In ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,’ Diane Lane Was Haunted by Slim Keith

Diane Lane whips out her copy of the same Slim Keith book I’ve loved for years: “Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life.” It details her love affair and marriage to Hollywood auteur Howard Hawks, how she befriended Ernest Hemingway when Hawks was wrangling the rights to “To Have and Have Not,” and her discovery of Harper’s Bazaar covergirl Lauren Bacall to play “Slim” in the movie, a character based on Keith.

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An entire chapter is devoted to her deep and loving friendship, during and after her marriage to uber-agent Leland Hayward, with gay novelist Truman Capote, who eventually betrayed her with his infamous Esquire article, “La Cote Basque 1965.” At that moment, as dramatized in the FX series “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” Keith (Lane) and her best pal, New York socialite Barbara “Babe” Paley (Naomi Watts), angrily turned their backs on Capote (Tom Hollander), who had used their intimacies to conjure up a portrait of their elite world that they did not like, at all. “I couldn’t believe that Truman would use his friends in such a destructive and evil way,” Keith wrote in her book.

“I feel beholden to her and wanted to do right by her,” said Lane, who earned her third Emmy nomination for this role. “And I keep reading all the things about her: ‘Well, she didn’t include that in her book, and she didn’t include that.’ If you had privilege, if you were a female, if you were in the entertainment industry, if it was during a certain window of time, God forbid you should have standards or emotions, because you will be controversial.”

Keith was a woman of accomplishment and style, who could ride and shoot and design and build an impeccable home. “Her authenticity was forged out of necessity,” said Lane. “And it was such a rarified jewel to find in these jaded wealthy echelons. She was a spark of something that money cannot buy.”

When Hawks was searching for the right actress for “To Have and Have Not,” his wife “suggested Lauren, who is Betty,” said Lane. “She had her come out and stay in their home, and went through Slim’s closet and set the template for the costuming of the character. That androgynous chic was stepping away from the cliche of feminine and a bit more liberated. It might have come from all her hunting years, hoeing rows of vegetables, and working on Cannery Row. There was no shame in hard work. She wasn’t afraid of hunting with the boys and keeping up with the boys, and she made them feel at ease, because she didn’t play the helpless female. That was never her.”

Keith also buried her family wounds, like “the tragic death of her brother and her father, who was trying to force Slim to choose parents,” said Lane. Keith picked her mother. “That tells me so much about a person, about how and why she had the strength to stand up as strong as she did to Truman. She had muscle. ‘You’re not going to strong arm me and blackmail me and intimidate me and threaten me and become a boogeyman where before you were my hero or trusted confidant or friend or shared nurturance partner.’ She helped Truman out in so many ways.”

Lane goes toe to toe with Hollander in several confrontation scenes. “You just try to stay in the game with somebody who’s throwing the ball that hard,” she said. “It’s like tennis. I was given the world with Gus Van Sant and this writing. It’s like a call and response, call and response. So we’re responding to his call for more attention. Just more attention.”

Lane had fun on the eight-episode series, which was adapted by Jon Robin Baitz from “Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era,” written by Laurence Leamer. She and her costars, including Watts, Molly Ringwald, Calista Flockhart, and Chloë Sevigny, embody a group of entitled hedonistic East Siders.

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“When you’re recreating these moments in these scenes with all of these strong women,” said Lane, “it’s a Russian doll sensation of a world within a world within a world within a world. Once you’re fully in your shoes, but also prepared as actors, familiar with one another, in character, things wind up getting a bit of a lift. Gravity is less strong, and things take on an electrical quality, like you believe it yourself. It’s not heavy lifting, when you are bringing somebody to life that lived. It’s like a good haunting.”

But when you shoot a TV series, you don’t always get to read all the scripts in advance. On “Capote vs. the Swans,” Lane and her costars were operating on the basis of one or two scripts at a time. They were in the dark about where the eight episodes were heading. “The play is the thing,” said Lane. “And I’m not suggesting that we’re trying to be Shakespearean here, but the script was always the Bible. We have this much, we have the text. I can get fired, the director can fall out, the producer can change, three card monte can happen, but at least we know we have this. So if we’re not all unified or in the know, you feel extra vulnerable. You feel hoodwinkable.”

There’s a twist in Episode 4: “It’s Impossible,” that wasn’t in Keith’s book [Spoiler Alert]: her affair with CBS mogul Bill Paley (Treat Williams), her friend Babe’s husband. “There was no proof anywhere that anything like that had happened,” said Lane, “and I didn’t see a slip of gossip about it anywhere. And I combed pretty deep.”

When Lane asked the show creators about it, she got a “where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire” answer. “I can’t begrudge artistic license when you’re writing in the spirit of Truman Capote,” said Lane. “I’m sure there’s many iterations of his story. He was the man who said, ‘I’m not going to let truth get in the way of good story.’ Truman was really a station of the cross for a lot of people.”

What went wrong with Capote? “The slang is wet brain,” said Lane. “You’re such an alcoholic that your judgment is permanently altered. Portions of your personality are almost not retrievable. He had so much going on internally that he combusted inward. He imploded. He finally couldn’t hold back the flood of all that he had held at bay for so long: the act, the taking care of other people, the feeling unseen, till finally, it was like self-immolating in the town square.”

Adding to the stress was the fact that Lane was shooting two shows at once. She was also starring as Jeff Daniels’ ex-wife in the series ‘A Man in Full” in Atlanta. “It was a fun exercise for me,” she said. “Just getting from A to B, the nice thing is that you cannot teleport. So by force, you have a transitional moment, even if it’s a giant airport, and even if it’s missing your plane and getting the next one and going direct to set. There’s a Venn diagram of the calendar where at some points they do bump right up next to each other, and it becomes sort of Herculean.”

Lane is able to take a breath now. She just attended the Northern California celebration of Eleanor Coppola’s life, attended by some 300 people. Lane starred in Coppola’s 2016 feature directorial debut, “Paris Can Wait,” opposite Alec Baldwin. “Wow, I don’t know anybody who met her who didn’t love her,” she said.