To understand what happened in November 1975, you first need to understand what it meant to be Babe Paley. Consider not the icon, not the photograph in Vogue, or the name on the international best-dressed list. The actual woman and what she had constructed and what it cost her to maintain it every single day of her adult life. That is what matters here.
By 1975, Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley had been famous for so long that her fame had become its own kind of architecture, something load-bearing, something she could not afford to let collapse. Appearing on the international best-dressed list for 11 consecutive years before being elevated to its Hall of Fame, placed her in a distinction reserved for those whose influence on fashion had transcended any single season or silhouette.
Photographed by Cecil Beaton and Horst P. Horst, profiled in every magazine that mattered, studied by designers from Paris to New York, who understood that what Babe wore this season other women would want next season. She was, by any measure, the most precisely calibrated public woman in America.
Living in a 14-room apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue, one of the most prestigious addresses in the city, with a husband who had built CBS from a 16-station radio network into the dominant communications empire in America, she entertained in a manner that made other wealthy people feel slightly underdressed and faintly anxious about their flower arrangements.
She was also, by November 1975, very ill. The lung cancer had been diagnosed that same year, a bitter coincidence that history has never quite resolved into coincidence at all. Having smoked her entire adult life, the cigarette was as much a part of her visual signature as the Hermes scarf or the Balenciaga dress.
Cancer is the kind of diagnosis that rewrites everything that came before it. That makes a woman look back at 40 years of choices and understand them differently. There is a particular cruelty in that kind of retrospective clarity. Choices that looked like freedom revealed themselves as compulsions. Habits that seemed merely stylish revealed themselves as something closer to self-destruction.
Babe was too intelligent a woman not to understand this and too disciplined a woman to say so. And then the magazine arrived. La Côte Basque 1965 inches was presented as fiction and Capote would insist on that designation until the end of his life with decreasing conviction and increasing desperation. Everyone in the social world he had inhabited for 20 years knew it was not fiction.
The characters were thin disguises stretched over people who were very much alive, very much identifiable, and very much furious. Every detail was too precise to be invented. Every conversation too specific to have been imagined. Capote had spent two decades collecting these women’s secrets the way another man might collect art.
And now he had sold the collection or at least previewed it in a magazine read by several million Americans who had never been to lunch at La Côte Basque and who were now being given a conducted tour of the restaurant’s best tables at the expense of the women who sat at them. For Babe specifically the most devastating element was not what Capote had written about her directly.
What proved nuclear was what he had written about Bill. The story of the governor’s wife and the incriminating sheets was understood immediately and unanimously to be about William S. Paley. His infidelity, his carelessness, his fundamental disregard for the woman he had married. Capote had taken Babe’s private pain the thing she had confided in him during 20 years of friendship, the wound she had never displayed publicly, and published it in a national magazine with enough transparency that
everyone who mattered could see exactly whose wound it was. He had not disguised it. He had merely renamed the principals and changed a few professional details and called it literature and sent it to press. She did not call him, did not write, did not send a message through mutual friends asking for an explanation or an apology.
Babe Paley had spent her entire life mastering the performance of imperviousness, and she performed it now with absolute discipline. The silence was not passive. It was the most precise and devastating response she could have managed, and she managed it until the day she died. That silence and what it contained is the whole story. To understand it fully, you have to go back further than November 1975, back to Boston, to a family that ran on ambition the way other families run on love, and back to the machinery that produced Barbara Cushing and what she
was trained to be. Understanding what it cost her to maintain that training for six decades without complaint, that is where this story actually begins. Babe Paley’s life is not a story about a woman who had everything. It is a story about a woman who was taught from her earliest years that having everything required giving up everything else, and who spent her life discovering in increments exactly how much she had surrendered.
The price was paid in silence, in composure, in 30 years of watching her husband humiliate her quietly and saying nothing to anyone except the one man she trusted. His use of that trust became a story about betrayal in its most clinical form, intimate, precise, and dressed in the language of art. Harvey Cushing was one of the most celebrated physicians in American history, which means he was also one of the most absent fathers in the Boston Social Register.
Born in 1869, Cushing became the pioneer of modern neurosurgery, performing operations on the brain that no one had previously considered survivable. His name was given to the hormonal disorder he described, Cushing’s disease, a condition involving a tumor on the pituitary gland that causes a specific constellation of symptoms so distinctive that once you know them, you cannot unsee them.
A Pulitzer Prize followed in 1926 for his biography of Sir William Osler. Extraordinary discipline and focus and ambition defined him, and he brought to fatherhood approximately the same warmth he brought to surgical procedure. Technically precise, outwardly authoritative, emotionally remote. His wife, Catherine Stone Crowell Cushing, compensated for this with a singular and consuming project, her daughters.
Betsy, the eldest, was born in 1908. Minnie, the middle daughter, arrived in 1906. Barbara, who would be called Babe from childhood, was born on July 5th, 1915. The youngest, and by most accounts the most beautiful of the three. Catherine Cushing was not a woman given to sentiment about beauty as an end in itself.
Her daughters were taught to understand beauty the way a chess player understands a powerful piece, as a strategic asset most valuable when deployed correctly, most dangerous when deployed carelessly. Social position was not an accident of birth in the Cushing household. It was a discipline, a practice, something you worked at the way a musician works at scales every day without complaint, because the alternative was obscurity, and obscurity was not something Catherine Cushing intended for her daughters.
