‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’: When Truman Capote skewered New York’s elite
When a biography of Truman Capote was published in 1997, a review that ran in the Denver Post distilled his singular place in pop culture to its essence: “The uneducated arriviste from Monroeville, Ala., sneaked into the postwar jet set as court jester, raconteur, father confessor, partygoer and giver, scandalmonger and manipulator. And decades before gay liberation, he wore his homosexuality like a flamboyant badge of honor. It’s easy to forget that he actually wrote books.”
Those books included “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood.” His final (and ultimately unfinished) work is at the center of the FX series “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.”
After the massive success of “In Cold Blood,” Capote turned his professional attention to his friends, the women of New York’s wealthy elite — his Swans, as he called them. The book was to be a lightly fictionalized but savage tell-all. Esquire magazine ran. The high-class avian excrement hit the fan and the Swans ejected him from their social circles. Capote’s world fell apart.
