The Women of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Are Birds of a Feather

The first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” aired in 2017. A juicy survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo “The Crown.” Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.

“It’s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,” Murphy said in a an interview earlier this month. “But feuds are never about hate. They’re about love.”

Then Murphy read “Capote’s Women,” by Laurence Leamer, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection “Portraits and Observations,” was to offer “the imaginary portrait precisely projected.”

Leamer’s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, “the very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,” Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)