The Cushing household was prosperous, prestigious by association with Harvey’s reputation, but not aristocratic in the way that the Boston families immediately above them in the social hierarchy were aristocratic. Catherine intended to correct this deficit with the only currency she had reliably available. Her daughters’ looks, charm, and trained social intelligence.
The marriages of the older sisters demonstrated exactly what this education could produce. Betsy Cushing married James Roosevelt II, the eldest son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1930. That connection to the most powerful political family in America was exactly as useful as Catherine had intended, opening doors that money alone could not have opened in that particular era when the Roosevelt name was becoming synonymous with the American government itself.
When that marriage ended, Betsy did not retreat. Jock Whitney became her second husband, a man whose net worth eventually exceeded $200 million, and who would serve as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s under the Eisenhower administration. The trajectory was not coincidental. Betsy had been trained for this, and she executed the training with the authority of someone who had internalized its logic completely.
Minnie Cushing’s path followed a similarly strategic arc. Her first marriage was to Vincent Astor, heir to one of the great American fortunes. Astor had inherited $87 million at the age of 20 in 1912 when his father, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the Titanic in April of that year, having placed his young wife Madeleine in a lifeboat and gone back to the first-class smoking room to wait for the end with whatever equanimity a man of his standing could manage.
Vincent was not a warm or easy man to be married to. Exacting, frequently cold, subject to dark moods, he was in complicated health for much of their marriage. Minnie managed it with the same discipline her mother had instilled in all three daughters. And when it ended, she married James Fosburgh, a painter and art adviser who moved comfortably in the world of wealth she had always inhabited.
The step down in financial terms was offset by the step up in intellectual and artistic company, a trade Minnie was apparently content to make. What the sisters shared beyond their extraordinary looks was a specific kind of training that had no formal name, but was completely recognizable to anyone who observed them closely.
Among them, there was a practiced ease. How to enter a room, how to dress, how to sit, how to speak to servants and to presidents with equal confidence. Common to all three was an instinctive understanding of which things were said and which were held back. Each of them had absorbed, at some level below conscious decision, that the maintenance of a certain image was not vanity.
Survival was the more accurate word, specifically the survival of a family project that had been running since before any of them were old enough to understand it. For Babe, the youngest, this education arrived with additional pressure. Watching her sisters execute their strategic marriages with apparent success provided both a model and a form of competition, the particular competition that operates between sisters in households organized around a mother’s ambitions.
Growing up understanding that her beauty was the family’s most negotiable asset, she was expected to negotiate it well. To fall short of what her sisters had achieved would have been not merely personal failure, but a failure of the family project itself. There was also the particular pressure of being Harvey Cushing’s daughter in Boston’s medical and social circles, which overlapped considerably more than either community liked to admit.
Harvey was famous, but he was also demanding and often absent, and the prestige of his name was not freely transferable to his daughters. A position had to be made independently, with Catherine’s coaching and their own formidable reserves of charm and discipline. Babe absorbed all of this. She was the best student in a class of three, and the class had been running since she was old enough to walk into a drawing room.
By the time she reached adulthood, she had internalized the curriculum so completely that it was no longer visible from the outside. Grace, it looked like. Ease was the surface impression. To the untrained eye, she appeared to be a woman who had simply been born this polished, this assured, this perfectly positioned in a world that rewarded exactly her particular combination of qualities.
She had not been born this way. Babe had been made. The making of Babe Paley began in Boston, and it continued without interruption for the next six decades. No graduation ceremony existed in the Cushing curriculum. A degree is something you complete and then put aside, the way you might enter a profession and leave student life behind.
The Cushing training was carried. It became the architecture of your personality, the load-bearing structure of your identity, and you maintained it not because you had decided to maintain it, but because you could no longer locate the self that existed before the structure was built. Barbara Cushing came of age in a world that had very specific ideas about what a woman of her class and beauty should do with herself, and she did most of them correctly, and one of them catastrophically, in the summer of 1937.
A job at Glamour magazine in 1935, at the age of 20, began her professional life. In the years when fashion journalism was still figuring out what it was supposed to be. By 1939 she had moved to Vogue working as a fashion editor in an era when that position required something considerably more than an eye for clothes.
A genuine understanding of the relationship between clothing and social meaning, between fabric and power, between what a woman wore and what she was communicating to the room she entered, that was the real requirement. Babe was good at this work, better than good. Rather than being merely decorative at Vogue, a charge leveled at beautiful young women hired by fashion publications more for the reflected glamour of their presence than for their professional competence, she brought to the position a vocabulary for beauty
precise enough to be professionally useful and original enough to be genuinely influential. The car accident happened in 1937 when she was 22. And while the specifics varied depending on the account, the essential facts converge. Her jaw was shattered, her front teeth were knocked out, and she required extensive reconstructive surgery.
A minor incident this was not. Her face had been broken and had to be rebuilt in an era when reconstructive surgery was considerably less precise than it would later become when the techniques and materials available to surgeons were far cruder than what would eventually be developed in the decades following the Second World War.
Long and painful, the recovery left the outcome uncertain for months. A woman emerged from it who was by all accounts more striking than the one who had entered it. This outcome strikes most people as implausible. To anyone who has observed the particular determination of a Cushing daughter operating under pressure, it strikes as entirely predictable.
