• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, March 13, 2024

Image above: Naomi Watts as Babe Paley.

I’m grateful to the dissenters who commented on my past column about “Oppenheimer and the Bomb.”

I had critiqued the writer/director for not showing the devastating human effects of the Hiroshima bombing in his three-hour blockbuster. 

But as the now-Oscar-winning Christopher Nolan told the press, “I keep reminding everyone, it’s not a documentary. It is an interpretation. That’s my job.”

We forget, when we process these important films as gospel, that they are as much about the people who made them -- and when -- as they are about the actual characters and their own histories.

Indeed, this question of whose art, truth or history it is came up in reviews of the buzzy FX series. “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.”  Its eighth and final episode breaks tonight.

While many reviewers loved the dazzling visual experience of the series, they also slammed it for anachronisms and inaccuracies, both large and small.

Of course, any elaborate Ryan Murphy production comes with added fantasies and even some phantasmagoria.

Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, who wrote the series, defended his vision when he recently told Town and Country, "I often think that truth is just a guess. I don't think there's such a thing as empirical truth ever when it comes to human beings.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Babe Paley’s granddaughter Belle Burden furiously charged that her gran’s life was once again “stolen and twisted” by the TV producers, who never consulted the family -- just as Capote, the social gadfly and “In Cold Blood” author, had stolen and twisted her grandmother’s story.

The series focuses on “La Cote Basque 1965,” Capote’s deeply dishy story published in 1975 as an excerpt in Esquire magazine.  It was promoted as one  of the chapters in his forthcoming book, “Answered Prayers,” which never materialized before his death in 1984.

 La Cote Basque was the name of the tony French boite on the Upper East Side, the ritzy cafeteria where in real life, Capote often lunched with his “swans” in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Much of the action of the first few episodes takes place there, as Capote gossiped with the exquisite Babe Paley, (“ Mrs. P had only one fault: she was perfect,” he said) along with such other well-known mid-century female figures as Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest and Lee Radziwill, Jackie O’s sister.

Capote’s Esquire story cruelly divulged a too-lightly fictionalized version of many of the deep dark secrets of upper-class misbehavior that the women had shared with him. It sent shockwaves through those power haunts when it came out, and many of the Swans -- but chiefly his favorite, Baby Paley (the wife of CBS Chairman of the Board William S. Paley) -- stopped speaking to Truman, which in the end killed him.

Capote cut Babe, the Swan he loved most, to the quick by revealing the mortifying story of one of her husband’s infidelities. 

The series shows her returning from Paris and walking into the menstrual-bloody aftermath of a tryst Bill Paley had in their own bed.

 “I walked off the Concorde and I walked into that,” she tells Capote, which is an anachronism, since the Concorde didn’t start flying until 1976, and the affair happened years before Capote exposed it in 1975.

There’s another anachronistic howler in the opening episode having to do with CBS. Capote meets Paley for the first time on the founder’s private plane as he, Babe and their friends are jetting down to the Paley villa in Jamaica.

Capote is charming the group with his banter. At one point he gets into a story so juicy he tells Paley to get his “boys from 60 Minutes on it.”  This was supposed to be the late 1950s, and the first episode of “60 Minutes” didn’t air until 1968.

Paley is depicted as a womanizer and rotten husband, which he was. But of course, he was more dimensional than that. When Babe confides in Truman that she wants a divorce, he advises her not to do it, telling her “He’s the most powerful man in America. Fuck Richard Nixon, it’s Bill Paley.”

For media mavens, there’s nothing in the series about how Paley got to be a master of the universe, going from cigar salesman in his Ukrainian immigrant father’s business to inventing the first radio network, and then combining a bunch of tiny TV stations to found and build the Columbia Broadcasting System into the “Tiffany” network.   

Part of his success came from his natural sense of what people wanted to hear and see. He probably would have been amused by “Feud.”

After all, we are watching the streaming series through the language and lens of 2024, while Capote’s fabricated recollections were of what happened to New York society figures of the 1950s and early 1960s, even though he put 1965 in the title of an excerpt that appeared in 1975. 

I Googled after every episode to attempt to determine truth from fiction. The fun part is, there’s many existing videos of Capote in action.

There was one middle episode of “Feud” that covered Capote’s famous Black and White Ball of 1966. It’s shot in black-and-white with perfect period detail by director Gus Van Sant,  as if it had been shot and directed by the respected 1960s documentarians Albert and David Maysles.

 How many layers of illusion is that?

And yet, through the magic of film, “Feud” manages to convey some essential truth.  I’ll be watching tonight to see what happens to the characters that I think I’ve come to know and judge.  But as Baitz said, is there empirical truth when it comes to human beings?