In 2017 as the Golden Age
of Limited Series officially took off Ryan Murphy, already the king of
anthologies and FX, blessed us with Feud: Better Vs. Joan. Over eight
episode we saw the saga of two of the greatest actresses of all time, rivals for thirty years and now trying to
revive their careers. We saw through the saga of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford’s
collaboration on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, one of the all-time classic
films, the story of old Hollywood, the end of the old guard, the toxic masculinity
that pervaded it and how two women who could have been ruling the silver screen
spent their lives destroying each other. Led by two of the greatest actresses
of all time, Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, it was an incredible work of art.
However, it came out in the midst of three other legendary works of limited
series – including Big Little Lies, which had another assemblage of
great actresses – and went home empty handed on Emmy night.
Murphy, one of the most
prolific writers in TV, planned a follow-up for years. Initially, the second
season was supposed to tell the story of Charles and Diana and Matthew Goode
and Rosamund Pike were cast in the title roles. But it never came to fruition.
Honestly that probably was for the best: The Crown was in the midst of
putting Charles and Diana at the center of its second half and it’s impossible
to imagine Murphy and his co-writers coming up with anything nearly as good as
what we got from Peter Morgan.
Finally late in 2022 Murphy
finally announced the second installment, and after all of the work stoppages
in Hollywood the first two episodes finally premiered on FX this Wednesday.
Titled Capote Vs. The Swans, it is the saga of Truman Capote’s last
novel Answered Prayers. A barely fictionalized version of New York society
and Capote’s first major work since In Cold Blood, a publication of an excerpt from Esquire
horrified the people who knew who it was based on. Capote spent the rest of his
life trying to finish the work but he died without it ever seeing print. The novel
was not found in the aftermath of his death, and this version of Feud tells
of his relationship with the women who inspired the novel and what might have
been the reason it never saw the light of day.
First we must talk about
Capote. Truman Capote has already been memorably portrayed on film and
television multiple times, most famously when Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar
for playing him. The most memorable versions of his story involve his
relationship to the writing of In Cold Blood. In both Capote and Infamous,
we learn that Capote spent six years
working on what would be the first truly great non-fiction novel but the
experience was so emotionally draining on him that he never completed another
book. Hoffman’s portrayal showed a sympathetic Capote but also a man willing to
manipulate the killers long enough to say he was on their side so he could get
them to confess the crime for his novel. He also had to wait for them to be executed
for it to have an ending. As it approaches the end Capote tells his friend
Harper Lee he couldn’t have done anything to stop this. Lee (played by Catherine
Keener) tells him: “Maybe not, but you didn’t want to.”
Much of the first two
episodes show Capote in the aftermath of the publication of In Cold Blood. Truman
Capote the writer is basically gone, and in his place is Truman Capote, the
society legend. Played by Tom Hollander, one of ‘the gays’ famously trying to
kill Jennifer Coolidge in the most recent season of The White Lotus, this
version of Capote is barely hanging on by the time we meet him. He has not
published a novel since In Cold Blood, he is constantly getting drunk
and his longtime companion Jack Dunphy (Joe Mantello) can barely be around him.
He’s also hanging around his ‘manager’ John O’Shea (Russell Tovey) who he met in a bathhouse and has since
convinced to work for him. Yet despite his frailties and erosions by alcohol, this
Truman Capote has become more rigid and more unpleasant. At the start of the
series the only people who he is hanging on to his women – or the Swans as he
calls them.
Truman Capote fits the classic
definition of ‘a walker’. For most of
the twentieth century and well past it, rich wives or widows, in the absence of
their husbands, would frequently have a younger man on their arm, and
frequently that individual was homosexual. Capote managed to have that same
layer because he was the only man these rich and lonely women had who offered
them companionship and a kind ear and asked for nothing in return. This is
clear in a flashback to 1968 when Capote responds to a call of Babe Paley (Naomi
Watts) who tells him that her husband William Paley (Treat Williams in what
would be his final role before his tragic death) has publicly humiliated her.
At this point she knows their marriage is a sham and she has overlooked his
many affairs but in this case his latest encounter with Happy Rockefeller has
put her in a position she does not think she can ignore. Truman offers solace,
tells her she’s not going to leave him, gives her some kind of pill and gets
into bed along side her. It’s important
we see this scene because it’s the only time in the first two episodes he does
not seem to have an agenda.
By 1978 he has become a
fixture among the wives of the rich and powerful. He and John have lunch with
three of them Babe, Nancy ‘Slim’ Keith (Diane Lane) a socialite who had already
been married to Howard Hawks and Leyland Hayward by this point and C.Z. Guest
(Chloe Sevigny) and actress and fashion icon.