Early in her life, the accident delivered a lesson Babe would practice for the rest of it. The transformation of private damage into public composure. Discussion of the accident at dinner parties was not done. Allowing it to become part of your story in a way that invited pity was dangerous because pity softened the image you were projecting and made other people comfortable with your vulnerability, which was exactly the wrong dynamic.
You simply returned, looking better than before, and moved on. Moving on was the first essential of the Cushing curriculum, and Babe had learned it early. Her first marriage arrived in 1940, which meant it arrived at the precise moment when the world was reorganizing itself around the imminent war. Stanley Mortimer Jr.
was everything the Cushing matrix specified: handsome, wealthy, well-connected, from an oil family with the kind of money that predated the necessity of explaining itself. They married on October 15th, 1940, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton, in a ceremony that the society pages reported with the reverence they reserved for events that confirmed the natural order of things.
Both families approved. The location was correct. Photographs showed a bride of exceptional beauty, composed and radiant in the way that women trained by mothers like Katherine Cushing are trained to appear on their wedding days, whatever they might actually be feeling. The natural order of things was about to be seriously disrupted.
Stanley Mortimer went to war as the men of his generation went, and the man who came back was not the man who had left. This was not unusual. An entire generation of American men returned from the Second World War carrying damage that their culture had no language for, and their families had no framework to address.
Stanley came back an alcoholic. What would eventually, in a later decade with more clinical vocabulary, be understood as manic depression accompanied the alcoholism, a condition that in 1945 was treated with a combination of denial, quiet suffering, and the expectation that a man of good family should simply manage his difficulties without becoming a burden to the people around him.
He was not a bad man. Babe, who had grown up in a household governed by discipline and performance and the management of difficult personalities, spent 2 years attempting to manage this particular difficulty before she concluded it was unmanageable. Two children arrived during the marriage. Stanley III was born in 1942, Amanda in 1944.
By all accounts, a devoted mother, Babe brought the same precision and care to parenting that she brought to everything else, without sentimentalizing it in ways that her social world would have found unseemly. The children were well-dressed, well-mannered, well-loved, which is the set of outcomes the Cushing training recognized as evidence of successful parenting.
She filed for divorce in 1946. The dissolution was noted in society circles with the particular combination of sympathy and calculation that attaches to high-profile marriages ending badly. Babe Mortimer, not yet 30, once among the most envied brides in New York, was once again available. Also, for the first time in her adult life, she was genuinely free, which is perhaps why the freedom did not Freedom was not something the Cushing training had prepared her for.
Purpose was. Direction was. The clarity that came with a position and a role and a set of expectations to perform against. The clarity of knowing exactly what was required and being able to deliver it. This was the environment in which Babe functioned best because it was the only environment she had ever known.
Already by 1946, she was one of the most photographed women in America. Her name appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar with the regularity of punctuation. Designers whose work she wore understood that Babe Mortimer’s endorsement was worth considerably more than any advertisement they could purchase. Something was being built, though the final shape of it was not yet visible.
The final shape arrived in 1947 from an unexpected direction, wearing a cigar and carrying the weight of an empire built before he turned 30. William S. Paley was not supposed to be the kind of man Babe Cushing married. He was Jewish, which in the social geography of 1940s America meant that certain doors, specifically the country club doors, the old Protestant money doors, the doors of the establishment Babe had been raised to move through comfortably, were not automatically open to him.
The exclusions were real and specific. There were clubs he could not join, resorts where he was not welcome, social events from which he was politely but definitively excluded, regardless of how much money he had or how powerful his professional position had become. Already divorced by 1947, already a father to two adopted children from his first marriage to Dorothy Hart Hearst, already in his mid-40s, these were not individually disqualifying facts, but collectively they described a man who had arrived at the pinnacle of American life by a
different route than the one the Cushing training had mapped. What he had in place of the old Protestant credentials was CBS. He had bought it in 1928 at the age of 27, when it was called the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System and consisted of 16 radio stations losing money in a new medium that most serious businessmen still considered a novelty or a fad.
His father, Samuel Paley, had given him money from the family’s Congress Cigar company, and Bill had taken that money and applied to it a programming instinct and an executive intelligence that turned out to be extraordinary. Radio, and later television, was not simply a technology in his view. It was a relationship between a broadcaster and an audience.
And the quality of that relationship depended entirely on the quality of the programming. Talent was hired aggressively and paid well. The network was organized around the proposition that the best shows produced the best audience, the best audience produced the best advertising revenue, and the best advertising revenue produced the best shows.
By the 1963-64 television season, CBS had 14 of the top 15 primetime shows in America. Such a description understates the reality. CBS was the network that defined what primetime American television was. Beginning from 16 failing radio stations to the most dominant broadcasting company in the history of the medium required a specific combination of gifts, programming instinct, executive ruthlessness, an ability to attract talent and then manage it without being managed by it in return, and a willingness to make decisions
quickly and defend them aggressively. Bill Paley had all of these in abundance. In somewhat shorter supply was the social ease that came automatically to men who had grown up in the correct families, attended the correct schools, and been welcomed without question into the correct clubs. This is where Babe came in.
