The fourth episode’s title, “It’s Impossible,” is a nod to the musical cue that’s threaded throughout this installment, Perry Como’s same-titled song, a haunting bolero whose sweeping romanticism is here tied to the beauty and elegance Babe Paley exudes, but also to the twinned love affairs she’s mourning and reframing as she faces her impending death.
The song opens the episode as Babe carefully makes herself presentable to the outside world. She puts on her makeup. She lays out and puts on her clothes. She chooses her jewelry. She makes sure her hair is just right. Only, as it turns out, to dispense with all of these accouterments once she arrives at the hospital for chemo. She dolls herself up only to let all of such vanity go. Such rituals, though, tell us a lot about Babe: she’s all but obsessed with appearance. There’s strength in it; but also a clear admission of vulnerability. None of it, after all, prepares her for the news that she has but a few months to live. The tumor is not shrinking; radiation doesn’t seem to be working.
Watts has long been an actress who excels at these kinds of scenes where beauty and anguish are but indiscernible, where a pursed lip can tell you a heartbreaking tale about a woman’s limited options laid before her. It’s clear the diagnosis rattles Babe, but rather than break her, it makes her more resilient; more orchid than magnolia, she’s steely nonetheless. And in that resilience, she begins wondering whether she should forgive Truman. Truman, who is now busy, is apparently hoping to throw a sequel to his Masquerade Ball as a peace offering to his swans, whom he hopes will all come together for good old times.
Not, of course, if Slim has anything to say about it. Driven by a zeal that’s turned the California beauty into a cruel viper of sorts (hearing her ask Truman if he’s been axed from the lollipop guild may be the single best read of the series so far). She insists all the swans stay away from the party and do anything they can to foil it. “He’s a cockroach!” she yells at them as C.Z. shares Truman’s party plans while they all lunch together. It’s there that Babe wonders if she shouldn’t forgive him and attend the ball: “The real gift goes to the person doing the forgiving,” she tells Slim, admitting that such a gesture may have more to do with how tired she is of fighting, especially with so little time (not that she tells her friends that).
That would be easier if Truman were easier to love and easier to forgive. But yet again, we find him drinking himself to the brink of death — and being on the receiving end of violence at the hands of his lover, O’Shea. “Fucking you is like fucking a fish!” he yells at Truman before punching him. Like many an addict, this new low leads him to rehab, with some help from his longtime partner, Jack. Might it stick? C.Z. and Joanne Carson sure hope so; they tell him as much when they visit him weeks later at the facility he’s at and see how much he’s thriving — or so he tells them and himself.
No matter, Slim is intent on still destroying him. What’s going to happen when he finishes his book? When it is her, C.Z., and Lee who end up at the end of his piercing gaze? Such venomous attacks — which include planting blind items to further isolate Capote — make a lot more sense when we see she’s sleeping with Bill Paley! She’s a liberated woman enjoying the freedom that affords her. And the two have found one another in their shared anticipated grief over losing Babe soon. Lane is having a ball playing Slim, finding grit in her effortless style and a viciousness that’s quite becoming. To see her playfully banter with Bill, you can see why she so easily lets herself betray her friend (and why she so wants to avenge her when it comes to Truman). There’s a buoyancy to their banter that Babe could never compete with.
This all comes crashing down when Lee (Calista Flockhart, doing some of her best work) sits Slim down and confronts her with the bombshell admission that she knows what’s happening between Bill and her. Who else knows? “No one,” Lee replies. “No one who doesn’t love you.” Gossip yet again becomes both currency and ammunition, the very way in which these women interact with one another, the very fuel with which they operate. And so Slim opts to end it with Bill. Still, how will she manage to face Babe after such a betrayal?
As ever, Babe is one step ahead. Dancing with Bill along to Como’s “It’s Impossible,” she all but tells him he knows he’s sleeping with Slim. She wants him to be happy when she’s gone, and Slim would be a perfect fit, no? There’s a lot unsaid as the two dance together in their home.
Such placid domesticity is not, alas, what Jack finds when he goes to visit Truman and check in on him mere days after he’s come back from rehab. Rather than catch him at his typewriter, finishing Answered Prayers as he’d promised, as he’d hoped, he’s in bed again with John, drunk and ashamed and yet spiraling into his own pathetic merry-go-round of desperation. It’s sad. It’s tragic. And it’s too much for Jack, who leaves. Maybe helping someone like Truman is futile. Or, in Como’s words, “It’s Impossible.”
