Feud: Capote vs. the Swans is all about Tom Hollander’s Truman Capote taking on the upper crust of Upper East Side society. But it just as easily could have been about Capote’s relationship with his longtime nemesis, Gore Vidal. The sixth episode in the series, “Hats, Gloves and Effete Homosexuals,” delves into Capote’s intense rivalry with that other famed midcentury queer author, which came to a head when Vidal sued Capote for libel in 1975 due to a salacious story Capote told about Vidal at dinner with the Kennedys.

Maybe Capote and Vidal’s mutual disdain stemmed from their many similarities. Both Capote and Vidal opted to skip college. Born in 1925, Vidal joined the military after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy. Capote, meanwhile, took up a job as an assistant at The New Yorker when he was 17. The position, in Capote’s opinion, was “not a very grand job,” but sufficed because he was “determined never to set a studious foot inside a college classroom,” he later wrote. “I felt that either one was or wasn’t a writer, and no combination of professors could influence the outcome. I still think I was correct, at least in my own case.” Later in life, Vidal would become a major donor to Harvard University—though he never attended it—leaving his entire fortune to the university.

Higher education or not, it soon became clear that both Capote and Vidal were writers. They quickly joined the literati, with Capote bursting onto the national literary scene with his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and, of course, In Cold Blood. Vidal, a truly prolific writer, would first find success in the 1950s writing mystery novels under a pseudonym before moving into other genres. His play The Best Man was nominated for six Tony awards in 1960, including best play, and his satirical 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge, about a young woman working at an acting studio in Hollywood, was groundbreaking for being one of the first novels to feature a main character undergo gender-confirmation surgery.

Capote was openly, if not particularly proudly, gay. Vidal had sexual relationships with both men and women, and pointedly didn’t identify as gay. Instead, he rejected the label on the grounds that there “was no such thing as being ‘gay,’ only gay sexual acts,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Vidal’s voracious sexual appetite was public knowledge; he wrote in his memoir, Palimpsest, that he’d had more than 1,000 sexual experiences by the time he was 25. In a 1969 issue of Esquire, he elucidated his thoughts on sexuality and sexual expression. “We are all bisexual to begin with,” Vidal wrote. “Homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime…despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three.”

Similarities aside, Capote and Vidal’s animus was long-standing, well-documented, and well-known in their elite circle. “You would think they were running neck-and-neck for some fabulous gold prize,” legendary playwright Tennessee Williams once said of the pair. Both men did nothing to dispel notions that they weren’t fond of each other. “Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success, to get out of,” wrote Vidal in Palimpsest. Capote wasn’t much kinder. “I’m always sad about Gore,” Capote once quipped. “Very sad that he has to breathe every day.”

Things reached a boiling point in 1975, when Vidal sued Capote for libel. Capote had insisted that Vidal was thrown out of the White House for being “drunk and obnoxious” at a party President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jackie O had thrown for Jackie’s sister Lee Radziwill and her husband, Prince Stash Radziwill. Capote told this story to Playgirl magazine, and Vidal was seeking $1 million in damages. Capote countersued. 

Despite publishing his infamous bridge-burning story “La Côte Basque, 1965” that same year, Capote sought refuge with one of his beloved swans: Radziwill (played on Feud by Calista Flockhart), with whom he had danced the night away at his Black and White Ball nine years prior. Capote claimed that although he wasn’t present for Vidal’s alleged ousting, he had heard the story from Radziwill, and that she was going to sign a deposition saying so. But Capote’s trust was wildly misplaced. 

Radziwill did sign a deposition—for Vidal. But in it, she claimed that she didn’t remember telling Capote the story about Vidal behaving badly at the White House. At the time, Sally Quinn of The Washington Post reported that Radziwill told a New York gossip columnist that she had no intention of getting mixed up in business between two…well, you know. 

“Well, you know what they are,” Radziwill said, according to the Post. “They’re just a couple of fags and this is just a fight between two fags. I think it’s disgusting that we have to be dragged into it.”

That gossip columnist happened to be Liz Smith, a.k.a “the grande dame of dish.” In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, Smith recalled the incident, saying that she called Radziwill and tried to intervene on Capote’s behalf. But Radziwill “threw him to the wolves.” 

“When I called her and said, ‘Lee, you really must testify for Truman,’” Smith remembered, “she said, ‘Oh, Liz, what do we care; they’re just a couple of fags! They’re disgusting.’ I was so stunned, I just hung up. I’ve never spoken to her since.” (Smith died in 2017; Radziwill died in 2019.)

According to The Washington Post, it wasn’t Radziwill’s refusal to intervene that really got Capote. Instead, it was “the fag thing.” Capote would go on to disparage Radziwill to reporters like Sally Quinn, and on The Stanley Siegel Show—divulging details from her personal life, like her alleged jealousy of her elder sister Jackie O. “If the lovely, divine, and sensitive Princess Radziwill has such a low opinion of homosexuals, then why did she have me for a confidant for the last 20 years?” Capote told the Post. “I would say that from 70 to 80% of Lee’s friends and Jackie’s friends are homosexual. When [Rudolf] Nureyev hears that, I dare say he’ll not be amused.”

“This whole thing is a literary Watergate and Gore Vidal is Richard Nixon,” Capote told the Post. “The Princess Lee Radziwill is Deep Throat in more ways than one.”

Radziwill’s refusal to sign the deposition wound up being the nail in the coffin for Capote. He lost his friendship with the princess, as well as the lawsuit. But Vidal’s victory was Pyrrhic: By the time he won the lawsuit in 1983, Capote had no money. When Capote died a year later in 1984, Vidal called his death “a wise career move.” (Vidal himself died in 2012.) So much for burying the hatchet. 

This post has been updated.