Truman Capote had more swans than FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans would have you believe. Perhaps because Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart), C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), and Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) were the “friends” most assailed in his infamous Esquire takedown, “La Côte Basque, 1965,” and/or most toxically entangled in his thrall, they get top socialite billing in the series. (Or maybe it’s just because one unhappy rich white woman starts to resemble the other after enough free-flowing luncheon champagne.)

But in real life there were three other women whom Capote counted among his swans, according to Laurence Leamer’s book Capote’s Women, on which this season of the anthology drama is based. And each was every bit as fabulous as the above.

Gloria Guinness

Capote considered three women to be the greatest beauties of his time: the film star Greta Garbo, his best friend and favorite swan Babe Paley, and Gloria Guinness, the fabulous, four-time-married socialite of mysterious origin. “When I first saw her, I thought that I had never seen anyone more perfect: her posture, the way she held her head, the way she moved,” said Capote.

Guinness’s backstory was always a point of confusion. (“All that is known reliably about the origins of Gloria Rubio von Furstenberg Fahkry Guinness is that she was born in Mexico to a left-wing newspaperman,” wrote The New York Times. “Very possibly she was a German spy during the Second World War.”) As for her upward ascent: When she was 20, by some reports, she married a 47-year-old director of a sugar refinery. When she was 23, she married a German count. (During this marriage, according to Leamer, she had an affair with the same Nazi official who romanced Coco Chanel.) When she was about 32, she married into Egyptian royalty—wedding the grandson of King Fuad I. And when she was about 39, she married Loel Guinness, a member of Parliament, scion of the Guinness banking family, and fabulously wealthy. (“As luck would have it, [he] had recently been left today’s equivalent of $2.39 billion in his father’s will,” snarked the NYT.)

From the Archive: Bye Society

With an estimated clothing budget of $250,000 a year (at least $1.5 million today), Guinness regularly topped best-dressed lists and was such a fashion icon that Harper’s Bazaar agreed to run her style columns without editing them. (This is how the women’s magazine came to call Jesus Christ “elegant,” in both the physical and spiritual senses.) She took the job so seriously that she held a 1970 press conference during which she touted a column and dazzled reporters with her wit.

Asked to name her favorite charity, she replied, “myself.” Asked about women’s liberation, she said, “If we get equality with men we’ll be as stupid as they are.” Asked about her sense of humor, she said it’s “the only reason my husband is married to me. I’m too expensive otherwise.” And she did not mince words about her innate sense of style: “I know I’m well-dressed. I learned how to do it in the days when I couldn’t afford to make mistakes.”

Guinness and her husband famously kept a portfolio of homes around the globe—including a Manhattan apartment in the Waldorf Towers, a Paris townhouse, a Palm Beach mansion (complete with a bowling alley), and a farm in Normandy. They traveled by private jet or, when necessary, helicopter. Speaking about her various home bases, she said, “So many people think it is difficult keeping all these homes, but I believe it is easier to keep five than one. You can’t possibly spend twelve months at any one place.”

She set off fashion trends, including turbans, black mink coats, and capri pants, carried herself with panache, and was the subject of fawning newspaper profiles. (In 1966, she met a fashion reporter at Cote Basque, the setting of Capote’s 1975 society crime, and thought nothing of taking pills at the table that she pulled from a Fabergé jewel.)

She aspired to do more though—namely write about subjects beyond fashion. In 1962, she told a journalist she was writing a play called “Why Must Women Have Children?” “It will probably be absolutely lousy,” said Guinness, herself a mother. “The producer I showed my first play to looked at me and advised: ‘Burn it.’ But I’m enjoying it. I’m having a marvelous time.”

Her husband, already jealous of the focus she pulled in every room, essentially told her to pick between him and her vocation. So she went about her fashion magazine career with typical stylishness.

In 1964, Guinness took Truman to see the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston heavyweight championship fight, an event she was covering for Harper’s Bazaar. “When Gloria and Truman walked down to their ringside seats at Miami Beach’s Convention Center, they looked as if they had dressed for a christening…Gloria was five feet nine and a half inches tall, and with the added height of her heels, she stood above most in the massive crowd,” wrote Leamer. “Truman considered her one of his swans, and she did appear an exotic bird that had landed ringside by mistake and would soon fly off again soon…. The photographers had come to take pictures of the fight, but some of them were so drawn to Gloria and Truman…they focused their cameras on the spectacular couple at ringside.”

One of Guinness’s friends shared an anecdote about the writer and this particular swan at Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel that spoke to their shared sensibility. “Behind the bar was a giant glass wall. It was the wall of the pool, and while you were sitting at the bar, you could see what the swimmers were doing underwater,” she said. “They would swim by, and though they didn’t know it, we could see that they were urinating in the water! It was absolutely awful, and I wanted to leave. But Truman and Gloria thought it was hilarious. I couldn’t drag them away.”

Pamela Harriman

“There was hardly anyone in Truman’s social world as notorious as Pamela, and that made her even more intriguing,” wrote Leamer of Harriman, a socialite famous for bagging a number of rich and powerful men including Edward R. Murrow, Whitney fortune scion Jock Whitney, Prince Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, and banking heir Baron de Rothschild. “Truman was going to anoint her a swan—a black swan, perhaps, but a swan nonetheless. Truman thought about sex the way Pamela did. It had very little to do with morality at all.”

To that end, Harriman wasn’t above going after the other swans’ husbands. She notoriously stole Slim Keith’s husband Leland Hayward, a stage producer, when Keith and Hayward were 11 years into their marriage. (“Slim didn’t want Leland,” Harriman said at age 72, defending her actions. “She was bored with it.”) Bill Paley, the philandering husband of Babe, was also on her lovers’ list—though the timeline of that liaison is unclear.

