Truman Capote couldn't have fully appreciated his good fortune while writing the true-crime masterpiece "In Cold Blood." By the time his so-called nonfiction novel was published with its many creative licenses-the two killers whose lives he'd dramatized had been executed; they couldn't talk back. He wasn't so lucky with his next major project, "Answered Prayers," which he claimed would be his magnum opus. In one of its chapters, published in Esquire under the title "La Côte Basque, 1965," he exposed close-held secrets of the friends and muses he called his swans: a set of graying socialites who'd achieved fashion-plate fame. They quickly closed ranks-and, in the decade between the excerpt's release and his death, in 1984, Capote failed to complete "Answered Prayers," or any other book-length manuscript.
His exile from Manhattan high society, and his accompanying artistic decline, is the subject of the new season of the Ryan Murphy anthology drama "Feud,"subtitled "Capote vs. the Swans." Capote's 1948 début novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," with its queer characters and famously naughty author photo, introduced him as a convention-flouting wunderkind. Those days of youthful defiance are long gone by the time "Capote vs. the Swans" opens, in the late sixties, with Capote (Tom Hollander) suggesting to his closest confidante, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), that there's no higher happiness than material comfort. After discovering that her husband, Bill, is engaged in his umpteenth affair, Babe is contemplating divorce, but Capote discourages it, citing her age and Bill's stature as the chairman of CBS. "You have a great life," he reminds her. "You have a house in Bermuda, a mansion in Coral Gables, the thing in London.
This story is from the February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) edition of The New Yorker.
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STUNTED
\"The Fall Guy.\"
MOTHERS OF US ALL
Paula Vogel's \"Mother Play,\" Shaina Taub's \"Suffs,\" and Amy Herzog's \"Mary Jane.\"
PURE PLEASURE
The \"Radical Optimism\" of Dua Lipa.
PARADISE LOST
The search for a home that never was in Claire Messud's new novel.
ORIGIN STORY
What do we hope to learn from our prehistory?
DEATH IN VENICE
At the Biennale, the past dignifies the weird, desperate present.
WE'RE NOT SO DIFFERENT, YOU AND I
\"You'll never get away with this!\" Ultra Man vowed as he wriggled in his chains. \"You may destroy me, but you'll never destroy what I stand for!\"
STONES OF CONTENTION
The British Museum faces accusations of cultural theft-and actual theft.
A CAMPUS IN CRISIS
Dissent and defiance at Columbia's pro-Palestine protests.
ARROW RETRIEVER
I am an arrow retriever. After a batrows are costly and time-consuming to make. It seems like a terrible waste-and maybe even a sin―for an arrow to fall to the ground without hitting someone. Even if the arrow kills somebody, it can be reused to kill someone else. As Randolf the Scot famously said, \"Arrows don't grow on trees.\"