When Truman Capote died, Gore Vidal, the writer with whom he had a years' long feud - including a $1 million law suit - called it Capote’s “best career move.”
Capote had run through a lot of the fortune he’d earned and had become an alcoholic and pill popper whose output was now more television appearances (sometimes drunken and incoherent) than actual writing.
When Capote was in the prime of his career Vidal, a child of the upper class - Sidwell Friends and St. Alban's education, a Senator for a grandfather, a father who founded TWA - had remarked that Capote was striving to get into the social circles which he was striving to leave. (Capote’s maternal family were rural dry goods store owners, and his father was a con man and stepfather an embezzler.) Trash talking the coastal elites may be just a luxury belief when you are firmly ensconced in them, as was Vidal. (Though my gay libertarian Trump supporting Cuban refugee friend wants to go on an outing with me to visit Vidal’s grave. Nasty as he was personally ("Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little"), Vidal did end up a critic in his own leftist way of the Deep State, forever wars, and the military-industrial complex: “The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.” Capote’s concerns seem less deep. I’m trying to think of what flowers to bring for such a complicated person. Suggestions appreciated.)
(Interestingly, neither Capote nor Vidal ever went to college.)
Both Capote and Vidal were acclaimed for working in specific genres of fiction. Capote created the modern true crime novel with In Cold Blood (1966). Less recognized, Gore is according to the late literary critic Harold Bloom, an important creator of distinguished historical fiction.
Both writers, both gay, produced early works centered on homosexual characters: Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) could be the first American gay novel, and climbed to the bestseller list. Vidal’s third novel, The City and the Pillar (also 1948), about a gay soldier trying to reconnect with the first man he slept with, got him blacklisted. (Not sure why - I read it and I don’t remember any pro-communism, just a gay soldier.) Capote was always extremely open about being gay, way back in the 1940s. Vidal went through strange locutions like using the word “homosexualist” or claiming "There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices." - though he is buried in a Washington, DC military cemetery with a man, Howard Austen, with whom he spent 53 (no doubt not monogamous) years.
It’s funny to me that that both men wrote for popular magazines like Esquire - which kids like me could find in my stepfather’s business’ waiting room - and also appeared on television. As a pre-teen and teen I was aware of Vidal, and even spent a summer in a university library reading the very bleak The City and the Pillar. (And the funnier Myra Breckenridge.) I was almost completely unaware of Capote. I may have been aware of Vidal because he punched up, feuding or making derogatory remarks about people like Ayn Rand or William F. Buckley Jr.
While Gore was almost coming to blows with Buckley, Capote was inviting Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (and Mr. and Mrs. John Podhoretz, though before neconservatism had actually been invented) to his famous Black and White Ball, for 400 guests who in today’s world would be called influencers: the wealthy, the talented, the famous, but heavily slanted to people in PR, publishing, movies and television, and media generally. From Tallulah Bankhead to Candice Bergen to Bennett Cerf. People who could often, among other things, sell more copies of a book.
In a way it is surprising that Ryan Murphy’s FX/Hulu show Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, isn’t instead about the feud between Capote and Vidal. But it’s about Capote befriending the last set of wealthy American and European women who exercised power just by being style innovators and marrying powerful men, and how he betrayed them and lost their friendship by telling their secrets in his later fictions.
Murphy’s story is a fiction. The last episode includes the ghosts of the swans revisiting Capote’s and their Manhattan haunts as well as a contrite Capote attempting to atone for the betrayal before he dies, and being ultimately forgiven by those he betrayed. So far one child of a swan, Babe Paley’s daughter, has written in the New York Times that the character on screen portrayed by the delicious Naomi Watts bears no relation to her mother. But the swans are far more cinematic than Gore Vidal would have been: Naomi Watts (Babe Paley, wife of the chairman of CBS), Chloe Sevigny, Molly Ringwold (as the second Mrs. Johnny Carson), Diane Lane, Demi Moore, and Calista Flockhart (as Lee Radziwell). (Until this, Flockhart’s IMDB bio was almost as skinny as the swans and these actresses.)
Murphy leaves things out you’d think might have been included - if this were historically accurate. Ann Woodward (Demi Moore), the first swan he betrays, with the blessing of the other swans (she was too obvious of a gold digger), a poor girl from the Midwest who’d tried to refashion herself into a cultured lady, then married her upper crust sugar daddy’s son to achieve the wealth and social prominence she craved. But then she maybe murdered her husband when she shot him, claiming she had mistaken him for an intruder. Left out of Murphy’s show is that Ann’s husband was widely believed by his family to be gay (or bisexual) and that Woodward had charged he wanted to bring another man into their bed. (And that when she was mad at Capote she called him a “faggot.”) (See Roseanne Montillo’s biography of Ann Woodward, Deliberate Cruelty.)
Biographers of Capote and the Swans point out that like Capote (and his mother), many of the east coast social elite were social climbers hiding their commoner backgrounds. Many of the swans were former showgirls, had posed nude in their early years, etc. CBS chairman Bill Paley was the child of Ukranian - not Berliner or Viennese - Jewish immigrants, even though married to an upper class WASP. Capote was able to insinuate himself into these social circles by being witty and charming - and as a petite and super-effeminate little pixie, very non-threatening. The taller, more passable, and prominently socially connected Vidal could not be so non-threatening. Vidal’s blue blood credentials also ran back a few more generations than did those of the swans and their husbands, especially those who worked in media and publicity. Capote could be the court jester, since his place in these circles derived from the swans including him.
It’s interesting that Murphy produced this the same year his American Horror Stories series is portraying a satanic IVF clinic and the year the Pope has denounced surrogacy. By becoming the darling of beautiful powerful women, Capote was able to influence, or at least enjoy the wealth of, the powerful men they could marry but he could not. In a way he was using their female bodies for the power female beauty supplies, perhaps why many gay men have worshiped Divas like Cher, Streisand, or Madonna, and a few want to dress up and pretend to be them. We’d all like, we think, to be married to the chairman of CBS. In books about Capote and the swans, like Deliberate Cruelty or Party of the Century, we learn that Capote may have even picked the mistresses of the powerful men, sometimes with the supervision of the swan who was his wife. (My apologies to any cygnets who didn’t know.)
For gay men I think Capote’s life is a cautionary tale. You think your friendship with women friends is platonic, “pure,” disinterested, like Will and Grace - but with less slapstick. But you should make sure you don’t pimp your friend’s female charms for your own gain. (Though now that I think about it, I had a straight gal pal, buxom, blond and beautiful, who would go with me to a gay bar, see the one lesbian bartender I had not even noticed, giggle and ask something like “If I order two is it ‘sex on the beaches’ or ‘sexes on the beach,” with her rack on the bar, and come back with two free drinks, one for her, one for me. But I did NOT put her up to this!) The moral of Vidal’s life I suppose is more complicated: do you want to be remembered for being vicious - or for such bon mot as “the difference between Italian boys and American boys, is the Italian boys have dirty feet and clean assholes, while American boys have clean feet and dirty assholes.” - instead of for your talents.
A version of this was published earlier in SpliceToday.