Editor’s note: The below contains light spoilers for Episode 3 of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.
The Big Picture
Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball was a lavish event hosted in 1966, attended by the upper echelon of Manhattan. The guests wore black and white attire along with masquerade masks, and the party was given in honor of Katharine Graham. Capote’s publication of a chapter from his never-published book Answered Prayers would eventually lead to his downfall in New York society.
The second season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series, Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, has returned after a multi-year hiatus, serving up the salacious gossip of the mid-century New York elite. The show centers around the real-life feud between author Truman Capote and his posse of high-society women, known as his Swans. Feud: Capote vs. The Swans spans the years 1955 to 1984, starting from Truman Capote’s (Tom Hollander) first meeting with his number one swan Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), and ending with Capote’s eventual betrayal and subsequent fall from grace. Years before the publication of the article that would end Capote’s social world, however, the writer hosted his famed Black and White Ball. As the show’s third episode, “Masquerade 1966,” centers around this event, here’s the true story about the famed Ball and its impact on history and Capote’s legacy.
Feud
An anthology series centering on famous feuds, including Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and Truman Capote and the New York elite.
Release Date March 5, 2017
Creator Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen, Michael Zam
Main Genre Biography
Seasons 2
Studio FX
What Was Truman Capote’s “Black and White Ball”?
Image via FX
Truman Capote’s famed Black and White Ball took place on Monday, November 28, 1966, at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. The “little masked ball” hosted 540 of Capote’s “closest friends” from the upper echelon of Manhattan society. Among those invited included the likes of Frank Sinatra, Andy Warhol, and Henry Fonda, to name a few. Capote was fresh off the success of his recent novel, In Cold Blood, and at his career peak in 1966. Published that same year, In Cold Blood documented the gruesome murders that rocked the community of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. Much of the book’s content comes from Capote’s own interviews with the killers, giving birth to the modern true-crime genre. The monetary success of the book allowed him to fund the $16,000 ball, which is worth around $150,000 in 2024 dollars.
Guests who attended the ball were required to wear black and white as well as masquerade masks. The guest of honor at Capote’s Black and White Ball was Katharine Graham (as played by Marin Ireland in Feud), the then-recently widowed head of the Washington Post. (It would have been in poor taste at the time for Capote to have thrown the party in his own honor.) Regardless, the party has always been most associated with Truman Capote, and it has become part of the cultural zeitgeist. The New York Times once dubbed it “the Best Party Ever,” and there was even a book published in 2007 by author Deborah Davis titled Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball.
“I felt a little bit that Truman was going to give the ball anyway and that I was part of the props. Perhaps “prop” is unfair, but I felt that he needed a guest of honor and with a lot of imagination he figured out me.”
-Katharine Graham to Esquire Magazine
Part of the allure of the Black and White Ball was that so many groups of people that would normally not be in the same room were together. There were artists and socialites, authors and royals. Capote even invited some residents from the Kansas town he stayed in while writing In Cold Blood. This is not to say that this was not an event by and for the upper crust of society, but the mixture of the backgrounds of these 540 guests is an important part of the event’s allure and legacy. Today, recreations of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball have been thrown by the likes of celebrity chef Ina Garten, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, and the controversial hip-hop mogul Sean Combs.
How Does Capote’s Black and White Ball Fit Into This Season of ‘Feud’?
The third episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans centers around the iconic Black and White Ball. While the episodes of the show bounce around between different periods, much of the previous episode, “Ice Water in Their Veins,” took place about 10 years after the ball. So viewers will be hopping back to before Capote’s exile and when his relationship with the Swans was at its peak. Capote’s esteemed Swans, a group of Manhattan socialites with whom he surrounded himself, were all in attendance at the Black and White Ball — yet none of them were the guest of honor, which was bound to have ruffled some feathers (pun intended).
The episode features Hollander’s Capote publicly calling socialite Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) a murderess at his party, a reference to the story he told in a previous episode of how Ann secretly killed her husband and framed it as a burglary. It is this story, alluded to in Capote’s infamous excerpt “La Côte Basque 1965,” that drives Woodward to suicide in the show’s first episode. And it is “La Côte Basque 1965,” a chapter from Capote’s never-released novel Answered Prayers, that is the impetus for all the events of the series. This same chapter, published in Esquire in 1975, causes Babe Paley and her fellow Swans C.Z Guest (Chloë Sevigny), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), and Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart) to ultimately turn their backs on Capote completely, icing him out of the society he worked so hard to become a part of.
With just eight episodes of the show, series writer Jon Robin Baitz is forced to be picky about what is and isn’t included in the story this season, so every scene must count. The Black and White Ball will likely be no exception — a purposeful look into Capote’s mind at work planning and executing his grand event. In typical Capote fashion, the Black and White Ball was not just a grand party, but also a social experiment in which different characters from New York society were brought together under one roof. While glitz and glamour are alluring, those alone cannot be enough to underscore the staying power Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball has had.
Feud: Capote vs. The Swans premieres new episodes Wednesdays on FX which are available to stream next-day on Hulu.
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