It always comes back to the mother. After waging a war on the ladies who lunch, Tom Hollander’s Truman Capote faces the final boss in the twilight hours of his life: his mother, Nina Capote—portrayed by legendary actress Jessica Lange. In the final episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, “Phantasm Forgiveness,” it’s not Diane Lane’s duplicitous Slim Keith, or Calista Flockhart’s acerbic Lee Radziwill, or even Naomi Watt’s beautiful Babe Paley, but Lange’s striving and resentful Lillie Mae who looms largest in Capote’s psyche in the last moments of his life.
Born Lillie Mae Faulk, Capote’s mother always longed to escape her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama and join society’s elite up in New York City. After divorcing Truman’s father when Truman was two years old, Lillie Mae changed her name to Nina and moved north in search of a more glamorous life, leaving Truman in Monroeville to be raised by her relatives. Eventually, Truman joined his mother and her new husband, José García Capote, in New York City, where, despite her best efforts, Lillie Mae was never fully embraced by the Park Avenue crowd that Capote would later infiltrate and set aflame. Lillie Mae would ultimately take her own life when Capote was 29.
“It’s tough, isn’t it?” says Lange of Lillie Mae’s fate. We’re speaking over the phone from Los Angeles the day before she’s set to present the best-actress award with fellow Oscar winners Charlize Theron,Sally Field,Jennifer Lawrence, and Michelle Yeoh. Regarding Capote’s mother, she puts it succinctly: “That’s the kind of mother you don’t want.”
As Feud comes to a close, Lange chats with VF about bad mothers, her meticulous research, and her lack of interest in the ladies who lunch.
Vanity Fair:The finale ofFeudreally focuses on Truman’s relationship with his mother. What was it like getting that final script and unpacking the complicated mother-son relationship?
Jessica Lange: Well, in classic Ryan Murphy fashion, I’d [only] gotten the first couple scripts. It was literally two scenes—there was the first episode, and then the Black and White ball. Then he said to me, because they were still writing, “What would you like to play? Because most of your scenes will be in the eighth episode.”
Having done some research reading the book, Capote and His Women, I thought, Well, what’s really interesting would be Truman’s childhood, which, of course, informs so much of his life and who he became. So I said, “Well, can we do a flashback to his early years?” So we had those couple scenes. And then, in classic actress fashion, I said, “What about her suicide scene?” Not to be maudlin or mawkish, but that would be an amazing scene to play. So we kind of went from there. I haven’t seen it, but I felt like they wrote some really great scenes.
The one thing that he didn’t agree to, which I had asked for, was to play [Capote’s short story] “A Christmas Memory.” I wanted to see a scene of Truman and his aunt [Nanny Rumbley Faulk, a.k.a. “Sook”], because she was such a primary caretaker, and they loved each other so deeply. I wanted to play that character too, in just the short scene of fruitcake season. But he said no to that one.
In many ways, Lillie Mae serves as the ultimate swan: The black swan that haunts Truman and antagonizes him, driving him to drink. How did you see her role?
Well, she gave up everything. She left her husband, the South, her child—which, as a mother, seems inconceivable—but she wanted so desperately to be part of that New York society and to fit in. And of course, she never did. I think that informed so much of her relationship to him, especially when he befriends all the kind of people that rejected her and really, I think, broke her heart.
It works as a metaphor in the piece—that she believes Truman is trying to get some kind of justice for her, trying to get even in a way. Then it’s just the writer’s imagination that she’s coercing him into drinking. It works in that dramatic context of, yeah, maybe he does drink partly because of his mother. Maybe he does take pills because of his mother. Maybe his disappointment…that life has something to do with his mother. It’s not meant to be literal.
You’ve collaborated with Ryan Murphy so much in recent years, but Ryan was a little bit more hands-off with this edition of the franchise. What was it like to work on a Ryan Murphy project that he wasn’t writing and that he didn’t direct?
Well, I missed him. I have to say, I only worked maybe four or five days altogether on the whole thing. I shot two days in New York and a couple days out in Los Angeles, so I wasn’t on the set much at all. But I know that, for instance, when we did Bette and Joan, his presence was constant. He directed some of the episodes, and I always loved working with Ryan that way. I’m not sure on this one because, like I said, I was barely there.
Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is all about Tom Hollander‘s Truman Capote taking on the upper crust of Upper East Side society. But it just as easily could have been about Capote’s relationship with his longtime nemesis, Gore Vidal. The sixth episode in the series, “Hats, Gloves and Effete Homosexuals,” delves into Capote’s intense rivalry with that other famed midcentury queer author, which came to a head when Vidal sued Capote for slander in 1975 due to a salacious story Capote told about Vidal at dinner with the Kennedys.
Maybe Capote and Vidal’s mutual disdain stemmed from their many similarities. Both Capote and Vidal opted to skip college. Born in 1925, Vidal joined the military after graduating from Phillips Andover Academy. Capote, meanwhile, took up a job as copy boy in the art department at the New Yorker while still in high school. The position, in Capote’s opinion, was “not a very grand job,” but sufficed because he was “determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom,” he later said. “I felt that either one was or wasn’t a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome. I still think I was correct, at least in my own case.” Later in life, Vidal would become a major donor to Harvard University—though he never attended it—leaving his entire fortune to the university.
Higher education or not, it soon became clear that both Capote and Vidal were writers. They quickly joined the literati, with Capote bursting onto the national literary scene with his short story collection Breakfast at Tiffany’s and, of course, In Cold Blood. Vidal, a truly prolific writer, would first find success in the 1950s writing mystery novels under a pseudonym before moving into other genres. His play The Best Man: A Play About Politics was nominated for six Tony awards in 1960, including best play, and his satirical 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge, about a young woman running an acting studio in Hollywood, was groundbreaking for being one of the first novels to feature a main character undergo gender confirmation surgery.
Capote was openly, if not particularly proudly, gay. Vidal had sexual relationships with both men and women, and pointedly didn’t identify as gay. Instead, he rejected the label on the grounds that there was no such thing as being gay, only gay sexual acts. Vidal’s voracious sexual appetite was public knowledge; he wrote in his memoir, Palimpsest, that he’d had 1000 sexual experiences by the time he was 25. In a 1969 issue of Esquire, he elucidated his thoughts on sexuality and sexual expression. “We are all bisexual to begin with,” Vidal wrote. “Homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime … despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three.”
Similarities aside, Capote and Vidal’s animus was longstanding, well-documented, and well-known in their elite circle. “You would think they were running neck-and-neck for some fabulous gold prize,” legendary playwright Tennessee Williams once said of the pair. Both men did nothing to dispel notions that they weren’t fond of each other. “Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success, to get out of,” wrote Vidal in Palimpsest. Capote wasn’t much kinder. “I’m always sad about Gore,” Capote once quipped. “Very sad that he has to breathe every day.”
Things reached a boiling point in 1975, when Vidal sued Capote for slander. Capote had been running around town, insisting that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House for being “drunk and obnoxious” at a party President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jackie O threw for Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill and her husband, Prince Stash Radziwill. Capote had reportedly told this story to Playgirl Magazine and as a guest on The Stanley Siegel Show, and Vidal was seeking $1 million in damages. Capote countersued.
Despite publishing his infamous, bridge-burning story “La Cote Basque 1965” that same year, Capote sought refuge with one of his beloved swans: Radziwill (played on Feud by Calista Flockhart), with whom he had danced the night away at his Black and White Ball ten years prior. Capote claimed that although he wasn’t present for Vidal’s alleged ousting, he had heard the story from Radziwill, and that she would sign a deposition saying so, claiming that Radziwill found Vidal to be “the most sinister man I know.” But Capote’s trust was wildly misplaced.
Another iconic American literary figure has officially entered the Feud chat. On the fifth episode of Capote vs. The Swans, airing Wednesday night, Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) falls deeper into the depths of alcoholic despair as he continues to be alienated from his beloved swans after the fallout from his Esquire short story “La Côte Basque, 1965.” Enter a well-timed visit from none other than legendary writer and activist James Baldwin, portrayed by actor Chris Chalk, who both challenges and comforts the struggling author. In Capote vs. The Swans, the two seminal writers trade barbs and words of encouragement, and it turns out their real-life relationship was similarly fraught.
