Truman Capote has cashed in on his friends' secrets. It cost him everything.

In 1979, five years before he died and four years after his banishment from the Upper East Side social cockpit, Truman Capote appeared on a talk show as a friend to the common man. The host, David Susskind, remained unconvinced. “You're always on people's yachts” and in “big mansions on Long Island,” he noted. 'The hassle in Spain with the running of the bulls from Pamplona.' Come on.

Capote gave up and fell into defending his affection for the moneyed class. It had come to define him as much as his written work, production of which had notoriously stalled after the publication of “In Cold Blood” in 1966. “I like rich people,” said Capote, “because they don't always try to to borrow something from me.”

The joke came from the bush and was unintentionally poignant. When Capote wasn't on loan, he was there – at the rarest parties and dining rooms, as a favorite guest in Cap Ferrat – to be traded. The terms of the exchange were relatively simple: his humor and company, his brocade stories and dazzlingly foul mouths, exchanged for the devotion of the thin, beautiful, unhappily married women, up and down Fifth Avenue, who still wore white gloves along Stonewall wore. and Woodstock, beyond Watergate and the fall of Saigon.

This world and the writer's place in it are with the advent of “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” an eight-part television series on FX. The impressive cast includes Naomi Watts, Demi Moore and Diane Lane as women who kept their subversions in bed, slept with men who were not their husbands, and had lunch with Truman – “Tru” – Manhattan's most celebrated gay confidant.

Whatever implicit contract existed between them was breached with very unfortunate consequences in 1975 with the publication of Capote's “La Côte Basque, 1965” in Esquire magazine. A short story that hardly conforms to form, it was intended as a chapter of 'Answered Prayers', the novel that became famous and was left unfinished.

At just under 12,000 words, the story is all talk, plotless and full of vulgar cruelty. Capote had betrayed his friends who, perhaps naively, did not consider themselves that way material. And he had done it in the service of a piece of literature that reads in language and sentiment like a set of meeting notes for an episode of “As the World Turns.”

Those closest to him were the angriest: Babe Paley, wife of CBS chairman William Paley, and the former model Slim Keet, whose identity was barely hidden. Some women, like Gloria Vanderbilt, were mentioned outright. Esquire paid Capote $25,000 for the story, but the costs to him were incalculable, beginning with his expulsion from a world he seemed to value above all others and ending with a descent into the drug and alcohol addiction that left him at 59 died at the age of 10. .

“His talent was his friend,” as Norman Mailer put it at the time. “His achievement was his social life.”

It's a challenge to look at “Feud” from the perspective of a culture that focuses so much on the blood sport, where billionaires come at you on social media. with book-length accounts of their narcissistic wounds. The work is to understand how valuable discretion remained for a certain group of people in New York in the mid-1970s, as the city and the country fell apart. What may seem like virtue can also be read as unconscious self-esteem.

It was actually the women outside Capote's immediate circle who were held up for the most scathing and misogynistic assessment in the Esquire story — for example, the character known as “the former governor's wife,” one who had an affair had with William Paley. Capote calls her “slightly pigish,” then “a domestic animal,” then “an insane size 10 Protestant.” Although Mrs. Paley may have been inclined to lean into the schadenfreude that would come from such a description of her husband's mistress, she was instead activated by the humiliation. She died of lung cancer in 1978 and never spoke to Capote again.

The greatest emotional damage seemed to be inflicted on Ann Woodward, a World War II-era showgirl who had married into a prominent New York banking family. She was only an acquaintance of Capote's and one he did not particularly like. In the fall of 1955, Mrs. Woodward shot and killed her husband in the middle of the night on their Oyster Bay estate, believing him to be a burglar.

A Nassau County grand jury ruled it an accident. Capote decided that was not the case, even though someone eventually pleaded guilty to attempting to rob the Woodward house the night of the shooting. The tragedy was over, but 'La Côte Basque' immediately revived it twenty years later, with an account of a woman, 'Ann Hopkins', whom Capote characterizes as 'raised in some slum', an ex-wife . -call girl and bigamist who kills her husband after he discovers they were never technically married and she realizes she would have more money as a widow than as a divorcee.

In mid-October, just as Capote's story was about to disappear, Ms. Woodward committed suicide in her uptown apartment. Although she had had a difficult life and there was no way of knowing why she did it, many speculated about the connection.

Esquire's editors had no idea of ​​the impact 'La Côte Basque' would have. “They just didn't know what they had,” Alex Belth, who manages the magazine's archive, told me recently. This was evident in the cover choice for that song, which featured comedian Rich Little.

When Esquire bought the story in the summer of 1975, it was reasonable to assume it would not resonate. A lot happened. In June, police officers began showing up at New York airports to hand out “Welcome to Fear City” pamphlets, warning newly landed people not to take public transportation or walk around after 6 p.m. On October 17, the morning news broke that the city would declare bankruptcy within hours if it could not pay the $453 million it owed its creditors. The national unemployment rate was about 9 percent.

That would have been easy to forget, two years after the birth of People magazine—at a time well into the sexual revolution, when formality had been wholesale abolished, when labor leaders were celebrated, when once-dominant social hierarchies were democratised, then Elaine displaced the established French restaurants as the place to be seen – that 'society', in the most sclerotic sense, continued to exist, however irrelevant it seemed outside a very narrow field.

“Feud,” written by playwright Jon Robin Baitz and directed by Gus Van Sant, relies almost entirely on interior shots, presumably because the reality of the outside world seems confusingly intrusive, compromising the possibility of sympathy for people's grievances and obsessions. who seemed so little concerned with it. Capote may have inadvertently alienated his friends, believing they would find his account of their banter hilarious. Or at least that they would be wild enough to forgive him if he was offended.

It was also possible that he wrote the story as an act of revenge. The portrayal of the women in such superficial terms conveyed the attraction and aversion to big money that generations of literary figures have had. As much as Capote craved the attention of these women, he ultimately saw them as uncaring, terrible mothers.

Regardless of Capote's motivation, the story surrounding his painful exile, which has already been the subject of books, documentaries and a library of reported pieces, continues to persist. At its core, it suggests the limits of a certain kind of containment. As a limiter you may reach the top, but you are actually always on a probationary period. Capote prided himself on being able to see so many things at once, observing lives and worlds from every angle. When he missed, he couldn't live with his mistake.