Inside Truman Capote’s real-life society betrayals fueling TV’s ‘Feud’
19.08.2022 - 20:14
/ nypost.com
Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood,” the pip-speak literary master’s legendary bon mots had warped into a cartoon bitchiness better suited to “Hollywood Squares” than a Paris Review soirée. Addled by drugs and alcohol and twisted by the suicided-death of his social-climbing mother, Capote hadn’t published anything of real significance in a decade. But for nearly as long, he had dangled a tantalizing promise to the press and public: a quintessentially Capote-ian “nonfiction novel,” titled “Answered Prayers” that would tattle-tale on high society’s most salacious scuttlebutt.
In 1975, the first chapter of the work appeared in Esquire under the title “La Côte Basque, 1965” (a reference to the restaurant where the swans gathered for lunch on East 55th Street).He described the book like a weapon to People magazine: “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet. And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen — wham!”The unlucky victims of this shooting would be his closest and most influential friends, the gaggle of glamorous girls memorialized as his “Swans.” The story mocked their husband’s affairs, their sorrows and their vanity.
It made them look ridiculous. It named names.
It hinted at even more.The fallout from the unfinished novel — only published posthumously after his 1984 death, from liver disease, at age 59 — is now the subject of the second installment of the FX series “Feud.” This week, Deadline revealed the cast of the eight-episode mini-series, “Feud: Capote’s Women,” by executive producer Ryan Murphy and Oscar-nominated director Gus Van Sant. It’s set to air sometime next year.
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