Julia Newman On Capturing the Tragic End of an Era in ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’

Julia Newman’s score for Feud: Capote vs. The Swans captures the elusive elegance–that inimitable sophistication that some are born with–but is never brittle. There is strength permeating through it even if these characters don’t know where it comes from, and Newman mixes it in with spikes of fragility. Truman Capote remains a literary giant, but his feud with his beloved swans is something he couldn’t write himself out of. Her score evokes a time, place, perspective and character like no other music has this year.

While some composers score directly to picture for the entire series, Newman was afforded the opportunity to read some of the text. “I got the scripts, and a lot of it is responding to what’s in front of you,” she says at the top of our conversation. “You hope that you dance elegantly with the aspects of the story but also when you devolve into a lot more of the psychology of the characters.”

It would be tempting to write a theme for all of these distinct characters, especially since Capote is so well-known and regarded as a titan of the written word. With a show like Feud, though, you might box yourself in if you limit characters to specific sounds or instruments. Newman thought bigger, and she wanted to have the circumstances of the scenes, as well as the time period, swirling around these people at all times.

“I read In Cold Blood for the first time six months prior to the show, and that was before I knew I was going to have any involvement in the show,” Newman admits. “You have to think of how controversial that book was and the debate that followed about what constitutes historical fact and how it enters the realm of historical fiction. I had to look more holistically about it. As a composer, we want to respond to what’s going on in front of us, so my job is to look at the characters and the time period to really consider the dramatic architecture of both the individual episodes and the season as a whole.

In the very first episode, we start in 1984 and then we cut back to 1968 following Truman Capote’s footsteps as he walks to Babe Paley’s apartment. If anything, the feeling that I wanted to evoke was of aliveness and of him being “on.” As we learn later on, he is really remembering all the details that Babe is imparting to him. I thought that was so interesting. Babe has everything, but she’s extremely lonely. Yet Truman is taking notes, and there is something so human, complex and multi-faceted that I was drawn to. I didn’t want to think of Truman Capote as an idea in the cultural zeitgeist.”

In terms of capturing the essence of a time and place, we know we are in good hands musically when we hear the track, ‘La Côte Basque.’ The restaurant was a place to be seen, and the violin climbs higher and higher with piano underneath it–as if it’s ready to catch you when you fall. There is a dreaminess to this cue, and it highlights the importance of the conversation held there between these women. Newman takes it one step further to remind us that everything in this restaurant stays the same. Imagine the reaction if the menu drastically changed or if their favorite maitre d’ took leave without notice. The ’70s were a time of great change, but none of that happened in La Côte Basque.

“I already established the vocabulary of cello and violin, and I liked the arpeggiated piano,” she says. “There is a floating quality and part of that is that it works as a device more broadly in terms of meeting the demand of a scene that keeps going when musically, you may have ended the cue earlier. I remember presenting this cue, but I was worried that it was too sad. I wondered if it wasn’t big enough and confident enough. Alexis Martin Woodall, one of our producers, really responded to it, and it was a learning moment for me in terms of what the show needed. She told me that it was just the right amount of melancholy. It’s meant to be melancholy. Yes, these women are still lauded in high society, but it’s also the end. It’s not the height of it, so that floating feeling points to a time, but we are in the tail end of it. Hearing that helped me think about the direction that the show was going.”

When Truman Capote dreams of his mother, Lillie Mae Faulk, you can almost feel the room shift. ‘Dream Mother’ is so startling, because it sounds so different than the majority of the score. It’s dangerous and sinister, but there is a cloudiness to it as if Capote is swimming through scotch to get home to his mother’s call. There are many ghostly moments throughout Feud, but they are of our own making and our desire to hold onto something–we may not even know we are doing it. When we first see Jessica Lange in the role, the camera cascades tightly around the two of them as if he is a little boy hiding behind the hem of her skirt.

“There’s an element of these apparitions or hauntings that are taking place in the often tortured mind of Truman Capote,” she says, thoughtfully. “They had a complicated relationship. On the one hand, Truman rejects what his mother was but also strives for the things that she wanted. She was desperate to be part of high society but she couldn’t cross the invisible barrier. You can play around with the idea of how he betrayed these very women who were at the center of that mythology. This moment is incredibly interior. When you’re compare this to the last track you asked about, there is that tilt towards the interior or the knowing that something is over. But it is decided to be exterior. When it came to the psychology of Truman, I shifted slightly away from the vocabulary that I established with some of those exterior moments to more ambient-based pieces when we go into these hallucinations. And that changed as that got bigger in episodes seven and eight. I worked closely with my amazing cellist, Cameron Stone, who was just a privilege to work with. When you have good players, they elevate the music that you are making since they bring a bigger dramatic understanding to the music that you have written. Cameron did some delightfully bizarre textural cello things in that section that, I think, offered an organic and acoustic element that allowed everything to be cohesive.”

There are sometimes scary cues that lend themselves to horror. If a cellist uses their bow to strike their instrument, our ears understand how it relates to the family of strings, but we can’t quite place it. It knocks us off-kilter.

“It is horror,” she affirms. :Think about how an alcoholic walks towards his or her death but is unable to take a different path. You’re totally alone. In some ways, that’s a true human horror, and, ultimately, it’s a tragedy that I really responded to. What is forgiveness? Is forgiveness unreasonable? These are profoundly human questions that these characters are facing, especially towards the end of the series.”

There is an anticipation in the track ‘Esquire 1975,’ as it is when Truman’s work becomes public. Are we ready for a war that we aren’t ready for?

“That’s when Bill Paley is sitting at his desk and his secretary is putting the newspaper on his desk for the first time,” Newman says. “Part of it is about a sense of pace and the story is really driving forward. It’s different from the buoyancy that you might think of in terms of Truman Capote musically. One of the things that I loved about this show is that there is a lot of fun gossip with the women sitting around at lunch or just the idea of a character like Lady Ina Coolbirth. It is a tipping point, but there is something delightful and devilish about it. I wanted to indulge us a bit. At our worst, we sometimes delight in the things that we do that are terrible. Not to condone any bad behavior.”

The ending of the show is a surreal one. Truman Capote’s ashes are being sold at auction as his swans watch from the back of the room. You can’t help but think, ‘This is all they are going for?’ as the gavel is struck at the final sale. Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, Slim Keith and Lee Radziwell recall a more elegant time as they look towards the future. Are we missing something that this time period should provide? It’s a haunting ending captured wonderfully in ‘Everything Ends.’ There is an almost nostalgic quality to the initial piano strokes as vocals come in to harken us back to a more familiar time. The string section is stunning before opening up and soaring.

“I was very affected by that auction scene,” she admits. “Everybody knows Truman Capote–he was such an icon. If that’s how he ends, that’s such a tragedy. Another person’s idea of who we are isn’t enough to save us in the end. There is this fantastical element of the apparitions of the women, and it dances with the tragedy in such a unique way. They are just looking at what life has become. Less elegant, much more chaotic, and whatever your opinion on that is, none of us could deny that it was different.

I was feeling a lot of different things when I wrote that, and I thought about what it means to begin and what it means to end. My father actually conducted that piece at 20th Century Fox at the Newman Scoring Stage, and that made me the third generation to work there. That moment encapsulates everything in terms of how friendships end, and people, as we all know, leave us.”

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is streaming now on Hulu.