The author’s prolific life and feud with high socialites is now cemented in Ryan Murphy’s new limited series. If you’re watching Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, you might be wondering if Truman Capote was gay in real life.
Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is based on the bestselling book Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Leamer. The series stars Tom Hollander as the acclaimed author Truman Capote. It features his relationship to New York housewives known as his “Swans” that include Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), and C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny).
On why he wanted to create a limited series about it, he talked about how “It was a story about ambition, friendship, and writer’s block,” Murphy told Town & Country. “It was a story about how you top yourself, and whether you even can. And it was, at its core, a story about relationships between men and women, specifically gay men and their girlfriends. A feud is never about hatred; a feud is about pain, always. For the show to work, there had to be a great split that was about heartache as opposed to hatred, and Babe and Truman were at the center of that.”
So was Truman Capote gay in real life? Read more to find out.
Yes, Truman Capote was gay in real life. He was open about his sexuality when homosexuality was heavily frowned upon. It was an integral part of his identity. In the latter part of his life in “Music For Chameleons, he said, “But I’m not a saint yet. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius.”
Truman Capote lived with his life partner and fellow writer Jack Dunphy for the majority of his life. Dunphy described their relationship as pretty independent in his book My. He told Axion Grafix, “that I never lost myself in him, as so many people do in relationships: they tend to lose themselves in the other person, to become one, I was very different from him. He would always accuse me of never spending money, which he loved doing. Another thing that assisted” their thirty years together “is that I never wanted what Truman wanted. Although we lived together, we lived rather separate lives. For instance, I would like to go to a Shakespearean production.”
Dunphy praised his partner in The New York Times for his intelligence. “The thing I was amazed at with him was the strange immaturity of the people around him. But he’s very immature in certain ways. He’s startled by flash and brilliance and power.”
Dunphy told The New York Times that the two didn’t have any shared friends. “But if we had,” he said, “he would not have been the man I love. Jack has the most integrity of any man I know. He is my family. Jack would never abandon me.”
After the author’s death, Dunphy received royalties for Capote’s books until his own death.
Tom Hollander has spoken about how he’s been reached out for particularly gay roles in recent years such as Quentin in The White Lotus season 2.
“I have been asked to play several gay characters over the years,” he told Vanity Fair. “I’ve played Bosie [Dogulas] against Oscar Wilde, I’ve played Guy Burgess, I played the character in The White Lotus. People keep asking me to do it because apparently when I play these characters, it’s believable. And that’s, in a way, where my job begins and ends. If people don’t believe it when they watch you, it’s the most difficult thing in the world, if it doesn’t work. If it works, then it works. For some reason, who I am, who I am as a person allows me to present as gay. Yeah, sometimes I do present as gay.”
He continued, “I’m somebody that walks into a room and there are some people who walk into the room, you go, ‘Well, they’re not gay,’ and, ‘They are gay.’ My own sexuality is sufficiently liberal to have encompassed many different experiences, which are not anyone’s business. I certainly have not lived the life that gay men used to have to live. I have not lived that difficulty. I have not had to live in the shadows and been under the threat of going to jail for expressing my sexuality. As an actor, you have to be able to imagine something and do it with seriousness and take it seriously, approach it with sufficient sort of solemnity and plausibility, and then you imaginatively put yourself into those shoes. That’s what it is. I mean, it’s true of playing any part. You are rarely playing yourself. You are always pretending to be something that you are not.”
Hollander also touched upon the “issues of representation.” “There are types of actors that have not been given sufficient chances to play great parts. All of these things are in the process of being revised and improved and changed, and that’s all absolutely right. At the same time as that movement is happening, what shouldn’t be sacrificed is the sort of basic fundamental principle of actors being able to play things that they are not necessarily, because then that’s not art. If an actor’s body is their canvas, my body is my tool—the painter uses a canvas, the actor uses their own body—so within that definition of acting, there has to be the possibility of transformation. And sometimes the most interesting, creative work comes from where somebody who is not something is coming up against it, and it’s the fizz of that—the joining of two that makes it interesting.
Truman Capote was a celebrated author who wrote books like Breakfast At Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood.
He was close friends with fellow writer Harper Lee of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. Capote turned to the wealth and fame excess of high New York socialites for inspiration in his work in the 70s. He based his novel Answered Prayers on the secrets of “The Swans,” such as constant infidelity. However, to much of his discovery, The Swans turned his back on them and their once strong relationship became very tumultuous.
“He was just trying to, in his warped mind, say: ‘I understand how awful it’s been for you, I’m your only friend; I’m your savior; I’m going to tell the world… You will be the heroines of your lives,’” Judy Green, a friend of Capote’s said to Buzzfeed News. “It’s much more an attack on the men than it is on the women. He really hated the men and adored the women. Of course the women were the ones who fought back and thought it was horrible.”
For more about Truman Capote’s Swans, you can’t miss Answered Prayers , his unfinished book that was published posthumously; the preview of which was published by Esquire led to his exile from New York high society. It includes such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead, as well as cunning beauty and nasty husbands. “What did they expect?” Capote famously said after the controversy. “I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”