In the episode, “The Secret Inner Lives of Swans,” Baldwin visits Capote, who is in the midst of an alcohol-induced slumber, right as Capote is on the brink of ending it all. Chalk’s Baldwin is at once a sharpshooter and a relentless truth-teller, refusing to let Capote waste his gift. The pair bounces around New York, going from the restaurant La Côte Basque, where Capote accurately notes that his swans “would never do this—have lunch alone with a Black man,” to an underground gay bar where they commiserate about being queer writers in the mid-70s. They end up back at Capote’s apartment, where Baldwin inspires Capote to, at least temporarily, put down the bottle and pick up the pen. “Your book, it is the firing squad that killed the Romanovs,” Baldwin says to Capote in Feud. “It’s your guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette.” By the episode’s end, Capote has regained his sense of self and dines on a swan stolen from Central Park, prepared by a La Côte Basque chef no less.
In reality, Baldwin would most likely not have been around New York to guide Capote on his journey of self-discovery. By the mid-1970s Baldwin, like Capote, was already a prolific and celebrated author, having rose to national prominence via his lauded works like 1953’s Go Tell It On the Mountain, 1955’s essay collection Notes of a Native Son, and his controversial and groundbreaking queer novel Giovanni’s Room, published in 1956. By the time those books were published, Baldwin had long since abandoned his native Harlem for Paris, in large part due to the unrelenting racism in America. Baldwin would die on December 1, 1987, a few years after Capote, of stomach cancer at his home in Saint-Paul de Vence, France.
“I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. (Sometimes I still do.),” wrote Baldwin in his essay The Discovery of What It Means to be an American, in 1959. “I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer…Still, the breakthrough is important, and the point is that an American writer, in order to achieve it, very often has to leave this country.” Abroad, Baldwin would continue churning out beloved work, including his 1962 novel Another Country, his essay collection The Fire Next Time in 1963, and the novel If Beale Street Could Talk in 1974. (Nearly half a century later, in 2018, Barry Jenkins would adapt If Beale Street Could Talk into a film by the same name, starring KiKi Layne,Stephan James, and an Oscar-winning Regina King.) By the time Capote’s imagined rendezvous with Baldwin occurred in the mid-1970s, Baldwin was already primarily living in Saint-Paul de Vence. Capote vs. The Swans writer Jon Robin Baitz knew as much, framing episode five as “a play, really—an imagined encounter,” Baitz told Vanity Fair. “They knew each other, but there was no real love lost between them in actuality.”
Baitz clearly did his research. Capote, it seems, was not too fond of Baldwin’s writing, at least as far as his peer’s fiction was concerned. “I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom,” wrote Capote to literature scholar and Smith college professor Newton Arvin in 1962. While that was certainly less than complimentary, he had kinder things to say about Baldwin’s non-fiction writing, although that too was caged in Capote’s classic brand of caustic cattiness. “I do sometimes think his essays are at least intelligent, although they almost invariably end on a fakely hopeful, hymn-singing note.”
That’s not to say Capote was the only one who had acerbic words for Baldwin. In the December 17, 1964 issue of the New York Review of Books, American theatre critic Robert Brustein wrote a scathing review of Nothing Personal, a collaboration between Baldwin and famed high fashion photographer Richard Avedon. In the review, called “Everybody Knows My Name,” Brustein rips their collaboration to shreds, beginning, “Of all the superfluous non-books being published this winter for the Christmas luxury trade, there is none more demoralizingly significant than a monster volume called Nothing Personal.” Avedon’s photos were accompanied by occasional text from Baldwin, which Brustein also went out of his way to eviscerate in his review. Baldwin’s contributions to Nothing Personal, Brustein wrote, pop up “interrupting from time to time, like a punchy and pugnacious drunk awakening from a boozy doze during a stag movie, to introduce his garrulous, irrelevant, and by now predictable comments on how to live, how to love, and how to build Jerusalem.” Harsh.
Not so fast, said Capote. In his published response, “Avedon’s Reality,” found in the January 28, 1965 edition of The New York Review of Books, Capote defended Nothing Personal, saying that he was both “interested and startled” by Brustein’s review. “Brustein is an intelligent man: a theater critic of the first quality, one of only three this reader can read with a sense of stimulation,” Capote acknowledges. “But surely Brustein’s comments regarding the Avedon-Baldwin collaboration is as distorted and cruel as he seems to find Avedon’s photographs.”