An asset of a very specific and sophisticated kind, not a decoration. The marriage happened on July 28th, 1947, 4 days after Bill’s divorce from Dorothy Hearst was finalized, a pace characteristic of how he operated in every domain of his life. Identifying something he wanted, pursuing it, and acquiring it without wasting time between the identification and the acquisition.
This was his method. He had wanted Babe with the focused intensity he brought to network development. And he had pursued her with the same combination of charm and determination that had convinced skeptical advertisers, resistant affiliates, and reluctant talent to align themselves with CBS. What Babe gained from the marriage was architectural in its scope.
The apartment at 965th Avenue was 14 rooms of the most coveted residential real estate in New York. In a building that occupied one of the great corners of the city, overlooking Central Park from a height that placed it above the ordinary city and below the clouds. Babe decorated it with the kind of precise attention to detail that expressed not merely wealth, but genuine aesthetic intelligence.
Every object in its correct relation to every other object, every color considered against every adjacent color. Every piece of furniture in conversation with the room it occupied. Then came Kiluna Farm in Manhasset, Long Island. A working estate with formal gardens that became one of the great private entertaining venues in mid-century America.
The kind of place that people talked about for years after being invited there. Describing the gardens and the meals and the quality of care with which guests were made comfortable. A home in Jamaica offered climate as an argument for the existence of pleasure. A yacht was added and the Templeton estate in the Bahamas.
What Bill gained was harder to quantify, but no less real. Babe Paley gave him access to a social world that his money alone could not have purchased. Moving through rooms full of old money and European aristocracy with the ease of someone who had been training for exactly this since childhood. She knew which fork, which house, which designer, which invitation to accept, and which to decline.
For a man who had occasionally been made to feel the awkwardness of his origins in certain rarefied settings, she provided the social armor that his professional success had not entirely supplied. Belonging was what she gave him. In return, he gave her the platform on which to practice at an unprecedented scale, the discipline she had been raised to perform.
They also had two children together, William Cushing Paley and Kate Cushing Paley. The family expanded to include Bill’s adopted children from his previous marriage, Jeffrey and Hilary, making the household at 965th Avenue a complex and carefully managed enterprise. Babe managed it, the way she managed everything, with immaculate attention to detail, absolute public composure, and a private interior life that she shared with very few people.
The marriage gave Babe what she needed and what she had been trained to acquire. Whether it gave her what she actually wanted was a question she eventually confined to a single confidant, a small, brilliant, outrageous man she had met sometime in the 1950s who understood her completely and loved her absolutely right up until the moment he destroyed her.
To call Babe Paley a style icon is to use contemporary language to describe something that was in the mid-20th century considerably more serious and more strange. Style for Babe was not self-expression in the way that phrase is understood today. Communicating her personality was not the goal, nor was establishing her identity as distinct from other people’s identities.
Control was the operative word. Specifically, she was controlling the only domain she could reliably and completely control in a life where so much else was determined by other people. By the demands of her husband, by the expectations of society, by the training her mother had installed so thoroughly that Babe could no longer always distinguish between what she wanted and what she had been taught to want.
The 11 consecutive years on the international best-dressed list were not an accident of genetics or social position. Women in Babe’s social circle were generally well dressed. Many of them were extraordinarily wealthy and had access to the same couture houses, the same ateliers, the same fittings with the same great designers. What distinguished Babe was not access.
Judgment was the differentiator. A quality of eye so consistently accurate, so reliably ahead of where fashion was going rather than where it had already been, that designers and fashion editors treated her choices as data worth analyzing. Mainbocher, the American designer who had opened his atelier in Paris in 1929 and who understood the relationship between understatement and elegance with the precision of a mathematician working on a proof, became a primary collaborator.
Balenciaga entered her wardrobe as well. A designer whose construction was so architecturally precise that wearing his clothes was described by those who did it as a particular kind of physical confidence, the confidence of being held by someone who knows exactly how to hold you. Givenchy completed the trifecta, his work achieving an elegance that managed to be simultaneously French in its refinement and accessible in its effect.
The Hermes scarf episode is the detail that has become legend. And it became legend because it illustrates something essential about how Babe’s aesthetic intelligence operated. She took a silk Hermes scarf, an object with a perfectly well-established correct use as an accessory tied at the neck or draped over the shoulders, and tied it around the handle of her handbag.
That was all. A simple gesture, casual, improvisational. The kind of thing you do on a morning when you are already carrying too many things and you need both hands, and you solve the problem by attaching the scarf to the bag rather than wearing it. Within weeks, women across New York were doing the same thing.
Fashion correspondents in multiple countries were writing about it within months. Within years, it had become so thoroughly absorbed into the visual vocabulary of accessorizing that most women who do it today have no idea they are replicating a solution that a woman in New York improvised on an ordinary morning, probably in the early 1950s.
This is what genuine influence looks like as opposed to mere popularity. Popularity is recognized and credited. Influence is absorbed until it becomes invisible. Babe did not set out to invent a new way of wearing a scarf. A choice was made that was so right, so perfectly calibrated to a problem that other women immediately recognized as their own problem that it propagated through the culture before anyone had consciously decided to propagate it.
After 11 years on the best-dressed list, the committee elevated her to the Hall of Fame, which was technically a retirement from annual consideration, but was functionally an acknowledgement that she had moved beyond the category of competition. Ranking the person by whose standard everyone else is being ranked makes no logical sense.
