On the day of Truman Capote's funeral (New Orleans, 1924-Los Angeles, 1984), the polarization of the two worlds of the author of essential works such as
In Cold Blood
or
Breakfast at Tiffany's:
to a end of the premises, his editors and the few friends he had left from high society, with which he lived his glory days and from which he had been expelled;
on the other, the nocturnal fauna of Studio 54 and Warhol's Factory, next to which he indulged in a self-destructive spiral from his social decline until his death on August 25, 1984, one month before his 60th birthday.
Now that the 40th anniversary of his tragic loss is about to be commemorated, producer Ryan Murphy (fanciful portrayer of the horrors of modern life in
American Horror Story
or
American Crime Story
)
and Gus Van Sant (who directs six of the eight episodes ) command
Feud: Capote v.
The Swans,
which arrives today on HBO Max.
The miniseries portrays the betrayal of the writer (characterized by actor Tom Hollander) to those he called his
swans
, the ladies of New York high society who adopted him as company, embodied in an impact casting that includes Naomi Watts, Diane Lane , Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart and Demi Moore.
The signal for Capote's social suicide was the publication in 1975 in Esquire
magazine
of the advance of the long-announced novel
Answered Prayers:
an extract titled
La Côte Basque 1965
.
The story, which took the name of one of the most exquisite French cuisine restaurants on Fifth Avenue where the
jet set
gathered , openly delved into the miseries that his circle of intimates Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria had shared with him. Vanderbilt, Lee Radziwill, Marella Agnelli, and CZ Guest.
His acidic revelations about substance abuse, assaults, hurtful comments, infidelities, a murder and even a sexual encounter tainted by “a period stain the size of Brazil” were far from the elegant events for which they usually occupied the pages of echoes of society.
Jean Murray Vanderbilt and Barbara 'Babe' Paley, two of Capote's 'swans', with the writer in 1957.ullstein bild Dtl.
(ullstein bill via Getty Images)
Truman Capote with Lee Radziwill, one of his 'swans' (and one of the few who did not stop talking to him), at the Four Seasons in New York in 1969. Santi Visalli (Getty Images)
The “huge rule” episode, for example, featured a mistress and William S. Paley, president of the CBS media group and husband of
socialite
Babe Paley (Naomi Watts in the series), who elegantly tolerated her husband was a womanizer.
Paley had been fashion editor at
Vogue
before shelved her career and devoted herself entirely to the unofficial title of queen of New York: an impeccable neatness only threatened by
La Côte basque 1965,
and the reason why she stopped speaking to Capote forever.
She died three years later, from lung cancer, without having forgiven him.
Capote could not forget it: Paley was his favorite
swan
and he never forgave himself for not reconciling with her.
Later, the writer interpreted Paley's harshness with bitter lucidity in an interview with
Playboy magazine
:
“In the end the rich stay together, no matter what happens.”
There were other tragic stories.
Ann Woodward (in the series, Demi Moore) did not see the story because she committed suicide three days before its publication.
There are those who point out that they had sent her a copy in advance and that Woodward, a showbiz girl who made her fortune by marrying an old millionaire, took her own life when she learned that Capote had unearthed the accidental death of that first husband in his story: She mistook him for an intruder and killed him with a shotgun in his own home.
Something for which she had been declared innocent at the time.
And there is much more.
Gloria Vanderbilt looks like a vain fool who doesn't even recognize her first husband when he approaches her at lunch to say hello.
Only Lee Radziwill (in the series, Calista Flockhart), Jackie Kennedy's little sister and one of those portrayed whispering in those rooms, continued speaking to her, always keeping her distance.
Slim Keith's counterpart (in the series, Diane Lane) is presented as “a vulgar posh with a happy life” from the American West married to an English aristocrat who gossips about her other friends in luxurious restaurants to Capote's alter ego, a con artist. literary and bisexual prostitute.
In the gossip mills it is said that it was she who led the social veto of the writer.
Her friend and official biographer Gerald Clarke warned her: “You're not going to be amused.”
“Nah, they're too stupid, they won't even know who is who,” responded the creator of the story.
The 'socialite' Ann Woodward.Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)
But not only the protagonists recognized themselves in the satire.
