Who Were Truman Capote’s “Swans”? The ‘Feud’ Cast Unpacks Their Counterparts

‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’

A look at the real-life American socialites whose soiled relationship with the ostentatious novelist is at the center of the newest season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, ‘Capote vs. the Swans.’

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[This story contains spoilers from Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.]

In Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, author Truman Capote’s close relationship with a group of wealthy American socialites unravels when he permits Esquire magazine, in 1975 and 1976, to publish four chapters of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers, in which the unsavory personal details of the women’s lives are exploited in a fictionalized telling of life among society’s elite.

Based on Laurence Leamer’s best-selling book Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, the eight-episode FX series from Ryan Murphy depicts Capote’s falling out with the group of upper-class women — whom he’d dubbed his “swans” — and their efforts to excommunicate him from the society life he so desperately clung to following the unprecedented success of his true crime novel In Cold Blood.

The second season in the anthology — which arrives seven years after the first season, Feud: Bette and Joan — also gives a voice to each of the wealthy female archetypes, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C. Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), Ann Woodward (Demi Moore), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart) and Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald), all of whom struggled as their inner complexities were trivialized by the men around them, including Capote, played by Tom Holland.

“I think the tragedy of that generation, which I would include my mother in, is a generation of women sort of caught between The Dick Van Dyke Show and the pill who were, I think, very frustrated a lot of times with the misogyny of the society,” Murphy said in a press conference ahead of Feud‘s premiere, attended by press including The Hollywood Reporter. “I think all of those women in our show were so brilliant in their personal lives and so intelligent that I do think 10 years-post, they all would’ve had successful businesses or brands. You can just see that they were all so smart, particularly in the world of manners and society and beauty. I think they all would’ve had skincare lines. I think they all would’ve had housecare lines. I think they would’ve done a Kardashian thing, which is a very brilliant business way of looking about selling an aspirational lifestyle.”

Though some of the swans did manage to turn the social capital they gained as fashion icons into successful business ventures, there was a somewhat constant struggle against betrayals of various kinds.

“I think that’s one of the reasons they turned to Truman, because they were all in marriages or with men who constantly put them in their place and told them they weren’t enough. And Truman was the one who said to them, ‘You’re actually smarter than your husbands, you control everything. All of these lives are because of what you’re doing.’ There’s a baked-in sadness in that, in so many women of that generation, that we wanted to write to,” added Murphy of tackling this story. “There’s nothing more depressing than lost potential, which I think they all really had.”

Ultimately, it was that need for importance and the desire to maintain their coveted social posts that created a blind spot for each woman when it came to Capote.

“As tragic as they are and as vulnerable as they are, they also were determined and arrived, and maybe found themselves in gilded cages when they ended up there,” said Watts, who’s also an executive producer of the series, at the presser. “They were ambitious in their own way. They loved having the greatest writer of the age in their salon. It solved a whole load of problems for them. It made them feel serious, legitimate: We’re special; look at our guests. It’s right that we live in these very big houses and have all this stuff, because our friends are the greatest writers of the age.

“There’s a sort of mutual dysfunction in a way,” she said of the relationship between Capote and the swans. “They’re scratching each other’s backs. It’s transactional. But then they also recognize each other’s sensitivity and loneliness. You can see how the ingredients of very intense friendship are there.”

Read below for more details on the real lives of each of Capote’s swans, as told to THR by the cast who portrays them.

Babe Paley (Naomi Watts)

Image Credit: Pari Dukovic/FX

Babe Paley was born Barbara Cushing in Boston, MA, on July 5, 1915. She made her social debut as a debutante in 1934 and together — with her sister Mary, who wed prominent American businessman Vincent Astor, and their sister Betsey, who married James Roosevelt, son of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt — the women were often referred to as “The Fabulous Cushing Sisters.”

“Her whole childhood was about being a good wife and serving your husband,” explains Watts, who portrays Babe, to The Hollywood Reporter. “What can you do to create a possibility for a rich and powerful husband, and how can you serve that in the best possible way? She gave herself to a level of perfection. But of course, that comes at a cost. And we know behind that, there were plenty of cracks to show.”

Babe began her career as a fashion editor at Vogue in 1938. In 1941, she was ranked as the world’s second-best dressed woman by TIME magazine, making that list again in 1945 and 1946, and in 1958, she was inducted into the Fashion Hall of Fame. It was at Vogue that Babe met her first husband, oil heir Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. The pair were married from 1940-1946 and had two children, Stanley III, and Amanda. In 1946, she met media executive William Samuel Paley who built Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). The couple married on July 28, 1947, just four days after William divorced his first wife, Dorothy Hearst, and they had two children, William C. and Kate. It was Bill’s extramarital affairs that led Babe to become close to and confide in Capote.

