On Tuesday night, actresses, producers and television executives, many draped in black and white feathered gowns, trickled into the Plaza Hotel to celebrate the premiere of FX’s “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” a limited series starting on Jan. 31.
The show focuses on the schism between the novelist Truman Capote, played by Tom Hollander, and the coterie of New York City socialites he befriended. The women severed ties with Capote after a fictionalized excerpt from his unfinished novel was published in Esquire magazine in 1975, which aired some of their closest-held secrets.
Some of the society fixtures, whom Capote referred to as his “swans,” are played by a distinguished cast: Barbara “Babe” Paley (Naomi Watts), Nancy “Slim” Keith (Diane Lane), C. Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald) and Ann Woodward (Demi Moore). The series is based on “Capote’s Women,” a 2021 book by Laurence Leamer.
Around 10 p.m., following a screening at the Museum of Modern Art, more than 400 guests filled the gold-trimmed Grand Ballroom of the Plaza for a party inspired by the lavish Black and White Ball, which Capote hosted in 1966 in the same room, and is fictionalized in the series. The Times’s Charlotte Curtis reported that “international Who’s Who of notables” attended including Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow and the Maharani of Jaipur.
