Who Is Ann Woodward? The Scandalous True Story of the New York Socialite Who Shot Her Husband

In episode one of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, Truman Capote (Tom Hollander) gets a drink thrown on him by Ann Woodward (Demi Moore) during lunch at La Côte Basque. He knows it’s coming: “Why does she keep staring at me?” he slurs to his dining companions, Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), C.Z. Guest (Chloe Sevigny), and Slim Keith (Diane Lane). “Maybe because you keep telling everyone she’s a murderess,” Slim replies.

“You fucking little piece of shit,” Ann says to Truman. “You think you don’t know? I know what you’re saying about me. You’re telling people that I murdered my poor late husband? That’s slander and libel!”

Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is a fictional show, but it is based on true events reported in Laurence Leamer’s 2021 book, Capote’s Women. And in the case of Capote and the so-called murderess Ann Woodward, the real-life story is perhaps even more tragic.

Ann Crowell and William “Bill” Woodward met at the Copacabana nightclub in 1943. He was a recent Harvard graduate serving in the navy, she a dancer in the chorus line. They married soon after. In the postwar years, the two lived lavishly: Bill, the multimillionaire director of Hanover Bank, owned an Upper East Side town house, a farm in Maryland, and a 60-acre estate on the North Shore of Long Island. Together, the couple bred and raced horses, attended glitzy charity galas, and went big-game hunting in Africa. This was all far from where Crowell grew up, on a farm in Kansas. (She had moved to New York City to be a model after graduating high school.)

Jealousy ran rampant between Ann and Bill. They hired private detectives to spy on each other and often got into blow-up fights: “Suffering from an acute sense of insecurity and flickering suspicions, Ann Woodward sometimes created volcanic public scenes with her husband. In [the Manhattan nightclub] El Morocco one night, she scratched Bill Woodward’s face until it bled, after he pulled out a handkerchief with a lipstick stain on it,” read a 1955 article in Time Magazine.