“To me, they were suffering in similar ways even though that pain was manifesting quite differently,” says Watts. “I think there’d been a lack of love in how they were raised, certainly in Babe’s relationship. Her husband was philandering, so she was suffering from a great deal of pain there and indignity. When they connected, they saw each other in ways and Babe, she just gave herself over. Writers are some of the greatest investigators and conversationalists and it just opened her up. She loved that she was able to show herself and that it was interesting and dynamic to somebody finally.”

Babe was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974 and succumbed to the disease, which was attributed to her heavy smoking, on July 6, 1978, just one day after her 63rd birthday.

Slim Keith (Diane Lane)

Image Credit: Pari Dukovic/FX

Nancy “Slim” Keith, also known as Lady Keith of Castleacre after her third marriage, was born Mary Raye Gross in Salinas, Calif., on July 15, 1917, before her mother changed her name to Nancy. She earned the nickname “Slim” for her tall, thin frame, which captured the attention of the fashion world. She landed on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar by the age of 22 and remained a fixture on its best-dressed list for many years to come.

Slim married film director Howard Hawks, with whom she had one daughter, interior designer Kitty Hawks, in 1941. The pair divorced in 1949 due to his infidelity. Her second marriage to producer Leland Hayward lasted from 1949-1960, and her third, to British banker and aristocrat Kenneth Keith, Baron Keith of Castleacre, was from 1962 until 1972.

“She was married three times to very important men and when she met Truman, they had amazing experiences together,” Lane, who stars as Slim in the series, tells THR. “They traveled to Russia together. She was going to help him by being an agent for his book, In Cold Blood. She got him Swifty Lazer [as an agent] and got him a million-dollar deal, which at that time was pretty unheard of. They were really friends. They were in cahoots. They were helping each other.”

That is, until Answered Prayers when Slim, as a result of her depiction as the fictionalized character Lady Coolbirth, completely shut Capote out of her life. The fashion icon, who died on April 16, 1990, from lung cancer at the age of 72 — also attributed to smoking — never spoke to him again.

“She had become a Lady recently in her last marriage, and there were a lot of descriptions about these women that he wrote about so that you knew who everybody was. If you knew the person, then you knew who he was speaking of. So they felt they had nowhere to hide, and I think she wasn’t going to stand for it,” explains Lane. “The amount of betrayal, I think, was as she says it in the screenplay: If a person can betray us in this manner, so directly, so publicly, so personally, and get away with it, then nothing means anything anymore. What is gravity to the world? Where is North on the compass? What is honor? What is truth? What is beauty? What does anything mean if this is friendship? We have to call this out. We can’t allow this writing to be the defining memory of our good needs.”

C. Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny)

Image Credit: Pari Dukovic/FX

Actress, author and designer C. Z. Guest was born Lucy Douglas Cochrane on Feb. 19, 1920, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Alexander Lynde Cochrane, was an investment banker and a member of the Boston elite. Lucy adapted the name “C.Z.,” from “sissy,” which is what her brother called her.

“There are a few interviews with her, one just audio and one on camera that I watched hundreds of times when at first I was going to try to attempt her Boston Brahmin accent,” explains Sevigny, who portrays C.Z. in Feud, to THR. “Our first scene that Diane and I had walking through C.Z.’s estate with the horse, I attempted the accent and Ryan Murphy came up and he’s like, ‘Nobody’s going to believe that anybody talks like that. Drop the accent. It’s too specific.’”

C.Z. married national polo champion and first cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, at Ernest Hemingway’s home in Havana, Cuba, on March 8, 1947. The Nobel Prize winning-novelist served as the best man at the wedding. Throughout her life, C.Z. who had two children with her husband, Alexander and Cornelia, was painted by famed artists such as Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Diego Rivera. In 1969, she was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame and on July 20, 1962, C.Z. was pictured on the cover of TIME magazine as part of a feature on American society.

Following a horseback riding incident in 1976, C.Z. began writing a gardening column for the New York Post and published the first of many gardening books, First Garden, that same year. In 1985, she designed a small fashion collection which she expanded to include sportswear one year later. In 1990, she launched a collection of gardening merchandise that included a fragrant insect repellant.

“She was an amazing woman,” says Sevigny. “Obviously a style icon. But she was also an accomplished equestrian gardener. She was kind of a precursor to Martha Stewart, I’d like to say.”

C.Z. died at the age of 83 on Nov. 8, 2003, in Old Westbury, New York.

Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart)

Image Credit: Pari Dukovic/FX

Lee Radziwill was the younger sister of former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Born Caroline Lee Bouvier on March 3, 1933, in New York City, she was referred to by her middle name “Lee” from birth. The former debutante had her “coming out party” in 1950, and after a failed attempt at acting throughout the 1960s, she worked briefly as an interior decorator while making headlines in popular fashion magazines of the day for her own personal style.