While much of the letter is in defense of Avedon—a friend of Capote’s—the In Cold Blood author does show support for Baldwin too, disputing Brustein’s assertion that Baldwin and Avedon made the book simply for the money. “First of all, if the publisher of this book sold every copy, he would still lose money. Neither Baldwin nor Avedon will make twenty cents,” wrote Capote. “Brustein is entitled to think that Avedon and Baldwin are misguided; but believe me he is quite mistaken when he suggests, as he repeatedly does, that they are a pair of emotional and financial opportunists.” Even when they don’t like each other’s work, artists of a feather stick together.
On a crisp November night in 1966, the would-be prince of New York City threw a ball that even Cinderella would have had trouble getting into. The prince was Truman Capote, and the party was his Black and White Ball, honoring the Washington Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham. Around 540 handpicked guests turned up to the Plaza Hotel for what Capote would describe as “a little masked ball” featuring New York’s finest, from Lauren Bacall to Norman Mailer to, of course, his beloved swans. Capote’s Black and White Ball wasn’t just the event of the season—it was the society event of the ’60s.
Naturally, FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans devotes an entire episode to the event—from its meticulous planning to the night of the picture-perfect party. To bring the Black and White Ball to life, executive producer Ryan Murphy and director Gus Van Sant enlisted famed fashion designer Zac Posen. “Gus is a good friend, and Ryan is a friend and somebody I’ve known for a long time. We’ve wanted to work together for a long time,” Posen says. When the team asked the designer if he might want to fabricate the episode’s elaborate gowns, they were in luck: “I don’t have my own line anymore,” he says. “So I only do one-of-a-kind pieces.” (Days after our interview, Posen would be named the executive vice president, creative director of Gap, and the chief creative officer of Old Navy.)
Running a major fashion label is not the same thing as costuming a major television show. “Costume design is a different consideration—more character building,” he says. “It’s also elevated. Not only is it costume design of a time period, it’s costume design within the wonderful world of Ryan Murphy, aesthetically set between Ryan and his collaborator [Feud costume designer] Lou [Eyrich], of a world that they’ve created through the lens of Gus Van Sant. So you kind of find your place within that.”
But Posen didn’t feel obligated to hew entirely to the historical record. In fact, Murphy specifically told him not to. Still, he did his homework. “I was finding historical matches of fabrics, of color sources, deadstock flowers from one of the oldest silk flower places in New York of that time period,” Posen says. He worked closely with Deborah Davis, author of Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball. Then Posen combined his research with his own creative vision. The result? A true feast for the eyes.
Every dress, Posen says, “is a character—a different, beautiful, aquatic bird on a pond.” Posen was inspired by the period’s magical surrealist filmmakers like Federico Fellini, as well as Franco Zeffirelli, British photographer Cecil Beaton, director Vincente Minnelli, and even Muppets creators Jim Henson and Frank Oz. “I was like, Let’s look at the people that I think are great imagineers in filmmaking, that are a really big part of my DNA,” says Posen. “How do we create that kind of magic [when] it’s going to be in a piece that takes place around historical characters, but is not a retelling of history?”
All the research in the world wouldn’t have made a perfect recreation of the ball possible. “Slim [Keith]—you can’t find documentation of what she wore,” says Posen. There were “no drawings or written descriptions that I could find, or any of the historians could find.” In other cases, there was too much history to pore through. “Lee Radziwill had the time of her life that night,” he says. “There’s a million Slim Aarons photos to Ron Galella photos and drawings [of her]. It’s all there, documented.”
There were practical matters to contend with as well. Directed by Van Sant, the episode “Masquerade 1966” was conceived as a movie within a show, shot mostly in black and white from the perspective of the Maysles brothers—the documentarians behind Grey Gardens, who were working on a documentary about Capote around this time. According to Posen, it was decided only partway through the process to shoot the episode almost entirely in black and white. Naturally, this had an effect on how Posen chose to costume certain swans.
Take Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), for instance. In real life, the socialite wore an embroidered Mila Schön dress to the ball, but Posen didn’t have time to embroider a dress. “I got the briefing right before Thanksgiving, and we shot in the beginning of the second week of January,” he says. “It was quick.” Flockhart was initially in a white jacquard cloque coat, which Posen says looked great on her, but it was “just going to disappear” on camera. So he pivoted: “Let’s use a metallic jacquard, let’s do an overlay of something graphic with these embroidered daisies, then trim it with something that looked kind of [like] futurism.”
