Truman Capote couldn't have fully appreciated his good fortune while writing the true-crime masterpiece "In Cold Blood." By the time his so-called nonfiction novel was published with its many creative licenses-the two killers whose lives he'd dramatized had been executed; they couldn't talk back. He wasn't so lucky with his next major project, "Answered Prayers," which he claimed would be his magnum opus. In one of its chapters, published in Esquire under the title "La Côte Basque, 1965," he exposed close-held secrets of the friends and muses he called his swans: a set of graying socialites who'd achieved fashion-plate fame. They quickly closed ranks-and, in the decade between the excerpt's release and his death, in 1984, Capote failed to complete "Answered Prayers," or any other book-length manuscript.
His exile from Manhattan high society, and his accompanying artistic decline, is the subject of the new season of the Ryan Murphy anthology drama "Feud,"subtitled "Capote vs. the Swans." Capote's 1948 début novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," with its queer characters and famously naughty author photo, introduced him as a convention-flouting wunderkind. Those days of youthful defiance are long gone by the time "Capote vs. the Swans" opens, in the late sixties, with Capote (Tom Hollander) suggesting to his closest confidante, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), that there's no higher happiness than material comfort. After discovering that her husband, Bill, is engaged in his umpteenth affair, Babe is contemplating divorce, but Capote discourages it, citing her age and Bill's stature as the chairman of CBS. "You have a great life," he reminds her. "You have a house in Bermuda, a mansion in Coral Gables, the thing in London.
Esta historia es de la edición February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición February 12 -19, 2024 (Double Issue) de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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Reckoning with Donald Trump's return to power.
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Jadé Fadojutimi, a British painter, sees the world through a prism.
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President for Sale - A survey of today's political ads.
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll. There were few people on the streets-like the population of a lot of capital cities, Harrisburg's swells on weekdays with lawyers and lobbyists and legislative staffers, and dwindles on the weekends. But, on the façades of small businesses and in the doorways of private homes, I could see evidence of political activity. Across from the sparkling Susquehanna River, there was a row of Democratic lawn signs: Malcolm Kenyatta for auditor general, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, and, most important, in white letters atop a periwinkle not unlike that of the sky, Kamala Harris for President.
