In episode one among Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) will get a drink thrown on him by Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) throughout lunch at La Côte Basque. He is aware of it’s coming: “Why does she maintain watching me?” he slurs to his eating companions, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), C.Z. Visitor (Chloe Sevigny), and Slim Keith (Diane Lane). “Perhaps since you maintain telling everybody she’s a murderess,” Slim replies.

“You fucking little piece of shit,” Ann says to Truman. “You suppose you don’t know? I do know what you’re saying about me. You’re telling those who I murdered my poor late husband? That’s slander and libel!”

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is a fictional present, however it’s primarily based on true occasions reported in Laurence Leamer’s 2021 ebook, Capote’s Girls. And within the case of Capote and the so-called murderess Ann Woodward, the real-life story is probably much more tragic.

Ann Crowell and William “Invoice” Woodward met on the Copacabana nightclub in 1943. He was a current Harvard graduate serving within the navy, she a dancer within the refrain line. They married quickly after. Within the postwar years, the 2 lived lavishly: Invoice, the multimillionaire director of Hanover Financial institution, owned an Higher East Facet city home, a farm in Maryland, and a 60-acre property on the North Shore of Lengthy Island. Collectively, the couple bred and raced horses, attended glitzy charity galas, and went big-game searching in Africa. This was all removed from the place Crowell grew up, on a farm in Kansas. (She had moved to New York Metropolis to be a mannequin after graduating highschool.)

Jealousy ran rampant between Ann and Invoice. They employed non-public detectives to spy on one another and sometimes received into blow-up fights: “Affected by an acute sense of insecurity and flickering suspicions, Ann Woodward generally created volcanic public scenes together with her husband. In [the Manhattan nightclub] El Morocco one evening, she scratched Invoice Woodward’s face till it bled, after he pulled out a handkerchief with a lipstick stain on it,” learn a 1955 article in Time Journal.