The rest of the world, too.
The release on newsstands caught the author in California, filming his debut as an actor in the black comedy
A Corpse at Desserts
(1976).
His ending in the film, where he is murdered with a knife from behind, served as a graphic prediction of what awaited him when he returned to New York.
Overnight he had become an outcast.
The mechanism that moves the gears of high society acted like a Swiss clock: invitations stopped arriving, their calls were not answered, they changed tables if they met in restaurants.
"What did you expect?"
Capote had been conceiving what was called to be his magnum opus for more than 15 years, as he announced
Answered Prayers
after the success of
In Cold Blood
(1966).
For his novel in code, he accumulated notebooks and notebooks with his notes from all those meetings of fabulous people in fabulous places.
While he entertained that wealthy world with his vitriol, he extracted all the necessary information.
“I don't know what they expected.
I am a writer.
They are my material,” he would say in his defense.
He proclaims that he came to join another more famous one that has guided the steps of so many chroniclers since then: “Never let the truth spoil a good story.”
With the
swans
he served as an advisor and confidant.
In a society where homosexuality was still criminalized (in New York, for example, it was not decriminalized until 1980), Capote challenged the internalized homophobia of husbands by transcending the classic role of
walker
(walker,
in English, is one of the derogatory terms with whom the
sissy
friends who entertained the ladies were known).
As journalist Louise Grunwald, wife of
Time
editor Henry Grunwald, told
Vanity Fair
: “No one set foot in their homes without their husbands' approval.
With his empathy and ability to listen, Truman seduced men and women.”
Liza Minnelli, Truman Capote and Steve Rubell, owner of Studio 54, during a party at the New York nightclub.Robin Platzer/Twin Images (Getty Images)
He told his wives how to get ready, what to watch, what to read, what to pay attention to, who to ignore.
He charted a course for his agenda, gave meaning to her boring days surrounded by other rich people.
Capote accompanied them on their lunches, on their
jets
, on their yacht vacations in Europe.
And he accumulated a capital even more valuable than what all of them possessed: his intimacies.
A fortune that led to their ruin overnight, when they felt betrayed by his revelations and also terrified, thinking about what else the rest of the novel would reveal.
In his defense, the writer wanted to justify himself before Liz Smith, the great lady of gossip, in
New York magazine:
“I wanted to prove that gossip literature can be made.”
Short, soft-spoken and with a strident voice that accompanied him all his life, the sophisticated character he built as an adult was never able to with the child who grew up feeling isolated and different in a lost town in Alabama.
He was haunted by the complex of being a poor boy from the miserable white neighborhoods of the southern United States. From his childhood he said he remembered only one friendship, with whom Harper Lee would also become a writer, who honored him by basing the figure of one of Capote on Capote. the children of the novel
To Kill a Mockingbird.
His biological father, Arch Persons, a businessman who made a living from small scams, soon disappeared from the map.
Raised by his loving aunts, he never got over the temporary abandonment of his mother in his childhood.
Lillie Mae Faulk left to try her luck in New York and picked him up after marrying again (Capote would take her stepfather's last name) to end up committing suicide at the age of 49 after going through various crises due to her alcoholism.
In the soap opera, his ghost is played by Ryan Murphy's fetish actress, Jessica Lange.
Her mother would serve as Capote's direct inspiration for the hustler prostitute in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
(1958), a character miles from the glamor that was sold in the film with Audrey Hepburn.
Accustomed to navigating between luxury salons and the worst clubs, he found Studio 54 the perfect refuge for his exile from high society.
In full euphoria, he declared one night: “Anything goes here.
Boys with boys, girls with girls, girls with boys, whites and blacks, capitalists and Marxists, Chinese and everything in between.”
In 1977, he confessed to his alcoholism at a university lecture.
He highlighted the seriousness of his situation on Stanley Siegel's show in 1978: “Where have you been last night?” the presenter asked live.
“Well, I haven't been in bed for 48 hours.
"I don't even know how I got here today," he responded, clearly injured, rolling his eyes under his characteristic hat.
Although he was taken off the set 17 minutes into the interview, he had time to declare that “at any moment I will end up accidentally killing myself.”