But Como’s song and lyrics may well describe the final scene of this episode. As Truman and Babe separately speak to their therapists about wishing and daydreaming about what a possible reunion could look like, director Gus Van Sant first makes us think they may be talking to each other. But then, as a newly sober (again!) Truman walks through the city with Kerry O’Shea (John’s grown-up daughter whom he’s taken under his wing); he spots Babe staring at the black and white dress in a window. Might he approach her? Should he? He does, of course. And Babe, driven perhaps by the forgiveness she’s hoping to gift herself, addresses the writer with tenderness. They’re both civil, perhaps too much so. But that’s all they have left, especially since they won’t have a ball to reunite for; Truman’s opted to cancel the party. It is best not to repeat oneself. Better yet, never look back.
In one gesture of grace and generosity, Babe asks him if he’s still writing. “I’m trying,” he replies, leading her, with grace befitting the image Truman had always conjured for her, to answer him in turn with encouraging words: “It is the most important part, the trying. Because whoever really succeeds in the end?”
Readers of Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Leamer know that such a meeting never happened. Capote never did encounter nor talk with Babe following his Esquire piece. Is Feud rewriting history, or are we here witnessing a kind of shared romanticized fantasy of a would-be encounter? Is it impossible, really, to think they may have chanced upon one another this way? Feud has toyed with us in moments when Truman lets his fantasies trickle into the real world — is this a similar instance?
Wit vs. Beauty
• Speaking at the end of the episode, Capote refers to himself as a Prometheus, being punished for stealing fire from the gods (goddesses, in this case, perhaps). Only no eagles are ravaging him every day, just vodka.
• The episode is dedicated to Treat Williams, who died last year. The SAG and Emmy award-nominated actor gets arguably the most affecting moments of this episode, not to mention the pivotal line of arguably the entire series so far: “Do any of you say anything outright?” he explodes at Babe, acknowledging just how much was unsaid in every one of the interactions of the moneyed elite — between spouses, between friends, and even between frenemies.
• Known as the Grande Dame of Dish, Liz Smith may only appear as an ancillary character in this week’s episode, but it’s key she was crucial to further alienating Capote from his social circle. Here’s the column C.Z. reads in brief at Capote’s rehab, Truman Capote Plans Pity-Party of the Century: “In an act of desperation, disgraced author Truman Capote is reportedly planning a second act to his famous black and white ball. The alleged party, to some, is seen as a futile attempt at winning back the hearts of New York’s elite, whom he scorned in his recent tell-all, “La Côte-Basque, 1965.”
• Q: Would one really want to attend a party where the guest list included Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, Barbra Walters, and Walter Cronkite? Does that sound fun at all? How about if you added Ed Koch? Or Jodie Foster?
• “You are the most important person in the world for me, Truman.” Trust Joe Mantello to know how to break you with the simplest of lines.
• With the line “He’s also hung like a Pegasus!” I started to wonder if Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is hitting some sort of record around how much talk of dick and balls a prestige TV series can pack into any given episode.
• Fun fact: Como’s “It’s Impossible” is the English cover of Armando Manzanero’s classic bolero, “Somos novios” (“We’re boyfriend and girlfriend” or “We’re dating”), which, more pointedly, perhaps, than Como’s version, hints at the romantic ties the song hinges on.
• I want to take a moment to credit Tom Hollander with pulling off quite a difficult balancing act in playing this version of Truman Capote, who swings so wildly between being the belle of the ball and a drunken mess. What I keep thinking as I watch the show is how Hollander’s height, and the way the show keeps stressing just how diminutive Capote was, adds to the sense that he was a child at heart — in ways both good and bad. At times, he’s a spoiled, petulant brat; at others, he’s mom’s favorite; he’s a teacher’s pet and a class clown. It’s easy to reduce Capote to a caricature — that’s mostly how he built himself in the eyes of the press and his readers — and so to pierce through that to find a man whose own contradictions were central to how asked others to see him, is nothing short of extraordinary. Hollander is always hilarious and makes Truman’s bon mots feel rooted in a brazen desire to be liked but also to be protected lest you lose that source of entertainment.
Manuel Betancourt , 2024-02-15 04:14:40
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