The degree to which a reader enjoys Capote’s Women by the American biographer Laurence Leamer will very much depend on their appetite for tales of wealthy, beautiful and deeply miserable people. Mine, personally, knows no bounds, so this multipart biography of Truman Capote’s “swans” — the female socialites who fluttered around him for decades until he inexplicably betrayed them — was dream holiday reading. And the TV uber-producer Ryan Murphy must have felt similarly because he is adapting the book into a series directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Tom Hollander as the camp and cruel Capote, with Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny and Calista Flockhart playing the swans.
Almost 40 years after his lonely death at 59 from years of drug abuse,
