The Forgotten Swans: Truman Capote’s Society Friends Left Out of ‘Feud’

Truman Capote had more swans than FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans would have you believe. Perhaps because Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), and Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) were the “friends” most assailed in his infamous Esquire takedown, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” and/or most toxically entangled in his thrall, they get top socialite billing in the series. (Or maybe it’s just because one unhappy rich white woman starts to resemble the other after enough free-flowing luncheon champagne.)

But in real life there were three other women whom Capote counted among his swans, according to Laurence Leamer’s book Capote’s Women, on which this season of the anthology drama is based. And each was every bit as fabulous as the above.

A masked Gloria Guiness arriving at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

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Gloria GuinnessCapote considered three women to be the greatest beauties of his time: the film star Greta Garbo, his best friend and favorite swan Babe Paley, and Gloria Guinness, the fabulous, four-time-married socialite of mysterious origin. “When I first saw her, I thought that I had never seen anyone more perfect: her posture, the way she held her head, the way she moved,” said Capote.

Guinness’s backstory was always a point of confusion. (“All that is known reliably about the origins of Gloria Rubio von Furstenberg Fahkry Guinness is that she was born in Mexico to a left-wing newspaperman,” wrote The New York Times. “Very possibly she was a German spy during the Second World War.”) As for her upward ascent: When she was 20, by some reports, she married a 47-year-old director of a sugar refinery. When she was 23, she married a German count. (During this marriage, according to Leamer, she had an affair with the same Nazi official who romanced Coco Chanel.) When she was about 32, she married into Egyptian royalty—wedding the grandson of King Fuad I. And when she was about 39, she married Loel Guinness, a member of Parliament, scion of the Guinness banking family, and fabulously wealthy. (“As luck would have it, [he] had recently been left today’s equivalent of $2.39 billion in his father’s will,” snarked the NYT.)

With an estimated clothing budget of $250,000 a year (at least $1.5 million today), Guinness regularly topped best-dressed lists and was such a fashion icon that Harper’s Bazaar agreed to run her style columns without editing them. (This is how the women’s magazine came to call Jesus Christ “elegant,” in both the physical and spiritual senses.) She took the job so seriously that she held a 1970 press conference during which she touted a column and dazzled reporters with her wit.

Asked to name her favorite charity, she replied, “myself.” Asked about women’s liberation, she said, “If we get equality with men we’ll be as stupid as they are.” Asked about her sense of humor, she said it’s “the only reason my husband is married to me. I’m too expensive otherwise.” And she did not mince words about her innate sense of style: “I know I’m well-dressed. I learned how to do it in the days when I couldn’t afford to make mistakes.”

Guinness photographed inside her Waldorf Towers suite.

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Guinness and her husband famously kept a portfolio of homes around the globe—including a Manhattan apartment in the Waldorf Towers, a Paris townhouse, a Palm Beach mansion (complete with a bowling alley), and a farm in Normandy. They traveled by private jet or, when necessary, helicopter. Speaking about her various home bases, she said, “So many people think it is difficult keeping all these homes, but I believe it is easier to keep five than one. You can’t possibly spend twelve months at any one place.”