As we eagerly await the second season of the splashy Gossip Girl reboot—presumably crammed with even more It-bags, dramatic showdowns, and toxic love triangles—there’s another glossy guilty pleasure about Manhattan’s elite waiting in the wings to take its crown: the long-delayed second installment of the Ryan Murphy-produced anthology series Feud. Its focus this time around? The true story of Truman Capote and his coterie of socialites, whom he called his “swans.”
Back in April, Deadline revealed that the follow-up to the show’s frothy first season, Feud: Bette and Joan—an account of the venomous rivalry between Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, played by Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange—would be titled Feud: Capote’s Women. Taking a starring role as the impossibly glamorous Babe Paley, one of Capote’s closest friends and the wife of CBS founder William S. Paley, would be Naomi Watts. Meanwhile, Gus Van Sant would direct and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jon Robin Baitz would pen all eight episodes and serve as showrunner, taking inspiration from Laurence Leamer’s bestseller Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal and a Swan Song for an Era.
Then, on August 17, Variety reported that the show had found its Capote, too: Pride & Prejudice and Gosford Park’s Tom Hollander had snagged the part of the prolific novelist who became a pariah when he published a story exposing the shocking secrets of his most powerful confidantes. Joining him will be eternal New York It-girl Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, a cover girl and muse to Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí; Diane Lane as Slim Keith, the former wife of Howard Hawks who was credited with discovering Lauren Bacall; and Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s radiant younger sister who married a Polish prince.
The trio were among the women in Capote’s glittering circle when he became the toast of high society following the publication of In Cold Blood. However, his next novel would prove less popular with his acquaintances: the unfinished Answered Prayers, a scandalous tell-all which mined their lives for material. When a chapter of it, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” appeared in Esquire in 1975, it was clear that its characters were thinly disguised versions of Capote’s friends, some of whom had dabbled in extramarital affairs and one of whom had shot her husband. Cue a mass exodus of the so-called swans and almost complete social isolation for the writer.
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