\n<\/p>\n
The first season of Ryan Murphy\u2019s \u201cFeud\u201d<\/a> aired in 2017. A juicy<\/a> survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of \u201cWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,\u201d<\/a> the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana\u2019s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo \u201cThe Crown.\u201d<\/a> Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,\u201d Murphy<\/a> said in a an interview earlier this month. \u201cBut feuds are never about hate. They\u2019re about love.\u201d<\/p>\n Then Murphy read \u201cCapote\u2019s Women,\u201d by Laurence Leamer<\/a>, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection \u201cPortraits and Observations,\u201d was to offer \u201cthe imaginary portrait precisely projected.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Leamer\u2019s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, \u201cthe very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,\u201d Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz<\/a> and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became \u201cFeud: Capote vs. The Swans,\u201d<\/a> an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)<\/p>\n Tom Hollander<\/a> (\u201cThe White Lotus,\u201d Season 2) was cast to play Capote at the height of his \u201cBreakfast at Tiffany\u2019s\u201d and \u201cIn Cold Blood\u201d fame and then long past it, stumbling over deadlines in a fog of vodka, cocaine and tranquilizers. When it came to casting the show\u2019s bevy of Swans \u2014 Babe Paley, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill, Ann Woodward (a wannabe Swan) \u2014 Murphy had one thought: \u201cI wanted icons to play icons,\u201d he said. \u201cWomen who were iconic and had some degree of fame and success would understand what it was like to be Swans. I thought they would know the gravity and also the stress of being a star.\u201d<\/p>\n He and Baitz made a list of their first choices for the roles, and perhaps because Murphy has almost single-handedly enlarged the possibilities for actresses over 40, all of those first choices agreed. (\u201cHe\u2019s masterful at casting the stars or the fallen stars or the forgotten stars,\u201d Van Sant, who directed six of the episodes, said of Murphy.) Which explains why, on a recent afternoon, my laptop screen was filled with a supergroup of film and television stars of the 1990s and beyond: Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chlo\u00eb Sevigny, Calista Flockhart and Demi Moore.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt feels like a sisterhood for actresses,\u201d Lane<\/a>, who plays Keith, said, beaming at her co-stars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There is some irony, of course, in asking women who have done so much \u2014 made countless movies and shows, produced others, won a shelf of awards \u2014 to play women who did so little. Indifferent wives and dubious mothers, Paley, Guest and their ilk were famous for making best-dressed lists and hosting dinners that someone else had cooked. Women who were born into money or married it, they were celebrated for the \u00e9lan with which they spent it.<\/p>\n Baitz found this poignant. \u201cThey were enslaved to their own mythology,\u201d he said in a separate interview. \u201cThey devoted themselves to something absurd. They devoted themselves to imagery and beauty and posing and being seen and society culture. That\u2019s a dead end. And that\u2019s why I care about them, because they\u2019re running into a dead end.\u201d<\/p>\n But the actresses don\u2019t see these characters as frivolous. \u201cThey all worked really hard to achieve this kind of status,\u201d Watts<\/a>, who plays Paley, said. \u201cThere were sacrifices made. There was huge discipline involved.\u201d<\/p>\n Anytime these women appeared in public, they had to be perfectly dressed, perfectly coifed, perfectly made up and manicured. \u201cIt was a full-time job,\u201d Moore<\/a>, who plays Woodward, said. \u201cThere were no casual sweatpants.\u201d Watts noted that Paley even went to bed in full makeup and with painful false teeth because she didn\u2019t want her husband to see her without them. Recreating Babe\u2019s look took several hours each day in the hair and makeup chairs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And there was arguably more to them than beauty. They had, the actresses playing them insist, a genius for life and a talent for self-creation. \u201cThere is an art to life,\u201d Lane said. \u201cAnd they understood that. There is an art to the dance of grace.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Murphy knew that the actresses he cast would be familiar with the pressure these women faced and that they could offer some of that same grace.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a group of women starring on our show who came up in the \u201990s,\u201d Murphy said. \u201cI don\u2019t think people remember the scrutiny of the press and how people would write about literally how much women weighed. It was very moving to see this group of women who had survived that. Survived and thrived.\u201d (In this regard, \u201cFeud\u201d is like a more glamorous \u201cYellowjackets,\u201d<\/a> another drama that benefits from the history and aura of its cast.)<\/p>\n Wisely, the women didn\u2019t want to talk too much about survival. (A video call with a stranger is no place to unpack trauma.) But they did acknowledge a familiarity with the burden of having to maintain a public face. \u201cIt\u2019s very brave to go out in the world knowing that you\u2019re going to be judged and scrutinized and picked at,\u201d Flockhart<\/a>, who plays Radziwill, said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Still Lane insisted that this was a burden that could be worn lightly. \u201cOnce you\u2019re experienced, you know how much you\u2019re supposed to be on duty or off duty or what\u2019s being asked of you,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Capote was attractive to the Swans because he could appreciate them both on duty and off. He delighted in their public performances \u2014 his persona was also largely self-created \u2014 while also recognizing the women underneath the Herm\u00e8s scarves and Mainbocher gowns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt worked for a period of time so beautifully,\u201d Watts said. \u201cThey got to perform. They had this constant, wonderful audience member who let them be seen. And they shared more with him than they did with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n But in November 1975, Capote betrayed that trust when Esquire published his short story \u201cLe C\u00f4te Basque, 1965.\u201d<\/a> A dishy, bitchy, wholly mediocre excerpt from his long delayed (and ultimately unfinished) novel \u201cAnswered Prayers,\u201d the story contained unflattering portraits of many of the Swans, disguised with only the loosest veils. At the time, Gerald Clarke, eventually Capote\u2019s biographer, had asked him if the Swans would recognize themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cNah,\u201d Capote replied, according to Leamer\u2019s biography. \u201cThey\u2019re too dumb.\u201d They were not too dumb.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Most of the Swans never forgave Capote. The women playing them were more sympathetic. They blamed it on Capote\u2019s alcoholism, his writer\u2019s block, even his literary gifts.<\/p>\n