Why Does Feud Hate Truman Capote So Much?

While I wouldn’t ordinarily presume to know what was the greatest night of a stranger’s life, with Truman Capote, I think we can be fairly confident: Nov. 28, 1966, the evening of his storied Black and White Ball. This was the so-called “party of the century,” where some 500 movie stars, socialites, politicians, foreign dignitaries, and artists gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to see and be seen (when they lowered their ostrich-feather carnival masks, that is), to drink and to dance, to snack on midnight scrambled eggs strewn with anchovy breadcrumbs, and above all, to celebrate him.

And what wasn’t to celebrate? Capote’s genre-defining “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, released earlier that year, was a huge hit, and he’d endeared himself to the upper echelons of New York society. He had become that rare thing in America: an admired literary author who was also a household name. Everyone wanted to be at his ball, and by all accounts, the party was a grand success, exactly the fizzy brew of celebrity, style, and campy sass (balloon décor!) that its architect had dreamed of. As Anne Petersen puts it in an essay on the soiree, in some ways it’s apt to think of the Black and White Ball as Capote’s “greatest artwork.”

You wouldn’t know that from watching Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the latest season of the Ryan Murphy–created production currently airing on FX that, in theory, dishes up the battle between Capote (Tom Hollander) and his “Swans”—a circle of Manhattan doyennes including the likes of Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart)—after he airs their dirty laundry in print. The third episode of the series, released last week, covers the planning of the Black and White Ball, along with the evening itself. Watching the show’s odd re-creation of the night, I’m exaggerating only a little when I say that you’d be forgiven for mistaking the event for an ill-attended birthday party in a church fellowship hall rather than the coup of skill, publicity, and taste that it actually was.

The way this season of Feud chooses to paint Capote’s sparkling triumph as dusty, drunk, and déclassé is truly surprising—until you watch the rest of the series, as I’ve had the misfortune of doing. After that dispiriting slog (you’ve been warned), it all starts to make sense: For whatever reason, the show is ultimately a project in punishing this man, and the spanking starts here. On the highest night of Capote’s life, Feud gets down to the work of laying him low.

The episode is rife with choices by script writer and season showrunner Jon Robin Baitz and director Gus Van Sant that reveal this weird vendetta. Unique from the rest of the series, it’s shot in black and white as a fictional documentary by the Maysles brothers (notably of crazy-lady Grey Gardens fame). The distance that the vérité lens plants between the viewer and Capote’s planning efforts makes everything look ridiculous and a bit sad—what’s he doing futzing about in a pile of stationery on the floor, the silly queen? That mood is intensified in a nasty little scene in which Capote is shown drunkenly hitting on and slow-dancing in his apartment with Albert Maysles (ever the participant-observer), because what could be more tragic? The show’s creators don’t let Capote have a single moment of glory at his party. Of course he has to get into a catty argument with his ex-lover/long-suffering friend Jack (ever the voice of propriety), then, in a twist worthy of Murphy’s American Horror Story, cavort about the dance floor with his dead mother (Jessica Lange, making an appearance) as the Swans glower on.

As if that weren’t enough to expose Feud’s malice, the Ball episode is the last time we see Capote even nominally happy. What follows is our sibilant, slippery protagonist’s fall from the gracious heights of the Upper East Side—a brutal and repetitive study, over four-ish hours, of the man’s descent into drink, drugs, isolation, and national embarrassment, with endless scenes of him dropping the bottle only to pick it up again, being bloodied by a lover, and appearing on chintzy talk shows pilled out of his mind.

It’s not that these things didn’t happen—the real Truman Capote did struggle with addiction, fail to finish his final purported “masterpiece” Answered Prayers, embarrass himself in public, and ultimately die of alcoholism. It’s just that, in the 18 years the show covers between the Ball and his death in 1984, Capote did plenty of other things too—like, for example, publishing a different, well-received collection of stories and essays. But Feud is interested only in portraying him at his worst, with a goofy homily about forgiveness tacked on at the end. As C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), the most empathetic Swan, complains to Capote of his bean-spilling in a later episode: “You cheapened the nuance of our lives.” Would that Capote could send that note up to the writers room today.

To be more generous to Feud than it is to Capote, I’ll grant that there’s maybe a decent season of AHS buried somewhere here, sadistic and unhinged as it is. Besides Lange’s admittedly fun Southern harridan crossover from Murder House, check out James Baldwin’s turn as a highball-smashing Ghost of Christmas Future in Episode 5. But this was supposed to be Feud. Though it was many years ago now, the first season of the franchise, about the ginned-up war between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, was pretty great. It had its outsized and baroque moments—it is Ryan Murphy, after all—and it, too, fiddled with the facts in questionable ways. But that season also had two things that Capote vs. the Swans lacks. First, an actual feud between well-matched parties that toed the line between campy entertainment and compelling, often moving drama. And second, an insightful analysis getting at the source of the animosity, which in that case was the misogynistic machinations of Jack Warner and the Hollywood boys’ club.

Who is actually feuding in this current season? Not Capote and the Swans—he does one rude (though entirely unsurprising) thing that pisses them off, and they use their clout to expel him from the society he craves. There’s nothing else to it: They win, he loses, the end. And so, what’s left for the remainder of the series is the punishment. At times, the bitterness feels oddly personal—and what for? Is it because Capote was an alcoholic and didn’t successfully get sober? Lots of people don’t, because it’s a disease. Because he wasted his talents? Again, he actually wrote more, including further chapters of Answered Prayers that aren’t discussed in the show. Because he’s a “bad gay” who seeks out sketchy partners in bathhouses? Well, who among us? Because he’s a journalist who “betrayed” his sources? Paging Janet Malcolm. Because … his mother? OK.

The thing is, these are all minifeuds between the show’s creators and their chosen subject. In their obvious distaste for Capote, they’ve worked up a froth of moralizing judgment about a man who isn’t around to answer, but they’ve fallen short of building much in the way of good narrative or dramatic tension. Like a lot of the work to come out of the Murphy factory in recent years, this Feud is possessed by a spirit of disgust and scolding that’s a real drag (and, for a showrunner who used to make some of the most inventive, boundary-pushing, and exciting TV out there, a disappointing turn).

There’s a moment in Episode 3, as the Black and White is in full swing, that’s perfectly telling about where this show went wrong—and all the more because it’s entirely made-up. Capote is swanning among his Swans, pontificating and gossiping and preening, when he’s alerted by security that there’s a crasher at the gates. He excuses himself for a confrontation. Who is it but Ann Woodward—a rich widow who accidentally shot her husband, but whom Capote has slandered as a murderer—and her son, trying to sneak in. Capote says no; Ann, he seethes, is just like his mom: “a rotten criminal and lousy mother.” Ann takes a beat, shocked. “What you’re doing to us is so low. So poisonous,” she says, in a chilling monotone. “One day you will know what this poison tastes like. And remember: The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty. You wrote that, didn’t you? Well, this is that. This is that.”

The uninvited are shuffled away, and Capote brushes off the curse: “Well, one did write that. At least we know she was paying attention.”

It seems the minds behind Feud were paying attention as well, but they learned exactly the wrong lesson. For in this war, the Swans more or less glide away freely. As for Capote, he doesn’t stand a chance. Under the pressure of such deliberate, relentless, unnecessary cruelty, he’s ground into the dust. This is that. Which is a bummer—it’s no fun fighting when your opponent is already dead on the floor.