Have you heard the story of Truman Capote’s downfall? That elaborate yarn about one of the 20th century’s literary lions double-crossing his closest friends, developing a terminal case of writer’s block, and slowly drinking himself to death? It’s the postscript in Capote, the 2005 film about the writing of In Cold Blood that’s drawn from Gerald Clarke’s biography about the writer. The 2006 movie Infamous, based on a dishy oral history by George Plimpton, ends with a similar summary. The saga was detailed in Sam Kashner’s Vanity Fair article from 2012, and again in Melanie Benjamin’s bestselling 2016 novel, The Swans of Fifth Avenue. It’s covered in the 2019 documentary The Capote Tapes, and it’s the central focus of Laurence Leamer’s 2021 book, Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, which is the source material for the new FX series Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans.
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