Much ink has been spilled over the rise and fall of Truman Capote. The brilliant and troubled author of groundbreaking books like Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood has been the subject of multiple biopics, including Capote, which won Philip Seymour Hoffman a best actor Oscar in 2006. Almost 20 years later, Capote returns to the zeitgeist as the bleeding and bloated heart at the center of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, which premieres on FX January 31. This time, as portrayed by British actor Tom Hollander, Capote is at war with Manhattan’s elite—the “It” girls of his generation—after infiltrating their tightly guarded inner circle, then exposing their secrets in a salacious magazine story. Titled “La Côte Basque, 1965,” the piece was named after the chic restaurant the ladies would lunch in and was published in Esquire in November 1975.
“La Côte Basque, 1965” was intended to serve as an excerpt from a much larger work: Capote’s final novel, Answered Prayers, a roman à clef about the wily ways of New York’s upper echelon. The book was inspired by Capote’s close friends, including Lee Radziwill, C.Z. Guest, Slim Keith, and Babe Paley—all of whom he immortalized in print under thinly veiled aliases. But after Capote revealed their secrets, the women cut him out of their lives, hastening his descent into alcoholism and despair.
We all know Truman Capote. But who, exactly, were his swans? “They were very soignée and very rich and also his best friends,” wrote Sam Kashner for Vanity Fair in the 2012 “Capote’s Swan Dive.” Below, VF takes a deep dive into the life and time of Capote’s beloved swans. Warning: spoilers on material covered by the series abound.
Left, from Getty Images; right, Pari Dukovic/FX.
The most dazzling swan of all, Babe Paley was, perhaps, Capote’s one true love. Born Barbara Cushing in Boston on July 5, 1915, Babe was the daughter of Harvey Cushing, a pioneering neurosurgeon and Harvard professor, which afforded her all of the creature comforts of a WASPy, blue-blood life. Her elder sisters, Mary and Betsey, went on to marry an Astor—Vincent Astor—and a Roosevelt—FDR’s son James Roosevelt—respectively. The trio were known in high society as “the fabulous Cushing sisters.”
That’s not to say Babe’s life was without hardship. Around the time of her debutante ball, Babe was in a devastating car accident in Long Island that required her to undergo extensive cosmetic and dental surgery on her mouth and jaw. Many would argue that post-surgery, Babe was even more beautiful than she had been before the accident. Some girls have all the luck.
Babe would take her gorgeous new face to New York City, where she’d land a job at Vogue as a fashion editor, marry oil heir Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., and become a mainstay of the best-dressed list. (In 1941, Time named her the second-best dressed woman in the world, following Wallis Simpson.) Babe had two children with Mortimer, Stanley and Amanda, before getting divorced and falling for the chairman of CBS, William “Bill” Paley. With him, she’d have two more children, William and Kate.
The family of six resided on Fifth Avenue in New York City, and built a summer home, Kiluna North, on Squam Lake in New Hampshire—partially because Bill, who was Jewish, was not allowed into Long Island’s country clubs. They were major players in New York society all the same.
While their life may have seemed idyllic, Bill and Babe’s marriage was far from perfect. Well before his marriage to Babe, William Paley was notorious for being a cheater. The extramarital shenanigans continued during his marriage to Babe, with Paley cheating on her with Happy Rockefeller, the wife of New York governor and 41st vice president of the US, Nelson Rockefeller.
Paley’s affair with Rockefeller was so salacious that it served as the central event of “La Côte Basque, 1965,” the Answered Prayers excerpt that catalyzes the action in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. The Esquire story included all the sordid details of the Paleys, renaming them Cleo and Sidney Dillon. Its publication created a rift between Babe and Capote that would never mend. Three years later, she died after a battle with cancer. Capote was not invited to the memorial service.
Even after her death, Babe and her legacy live on. (Fun fact: former Real Housewife of New York City and tabloid mainstay Tinsley Mortimer married into the family of Babe’s first husband.) As Vanity Fair put it in “Capote’s Swan Dive,” Babe was “the tall, slim elegant society doyenne widely considered to be the most beautiful and chic woman in New York.” Capote may have put it even better: “Mrs. P had only one fault: she was perfect.”
Left, from Getty Images; right, Pari Dukovic/FX.
