz and Gus Van Sant (who directed six of the season's eight episodes) execute with fierce precision. The series, when it wants to, plays the absolute absurdity of the situation with pitch-perfect dead seriousness. To the Swans, their tiny social world, however warped, is hilariously synonymous with the world at large. And, to give credit where it’s due, Van Sant’s episodes are miles ahead of the others.
While the series’ non-linear structure doesn’t always flow as intended, at its best it places the Swans outside of time—through the 60s, 70s, and on, the world changes around them, and they remain almost exactly the same. They are, each of them, artists out of time. The Swans’ friendship and feud with Truman may be happening against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, the stirrings of gay liberation, and the Vietnam War, but this context is irrelevant to the bubble in which they exist. The headline, above the death tolls, is that they have been betrayed by a friend.
But perhaps our expectations were off-course in the first place. For all its posturing, Capote vs. the Swans was never going to be a show about the Swans—it looks at them with too much contempt for that. These women exist in Truman’s universe, yes, and, if you squint, look almost like the show’s central characters. But under the surface, Baitz is not interested in them—or any women—even if Van Sant is. Instead, every scene of Feud sets out to minimize the Swans in favor of Capote’s genius, even as it tries to critique the author for doing the same thing by using their lives as literary fodder. The series is willing to poke fun at Truman for both his insistence on seeing himself as a martyr and his inability to see the Swans as real people, but it doesn’t really want to challenge either of those perceptions. There may be six Swans in the show’s extensive marketing, but in Baitz’s script, there are two and a half whole women.
Even Naomi Watts’s Babe Paley, so nominally central to the series, exists mostly to suffer, just as most of the other women exist to dish out acerbic one-liners. Babe is suffering when Truman meets her, thanks to the knowledge of her husband’s affairs. After “La Cote Basque 1965,” his affairs remain rampant, her friendship with Truman is over, and she is literally dying of cancer, so she suffers even more. As Ann Woodward, the woman whose life Truman quite literally destroys with his essay, Demi Moore is given nothing to feel but pain, except for occasional rage caused by it.
For the rest of the women, there are two functions. They serve either to nurture poor maligned Truman, as with Chloe Sevigny’s C.Z. Guest and Molly Ringwald’s (criminally underdeveloped) Joanne Carson, who act as the series’ voices of reason for urging the others to forgive him without even so much as a real apology. Or, as with Diane Lane’s defiantly nuanced Slim Keith and Calista Flockhart’s less-so Lee Radziwill, they are there to prove the Swans were always crueler to each other in the first place. The world of Capote vs. the Swans may be warped through Truman’s perspective, but if the Swans have perspectives of their own, the series is uninterested in seeing them. There is a reason they are referred to most often as the collective “Swans,” after all.
It’s not that the Swans needed to be victims. Their cruelty itself is well-documented, in Answered Prayers as much as in Capote’s Women. And Truman is not incorrect when he points out their classism, bigotry, and a general desire to remain the gatekeepers of their microscopic social world. There is no question that the Swans had the capacity to be—and often were—cruel women. But Feud is uninterested in letting them be whole women. That Truman spends years in the safety of their social circles, gleefully participating in this cruelty until such time as he could exploit it for his own gain, does not seem to tip the scales against him. Instead, the series seems to buy into the same sort of woe-is-me approach that Capote gave Jones in Answered Prayers—the tragedy of his existence subverts his own cultural capital. In turn, the Swans’ crime—refusing to forgive his own—is somehow worse than anything he could have written. For the sake of being a Feud installment, the series feels desperate to convince its audience that the women deserve what came to them, or at least that by reacting in anger, they committed an equal sin.
Perhaps, for an artist whose legacy had not been so well-preserved and continually revered, this approach to the titular feud would have been more intriguing. But for Capote, a writer whose work achieved incredible success during his lifetime and has retained that success in the four decades since his death, the attempt to redeem him from criticism—particularly when that criticism is largely inter-personal—falls flat. As Answered Prayers itself probably could have told you, it is difficult to convince your audience you are redeeming a character when you’ve overestimated the extent to which they’ve been struck down in the first place.
Instead, one part of Capote seems missing entirely from Feud’s Truman: Answered Prayers itself. Or, rather, the line between novel and biography—between Truman Capote and P.B. Jones—is never quite concrete. Instead, the show erodes what space the novel, and the circumstances behind its publication, leave for the possibility of Capote’s own feelings of guilt in the wake of “La Cote Basque 1965.” In “Unspoiled Monsters,” Capote presents a character whose life has been completely destroyed—arguably far more than even the author’s own—but destroyed by his own hand. In Feud, what Hollander’s Truman seems to experience is not quite guilt over the damage he’s done, but regret at how it has damaged his own life. Even his most vulnerable, genuinely regretful moments—those when he seems to earnestly miss the company of Babe—are filtered through this lens. Babe is asked to forgive him, and time and time again, Baitz enters with the assumption that the tragedy of his circumstances must warrant forgiveness. If a transgression has occurred, it’s that Capote’s friends have not remedied his tragedy, even if he has created that tragedy in the first place.
In the season finale, once the tragedy of Truman has been run over in every direction, he’s finally put face to face with a Swan, forced to confront the real woman behind the archetype. At least, that’s what it seems like at first.
“You gained nothing,” Slim Keith tells Truman as the two begin to break her precious china in a cathartic release of their rage. “But you made me a joke. You made my dreams and ambitions seem so ugly when it was all I had. I consisted of my ambitions. Your story cast its spell and took away everything I had.”
It’s refreshingly candid and almost feels like something deeper for Keith, who—despite Lane’s valiant efforts to give her complexity—has until then been largely confined to her viciousness. The disgust once pointed at her fellow Swans in the form of gossip now comes directly for Truman in the form of raw, unfiltered rage, and he navigates it with ease. But even then, one Swan takes the place of six individual women. And, because neither Truman nor his Swans can ever really escape their prewritten fate, Keith’s monologue becomes the next chapter of his book. After six episodes of reducing the women to their cruelty at every turn, Baitz and Van Sant almost look deeper, allowing them—at least one of them—something beyond their assigned archetype. But by the time Slim Keith breaks her first dish, their attempt at offering nuance to a woman who has spent the entire series in a rage feels like too little, too late.
Capote’s finished version of Answered Prayers was never published—never even submitted to his editor. What came of the four unpublished chapters that would have made up the novel’s remainder is still unknown. Three prevailing theories remain: that Capote' never finished the chapters to begin with (the least likely, given friends’ testimonies that he read them excerpts aloud), that he finished them and hid them away somewhere, or, perhaps most tragically, that he finished them and destroyed them altogether.
Whatever came of those chapters, their absence, like the tragedy at the center of the remaining chapters, creates space for the possibility of guilt, or at least for more nuanced feelings on Capote’s part than just self-pity. But regardless of any complications that may have existed in the author’s conscience, Capote vs. the Swans has given itself the task of reassuring him. In doing so, it’s flattened much of his nuance. If P.B. Jones was ruined by his own hand, Feud’s version of Capote is a martyr. Baitz, Murphy, & co. may be interested in finishing what they think Capote started with Answered Prayers, but they have nothing new to say.
Collage by the author.