What style meant to Babe at the level that mattered was something she did not often discuss in interviews because the interviewers were asking the wrong questions. Questions about designers and fabrics and the specific decisions of a specific season were what they brought. Nobody was asking what it felt like to inhabit your own exterior so completely that the exterior became, in certain essential ways, more real than anything inside it, nor what it costs to spend your life performing a version of yourself so
polished that the actual self becomes progressively harder to locate. For a woman whose private life contained as much pain as Babe Paley’s, the perfection of the surface was not vanity, and it was not frivolity. It was the one domain where she held absolute authority. Bill Paley could conduct his affairs with whoever he chose, and he did, at considerable frequency and with conspicuous carelessness.
Society could demand that she maintain the performance of a happy, elegant, accomplished marriage, and she did, at considerable cost. But the clothes, the rooms, the flowers, the table settings, the precise calibration of every visual element that fell under her control, these were hers, exclusively, irrefutably.
No one could take them from her or compromise them or conduct them badly on her behalf. In a life where she was expected to subordinate her own needs and feelings to the requirements of other people’s comfort, style was the one place she was answerable to nothing but her own eye. Other women watched her and saw someone who seemed to have been born in possession of something they were trying to acquire.
The women who knew her better, the very small number of people who were allowed past the facade, understood that what they were observing was not ease or effortlessness or the casual expression of natural gifts. Discipline was what it was, applied daily with no days off, no allowance for the ordinary messiness of being human.
The scarf around the handbag, the Balenciaga at the opening, the roses from Kiluna Farm arranged with precise informality on the table in the dining room of the apartment at 965th Avenue. These were not accidents or expressions of inherited taste. They were the visible evidence of a woman who had decided very early that if the world was going to look at her, she would control exactly what it saw.
Everybody knew about Bill Paley’s women. This was not a secret in any meaningful sense of the word. It was the kind of open secret that New York society in the 1950s and 1960s maintained through a collective agreement not to discuss it in front of the person most affected. Combined with a complete willingness to discuss it everywhere else.
The agreement was not stated. No statement was necessary. Operating on a set of understandings so deeply embedded that articulating them would have been considered itself a kind of violation, this social machinery required no enforcement mechanism. Among the women was Pamela Harriman, who was at that point working her way through some of the most powerful men in the Western world with a focus and dedication that would eventually, decades later, be channeled into Democratic Party fundraising and an ambassadorship to France.
Bill was, for a period, among her projects. Pamela was not the only one on his side of the arrangement, and he was not the only one during the years of his marriage to Babe. The infidelities were chronic, constitutive, as much a part of who Bill Paley was as the network he had built and the cigars he smoked and the programming decisions he made with such confident authority.
He was a man who wanted things. Pursuit followed want with the same intensity he brought to business acquisitions, which is to say relentlessly and with the assumption that what he wanted was available to him because most things he had wanted had turned out to be available to him. The fact that he was married conspicuously and publicly to the most admired woman in New York apparently did not constitute a sufficient deterrent.
If anything, the most uncharitable reading of Bill Paley’s behavior suggests that the availability of the most admired woman in New York at home made the pursuit of other women feel like a manageable risk rather than a genuine threat to what he valued. Marriage for him was a social institution.
Babe as a wife was irreplaceable. As a companion for evenings when no one was watching, she was apparently insufficient. The rules of Babe’s world were clear about how a wife in her position was expected to respond to this. Above all, she was expected not to respond. Not publicly, not demonstrably. No response was to be made in ways that would require other people to take sides or acknowledge what was happening or choose between loyalty to Babe and the social capital that came with access to the Paleys collectively.
The maintenance of the marriage as a social unit was more important than the maintenance of the marriage as an emotional reality. Babe understood this requirement with the clarity that the Cushing training had given her for exactly these situations. Because Katherine Cushing had understood from the beginning that the marriages she was training her daughters to make would not necessarily be the marriages her daughters would have chosen if left to their own inclinations.
She never complained publicly. Not once in 30 years of marriage to a man who humiliated her chronically. No complaint emerged in interviews, at dinner parties, or in the kind of subtle social signaling that would have allowed sophisticated observers to read her unhappiness without her having to state it directly.
Maintained with a discipline so complete that some people in their social circle genuinely believed the marriage was happy or told themselves they believed it, which amounts to the same thing for social purposes. The facade held because it had to. Collective maintenance of the polite fiction was required from all sides, everyone participating because the alternative was a reckoning that nobody in the room wanted.
What Babe did with her pain was architectural, in the same way that her style was architectural. She put it somewhere it would not show. The extraordinary care with which she managed the houses, and the entertaining, and the social calendar absorbed it. Kiluna Farm became one of the most admired private estates in America, precisely because Babe treated its management as a serious creative project rather than a domestic obligation.
The gardens were impeccable. Each guest room was individually considered, suited to the particular preferences and tastes of the person who would sleep there, which required knowing those preferences well enough to anticipate them, and caring enough to act on that knowledge. Flowers sent from the farm to friends in the city expressed such genuine warmth and such specific attention to who those friends were and what they would appreciate that the gesture was remembered for decades by the people who received them.
She also put her pain into Truman Capote, or rather she put it into their friendship, into the conversations that happened in his apartment or hers, over drinks or lunch or long afternoons, where she could set down the performance for an hour and be briefly a person rather than a presentation. His company was the safety valve for 30 years of accumulated pressure, the one place the performance could stop.
