Jon Robin Baitz achieved fame as a playwright at a young age, earning praise and awards for works such as “The Film Society,” “The Substance of Fire,” and “The End of the Day.” He went on to write a number of other successful works while also branching out into writing for film and television, notably creating the long-running ABC series “Brothers & Sisters.”
More recently, he was paired with Ryan Murphy for “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” the second installment in the super producer’s FX anthology series, following 2017’s “Feud: Bette and Joan.”
Baitz, showrunner and sole writer of the new “Feud,” loosely based its eight episodes, which involve the final years of famed “In Cold Blood” author Truman Capote and his tense friendship with a circle of New York high society women. York (His “Swans”), on Laurence Leamer’s 2021 book “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era.”
The series is marked by its sharp writing, direction and period recreation, as well as Tom Hollander's indelible turn as the troubled Capote and the stellar list of actresses (including Naomi Watts, Diane Lane and Chloë Sevigny) who vividly inhabit the “swans.”
Baitz, 61, phoned in from his Manhattan home (he divides his time between New York and California) for a quiet, reflective chat with The Envelope about his latest project.
How did you choose to structure and tell this period of Capote's life story? How much did you trust your source material?
We were more interested in this particular moment and topic, which is the last part of his life when essentially the chickens came home and left him in a kind of desperate situation, confused by pharmaceuticals and alcohol, terribly alone and losing friends There is not an incredible amount of literal transposition of material from [Leamer’s] book to screen. A lot of it is this meditation on the friendship that lives between the lines of the book.
“We really felt that this material was a way to explore aging, friendship, loss and the love of friends, but also my continued interest in what it means to be a writer who takes life and uses it,” says the showrunner from “Feud”, Jon. Robin Baitz.
(Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)
The book is very good with a wide spectrum of facts. What lies behind the events is a kind of parade of great pain, and I think what Ryan and I were most interested in were the consequences. [of that]. We really felt like this material was a way to explore aging, friendship, loss and the love of friends, but also, at the same time, my continued interest in what it means to be a writer who takes life and uses it.
Capote was a notoriously difficult and polarizing figure, but also a fascinating one. How did you approach playing him?
With a kind of deep sorrow for him. Some of the people who knew him have commented that it is a very unfriendly portrait, but he had become a very unfriendly man in many ways. Mike Nichols, who he was friends with, told me that Truman Capote was the only man he had ever met in his entire life who told lies simply to hurt people. I thought about that descriptor and how you become one and the pain it takes to become Truman. I thought he was multiplied several times by Tom Hollander's infinite humanistic capacity for empathy.
What a phenomenal performance.
Really is. It was a blessing even though there were [have been] other kinds of wonderful iterations of Truman. I do think that Tom's, although he is the least understanding in many ways, is the warmest, paradoxically.
Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill and Tom Hollander as Truman Capote.
(FX Networks)
Did you discover any surprises about Capote along the way?
I think instead of that happening, I had a deeper idea of what is lost when one becomes desperate, and whether that despair includes the self-annihilation of alcohol and pills, and trying to hold on to a kind of fame that doesn't exist in particular. in the world of the 1970s and 1980s and onwards.
I saw it all as an avalanche of cautionary tales, in negative space: hold on to your friends, appreciate your friends, respect and honor them, and try to be the guardian of your own talent, because if you are blessed with For some, the time always runs.
Making it seem like I was working on a very long, heartbreaking novel.
I loved the episode where Capote spends the day with James Baldwin. But that never really happened, right?
No, I try very hard to try to convey that because there was a lot of ambivalence or jealousy even from Truman toward Baldwin. Kind of a strange energy from a gay man. [and writer] to another. I think Baldwin was more generous and more involved in his nature, but Truman was cruel to Baldwin in the role, which is just another example of Truman's lack of unnecessary generosity.
What do you think you brought to the table in writing this story now that you may not have brought to the table during your “child prodigy” years?
I think maybe my youthful disposition to judge characters has dimmed. My instinct about the answer to that, I guess, lies in the description of Truman and [friend and ex-lover] Jack and how much love he has for Truman and how forgiving he is. I suppose I now lean more firmly towards humanism than towards the special dispensation for the talented. I don't think genius benefits from being kind, and I try to live that way. I now find brutal behavior less stimulating and more worrying to write about. I think my voice is maybe a little sadder, older, kinder.
