Las week delivered us an episode of “Capote vs. The Swans” that…was lacking in swans. At least in what we’ve defined as the swans up until now.

The timeline of the episode puts us squarely in 1975, post release of “La Cote Basque” We are now seeing how savagely the Paleys reacted to being included in the article. Bill tells Truman to kill himself. Which Truman sort of complies with. He downs a myriad of pills but alas, he is awake the next day for the call of Jimmy Baldwin.

Baldwin, a homosexual man as celebrated as Capote himself, tells Truman to meet him at the scene of the crime (La Cote Basque) where the two share a meal that turns into an art museum visit, that turns into a trip to a gay bar, which ends with a supposedly sober nightcap at Truman’s. There, Jimmy gives Truman the tough love to sober up and finish his book.

This entire interchange is of course, entirely fictionalized. The two men sort of knew each other, that much is true but this “gay men helping gay men” brotherhood the episode wants us to believe is not correct. The two respected each other but in truth at this point Truman was in free fall with his alcoholism and Jimmy was almost always firmly in France, having decided his home country was too troubled and racist to help (I mean is he wrong?)

So why have it? We get to see so little of Truman’s life without the swans. He throughly entrenched himself in their high class lives. So this seems to be a way to balance the narrative out. Why they decide to do it with Jimmy and not his real life partner Jack is slightly opaque. But hey, I love fictionalized meetings between historical figures so I guess why not? Am I Gus Van Sant? Am I Ryan Murphy? I do think Lawrence Leamer who wrote the book the show is based on might be slightly confused.

There is the fact that of course Truman’s swans are racist. These are women who can only think about the 1% of the population their family bred them to think counted. That Jimmy would come to Truman and demand the book touch upon that makes sense on a primary level. Although in fact he didn’t get very much writing done on the book at all.

We do get a lot of facts about the parenting habits of swans. And in fact gay swans can raise children and are better parents than traditional families. Territorial and protective are two benchmarks of swans, whatever their proclivities are. In the highly metaphorical use of the animals we see that Jimmy is telling Truman he can try and attain what they have but he will always be a bit different, but that difference might make him even more successful.

The episode ends with this metaphor bring brought home to cook when a sober Truman requests a sweet confused waiter in culinary school go to Central Park to kill and cook a Swan. Jimmy on his way out of town tells Truman that in England the queen is the only one allowed to eat swans, prompting the idea to really disavow the order of the monarchy. But instead of the queen of England Truman defies his queens: Babe, Slim, CZ, Lee.