I’ve been thinking of Truman Capote a lot these days. I suppose it makes sense given the number of stories I’ve been seeing about Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. A lot of it is from legacy publications pulling stuff from the archives, but I also can’t click my mouse more than twice without seeing some sort of article looking at what’s real on the show and what isn’t or who the Swans were.
But I’ve also been thinking of Capote because we were in Newport for the weekend. I’d been there a few times, but never in the off-season when things are drastically slower than during the warmer months. We stayed at The Vanderbilt, which seems to be the place where those sorts of locals who are here during the winter spend their nights. I love these sorts of hotels like the Deer Path Inn in Lake Forest, IL. or the White Heart in Salisbury, CT., the ones that are nice and unique enough that they don’t feel like what we’ve come to consider hotels in the 21st century that the neighbors will use it as their meeting place. It adds a nice vibe to the experience. But with a place like Newport, where you’re often very likely to be sitting near somebody whose money goes back generations, it can get a little more interesting. It’s such a small, closed-off world that a little eavesdropping at the bar can get you all sorts of good town gossip that might not have much currency outside of the area but is fun to hear nonetheless.
The stuff I overheard while drinking my martini was mostly banal: complaints about private schools, upcoming vacation plans, that sort of thing. But as I was finishing up, I overheard this one woman with faint traces of the old Mid-Atlantic accent that’s like catnip to me say, “Oh, she absolutely killed him. I mean, she didn’t shoot him, but I’m certain she drove his heart to give out.”
I wanted to keep listening but our table was ready. As we walked to it, one of the early scenes in Capote vs. The Swans, where Capote is regaling guests with a story about the death/murder of Ann Woodward’s husband, popped into my brain. The way the woman casually talked about some man dying of a heart attack that she believed was caused by his wife, sounded so similar. It was like gossip Capote would tell at dinner to amuse guests, except Capote would likely find a way to turn it into “fiction.”
I put that in quotation marks because that’s how “La Côte Basque, 1965,” the story he had published in a 1975 issue of Esquire that sets his Feud downfall in motion, was presented as a fictional tale. Of course, this was Capote we’re talking about; the blurring of lines between what was real and what was reworked in his mind was what made his books and stories so riveting.
And while Ryan Murphy’s latest season of Feud focuses on Capote betraying the trust of socialites like Babe Paley and Slim Keith probably has as much Hollywood stretching of reality as one of Capote’s tales might, one thing I’ve always been fascinated with is the way things ended up with Capote and the ladies he once lunched with. It’s hinted at in the first episode what Keith and Paley have in store for him, but it isn’t as clear how things will go with Capote and another of his “Swans,” C.Z. Guest. There was something about Guest that Capote felt that he didn’t hold for the other women since she was spared in his fiction. There’s that, and there’s also how Capote was penning a fawning tribute to Guest for her book on gardening while the issue of Esquire that started the war between the writer and the women was at the printing press. He writes about the first time he saw her, at the opening night of My Fair Lady. He compares her to the femme fatales from Raymond Chandler’s books, writing that “Her hair, parted in the middle was paler than Dom Pérignon.”
I suppose I’m interested in this one friendship that Capote seemed to consider a bit more sacred than the ones with the other socialites he ran with only because the psychology of writers is a fascinating thing to me. Why her? Why was she spared?
In all the film and television portrayals I’ve seen of him, Capote is often shown as a deceptive person who gets people to say what he wants and who helped create the school of new journalism that detractors will almost always call out for the way many of the writers associated with the tag may or may not have made some things up to make the story more interesting. But while Tom Wolfe was a white-suited fly on the wall and Norman Mailer became cartoonishly larger than life, I’ve always appreciated how immersed in the subject matter Capote often was. The story of how he created In Cold Blood out of real-life events has been documented and dramatized over and over (I think Capote is one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s best roles, and that says a lot since he was a genius), but while I was reading Sam Wasson’s wonderful Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman over the holidays, I gained a new insight into Capote. Holly Golightly and so much of his most famous story is basically proto-new journalism. He took a bunch of women he knew (some of the Swans, but also his mother, Nina) and mashed them all into one character. There’s also maybe a little bit of him in Holly with the whole escaping an unhappy life down South and reinventing yourself in NYC thing. There’s certainly plenty of Capote in the narrator of the book who Holly says looks like her brother, Fred. So that’s what she calls him the person telling us the story.
I didn’t pick up Wasson’s book because Capote was going to be in the news cycle with the upcoming show; I did it because I’m a completist and love his other books but somehow missed Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. But reading it was what made me look at Capote’s truth, fiction, and motivations in a whole different light. He wanted fame and money, but he also wanted love and security. He was a very public gay man during a time when there weren’t any other very public gay men, and he also grew up knowing what it was like to be on the lower rungs of society.
I went back and reread Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I also read all of his other fiction I could find, and I started to understand that Capote’s biggest fault was he was often too honest…in his fiction. The substance abuse and inflated ego didn’t help in the long run, but it also didn’t hurt in making the whole story more compelling. It’s what makes reading him so fun and why we still talk about him today. And in the case of Guest being the outlier among the other Swans he had no problem skewering in a very public manner, I think he felt he could protect the people he didn’t write about the same way he knew that he could hurt the ones he did use in his work.