While they are eating when John
goes to the bathroom they all tell him that John is too good for him and that
he is not the kind of man he should be with. However during this meal Ann
Woodward (Demi Moore)approaches him and berates him in public. In an earlier
flashback where Capote first dined with the Paley’s, he told them all that
Woodward shot her younger richer husband and that the family covered it up as
an anecdote. Woodward tells him that this was pure invention and that they were
once friends and wants to know why he did this to her. Truman looks at her and
tells her that ‘he heard she once called him a f-- and I wanted to show you
what a f— can do.” He says this with no remorse, even after she throws a drink
in her face. The Swans tell him he is playing with fire. They don’t know that on
the way home John will tell him to write about them and that he will very
quickly do just that.
When the excerpt is
published Babe feels the most betrayed and when she goes to dine with Slim she
learns that Woodward killed herself upon reading the excerpt. Slim tells Babe
that they have to unite in order to destroy Truman whose betrayal is worse than
the ones he is relating.
By this time you’ve heard
of the actors in this cast and you will want to watch anyway. Calista Flockhart
shows up in the next episode as Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister
and Molly Ringwald is playing one of Johnny Carson’s ex-wives and that on its
own might be enough to persuade you to watch even if you know absolutely
nothing about the women involved or even Capote. I’ll be honest the cast alone as
well as the subject matter was enough to draw me in and considering how much of
the episodes involve old Hollywood and society (David Selznick and Jennifer
Jones showed up in the first episode; we saw flashes of Peter Sellers and Phyllis
Diller in the next), all of which are things to draw me in. But the series has,
at its foundation, the relationship between Capote and Babe who after what
happens in the first episode he spends the next episode trying to earn his
forgiveness.
At this point it’s easier to
feel sympathy for The Swans, despite the
fact that they are essentially members of
the one percent and Capote is an eternal outsider. Jon Robin Baitz, the playwright
and screenwriter who is the main writer of the saga (he also was the showrunner
of the frequently superb Brothers & Sisters) argues that these women
were vulnerable because of the betrayals by their husbands. This is clearly
true in Babe’s case, who when she reads the excerpt blames Bill for the fact
that she was so lonely she turned to Truman for companionship and he betrayed her
to. At a luncheon with four of the Swans in presence, most of them are
horrified at how much joy he seemed to relate in describing their menstrual
functions. Babe is also dealing with a diagnosis of cancer and is trying to
face her mortality: she keeps deciding whether she should forgive Truman but
remains firm when Jack comes to see her twice, practically begging.
Hollander plays Capote as
if he has increasingly lost who he was. Even in his younger days there are
signs of the vicious nature of his personality: he has no problem relating the
saga of ‘Bang-Bang’ Woodward to dinner guests in Florida and even less trouble
writing about in what will be his excerpt in Esquire. In the second episode the
Swans have begun their scheme to exile him from society, refusing his phone
calls and gifts and we see him increasingly drinking more and more.
What remains unclear – and very
well still may be by the end of this series – is why Capote did it. Did he
think he was invincible? Was he so desperate to reclaim his genius that he did
not care who he hurt doing so? Was he so self-destructive that a part of him
wanted to do this? Not even he seems sure. Talking to C.Z. he tries to argue
that it was ‘just a book’ and that he hoped that it would be viewed as a work
of fiction. It’s also clear that there was clearly some great guilt at what he
was doing. Early in the second episode he is shooting his scenes for Murder
By Death (and has to get drunk in order to do so ) and while he is filming
his scene, he begins to hallucinate all the women he has wronged. At a
disastrous Thanksgiving, he sees an image of his mother (Jessica Lange again)
who tells him why he did it and that now it’s time for him to kill himself. “You’re
practically there already,” she tells
him. He says he has no intention of dying yet but during that dinner he berates
John in front of the table and John nearly beats him to death. Because of his
sexuality Capote was always an outsider (we see him going to the bathhouses in
the first episode) but by the time of Breakfast at Tiffany’s he’d
finally made it in. Did his experiences writing In Cold Blood drive him
to this or what is who he was to begin with?
Based on the first two
episodes of Capote Vs. The Swans, I’m grateful for the scrapping of the
Charles versus Diana idea. Even before The Crown came along that had
already been a subject of many movies (Watts herself had played Diana
previously). The subject here is far closer in spirit to Bette Vs. Joan and
because it is more obscure, more interesting. As is frequently the case with
Murphy’s work, the women always dominate the screen and just as with American
Crime Story, we get a picture of the world beneath the subject matter. It’s
taken seven years, but getting the second season of Feud, well, my
prayers have been answered and I think the viewers will be too.
My score: 4.75 stars.
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