What this cost her in cumulative terms is difficult to calculate with precision. The immediate emotional cost of watching your husband conduct a serial series of infidelities while you maintain perfect composure is one thing. Suppressing that pain so completely for so long is structurally different. It reshapes you from the inside.
It teaches you gradually and without announcement that your own feelings are less real, less important, less admissible than the social performance you are required to maintain. Over decades, this teaching becomes structural. It stops feeling like a choice you are making and starts feeling like the way things are. There is also the specific humiliation that attaches to being publicly beautiful and privately abandoned.
Babe Paley was the most admired woman in the room at virtually every gathering she attended. Men looked at her with desire and women with envy. And her husband, who had theoretically won the prize every other man in the room wanted, treated her as insufficient. This is a particular kind of wound. It does not announce itself.
Working quietly over years, it convinces the person who has absorbed it that the problem is with them, rather than with the person causing the damage. Babe never said any of this in a way that was designed to be reported. Some of it she said to Truman Capote. That turned out to be a distinction without any practical difference.
Truman Capote entered Babe Paley’s life sometime in the early 1950s. At the precise moment in his career when his talent was at its most dazzling and his self-destructive tendencies had not yet fully manifested. Other Voices, Other Rooms had been published in 1948 to a combination of critical admiration and social scandal.
The novella that would become Breakfast at Tiffany’s followed. Journalism and short fiction were in progress that would eventually, by 1966, produce In Cold Blood, a work that functionally invented the genre of narrative nonfiction and that remains one of the most startling exercises in sustained repertorial control that American letters produced in the 20th century.
In these years, he was also the most entertaining person at any party in New York, capable of holding a room with stories that were part gossip, part literary performance, part social analysis, and wholly irresistible to anyone who cared about language and wit, and the particular pleasure of being in the presence of someone operating at the absolute peak of their intelligence.
Unthreatening was also, in certain obvious ways, precisely what he was. Physically small, slight, with a high voice and a manner that was simultaneously childlike and utterly knowing. He was openly homosexual in an era when that required either considerable courage or considerable recklessness, and Capote brought both.
Competing with Bill Paley for anything was not in his nature. Looking at Babe as a conquest or a trophy or a social connection to be leveraged would have been foreign to him. His attention fell on her as herself, with genuine curiosity and genuine admiration that was uncontaminated by desire or ambition, which was a form of attention she had almost never received from anyone, and which was devastatingly effective.
He called the group of women he cultivated his swans, and the term was both flattering and, in retrospect, revealing about the nature of the relationship from his side of it. A swan is a beautiful creature, graceful and admired from a distance. In the natural world, it is also something you observe rather than something you know.
Capote’s swans were, collectively, the most visually celebrated women in America. Babe, along with Slim Aarons, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, and others. Each of them had a public image so polished as to be essentially opaque, had trained herself to the same discipline that Babe had trained herself to, and maintained the same immaculate surfaces over the same private complications.
Capote was the one person who got behind the surface for all of them. And what he found there, in each case, was material. With Babe specifically, the friendship became the closest female relationship of his life, which is the way it was described by people who knew them both. There is something in that phrasing worth pausing over.
The closest female relationship of his life. Male lovers, male friends, a whole separate social geography populated by the writers and artists who constituted his professional world. These existed in parallel. But Babe occupied a specific and irreplaceable category. She was the person he could be most fully himself with in social terms, and she, in return, was the person who could be most fully herself with him.
Because he had made himself the safest repository she had ever found. What they talked about has been reconstructed from Capote’s letters, from the recollections of mutual friends, and most precisely and most damningly, from the text of Answered Prayers itself, which functioned among its other qualities as a document of what he had been told in confidence.
Bill was the central subject. The affairs, the specific women, the humiliation of maintaining the performance of a happy marriage while your husband made his infidelities so flagrant that they were the subject of private conversation at every dinner party in Manhattan. All of this came up. What it meant to be Babe Paley was another theme.
The constraints of it, the loneliness of it, the particular isolation that attaches to a life lived in such complete public view that genuine privacy becomes almost impossible. These were the things Babe could not say to anyone else, had never said to anyone else, had spent 30 years not saying. Capote listened with total attention and absolute retention.
This was his gift as a writer, absorbing a story, holding it in memory with a fidelity that sometimes startled people who later encountered their own words reproduced with documentary precision, and reproducing it later with unfailing accuracy. For In Cold Blood, he had trained himself to conduct interviews lasting 6 hours, and then reconstruct them from memory alone, a capacity he had developed specifically because taking notes in the presence of traumatized or guarded subjects changed what they said and how they said it. He applied this
same capacity to his conversations with Babe, though he did not tell her he was doing so. A friend was what she believed she was talking to. A reporter was also what she was talking to, at least in part. The question of whether Capote saw a meaningful distinction between these two things is one of the organizing questions of his biography, and the answer is probably that he did not, at least not in the way that Babe needed him to.
For Capote, stories were stories. The sourcing did not fundamentally change the nature of the material. Having spent his entire professional life turning real people and real events into narrative, he had developed a set of rationalizations that allowed him to do this without confronting what it cost the people he was using.
