Feud’s Diane Lane on the Dual Tragedies of Slim Keith

In Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, Diane Lane is making a meal out of mostly having meals. As the tough California transplant Slim Keith, she’s a member of the show’s titular flock, spending their days at haughty liquid lunches at La Côte Basque before splitting off to ride horses, ignore their kids, or sleep with each others’ husbands. Though these lunches are mostly an excuse to push around food, shoot the shit, and split a bottle of wine, Slim seems to rule them with a velvet fist, bowing to Babe when necessary but laying down absolutes when it comes to who’s in, who’s out, and what the rest of the girls will or won’t do. Whether Slim’s adherence to the no-contact order against Truman is out of loyalty to her dying friend or Babe’s husband, Bill, with whom she’s having an affair, is unclear. But if Feud’s angry row is to be maintained, it’s because Keith has put the fear of God and expulsion into her friends — and even, it seems, into Babe, despite an occasional softness toward her old bestie.

Though much of the latest Feud focuses on the sympathetic relationship between Truman and James Baldwin, with the pair gallivanting around town and sharing natural-history facts over cod cheeks and just two cocktails, the glimpses we get into the hidden lives of the Swans through the pair’s conversation are eye-opening — as is the reexamination of whether or not the Swans ever really gave Truman a fair shake. Did they truly open their homes and lives to him, or was he a mere collectible of sorts, a funny gay artist to take off the shelf when they wanted to liven up their lives? “He was allowed to be in the room, and that was pretty much it,” Lane tells Vulture. “If he could be of service, they would use him.” And when they were done with him, as Slim says in the show, they could always just call Bill Blass.

Let’s start with the big question: What do you think possessed Truman to publish his piece about the Swans — or to think he could, in some sense, get away with it?
I don’t think motives are always crisp and clean, or at least clear enough that you can name just one. When a person feels like they’re leaning toward a decision, it can be because they weighed their priorities and the scale has tipped toward killing one thing so that the other can live. You can’t have it all forever, and you can only fool some of the people some of the time. Truman knew his status in the group wasn’t going to last forever. I also think there was some part of him that found the decision to be a bit adrenalizing.

I get sweaty just thinking about the scale of the duplicity: feeling one way about somebody while you act another way in front of them. That’s like being an assassin. You have to come to terms with a truth that is hidden away from others, and Truman had a strong muscle in that regard.

But you could argue that’s what the women were doing too. They played at being his friend, but they never really accepted him. He was an accessory. 
He was a guest and he knew it and he felt it. Occasionally, he could ascend the heights of being intimate, he could ascend to a higher level of trust, but these people have the whole façade of hierarchy in common, and he wasn’t a part of that.

There’s a line in the episode about how the elite use “gays for entertainment, Blacks for labor, and women for the men to look at,” which I think puts a pretty fine point on the whole thing. If you’re not one of the men making decisions, then you’re expendable in some sense.
It’s addressing the elephant in the room, and that’s exhilarating. Nothing is more important, I think, than the truth being spoken out loud.

In this week’s episode, James Baldwin says that it’s “impossible for an American white person not to be, in some fundamental sense, a racist.” Do you think that’s true? 
I think it’s wonderful to consider those thoughts and allow that idea to have oxygen. And it’s wonderful for people such as yourself to ask people such as myself what they think. I really have to think about it, and I appreciate the question.

You know, what I loved about James Baldwin as a young person growing up and watching him as a living, breathing part of our culture in the early ’70s was that he was so bracing and enlivening. As a young person, when the hair stands up on your arms and you feel the excitement of truth being spoken or broadcast into people’s living rooms, it’s wonderful. It was a breath of fresh air, and it was also a gasp of response, which I think certainly Ryan Murphy knows a thing or two about.

We learned last episode that Slim was allegedly sleeping with Bill Paley. Do you think her anger at Truman came from her love of Babe or from her interest in him? 
I think it’s left ambiguous intentionally because taking the leap into making the statement that this affair occurred is likely artistic license. I really can’t cast aspersions on past sex lives.

Before the season, Ryan Murphy and Jon Robin Baitz said in interviews that for a feud to actually be a feud, there has to be love present as well as hate. What do you think was between Truman and Slim, specifically?
All of the ingredients friendship has were present. Of course, there were boundaries and there were terms in the sense that this was relatively transactional, like, when are you invited and when are you not invited? But I can only speak to what I was fortunate enough to get exposed to right from Slim Keith’s pen. She had tremendous, joyous memories with Truman. They took trips together, and she helped him with his career. She was the first person to read all the drafts of In Cold Blood, so she was a source of nurturance for him. He knew how to make her feel important, and everybody wants to feel important.

I mean, that’s what you do with friends: You expose your need and appreciation of them, and that’s transactional in some sense, but to what degree? It’s not for me to pass judgment on, but when somebody does something that is utterly out of the realm of what is considered friendly behavior, it takes your breath away and you review your entire relationship. You wonder at which point this person became somebody you don’t recognize. Or was that always the case?

Does that, in some sense, make you understand her severity in shutting it down?
When Slim was a little girl, there was a tragedy in her home in which her brother died from a freak accident that involved being burned. Her father blamed her mother and banished her from the home and excluded her from their family burial plot. He also asked Slim to leave her mother and live with him, trying to seduce her with gifts and promises of things.

Slim was so hurt and shocked by that request from her father. She did not speak to him for years and years, until practically his deathbed. For this kind of thing to repeat in somebody’s life twice, where there’s a level of shock about what somebody very important to you is capable of? She had experience with this kind of betrayal, a previous scar. It was a very character-defining thing, and I think it’s part of how she came to know herself on those terms.

It does seem like Slim had a very strong level of self-assurance, considering her backstory is that she was this girl from Salinas, California, who made movie-industry friends just by virtue of being fabulous, and all of the sudden she’s hanging out at Hearst Castle.
She was this exciting and vivacious and erudite young woman who rounded out the table at Hearst Castle. You know, it’s very lonely at the top. Slim saw over the moat. She was allowed to walk across the drawbridge as far as society and class and boundaries around acceptance versus non-acceptance. She was a very well-read human. She really adored men and was as industrious as she could be in terms of helping great men and great minds. I mean, Hemingway valued her opinion, which tells me a lot. And so did Truman. She had a lot of sway because she could converse with the great minds of the day.

It’s my last question, and I have to ask: If presented with the opportunity, would you eat a swan? It seems odd, but people eat goose and duck, so how weird can it be? 
I think I’d have to be pretty dang hungry.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

More From This Series

• Even Tom Hollander Felt Pressure Holding Court for the Swans
• Feud’s Chloë Sevigny Wants Hollywood to Read More Books
• Feud: Capote vs. the Swans Series-Finale Recap: Epilogue

See All