Norman Mailer once recounted the story of getting a drink at an Irish bar in Brooklyn with Truman Capote to one of the author’s many biographers. It was back in the 1950s when the borough was still a working-class haven, not the playground for the expendable-income set it is today, and the place had attracted an earthy crowd.
Yet, Capote made no effort to mask his effeminate mannerisms or deepen the high-pitched Southern whistle that made his voice so distinctive. No, he was obviously, unabashedly homosexual at a time when that could land you in jail or, in this case, the wrong end of someone’s fist. As the patrons glowered back at them, Mailer remembered being “very impressed with what it cost him to live like that.”
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Tom Hollander, whose monumental task it was to wade through the psychic shell casings of the author’s life in the FX series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” says that story helped him access the effete Capote’s steely core.
“How courageous was he?” Hollander, whois calling me from a train station in Italy, says, raising his voice above the dinging of a distant bell. “He was like a warrior and the difficulty and loneliness of being that openly himself must have taken a toll.”
To transform into Capote, Hollander spent two months with a movement coach, Polly Bennett, “walking up and down these church halls” in London. “I needed to find his center of gravity and to get comfortable with it, so I wasn’t thinking too much,” he says.
He worked with a vocal expert, Jerome Butler, to capture Capote’s creaky, slightly nasally speaking style. On set, Hollander listened obsessively to interviews with the writer to nail the proper inflections. “It’s like learning a dance step — you have to go over and over it until it becomes natural,” Hollander says. “You break it down and it’s all quite technical. And eventually, it stops being technical because it’s in you and you’re able to express emotions through it. You can’t do that if all your energy is going into getting the accent right.”
In “Capote vs. the Swans,” the emotions that Hollander is asked to evoke run the gamut. The show chronicles the writer’s professional and personal highs — the publication of “In Cold Blood,” his legendary Black and White Ball — as well as his punishing lows, namely Capote’s descent into alcoholism and the social ostracization that followed the publication of excerpts from “Answered Prayers.” That (never-finished) novel committed the unforgivable sin of pulling back the curtain on high society to reveal their infidelities, rivalries and dirty secrets. The loss of friendships with the likes of Babe Paley (Naomi Watts) and Slim Keith (Diane Lane) that resulted helped accelerate Capote’s drinking. He never published another novel.
“In a way, the performance that he gave of being the great raconteur, who was so witty and clever and charming, became exhausting,” Hollander says. “And he started to lose the discipline required to really write, where it’s just you at your desk with your typewriter. It can be a lonely life.”
“Feud” landed 10 Emmy noms, with Hollander earning some of the best reviews of his career. But he relates to the anxiety that Capote must have felt as his powers faded, and the fear of failure grew more all-encompassing.
“As actors, you understand the fragility of it all,” says Hollander. “You keep moving forward because you need the affirmation. You need to keep impressing people, but you know how hard that can be to achieve.”
But the experience of playing this literary icon over the decades-long span of the show was, for Hollander, one of the “two or three best” of his professional life. When shooting wrapped, he struggled to let go of Capote.
“He became my friend,” says Hollander. “You spend every day for six months walking down this road together and then you have to wave goodbye. Not to sound pretentious, but when you’re acting, you’re resurrecting these people, and it’s a great honor to become someone so much cleverer than yourself.”