Convenient as these rationalizations were, they served him well right up until November 1975, when they stopped serving him at all. She trusted him with the things she trusted no one else with, because he had made himself the safest repository she had ever found. Discretion was his most convincing quality. Loyalty was his most persuasive attribute.
Above all, he seemed to understand the difference between the material of her life and the life itself, between the secrets she shared with him and the woman doing the sharing. Her friend, not her biographer, that was what he seemed to be. He did not, in the end, know that difference at all. Or he knew it and could not stop himself.
Whether Capote was capable of understanding the harm he was about to cause or whether his hunger for material had simply overridden his capacity for empathy is a question that biographers and critics have argued about ever since. Both things were probably simultaneously true. And the coexistence of genuine love and genuine harm is not the paradox it appears to be.
It is simply the most specific kind of betrayal, not the betrayal of an enemy or a rival or a stranger, but of someone who loved you and whom you loved and who used that love as a door through which to take what you had not offered. The Esquire issue arrived in November 1975 with La Côte Basque, 1,965 inches presented as a chapter from the novel Capote had been promising for years, the novel that was going to be his masterpiece, his Proustian social record of the American 20th century, the work that would consolidate everything In Cold Blood had established
about his ability to transform real events into literature and establish him permanently and irrefutably as the greatest American prose writer of his generation. Answered Prayers was the project he had been announcing since the late 1960s. By November 1975, the announcement had been going on long enough that some people in his social world had begun to wonder whether the book existed at all.
What the chapter actually was, stripped of its literary framing, was a transcript of 20 years of confidences from the most powerful women in New York, written with enough transparency that their identities were obvious to anyone who had ever been to a dinner party in their vicinity, and published in a magazine with a national circulation that brought the conversation of those dinner parties to millions of readers who had never been near them.
The setting was the restaurant La Côte Basque on East 55th Street, which was in the 1960s and 1970s the luncheon destination of choice for Manhattan’s social elite, a place where the tables were painted with murals of the French coast, and the clientele was largely composed of women who had the time and the resources to devote 2 hours to lunch and the conversation that surrounded it.
A narrator called P.B. Jones sits with a character called Lady Ina Coolbirth and observes the other diners, commenting on them with the particular mixture of affection and savagery that Capote had always brought to his social observation, and which had previously been expressed only in private. Lady Ina Coolbirth was Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s sister, and the characterization was specific enough that Lee did not need a diagram.
Anyone who had ever been in the same room as Lee Radziwill and was now reading Esquire did not need one, either. But the most destructive element was not Lady Ina Coolbirth or any of the other thinly disguised figures who populated the restaurant’s tables in Capote’s telling. Embedded within the chapter was a story about a prominent man and his wife, and about the sheets in a hotel room that bore evidence of a sexual encounter the man had conducted with another man’s wife.
Details were specific, the texture of the humiliation precise. Positioning within the chapter and the weight Capote gave the story made it immediately universally understood among everyone who read it with any knowledge of the social world it described. The man was William S. Paley. That wife was Babe. Operating on several simultaneous levels, the betrayal compounded itself into something exponentially worse than any single element would have been on its own.
At the most immediate level, Capote had taken information Babe had shared with him in private during 20 years of friendship, information she had shared precisely because she trusted him to hold it and published it. Having done it in a way she could never publicly address made it worse. To acknowledge the story was to confirm the identification and to confirm the identification was to confirm everything the story implied about her marriage and her husband and the private reality behind the public performance she had maintained
for 30 years. At a deeper level, Capote had taken the central wound of Babe Paley’s life and made it legible to strangers. Her most private pain had been turned into entertainment. What she trusted him with had been published for money and for the literary reputation he believed the novel would secure for him.
His art was decided to be worth more than her privacy and that decision was made without asking her, without warning her, without giving her the opportunity to refuse. The other swans responded with the force of women who understood immediately and precisely exactly what had happened. Slim Keith was furious.
Gloria Guinness was furious. C.Z. Guest was furious. Marella Agnelli was furious. Every woman in Capote’s intimate social circle understood that what had happened to Babe could have happened to her because she had also told him things, because he had also been her friend and because the chapter made it clear that the distinction between friend and material was one that Capote had decided unilaterally did not apply to him.
The social doors that Capote had spent 20 years entering and exiting as a favored guest, closed with a unanimity that was itself remarkable. An act of collective social enforcement so swift and so complete that it demonstrated, among other things, just how much power these women actually held when they chose to exercise it in the same direction at the same time.
Overnight, he was transformed from the most amusing guest in the most desirable drawing rooms in America to a man whose invitations had been permanently withdrawn. He had not adequately anticipated this outcome. Perhaps he had told himself that the work would be so manifestly brilliant, so clearly a work of genius that could only have been produced by a writer with his particular access to this particular world.
That the people he had used as material would eventually forgive him as the subjects of great literature are historically expected to subordinate their personal objections to the greater cultural good. This turned out to be wrong in every particular. The people he had used as material were not interested in the greater cultural good.
His secrets had been published in a national magazine while they were still alive to suffer the consequences. And that was all that mattered. Babe’s response, as noted, was silence. Complete, absolute, unbroken silence. It was the most fitting possible response, and it was the one that wounded him most. Other women could rage, which at least gave him something to respond to, some drama in which he might play a role and seek a resolution.
