Diane Lane whips out her copy of the same Slim Keith book I’ve loved for years: “Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life.” It details her love affair and marriage to Hollywood auteur Howard Hawks, how she befriended Ernest Hemingway when Hawks was wrangling the rights to “To Have and Have Not,” and her discovery of Harper’s Bazaar covergirl Lauren Bacall to play “Slim” in the movie, a character based on Keith. An entire chapter is devoted to her deep and loving friendship, during and after her marriage to uber-agent Leland Hayward, with gay novelist Truman Capote, who eventually betrayed her with his infamous Esquire article, “La Cote Basque 1965.
” At that moment, as dramatized in the FX series “ Feud: Capote vs. The Swans ,” Keith (Lane) and her best pal, New York socialite Barbara “Babe” Paley (Naomi Watts), angrily turned their backs on Capote (Tom Hollander), who had used their intimacies to conjure up a portrait of their elite world that they did not like, at all. “I couldn’t believe that Truman would use his friends in such a destructive and evil way,” Keith wrote in her book.
“I feel beholden to her and wanted to do right by her,” said Lane, who earned her third Emmy nomination for this role. “And I keep reading all the things about her: ‘Well, she didn’t include that in her book, and she didn’t include that.’ If you had privilege, if you were a female, if you were in the entertainment industry, if it was during a cer.