As Joanne Carson in 'Feud,' Molly Ringwald strikes a California contrast with the Manhattan swans
NEW YORK — Molly Ringwald has a long-standing connection to Truman Capote: When she was about 3 years old, she appeared onstage in "The Grass Harp." Her character was referred to as Fig Newton — although she doesn't think that was in the script — and she didn't have any lines.
Still, it sparked an awareness of the writer at an early age and his powerful mystique. "It was one of those things where I was always interested in Truman Capote because I've known about him for so long," she says.
Five decades later, Ringwald has returned to where it all began in "Feud: Capote vs. the Swans," a drama — loosely based on Laurence Leamer's "Capote's Women" — about the writer's tangled, toxic relationships with a coterie of New York socialites he admiringly dubbed "the swans." The women, led by Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), largely shunned Capote (Tom Hollander) after the publication of "La Côte Basque, 1965," a barely fictionalized account of murder and infidelity among the Manhattan elite, in Esquire in 1975. The bitter falling-out hastened Capote's descent into drug addiction and alcoholism, and it may explain why he struggled in vain to complete
