While I wouldn’t ordinarily presume to know what was the best night of a stranger’s life, with Truman Capote, I believe we will be fairly confident: Nov. 28, 1966, the evening of his storied Black and White Ball. This was the so-called “party of the century,” where some 500 movie stars, socialites, politicians, foreign dignitaries, and artists gathered on the Plaza Hotel in New York City to see and be seen (after they lowered their ostrich-feather carnival masks, that’s), to drink and to bop, to snack on midnight scrambled eggs strewn with anchovy breadcrumbs, and above all, to have fun him.
And what wasn’t to have fun? Capote’s genre-defining “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, released earlier that 12 months, was an enormous hit, and he’d endeared himself to the upper echelons of New York society. He had turn out to be that rare thing in America: an admired literary writer who was also a household name. Everyone desired to be at his ball, and by all accounts, the party was a grand success, precisely the fizzy brew of celebrity, style, and campy sass (balloon décor!) that its architect had dreamed of. As Anne Petersen puts it in an essay on the soiree, in some ways it’s apt to consider the Black and White Ball as Capote’s “greatest artwork.”
You wouldn’t know that from watching Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the most recent season of the Ryan Murphy–created production currently airing on FX that, in theory, dishes up the battle between Capote (Tom Hollander) and his “Swans”—a circle of Manhattan doyennes including the likes of Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart)—after he airs their dirty laundry in print. The third episode of the series, released last week, covers the planning of the Black and White Ball, together with the evening itself. Watching the show’s odd re-creation of the night, I’m exaggerating only slightly after I say that you simply’d be forgiven for mistaking the event for an ill-attended celebration in a church fellowship hall moderately than the coup of skill, publicity, and taste that it actually was.
The way this season of Feud chooses to color Capote’s sparkling triumph as dusty, drunk, and déclassé is actually surprising—until you watch the remainder of the series, as I’ve had the misfortune of doing. After that dispiriting slog (you’ve been warned), all of it starts to make sense: For whatever reason, the show is ultimately a project in punishing this man, and the spanking starts here. On the very best night of Capote’s life, Feud gets all the way down to the work of laying him low.
The episode is rife with selections by script author and season showrunner Jon Robin Baitz and director Gus Van Sant that reveal this weird vendetta. Unique from the remainder of the series, it’s shot in black and white as a fictional documentary by the Maysles brothers (notably of crazy-lady Grey Gardens fame). The distance that the vérité lens plants between the viewer and Capote’s planning efforts makes all the pieces look ridiculous and a bit sad—what’s he doing futzing about in a pile of stationery on the ground, the silly queen? That mood is intensified in a nasty little scene wherein Capote is shown drunkenly hitting on and slow-dancing in his apartment with Albert Maysles (ever the participant-observer), because what could possibly be more tragic? The show’s creators don’t let Capote have a single moment of glory at his party. Of course he has to get right into a catty argument together with his ex-lover/long-suffering friend Jack (ever the voice of propriety), then, in a twist worthy of Murphy’s American Horror Story, cavort in regards to the dance floor together with his dead mother (Jessica Lange, making an appearance) because the Swans glower on.
As if that weren’t enough to reveal Feud’s malice, the Ball episode is the last time we see Capote even nominally comfortable. What follows is our sibilant, slippery protagonist’s fall from the gracious heights of the Upper East Side—a brutal and repetitive study, over four-ish hours, of the person’s descent into drink, drugs, isolation, and national embarrassment, with countless scenes of him dropping the bottle only to choose it up again, being bloodied by a lover, and appearing on chintzy talk shows pilled out of his mind.
It’s not that these items didn’t occur—the actual Truman Capote did struggle with addiction, fail to complete his final purported “masterpiece” Answered Prayers, embarrass himself in public, and ultimately die of alcoholism. It’s just that, within the 18 years the show covers between the Ball and his death in 1984, Capote did loads of other things too—like, for instance, publishing a distinct, well-received collection of stories and essays. But Feud is interested only in portraying him at his worst, with a goofy homily about forgiveness tacked on at the top. As C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), probably the most empathetic Swan, complains to Capote of his bean-spilling in a later episode: “You cheapened the nuance of our lives.” Would that Capote could send that note as much as the writers room today.
To be more generous to Feud than it’s to Capote, I’ll grant that there’s perhaps an honest season of AHS buried somewhere here, sadistic and unhinged because it is. Besides Lange’s admittedly fun Southern harridan crossover from Murder House, take a look at James Baldwin’s turn as a highball-smashing Ghost of Christmas Future in Episode 5. But this was imagined to be Feud. Though it was a few years ago now, the primary season of the franchise, in regards to the ginned-up war between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, was pretty great. It had its outsized and baroque moments—it’s Ryan Murphy, in any case—and it, too, fiddled with the facts in questionable ways. But that season also had two things that Capote vs. the Swans lacks. First, an actual feud between well-matched parties that toed the road between campy entertainment and compelling, often moving drama. And second, an insightful evaluation getting on the source of the animosity, which in that case was the misogynistic machinations of Jack Warner and the Hollywood boys’ club.
Who is definitely feuding on this current season? Not Capote and the Swans—he does one rude (though entirely unsurprising) thing that pisses them off, they usually use their clout to expel him from the society he craves. There’s nothing else to it: They win, he loses, the top. And so, what’s left for the rest of the series is the punishment. At times, the bitterness feels oddly personal—and what for? Is it because Capote was an alcoholic and didn’t successfully get sober? Lots of individuals don’t, since it’s a disease. Because he wasted his talents? Again, he actually wrote more, including further chapters of Answered Prayers that aren’t discussed within the show. Because he’s a “bad gay” who seeks out sketchy partners in bathhouses? Well, who amongst us? Because he’s a journalist who “betrayed” his sources? Paging Janet Malcolm. Because … his mother? OK.
The thing is, these are all minifeuds between the show’s creators and their chosen subject. In their obvious distaste for Capote, they’ve worked up a froth of moralizing judgment a few man who isn’t around to reply, but they’ve fallen in need of constructing much in the way in which of excellent narrative or dramatic tension. Like a variety of the work to return out of the Murphy factory in recent times, this Feud is possessed by a spirit of disgust and scolding that’s an actual drag (and, for a showrunner who used to make a number of the most inventive, boundary-pushing, and exciting TV on the market, a disappointing turn).
There’s a moment in Episode 3, because the Black and White is in full swing, that’s perfectly telling about where this show went improper—and all of the more because it’s entirely made-up. Capote is swanning amongst his Swans, pontificating and gossiping and preening, when he’s alerted by security that there’s a crasher on the gates. He excuses himself for a confrontation. Who is it but Ann Woodward—a wealthy widow who by chance shot her husband, but whom Capote has slandered as a murderer—and her son, attempting to sneak in. Capote says no; Ann, he seethes, is identical to his mom: “a rotten criminal and lousy mother.” Ann takes a beat, shocked. “What you’re doing to us is so low. So poisonous,” she says, in a chilling monotone. “One day you will know what this poison tastes like. And remember: The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty. You wrote that, didn’t you? Well, this is that. This is that.”
The uninvited are shuffled away, and Capote brushes off the curse: “Well, one did write that. At least we know she was paying attention.”
It seems the minds behind Feud were being attentive as well, but they learned precisely the improper lesson. For on this war, the Swans kind of glide away freely. As for Capote, he doesn’t stand a likelihood. Under the pressure of such deliberate, relentless, unnecessary cruelty, he’s ground into the dust. This is that. Which is a bummer—it’s no fun fighting when your opponent is already dead on the floor.
Credit : slate.com