The Truman Show had fallen from applauded wit to a worrying caricature.
a family man
It was told by her goddaughter, Kate Harrington, daughter of John O'Shea, one of the boyfriends who gave Capote the worst life.
At the age of 14, Capote took Kate to Richard Avedon's studio to take her first photos of her as a model.
Later, she would serve as his chaperone during his landings at Studio 54, although he always sent her home before the night got out of hand: “He welcomed me and took care of me like the girl I was, but there came a time when that gave way.” "I came back and he was the child and I was the one who was always taking care of him," he declared in the documentary
The Capote Tapes.
(available in Spain on Filmin)
.
The author had a particular tendency to have long
affairs
with married men and at the same time gain the affection of the rest of the family, including betrayed wives.
O'Shea was a bank manager, married for 20 years and had four children.
In the words of his friend Joe Petrocik, “the perfect Truman type: a family man, Irish and Catholic.”
Truman Capote poses in 1981 in Los Angeles.Harry Langdon (Getty Images)
An aspiring writer, after his first meeting in a sauna in 1973 he was dazzled by the alternative life that the little genius offered him.
Their differences soon gave rise to a toxic relationship in every sense, filled with all kinds of substances and verbal and physical attacks.
He even broke Capote's nose, broke some of his teeth and fractured a rib.
They left him and came back all the time.
Along the way, the author sued him for stealing the manuscript of a chapter of
Answered Prayers
and even hired a thug to intimidate him who ended up setting O'Shea's car on fire.
His tendency to physically self-boycott coexisted with his entrances and exits in hospitals and clinics.
He pretended to swallow the pills that were prescribed to him, he hid his own minibar, he even rented luxurious limousines to escape in style a few days after entering the rehabilitation centers.
As his lawyer, Alan Schwartz, would point out, Trapote accumulated all kinds of ailments: polyps in his throat, prostate problems, painful tics, epilepsy, emphysema, liver diseases... Everything, aggravated by his excesses with vodka, cocaine and drugs. barbiturates.
His death came when he drank the least, when his turbulent party companions were gone and he was battling phlebitis, the illness that frightened him like nothing physical had before.
With the corpse still warm, his archenemy Gore Vidal was happy to send him away: he called his last breath “an intelligent turn in his career.”
The writer had won a lawsuit against Capote for defaming him in
Playboy
by recounting the night when Vidal had supposedly been kicked out of a dinner at the White House for “getting drunk and insulting Jackie Kennedy's mother.”
He demanded a public apology and a million dollars in damages.
Precisely that amount, one million dollars, is what Truman Capote would have charged from the Random House publisher for the publication of
Answered Prayers.
The complete novel never saw the light of day (there is a compilation of the three episodes that saw the light, as an unfinished novel, which was published in the fall of 1987).
The whereabouts of that literary testament that would dig his grave remains a mystery today.
If there ever existed a real manuscript (Capote wrote everything by hand) of that “contemporary response to Proust's
In Search of Lost Time
” that its author had been promising, he managed to keep it hidden even from his biographer Gerald Clarke, his publisher Joe Fox and his attorney and executor Alan Schwartz.
The three turned Capote's apartment on the 22nd floor of the luxurious United Nations Plaza upside down, questioned all of his possible accomplices, and even forced his most faithful ex-boyfriend, writer Joe Dunphy, to open the trunk of the Buick that in his last moments. days I couldn't even drive.
All without success.
However, many friends claim to have heard him recite passages and passages over the years, although given his excellent memory and ability to improvise, many of these stories were nothing more than his usual gossip.
The legend says that, already sick, one morning he called the aunt who had raised him to confess that she had destroyed him.
The day before his death, Capote handed a key to his most faithful friend, Joanne Carson (second wife of presenter Johnny Carson, in the television series played by Molly Ringwald), in whose house in Bel Air (Los Angeles) he had already settled. very weak.
She told him it was from a safe deposit box in California where the manuscript was.
No further details, no bank, no number.
“The novel will be found when it wants to be found,” he outlined mysteriously.
Its pages may rest in that cold darkness forever.
A great final joke at the height of his incomparable ingenuity.
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