From the Archive: The Prime of Pamela Harriman

“Babe and her sister Minnie vowed to fight eternally against ‘that bitch’ Pamela, while Babe’s other sister, Betsey, stood in support of the soon-to-be new Mrs. Hayward (despite the fact that Pamela had slept with her husband, Jock Whitney, during World War II),” wrote Leamer. “Truman was convinced Betsey took Pamela’s side simply because she was relieved that she no longer had to fear that the British seductress would again come for her husband.”

The British-born Harriman began her upward social ascent at age 19 when she married Winston Churchill’s son Randolph at the start of World War II. She soon became pregnant, and spent the duration of the war—with Randolph away, in service—living with her new father-in-law at 10 Downing St. It was because of his connections that Harriman met many influential people of the time, and it was during that first marriage when Harriman encountered and fell in love with the man who would become her third husband: Averell Harriman, the heir to a railroad fortune. 

Despite her later-year accomplishments—after fundraising for the Democrats, Bill Clinton appointed her US Ambassador to France—she was remembered as “the captivating woman who snared some of the world’s richest and most attractive men on two continents, marrying three of them” by The New York Times in her obituary. “Taught, as were most girls of her class, that her goal was to marry well, she developed an exceptional ability to beguile men. She enveloped them in her attention, anticipated their every need and locked on them with adoring eyes that suggested genuine interest in their every word.”

She was also known for her quid pro quo relationships with some of her married paramours; before Harriman married Averell, the tycoon reportedly gave her a yearly allowance of at least $20,000. While “dating,” the married Agnelli let her use an apartment in London. (“The wives of Pamela’s lovers had varying reactions to her,” wrote Newsweek. “The most noteworthy was Liliane de Rothschild, who bashed her car into Pamela’s Bentley.” The report continues, “In Pamela’s world, the most desirable men were spoken for—but she didn’t let that stop her.”

“I think I’ve lived through ever screw she ever had in her life,” Capote cattily said, according to Leamer. “Believe me, that’s an Arabian Nights tale of a thousand and twelve.”

In 1992, a New York writer asked her about her reputation as a gold digger and a courtesan. She replied, “It’s really been very unfortunate for me that people like Averell and Gianni, that I’ve been in love with, happen to be rich. I happen to totally believe if they hadn’t had a penny I would have still been in love with them.”

Marella Agnelli

Dubbed “the European swan numero uno,” Agnelli was the wife of Fiat king Gianni Agnelli. She had the distinction of being one of the youngest swans, given she was about a decade younger than Babe Paley and Slim Keith. Capote spent some summers on the Agnelli yacht, where he once told Agnelli that his long-awaited Answered Prayers was “going to do to America what Proust did to France.”

For years, she could not bring herself to even mention Capote by first name. “Capote despises the people he talks about,” she once said. “Using, using all the time. He builds up his friends privately and knocks them down publicly.”

Agnelli hosted Capote at some of her 10 homes—flung as far as Turin, Rome, Milan, New York, St. Moritz, and Marrakech, and with art collections that included Picasso, Renoir, and Matisse. The Agnellis yachted up and down the Amalfi with John and Jacqueline Kennedy, bringing Capote along with them on other yachting excursions. 

“One friend who relished being part of our summer cruises in the Mediterranean was Truman Capote. I had met him in New York in the early 60s, and we became friends. Gianni liked him, too, finding him amusing and good company. Truman claimed to love yachting, but he was actually very lazy and hated anything active, like jumping off boats and going for long swims or sightseeing. He had very fair skin and couldn’t stand the sun much, and so he spent a lot of time during the day in his cabin reading…. One time I said to him, ‘Truman, you must come with us at least once to see some of the amazing ruins.’ And he said, ‘Oh, forget it. One old stone is just like another.’”

“At the time he felt invincible,” Agnelli wrote in her memoir. 

Agnelli may have been the only swan to publicly describe Capote’s betrayal and her consequent heartbreak. “During the 1960s, I regarded Truman as one of my closest friends, perhaps the closest. Being warm and amusing, he had the talent to get close and intimate,” she wrote in her 2014 memoir, Marella Agnelli: The Last Swan. “I found myself telling him things I had never dreamed of telling anyone. He was able to create a deep sense of intimacy. But he was waiting like a falcon.”

Per a 2014 Vanity Fair piece excerpting Agnelli’s memoir:

Agnelli writes that she tried to dissuade Capote from publishing his planned exposé when he read her a few chapters while cruising the Mediterranean on her boat, the yacht Sylvia. “What he was writing was very shallow, and I remember getting quite cross with him one day, saying, ‘Oh, Truman, this is a gossip column. What are you getting yourself into?’” She writes that after the scandal that met the publication of his book, she “often thought that his famous Black and White Ball, which took place in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza hotel in November 1966, was a way of gathering together all the characters who were going to be a part of his novel.”

When Capote invited Agnelli to a lunch in 1970, she realized that the connection she thought he shared only with her was one he had with many women. She writes, “We all found ourselves suddenly part of a large group of friends who had more or less the same relationship with Truman. He called us his ‘swans,’ but now it seemed there were just too many swans. Some of the swans I didn’t even like that much. I had always thought my relationship with Truman was personal. The intimacy, the laughs, the giggles . . . I thought it was a special friendship between Truman and me, unaware he was also giggling and laughing with Babe or Gloria or Slim. When I told him, ‘Strange, I thought I was the only swan,’ he answered only, ‘Oh, well, darling. . . .’ ”