Diane Lane on the Unfiltered Slim Keith, Her Betrayal and What the Real Swans Would Say About ‘Feud’ Season 2

[This story contains spoilers from the fourth episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, “It’s Impossible.”]

For Diane Lane, the entire premise of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans is full of complexity and layers.

As the FX series depicts the fallout from Truman Capote’s “La Côte Basque” — a chapter from his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, that was excerpted in Esquire‘s November 1975 issue that caused a giant rift between the acclaimed writer and his “Swans” — the actress can’t help but notice the irony that she’s playing socialite Slim Keith, one of the Swans that was outraged by Capote’s thinly veiled portrait of the elite milieu in which she was a part. “I imagine them sitting on a sofa, enjoying champagne and popcorn, and having the last laugh on all of us,” says Lane, who laughs at the meta nature of the show’s depictions of the secrets, lies and gossip shared between Keith’s wealthy cohort.

As a self-appointed Queen Bee of her group, Keith rushes to the side of Babe Paley (played by Naomi Watts), who is humiliated by Capote’s fictional portrait of her and her marriage to CBS exec William S. Paley (Treat Williams). In “It’s Impossible,” Keith goes on the warpath against their common enemy, planting stories in gossip columns to ruin Capote’s efforts to plan a sequel of sorts to his famous Black and White Ball in 1966.

But despite her intentions, Keith’s smear campaign is seen by her social circle — including Chloe Sevigny’s C.Z. Guest, Molly Ringwald’s Joanne Carson and Calista Flockhart’s Lee Radziwill — as too destructive, especially as Capote is in the throws of an alcohol dependency. Even Babe Paley, stricken with cancer, has already softened toward him and is considering offering her forgiveness.

But Keith is steadfast — and hiding a secret of her own, as it’s revealed in this week’s episode that she’s having an affair with Bill Paley while championing his wife.

Lane spoke with THR over the phone earlier this month to discuss the flaws-and-all approach to Slim Keith’s character, how she’s heard from people who knew Keith in real life (including Jane Fonda) and the emotional experience of watching her scenes with Williams, who died last June after filming wrapped.

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I’ve read that you and your costars were Ryan Murphy and Jon Rabin Baitz’s first choices to play your onscreen personas. Is that true from what you recall? 

That’s a direct quote from the man himself, and I’m not gonna look that gift horse in the mouth.

What about Slim made her an exciting character to sink your teeth into? 

She was — and still is — a beloved woman. What she’s famous for was that everybody wanted to hang out with her. And there’s something to be said for possessing certain qualities She said that her brain came alive around interesting conversation; some people just expand and their velocity increases, and it carries you along and it’s infectious. Truman had that quality, and I think she appreciated so much about his mind and his powers of observation. And he wanted her respect very much. So did Hemingway. This woman really was a heavyweight of discernment and represented growth from beyond humble beginnings.

I love her book [Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life]. We’ve heard her take on things, her appreciation of things, her love of love itself. She just left a very lovely trail behind her that I can see from her book. Now, she admits that she omitted a lot (laughs). She learned from her experience that it’s wise. Leave a kind trail behind yourself for your progeny. Do we really want to be remembered for scars and wounds and unforgiveness? I mean, all these women in the show learned so much from this experience. It really rang their bell in terms of coming to terms with somebody else defining you and allowing that to happen. Not allowing that to happen really takes great effort, as you can imagine, because the written word does outlive everyone.

Did you know much about Slim, the Swans, this moment in time before you signed on?

Not really. I would say I knew more about Truman, because of his youth-defying antics and carrying on. He was hanging out with disco dancers at the end of the ’70s. I recall him on television, humiliating himself. It’s just tragic to behold somebody who has great reverence… I don’t know what you’d refer to as. Is it like, a self-immolation at that point? Because there’s so much denial wrapped around addiction in those days people weren’t as keen to self analyze. So, he had another way of working it out, didn’t he? 

Slim’s voice is so specific in the show. How did you find how to embody her physically? 

She was very breathy and she spoke, it just sort of clicked. Where she put the emphasis on the syllable was not totally predictable — I was not able to bring that to the floor. I got to hear a recording of her, because her voice is part of the narration in a few documentaries that came out about Truman; she was a telephone interview, and the quality of recording was not fantastic. But I could feel her spirits in her voice. There’s something about the spoken word and the breath that makes people so interesting. I have an old cassette that I found last night of my mother, and wow. If you can hear somebody’s voice from history, I mean, it’s a gift. 

