The Black and White Ball Enters The Chat in This Week's Feud Recap

Plus more Ghost Mom Hallucinations, like, we GET it

Welcome back to the land of the rich and unhappy, a.k.a. Truman Capote’s social circle, circa 1966! This third episode of Feud: Capote vs the Swans was an intriguing (and only somewhat successful) concoction, focusing on Capote’s very famous Black and White Ball¹ as seen through the eyes of Albert and David Maysles, the documentarians who are probably best known for having done Grey Gardens (thanks to an inadvertent assist from Lee Radziwill) and the Rolling Stones concert doc Gimme Shelter, which is a fascinating film in part because they were shooting at Altamont.

Despite how the show presents it, though, the documentary here is a fictional one — although the Maysleses did make a very brief piece with Capote this same year, primarily talking about In Cold Blood — and I think it’s actually probably more inspired by this bit of Grey Gardens backstory:

Albert and David Maysles came into contact with the Beales in 1972 after Lee Radziwill suggested they make a documentary on her childhood…