‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’: Meet the scandalous women in his inner circle
They were the well-heeled women of the Upper East Side, impeccable in taste and brutal in their exclusivity.
They were the Swans, the ladies loved — then betrayed — by Truman Capote, who lunched with them and talked with them daily, before writing a book that exposed their secrets.
A new season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” series retells the “Capote vs. the Swans,” with Tom Hollander playing Capote and a star-studded cast of women including Demi Moore and Naomi Watts playing the Swans.
Capote, who had risen to fame with his 1965 book, “In Cold Blood,” had struggled with a planned tell-all novel called “Answered Prayers.” He intended to be the American equivalent of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.”
The book kept getting delayed and in 1975, Capote allowed Esquire to publish four chapters.
The second, entitled “La Côte Basque 1965,” was a thinly disguised portrayal of several of his Swans, including Babe Paley, Slim Keith and Lee Radziwill.
The cocooned coterie was horrified and never spoke to Capote again, which pushed him to new levels of drug abuse and alcoholism.
For the next few years, the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” author was in and out of rehab and he was often seen in public highly intoxicated.
In 1978, he appeared on a talk show, completely inebriated, and admitted that he had been awake for 48 hours. When the host asked him what would happen if he didn’t “lick this problem of drugs and alcohol,” Capote heartbreakingly replied: “The obvious answer is that eventually, I mean, I’ll kill myself . . . without meaning to.”
He did indeed die, in 1984, of drug intoxication.
Here’s a look at the women that helped Capote enter high society, then banished him from it.
Barbara ‘Babe’ Cushing Mortimer Paley (played by Naomi Watts)
Known as Babe, the blueblood socialite was the queen bee and Capote’s favorite.
She was the daughter of an esteemed brain surgeon and younger sister to Minnie and Betsey, who were part of “the fabulous Cushing sisters.” The trio all married powerful and wealthy men. Her sisters married Vincent Astor and James Roosevelt, respectively, and Babe wedded William S. Paley, the chief executive of the CBS television network.
Paley was incredibly powerful and also an incorrigible philanderer.
Capote gleefully skewered the couple, writing about Sidney Dillon (William Paley) having an affair with the wife of a prominent New York governor (believed to be Happy Rockefeller) while his wife, Cleo Dillon (Babe Paley), was out of town.
After they sleep together at his home, he discovers a large blood stain on the sheets and spends hours furiously trying to wash away the evidence of his philandering.
Babe’s chic personal style was enormously influential. A photograph of Paley clutching a handbag with a scarf tied to it sparked a trend emulated by millions of women. She often mixed pricey jewelry with costume pieces and embraced letting her hair go gray.
Her style earned her a place on the best-dressed list 14 times and her ability to command attention was legendary.
“Mrs. P had only one fault. She was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect,” Capote wrote in his journal.
He saw her in public only once before her death in 1974 at age 63, from lung cancer.
Capote attended her funeral heavily intoxicated, staying in the back, behind a tree where no one would see him.
Nancy “Slim” Keith (played by Diane Lane)
By the age of 22, Keith had adorned the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. She won a Neiman Marcus Fashion Award in 1946 and was included on multiple Best Dressed lists for years. As a teen she socialized in Hollywood, gallivanting with the likes of Gary Cooper and Cary Grant and was wooed by Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway.
In 1938 she met director Howard Hawks, who was immediately smitten despite being married. She’s credited with jumpstarting Lauren Bacall’s movie career by showing Hawks a magazine cover with Bacall’s picture on it, prompting him to sign her to a seven-year contract and cast her in “To Have and Have Not.”
Eventually, Keith divorced Hawks and married movie and theatrical producer Leland Hayward. She wrote that Hayward was the one love of her life but after 10 years of marriage he left her for Pamela Churchill. Her next and last husband was British banker Kenneth Keith, whom she left in 1972 after a 10-year marriage.
The socialite famed for her golden looks was also reportedly the model for the fictional Lady Coolbirth in “Answered Prayers.” After the chapter’s publication, she never spoke to Capote again.
A chain smoker, she died of lung cancer in 1990 at age 72.
Lee Radziwill (played by Calista Flockhart)
Radziwill was the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy and spent her entire life trying to come out from behind her sibling’s enormous shadow. Theirs was a complicated relationship riddled with jealousy.
At one point, Radziwll harbored dreams of becoming an actress and Capote was commissioned to write the teleplay for a 1967 television adaption of the Otto Preminger film “Laura” starring Radziwill. Her performance was roundly trashed by critics but the pair remained close friends, even accompanying the Rolling Stones on tour.
