To make a television series like Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, there’s an awful lot to get right. First and foremost, there’s the story of the legendary falling out among Truman Capote and his glittering group of friends—women like Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, Ann Woodward, and Slim Keith—whom he betrayed with the publication of "La Côte Basque, 1965," but there’s also the jewelry, the Black and White Ball, the love affairs, and, of course, the interiors.
The series, airing now on FX and Hulu, relies heavily on the spaces these characters inhabited—from the Paley’s Billy Baldwin-designed apartment in the St. Regis to La Côte Basque itself and the Plaza Hotel—to help tell the story of who they were and how they lived. And none of the details were left to chance.
“We’ve lived in this world before,” production designer Mark Ricker says with a laugh. He and set decorator Cherish Hale have worked on Ryan Murphy productions before, including Halston, and are familiar with the kind of lives these series portray. “The way this works is that we only had the pilot episode, so we were certain about how to start. But the trick we’ve discovered with a limited series is that you have to know what’s going to come before you have all the scripts; what are we going to have to build to depict the lives of these people?”
There were a few givens. “We knew that the Paley apartment and Truman Capote’s [UN Plaza] apartment were going to be included, and the restaurant as well,” Ricker says, “but it’s a constant state of anticipating what’s coming.”
There’s also the delicate dance of depicting history without recreating it precisely. “The Paleys apartment was a known entity, similarly to Halston’s Paul Rudolph townhouse,” Ricker says. “For me and for Cherish, getting right certain details that we know will be key elements—like the taxi-yellow colored room and the Billy Baldwin draped canopy room—helps you find the anchors, and then you're given more license to deviate.”
Some things were shot on soundstages, others used stand ins (like the restaurant Daniel subbing for La Côte Basque). There were also sets that served double, or even triple, duty. “We found one mansion, this brilliant place that I'd scouted for Halston that wasn't really right for that, that we used initially as Ann Woodward's house,” Ricker says. “We flipped it three or four times; we turned it into Happy Rockefeller’s New York apartment and later Slim Keith’s. Later, bedrooms became dining rooms because living rooms, depending on how we shot them. It was a puzzle, but having that location was a golden moment.”
Another concern for the pair was what would go inside of those rooms. “The Paley apartment looks amazing,” Hale says, “but a lot of it isn’t antique furniture. Some of it is reproduction, some of it is antique, but we did our best to give it the look within our limitations.”
How does one do Babe Paley on a budget? “We did do a lot of shopping at places like Kaiyo, which is basically an online thrift store,” Hale says. “Sometimes you don't know what something is going to look like until it shows up, but sometimes it's great. We didn't rent that much on this job, but there was quite a bit of online shopping—even on Facebook Marketplace.”
Not everything could be sourced, however. In order to recreate Capote’s Manhattan apartment, the team was able to shop for pieces to portray his collections of paperweights and embroidered pillows—not to mention the viper figurine that sat on his coffee table—but other things needed to be created. “We went into his real apartment and shot the backing,” Ricker says. “A lovely woman lives there now, and she invited us in for a day and we set up our cameras and we got photographs of the exact view that he had from his unit.”
The team also had to use their imagination when it came to creating spaces for Slim Keith. “There was very little out there when it came to photos of her” in her own spaces, Ricker explains. “We had that mansion out in Long Island, and there was a beautiful room there that we turned into Slim's office. It just felt right for her to have put her in a darker, more masculine environment based on the details that we read about her.” Hale adds, “that was based on one photograph we had seen of her wearing a burgundy riding coat. We made a guesstimation about what her personality would be based off of this one photograph.”
Their guesses seem to have been right more often than not. In one instance, a portrait of Capote was recreated by a staff painter and hung on the wall of his apartment to great effect. “Tom Hollander took that painting home,” Hale says. “That was the one request that he had, that he was able to keep that painting.”
Adam Rathe is Town & Country's Deputy Features Director, covering arts and culture and a range of other subjects.
