| Truman Capote’s spiral toward self-destruction is often portrayed as a slide into alcoholism and drug abuse. But there was a literary plotline, too. In the mid-seventies, Capote—by then the celebrated but past-his-prime author of “In Cold Blood” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”—published “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a thinly veiled story about a gossipy lunch at a fancy Manhattan restaurant. Attending the fictional meal was a collection of shallow, backstabbing characters clearly based on the writer’s real-life circle of “friends,” a clique of socialites he called his Swans. Readers loved the story, and the Swans, emphatically, did not. The extravagant fallout forms the basis of “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” a star-filled Ryan Murphy series premièring this week on FX. In 1943, Capote was still a teen-age employee at The New Yorker—“sorting cartoons and clipping newspapers,” he later recalled—when he wrote “Summer Crossing,” a short novel that the magazine excerpted decades later, about a teen-ager struggling with a taboo attraction. Grady McNeil, who splits her time between family homes on the Upper East Side and in Connecticut, has fallen for Clyde Manzer, a parking-lot attendant from a distant part of Brooklyn. On the day Grady’s parents sail for a summer in Europe, she goes in search of Clyde, hoping to find affection from the attractive but moody (and N-word-spewing) young man. Together they venture to Central Park, and then to an empty apartment on Fifth Avenue. Like Capote, Grady seems to have dubious judgment, and an underdeveloped instinct for self-preservation. “Two or three times she was sure he had taken her car out driving, and once, after she had left the car there overnight, she had found lodged between the cushions a garish little compact, decidedly not her own. But she did not mention these things,” Capote writes. “She kept the compact and never spoke of it.” | 
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