And then there was Slim. Born Mary Raye Gross in Salinas, California in 1916, Keith’s mother changed her name to Nancy when she was a child. Keith would opt to change it again, going by the nickname “Slim,” when she fled the coop. From a well-off family yet considerably outside the blue-blood bubble, Keith had to hustle to make it in high society. She dropped out of school at 16 and, after meeting William Randolph Hearst and his mistress actress Marion Davies, found herself enmeshed in the world of entertainment. She became a Hollywood socialite, frequently partying with the likes of Clark Gable and Cary Grant. By 22, she was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and, like her pal Babe, became a mainstay of the best-dressed lists of the time.
Keith was married not once, not twice, but thrice. Her first marriage, in 1941, was to Howard Hawks, director of classic films, including His Girl Friday and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They divorced in 1949, but not before Keith effectively discovered legendary actress Lauren Bacall by showing Hawks a magazine with Bacall’s photo on it, leading him to sign her to a seven-picture deal. After an alleged fling with Ernest Hemingway, Keith would meet and marry her second husband, Leland Hayward, a movie and theater producer responsible for bringing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music and South Pacific to Broadway. Ten years into their marriage, Hayward left Slim for political activist and socialite Pamela Churchill. “Yes, I made a life for myself; I even remarried,” Keith wrote in her memoir, excerpted in VF as an article called “Forever Slim.” “But when I lost Leland, I lost the best part of my life.” But Keith wouldn’t be down and out for long. She soon snatched up British banker Kenneth Keith, who also happened to be Baron Keith of Castleacre. Thus, Lady Slim Keith of Castleacre was born.
In Capote’s book, Keith’s avatar was Lady Ina Coolbirth, whom Capote described as “a much married and divorced society matron.” In real life, he affectionately referred to Keith as “Big Mama”—but that well of love ran dry after he published “La Côte Basque, 1965.” Keith never spoke to Capote again and, by some accounts, was considered the chief organizer in keeping the Swans at war with Capote until the end. As for Keith, she died of lung cancer in 1990, at the age of 73.
C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny)
Left, from Getty Images; right, Pari Dukovic/FX.
The bluest of the bloods, C.Z. Guest was born Lucy Douglas Cochrane in 1920. The daughter of a prominent investment banker, Guest had an incredibly WASPy upbringing in Boston, à la her friend Babe. (Proof: She went by the nickname “C.Z.” because her brother used to call her “sissy” instead of sister.) Befitting her privileged upbringing, C.Z. had appropriate hobbies including horseback riding, gardening, and fox hunting; like her friends, Babe and Slim, C.Z. was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame. However, C.Z. had a bit of a wilder side than her clean-cut appearance would suggest. She appeared as a stage actress in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1944. She was also painted by Diego Rivera, Salvador Dalí, and Andy Warhol.
In 1947, C.Z. married Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, a British-American polo champion and, as his name indicates, a relative of Winston Churchill. Ernest Hemingway was the best man at their wedding. The couple had two children, Alexander and Cornelia Guest, and quite shockingly for the swans, they stayed married until his death in 1982. Guest would go on to have a popular gardening column in the New York Post before her death in 2003. She was the only swan to forgive Truman after “La Côte Basque, 1965.” It seems Guest really was the stand-by-your-man type.
Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart)
Left, from Getty Images; right, Pari Dukovic/FX.
Arguably the most famous of all the swans, Radziwill was best known for being the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, fashion icon and first lady to JFK. While she could have spent her entire life in her sister’s shadow—and, perhaps, she felt that she did—Radziwill was also a society figure in her own right. A New York City native, Radziwill, born Caroline Lee Bouvier in 1933, became a literal princess, marrying Polish royal Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill in 1959. They had two children, Anthony and Christina, before they divorced in 1974. (And yes, there’s another Real Housewives of New York City connection here: Radziwill’s son was married to former RHONY cast member Carole Radziwill.) In 1988, she married Oscar and Tony-nominated director and choreographer Herbert Ross; they divorced in 2001.
Even before “La Côte Basque, 1965,” Radziwill had a rocky relationship with her friend Truman Capote. He promised to make her a star, helping her get cast in the television play Laura, based on the 1944 movie of the same name. Radziwill, unfortunately, didn’t have the goods as an actress and was critically panned for her performance in Capote’s script. She never acted again. Yet Radziwill made it out of “La Côte Basque, 1965” relatively unscathed, especially when compared to her friends Babe and Slim.