In the mid-’70s Gore Vidal sued Capote for $1 million when Capote told Playgirl Magazine that the “Myra Breckinridge” author had been thrown out of the Kennedy White House after behaving badly at a party given for Lee and her then-husband, Stash Radziwill.
Capote claimed that Lee had told him the story. He also contended that she promised to sign a deposition for him saying so but she refused.
Radziwill died on February 15, 2019, aged 85, in her apartment on the Upper East Side.
Lucy Douglas “C.Z.” Guest (played by Chloë Sevigny)
Guest was a fashion designer, accomplished equestrian and gardener. Her clean-cut style put her on the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1959.
The Boston native was painted by Diego Rivera, Salvador Dalí, Kenneth Paul Block and Andy Warhol, and married Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, a relative of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Besides Capote, her high-profile friends included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who were the godparents of her children.
Her daughter is Cornelia Guest, a second-generation socialite who was dubbed the Debutante of the Decade for the 1980s and is now a passionate animal rights advocate.
Ann Woodward (played by Demi Moore)
Woodward was an actress and showgirl who married William Woodward Jr., heir to the Hanover National Bank fortune and the Belair Estate.
She had two sons with her husband, William Woodward III and James Woodward.
However, their marriage was an unhappy one, marked by infidelity on both sides. Her husband asked for a divorce in 1947, but Woodward refused.
In late 1955, there was a rash of burglaries in their Oyster Bay neighborhood. In October of that year, the pair had returned after attending a party honoring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Sleeping in separate bedrooms, Ann fired a pistol twice, killing her husband. She claimed she had mistaken him for a burglar and was never indicted for the shooting.
Although never found guilty, Woodward was shunned by high society for the rest of her life and her two sons went to live with her mother-in-law.
Capote based a character named Ann Hopkins on Woodward. In his telling, Hopkins was a bigamist and gold digger who murdered her husband.
Woodward was reportedly tipped off about the unflattering portrayal and before its release died by ingesting cyanide.
Her body was discovered on October 10, 1975, in her apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her mother-in-law said of her death, “she shot my son, and Truman just murdered her, and so now I suppose we don’t have to worry about that anymore.” Tragically, both of Woodward’s sons died by suicide; James in 1976 and William in 1999.
Joanne Carson (played by Molly Ringwald)
Joanne, the second wife of Johnny Carson, married him in 1963 a year after he began hosting the “Tonight Show.”
After their divorce in 1972, she became close to Capote and he would spend several months a year at her rustic home on Sunset Boulevard soaking up the sun, swimming and writing, and on August 25, 1984, dying in his writing room. He was 59.
According to the coroner’s report, the cause of death was “liver disease complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication.”
In 2006, Carson auctioned off gifts that Capote had given her over the years.
The auction, called “The Private World of Truman Capote,” comprised of 337 lots and included the last story Capote ever wrote, penned for Carson the day before he died.
He had asked her: What would you like for your birthday? “Truman,” she replied, “I just want you to write. If you’re writing, I’m happy.”
In 1988, Carson, who had kept half of Capote’s ashes, claimed that they had been stolen during a Halloween party, along with jewelry and his last manuscript.
To add even more intrigue to the tale, days later she alleged to have found the ashes resting inside a coil of garden hose on her back steps.
Carson, who died in 2015 at the age of 83, was interred next to Capote at Westwood Cemetery in Los Angeles.
The following year, her share of Capote’s ashes were sold at auction for $45,000.
Kate Harrington (played by Ella Beatty)
Harrington met Capote as a child when her father, John O’Shea, a bank manager, had invited the author to the family home on Long Island for dinner, neglecting to mention that he and Capote were lovers, having met at a bathhouse in the city.
O’Shea, a violent alcoholic, eventually abandoned his family and moved in with Capote. The two had a supremely dysfunctional and violent relationship and for a time O’Shea even acted as Capote’s manager, attempting to take control of the author’s business and literary interests.
Harrington called Capote when she was 13, in the hopes that she could get a job and help her mother.
Capote introduced the teen to photographers like Richard Avedon and helped launch her career as a model. She often stayed with the author at his apartment on the East Side and told a documentary that he had one rule for his new roommate.
He insisted that she always keep a diary. When she asked why he replied, “Because your life is about to change. And it’s the only way you hold on to who you really are.”
She lived with him during his sad decline and recalled pleading with him to get healthier telling him, “I love you. Isn’t that enough?” The author replied, “Oh darling, if only it were.”
Harrington became a movie costume designer and married “Die Hard” director John McTiernan, with whom she shares two children, including a daughter named Truman.
