Craving a break from the spectacle of contemporary America, I have been burying myself in the glamour of the recent American past – the day-drinking and exquisite fashion of New York high society in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

I’m spending my evenings with the moneyed women depicted in Feud: Capote v The Swans, a new show that is the sort-of sequel to the previous iteration, which depicted the rivalry between old-Hollywood actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

Truman Capote escorts Lee Radziwill to a reception at the Four Seasons in New York on November 5, 1969; Calista Flockhart as Radziwill in Feud.Credit: Getty, supplied

The women of the second season, the “swans” – Babe Paley, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest and Lee Radziwill – were the grand dames of New York society, ruling it with a semi-benevolent gloved fist at a time when traditional class structures were dissolving in the social revolution of the ’60s.

They were socialites, rich wives, fashion editors, philanthropists and epic lunchers.

Radziwill was the sister of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy – she took her surname from her second marriage, which was to a minor Polish prince.

She used the title of “Her Serene Highness”, even though the Republic of Poland had abolished the recognition of noble titles in 1921 – denoting a queenliness that might have related to her reported jealousy of her more famous sister.

The drama of the series comes from the man the women took as their social pet – the writer and bon vivant Truman Capote.

Capote was very famous, particularly after publishing In Cold Blood in 1966.

The true-crime book, about the murder of four family members in rural Kansas in 1959, was a sensation, a masterpiece of taut prose and a new kind of non-fiction (although it has since been shown Capote probably made up important bits of it). Capote was openly gay, sharp of wit and extremely charming. He grew close to the women he called his swans, and they told him all their gossip, secrets and personal tragedies.