Star Watch 3.09.23

Ella Beatty was spotted in Central Park recently for her first major film role in the FX anthology series, “Feud: Capote’s Women.

Benning, 22 years old, is the daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.

Benning is playing one of the women that celebrity writer Truman Capote betrayed in an effort to write his next big opus, a young model named Kerry O’Shea. In a not too thinly disguised Capote article in Esquire that triggered Capote’s banishment from many society circles in the mid-60s, her fiction version was named Kate Harrington

Capote, the bestselling author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966), his “nonfictional novel” was celebrity writer who for years was feted by the literary world and especially by the women of high society in the Big Apple in the late 50s and 60s. His high point on the society world was said by some biographers to be the Black and White Ball he staged in 1966 that drew 450 people including Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow and Lee Radziwill. But he was experiencing a major case of writers block as he tried to finish his next big book entitled, Answered Prayers. When he ran an excerpt in Esquire entitled “La Cote Basque” about the habits and sexual picadillos of the jet set, it was clear to most of the society doyennes at the time who Capote was really writing about. They saw their lives on public display in a not very favorable light as the not-to-well-disguised fictional counterparts in Truman’s nascent novel. Many of his one time “swans” felt betrayed and turned against Capote, who never did complete Answered Prayers.

The new FX film, the second in its “Feud” series, is based on the best-selling book, Laurence Leamer’s “Truman’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal and a Swan Song for an Era.”

The cast stars Tom Hollander in the title role and women stars, aside from Beatty, include Naomi Watts as Babe Paley, the one time Vogue editor who married CBS honcho Bill Paley, Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, and Calista Flockhart as Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

Capote had serious drug and alcohol problems during his later years before his death in August 1984, a month shy of his 60th birthday. While he did write again, he never reached the same heights as his two early bestsellers. He died of a diseased liver in the home of Joannne Carson, the ex-wife of legendary Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. His lifelong nemesis Gore Vidal called Capote’s death “a wise career move.”