Having her book was like a cheat — her being able to respond to this injustice and not allow herself to be framed and filtered and funneled through it. You know, I don’t know how she would feel about this presentation (laughs). I really do not want to go there. It’s a funny truth that kind of contradicts itself: By putting myself out there as her, I go and ask for forgiveness to the ancestors, because you have to walk humbly when you’re bringing somebody who walked among us. And there are people who knew her who have reached out.

The communications from Jane Fonda, for example; Slim was a friend of their mother and stepmom. And other people I’ve worked with who knew Slim personally. It’s intense, because everybody’s still touched by her. That generation still has its wings around us. You don’t forget people’s impact upon you, and it’s wonderful to remember it, especially because, with the patina of time, the edges are often forgiven. Forgiveness is real and its effects are absolutely important. I love what Ryan says about feuds and the way he writes them: Feuds are about love. As Babe says, “You can’t really hurt somebody unless there was a love there.”

To go back to what you said about Slim omitting things from her book, I find she, as a character in the show at least, has a complex relationship with fact and fiction. I think of the scene where she gives Truman a real dressing down about the stories he made up in the Esquire piece, when he believes them to be the truth.

I imagine them sitting on a sofa, enjoying champagne and popcorn, and having the last laugh on all of us — and themselves. “Well, honey, they got that right.” “No, they exaggerated that! I would have done it this way…” “They left that part out. Aren’t we lucky?” All of this is lore and all of this really happened in various memories. I do think that what has been written is quite beautifully executed. 

Her relationship with Babe is also complex. Her feud with Truman is rooted in her protecting Babe from his betrayal. But she’s also betraying Babe herself by having an affair with her husband. 

That’s how friends were in the ’70s! (laughs) I mean, my mother had a girlfriend who burned her paintings. I should have inherited those. It’s incredible what goes on in the name of friendship — I’ve seen worse!

I’m curious what you think about Slim’s relationship with Bill and how she comparmentalizes it for herself. 

When you’ve been a close friend with someone and you’re like a family at this point, because you share family events and secrets and successes and failures — all the things that friendships buoy you through. When somebody’s stricken with bad health, the whole village gets together in a way to support the ones who need supporting. The caregivers need help, too, right?. It might be notoriously common among that generation of CEOs, those rich white men. He was voracious and had to stay moving. Sitting in one place and having an emotion is something that we get to witness as a daily experience.

But Bill is thunderstruck and beside himself. His journey is intense and beautiful, because we get it through Treat Williams’ artistry and compassion for a person. These people become icons, historically. It’s like looking at a statue — I look at a statue and I think about that person’s family who knew them really well. And who would be laughing right now that they have a statue? These people were human, and they were flawed like all of us, and in their own ways. What we’re dealing with here is a kind of freedom of perspective and a challenge to the audience to fathom what these people were thinking.

In the conversation she has with Lee, who calls her out on the affair, Slim says it’s more of a close friendship than a sexual relationship — and they both share a love for Babe during a time of crisis in her life. 

There was some commentary about when Babe died, what she left to her friends in her will and what she had left for Slim. In hindsight, through a very catty lens, people would say, “Oh, well, that’s a comment.”  People love to infer things. And I’m just gonna let it sit there because I really have no inkling as to whether these depictions are correct or not. You know, this is a different medium for me — I’m used to making films, where everybody has read the script and all the departments show up knowing what we’re doing. TV is a journey we take together as actors, and the story is revealed along the way.

You mentioned Treat Williams, to whom episode four was dedicated after he passed away last year. Do you have fond memories of working with him?

I’m still in shock. I’m still processing his loss to us. To have his work resonate so much through his character and in the work he did on this …  It’s incredibly exponentially more indelible, because of the fact that it was his last portrayal and he brought so much humanity. I think it might have been his best work, and he was having the time of his life. He was very buoyant on set. He was a source of joy for the work we do, and we had our own sense of humor with one another. To share that experience with him, I feel very grateful. And I know Naomi does. I mean, boy, their scenes together tore my heart out. I saw an early cut of this in May, and I was crying at the end of the episode, it was so beautiful. And then June happened, and we lost him.

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans releases new episodes on FX Wednesdays at 10 p.m., streaming the following day on Hulu.