Within the first episode of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Naomi Watts’s Babe Paley and Chloe Sevigny’s C. Z. Visitor greet one another in entrance of a restaurant known as La Côte Basque. They don’t take away their big sun shades as they kiss on the cheek—a safety towards the flashbulb of a paparazzi’s digicam capturing their arrival. In the meantime, Tom Hollander’s Truman Capote sits in an idling cab outdoors. “Hold the meter working,” he tells the driving force. “We don’t wish to go in fairly but. Timing is every thing.”

A couple of minutes later, Capote makes his personal grand entrance, guaranteeing that everybody additionally sees who he’s sitting with. It is a lunch, it’s clear, that’s as a lot concerning the firm because the delicacies.

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is a piece of fiction, nevertheless it’s primarily based on precise occasions described in Laurence Leamer’s 2021 e book Capote’s Girls—and the oft-referenced La Côte Basque was an actual restaurant and societal temple that has gone down in historical past.

When Elaine Stritch sang of the “women who lunch” in Stephen Sondheim’s Firm, she most likely meant the patrons of La Côte Basque—the final word spot to see and be seen in Sixties New York. (It was seemingly John Fairchild and his workers at Girls’s Put on Every day who coined the phrase; they did, in any case, used to ship photographers to attend outdoors its doorways at 5 East fifty fifth Avenue, hoping to catch regulars like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Frank Sinatra, or the Duchess of Windsor streaming out and in.) On strolling inside, company encountered a grand room with seascape murals, wonderful tablecloths, purple leather-based banquettes, and a really highly effective maitre’d. “At La Côte Basque, the place egos are boosted or wounded relying on what desk you’ve been given, you possibly can nonetheless begin out feasting on Jambon de Bayonne or Foie Gras des Landes ($8 additional) and sail into Jarret de Veau Braisé à l’Estragon,” Vogue reported in 1971. (Certainly, fluent menu French was a prerequisite: patrons dined on genouillés provençale, délices de sole des gourmets, and contre filet rôti, no English translation supplied.)

But at La Côte Basque, the style usually outshone the meals. Girls used their lunches to indicate off their newest purchases from Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, and the ateliers of Paris. Within the December 27, 1960, concern of The New York Instances, an illustrated article depicted the appears of varied girls on the restaurant, which included semi-fitted tweed fits, fur hats, alligator luggage, and a “well-known Dior raincoat of poplin, lined in mink.”