Norman Mailer once told the story of having drinks in a Brooklyn Irish bar with Truman Capote to one of the author’s many biographers. It was in the 1950s, when the neighborhood was still a working-class haven, not the playground for the disposable income crowd it is today, and the place had attracted a down-to-earth crowd.

Yet Capote made no attempt to disguise his feminine mannerisms or to amplify the high-pitched Southern whistle that made his voice so distinctive. No, he was openly, unashamedly homosexual in an era when it could land you in jail or, in this case, the wrong end of someone's fist. As customers glared at them, Mailer recalled that he was "very impressed with what it cost him to live that way."

Tom Hollander, whose monumental task it was to wade through the psychic shells of the author's life in the FX series "Feud: Capote vs. the Swans," says that story helped him access the steely core of the effeminate Capote.

“How brave was he?” says Hollander, calling me from a train station in Italy, his voice raised above the tinkling of a distant bell. “He was like a warrior, and the difficulty and loneliness of being openly himself must have taken its toll.”