“She was just like all of these women: complicated, interesting, smart, fragile, wounded, lonely,” says Flockhart, who portrays Lee in the series, to THR. “At the end of the day, Lee spent her life living in the shadow of her sister, which is also the name of the biography that I read a lot,” she adds in reference to Diana DuBois’ 1997 book In Her Sister’s Shadow: An Intimate Biography of Lee Radziwill.

“But she had a tenacity. She was very brave,” adds Flockhart. “Truman got her to do a play. She had never acted in her life, and she got on stage in Chicago, and she was apparently horrible and got a lot of bad press, but she survived. Then she went into interior design, which she was very good at, and she worked with Diana Vreeland. She had this crazy amazing life that just looked so fun, and it was a lot of hard work, I can imagine.”

Lee was married three times. First, to publishing executive Michael Temple Canfield from 1953-1958. Her second marriage was to Polish aristocrat Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł in 1969. They had two children, Anthony and Christina, before divorcing in 1974. Lee was married to her third husband, actor and director Herbert Ross, from 1988-2001. When Ross died later that same year, Lee resumed using the last name Radziwill, which she shared with her children. The American socialite died in her upper East Side apartment in Manhattan at the age of 85 on February 15, 2019.

Ann Woodward (Demi Moore)

Image Credit: Pari Dukovic/FX

Ann Woodward was born Evangeline Lucille Crowell on Dec. 12, 1915, in Pittsburg, Kansas. When she was a young adult, she began using the name Ann Eden after her parents divorced and remarried.

Ann moved to New York City in 1937 and landed a gig as a radio actress after signing with a modeling agency. It was while working as a showgirl at a nightclub, however, that she met wealthy banker William Woodward Sr. Woodward Sr. provided for Ann’s lifestyle and, as a result, she was rumored to be his mistress. He also introduced her to his son, William Woodward Jr., whom Ann would go on to marry just two weeks after they announced their engagement on March 6, 1943. After the birth of their sons, William, III, and James, Woodward Jr. is said to have asked for a divorce, but Ann refused.

On Oct. 30, 1955, Ann shot and killed Woodward Jr., claiming to have mistaken him for a burglar, as there had been a string of robberies in their neighborhood of Oyster Bay, Long Island, at the time. Though a grand jury exonerated Ann of any wrongdoing in the shooting, in Answered Prayers, the character based on the shunned socialite is portrayed as a gold-digging bigamist who shot and killed her husband, implying Ann murdered Woodward Jr. Though Capote may not have set out to hurt the other women in his swan circle with his stories, Ann appeared to be an intentional target of the writer, who was said to have immediately disliked her.

“Basically, the idea was they were both at a dinner, not sitting together, where he did overhear, supposedly, her making a derogatory comment about him that maybe set off the spark of his acrimony,” explains Moore, who portrays Ann on-screen, to THR. “On a deeper level, what I also found was that Truman grew up with a mother who always projected the idea that where you really needed to get to in order to be somebody was these high society New York social circles, and that that was a marker of acceptance for that little kid. I think that Ann reminded him most of his mother and there was a lot of pain there. I think there was also a lot projected in that way towards Ann, and she came from a similar background as well.”

Ann, whom friends say had been battling depression at the time the excerpt was published, committed suicide by cyanide poisoning and was found dead in her 5th Avenue apartment on Oct. 10, 1975. Her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Woodward, said after her passing, “Well, that’s that. She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her, and so now I suppose we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Three years after Ann’s suicide, her son Jimmy jumped to his death from a ninth-story window in 1978 when he was 31 years old. Her son Woody took his life in the same manner in 1999 at the age of 54.

Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald)

Image Credit: Pari Dukovic/FX

Though not one of Capote’s official swans, the second wife of late-night talk show host Johnny Carson was a loyal and longtime companion of the author.

“Joanne Carson was really like his last friend,” says Ringwald, who stars as Joanne in the series, to THR. “After he had this feud with these women and they all dropped him, he went to California where he tried to write and lived with Joanne. He literally died in her arms.”

Joanne, born Joanne Copeland in Los Angeles on Oct. 20, 1931, was a co-host of the game show Video Village in the early 1960s, and later had a syndicated health and fitness talk show. She became close to Capote after her divorce from Johnny in 1972. The novelist kept a writing room at her home in Bel Air, where he died from liver disease “complicated by phlebitis and multiple drug intoxication” on Aug. 25, 1984, at the age of 59. Joanne was interred next to Capote at Westwood Cemetery in Los Angeles when she died on May 8, 2015, at the age of 83.

“I really think that she was one of the few people in his life who loved him unconditionally. She really adored him, and she thought he was a genius. She wanted to facilitate his art,” says Ringwald. “I feel like every artist, every writer, there’s someone in their life who’s saying, ‘You’re incredible, you can do this,’ and I think we all depend on those people. I think Joanne really was that for Truman.”

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The eight-episode limited series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans releases new episodes on FX Wednesdays at 10 p.m., streaming the following day on Hulu.

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