Swan Song

We are enjoying watching the "Capote vs The Swans" series on TV, a fairly complicated look at the lives of the Fabulous People of Manhattan fifty years ago, and how many of the rich women in that group gravitated to Truman Capote for friendship and to have someone to drink with all afternoon while they waited for their cheating husbands to come home and have dinner as prepared by a chef. Not that the women didn't have affairs of their own, although certainly not with Capote.

Capote and his glam squad 

Capote was paid $25,000 for an article (“La Côte Basque, 1965”) that he wrote for Esquire magazine, and the frankness with which he detailed the sordid secrets of his coterie cost him his friendships with these women he called his "swans" for their slim elegance.  He only lived nine more years after his swift fall from grace. The man who revolutionized the world of writing by turning a Kansas mass murder into the first "fact as fiction" book, "In Cold Blood," and whose "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and other short stories were admired widely and emulated often managed but sparse written output after his social status was yanked out from under him. 

Gore Vidal said, "Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success, to get out of." Vidal settled into a productive lifestyle by stepping away from the glare with attracted Capote like a moth. Such a shame. 

But I wanted to say that the show shows these rich, rich people leading poor, poor lives.  All the drinking and carousing and infidelity and feuding and fussing is no way to live. One scene shows Babe Paley, wife of CBS boss Bill Paley, being helped into her pajamas and bathrobe by one of her maids. Imagine being so effete that you no longer perform basic, really basic, functions like that for yourself. No wonder these people turned to alcohol, gossip, and nattering on all the day with Truman Capote, while HE should have been researching and writing another great book and THEY should have been doing something worthwhile with their time, money, and influence.