The year is 1978, and our story is coming to a close. Or so it appears. There’s one more episode after “Beautiful Babe,†though given everything we witness in this episode, it’s unclear what story is left to tell. If I sound a tad impatient, it is because I am curious how long until it’s all over — especially since this seventh episode is thin on story and big on vibes. Like a rowdy drunken guest — Truman, say — it seems Feud wants to overstay its welcome. (Wasn’t last week’s episode all about knowing when to bow out?) And it’s structured around the death of its two central figures.
First up (and out) is Babe. For yes, between ordering bites of banana bread (how 2020 of her!) and her early-morning perusal of the New York Post, Mrs. Paley learns she has only six months to live. The news doesn’t much change her, though it does lead to some stress between her and Bill: “How about you don’t do a fucking thing?!†she yells at him as he tries to make sense of the news, even as it’s clear they’re both in the anger phase of grief. He wants her to stop smoking; she volleys back that she’s been drinking and smoking for ages as a way to mollify her life with him. It’s a bitter detente between the two, not helped by the way Bill needles her about not being a better mother (her own daughter won’t even come to see her!).
She’s much calmer around Lee, C.Z., and Slim, whom she sees for lunch, as she normally does. Only this time, she’s feeling wistful. Maybe she should’ve laughed off the whole Esquire/Truman thing and then none of them would be faced with the prospect of not being able to let go of the scandal of it all: “It’s become an absurd play. What would we do without it?†It’s true; there are appearances to keep up (what would Lee look like if she suddenly were to lunch with Truman again?), but also, they’re all caged by the very notion of appearances, so knowing how the game is played doesn’t change the outcome. “To accept his apology,†Babe concludes, as if she were toying with the idea of it in her head but also for the benefit of her friends there gathered, “would be to accept defeat.†Which is unfathomable. Better they move on and plan a party! It’s been ages since they’ve had one. Babe knows exactly what food she’ll serve, and what the cherries will be served in, and how the napkins will be folded.
When might this party be? C.Z., Slim, and Lee ask. “Summer, when I die,†Babe says.
It’s the kind of line that might feel dreadfully maudlin or tunelessly operatic in another show. But, you know, in a show about Capote and his Swans, about the end of a gilded era of New York society, about a tell-all that proved to be the death knell of entire friendships, the line feels like an apt précis of how Babe has come to understand her life: as something to be curated to perfection.
And so she sets out to the country where, wheelchair-bound, she begins reminiscing about her life and chronicling the many things she’s done wrong. One wonders if the real Mrs. Paley was as stylistically astute as Naomi Watts, whose voice-over narration over mundane chores around the Paleys’ country estate suggests a woman with a canny ear for self-aware writing. “Perfection was for me,†she writes, “a kind of eternity I thought I could own. If every detail was in its place, I thought the world might just come to a stop.†But perfection, she notes, can only ever be borrowed with interest.
This is why she’s decided to embrace beauty for beauty’s sake, a line she echoes as she spends dinner with an assortment of guests, unlike the kind she’d normally host. And then a moth caught in a lamp catches her eye … and so it’s clear she’s dying, hallucinating, fantasizing about what could be in the great beyond.
Namely, she imagines herself a few years younger (before her wrinkles, gray hair, and hair loss from chemo) and getting all dolled up with Truman. It’s all believable until they go to Babe’s bathtub and find a swan frolicking about. And that’s when I worried Feud had lost its plot. Didn’t we already stage a fantasy of a Babe-Truman reunion a few episodes back? Also, what does it mean that the show insists that in her dying moments, Babe would focus on Truman even as her children and Bill are gathered around her? If it all feels like the fanciful campy fantasies birthed from a camping old queen … well, let’s just say Feud takes its Capotean sensibility perhaps a bit too literally in this second-to-last episode.
Babe’s funeral is, of course, sheer perfection. From what Lee, Slim, and C.Z. can gather, it may well mark the end of their fruitful friendships — Babe was the glue keeping them together. The one person not at the funeral is Truman. Bill had forbidden him to come, news that C.Z. had had to deliver to her old friend, along with the heartbreaking news of Babe’s death. And so, while he doesn’t get to deliver Babe’s eulogy at her funeral, he reads out what he’d written of it for C.Z., who cannot contain her sadness as Truman recites that Babe had become almost like his own reflection: “I gave her the best parts of myself.â€
And now that she’s gone … well, it seems no good parts of him are left. He’s slurring his words on television (again), and he’s unable to write even after (yet again!) being helped out by Jack and Joanne Carson and shipped back out west where sun and pool do little to get Truman out of his funk. Indeed, soon, he’s hallucinating just as Babe was. He’s daydreaming about air-con guy Rick by the pool (oh my!) and imagining he’s one page away from finishing Answered Prayers (as if!), only to find himself almost drowning amid fantasy visions of Babe in a swan boat (yes, really). Ultimately, it’s all a bit too much for both Truman and Joanne, who credits Richard Simmons’s workouts for her ability to have fished him out of her pool, where she found him unconscious.
Truman is truly far gone. He daydreams about Babe visiting him (and snidely commenting on Joanne’s ghastly West Coast style), and ultimately, it’s in this vision of yet another fantasy reunion (so many reruns in this episode!) that he eventually lets go. And so we’re left with images of Babe and Truman on a wintry beach as Joanne calls Jack to let him know that Truman has passed: His last words, it seems, were “beautiful Babe.†It’s all laid rather thick — and it makes me wonder what Jon Robin Baitz has in store for the show’s season finale. Let us hope it’s not some kind of after-life party with Babe, Truman, and the like. Though if I were to gander a guess, we’ll finally see what state Answered Prayers really was in and how it eventually got published in its truncated form.
Wit vs. Beauty
• “What a moment to be alive!†— Truman, not about anything about his life, really, but about the tie at the Oscars that saw Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand both winning Best Actress, a high many of us avid Oscar watchers have been seeking for years.
• Are we getting a vinyl of Thomas Newman and daughter Julia Newman’s exquisite compositions for Feud: Capote vs. the Swans? That percussive theme with Truman in the pool (not to mention the romantic riffs throughout this episode) was just divine.
• If you’re morbidly curious, you can find clips of that Stanley Siegel talk-show appearance online (clearly taken from an uncredited documentary).
• “Root beer? Please! Are we throwing a pizza party?†Oh how I’ll miss Watts’s perfectly calibrated Waspy reads (in this case, thrown at Joanne).
• In case you need to brush up on your Gay Math: Watts and her Babe, in turn, is Mother. But that does not make Mrs. Paley the mothering kind. The opposite turns out to be true, in fact: After all, even in this fantasia of an episode, Babe spends her dying breaths thinking not of her children (there gathered at her bedside) but about the one other man who broke her heart.
• Love when bits of dialogue make literary and socialite gossip the stuff of trivia: The inspiration behind Capote’s Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is believed to be Carol Grace, who had taken her husband’s — Academy Award winner Walter Matthau — name after their marriage in 1959.