Slim Keith could be furious in ways that were publicly visible and therefore potentially manageable. Babe simply removed herself from the relationship completely and permanently. And in doing so, demonstrated something essential about who she was at her core. The discipline was not a surface quality. It went all the way down through every layer she had built in 60 years of relentless self-construction.
The year 1975 was cruel to Babe Paley in a way that felt to those who knew her almost contrived in its timing. The lung cancer diagnosis arrived in the same year as the Esquire issue. Two catastrophes delivered together, as if the universe had decided to be thorough about dismantling the structure she had spent 60 years building.
She had smoked her entire adult life, which in her generation and social class was simply what one did. The cigarette was everywhere in the photographs from the 1940s through the 1960s, in her hand at parties, in the Slim Aarons images of poolside leisure, at dinner in the apartment, on the deck of the yacht.
As much a part of the visual vocabulary of mid-century elegance as the cocktail glass or the pale linen suit or the sunglasses worn on the terrace of a house in Jamaica. Nobody, at least nobody in the circles Babe inhabited, spoke in those years about what cigarettes were doing internally. Or if they knew, they managed to set that knowledge aside in the way that people set aside knowledge that is inconvenient to the life they have chosen.
The cancer, when it was diagnosed, was serious in a way that left little room for optimism. Babe approached the illness the way she approached everything else, with composure, with discipline, and with the determination not to become a public spectacle of suffering. Appearing at events when her health permitted continued.
Dressing with precision continued. The apartment and the social routines that had structured her life for 30 years continued to be maintained. Stopping the performance would have required her to become a different kind of person than she had been for six decades, and she did not know how to do that. By this point, the performance was was separate from the person.
It was the person. What was harder to maintain, and what required the people around her to perform their own kind of careful silence, was the pretense that Bill was managing her decline with appropriate devotion. He was not. Bill Paley continued to travel and to socialize during Babe’s illness with a regularity that was noted by virtually everyone in their social circle, and commented on in the way that Manhattan social circles comment on things.
Quietly, persistently, and always in the third person when anyone connected to the Paleys might be within earshot. Abroad he was when she needed him at home. At parties he was when she was confined to the apartment. His own comfort and his own social pleasures were pursued with the same single-mindedness he had always brought to them. And the fact that his wife was dying of cancer did not constitute, for Bill, a sufficient reason to reorganize his priorities in any fundamental way.
This is the Bill Paley who existed behind the CBS founder, behind the programming genius, behind the man whose professional achievements were genuinely extraordinary. A man who had married the most admired woman in New York and treated her throughout their marriage and through her dying as something less central to his life than he was to hers.
Rapid and merciless, the physical decline reduced the woman who had been on the international best-dressed list for 11 consecutive years, who had been photographed by every photographer who mattered, who had been studied by designers and envied by women across two continents to approximately 80 lb by the final months of her life.
Consider that number for a moment. At the height of her fame, Babe Paley had weighed probably somewhere in the vicinity of 115 to 125 lb, which for a woman of her height was already slender, the kind of slender that the fashion world of the 1950s and 1960s treated as the baseline of acceptability. 80 lb is the weight of a child.
It is the weight of a body that has used up everything available to it and is now consuming itself. Cancer does this when it is thorough and when the person in its path has run out of reserves to resist it. She did not see Truman Capote, did not send a message, did not grant him the resolution of a final conversation or a final fight or a final explanation of why she had chosen silence over everything else.
The silence maintained since November 1975 continued through her illness with absolute consistency through the weeks when she was still well enough to go out and through the months when she was not. This was, from anyone’s perspective, an extraordinary discipline. Most people facing death reach toward their significant relationships, including the complicated ones.
Babe reached toward nothing where Capote was concerned. Her decision was made in November 1975 and she honored it until the end. A question shadows this period that cannot be answered definitively but cannot be dismissed either, whether the heartbreak of the betrayal contributed to the speed of her decline. Cancer was real, its causes were real, a lifetime of cigarettes was the primary one.
But the emotional state of a cancer patient is not irrelevant to the progression of the disease and a person who has lost her primary emotional support at exactly the moment she needs it most, who is simultaneously carrying the wound of the worst betrayal of her life and the knowledge that she is dying, who watches her husband continue his social life while she diminishes, that person may not bring to the fight the same resources as a person who has more reason to persist.
Bill Paley remarried within the same year Babe died. The woman was Jane Hitchcock and the marriage happened in 1978 with a speed that told you everything you needed to know about the nature of Bill’s relationship to the institution of marriage and to the particular woman who had spent 30 years performing it for him to such extraordinary effect.
Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley died on July 6th, 1978. Born on July 5th, 1915, she died one day after her 63rd birthday, which is either a detail that means nothing or a detail that means everything depending on what you believe about the relationship between the facts of a life and the shape we perceive in them afterward.
New York was where she died. The apartment at 965th Avenue, with its 14 rooms and its precisely chosen objects and its immaculate maintenance, was the setting for the last phase of her life, the place she had made more completely her own than any other space she had ever occupied. Truman Capote was told of her death.
He wept in the way that people weep when something they have destroyed is finally and irreversibly gone with genuine grief compounded by the knowledge that the destruction was their own work. In the days and weeks following her death, he attempted to contact her family to express condolences to be admitted to the grief of the people who had surrounded her in her final years.
He was refused. The family and the people who had been close to Babe at the end were not interested in Capote’s grief. His exclusion from the mourning was understood by everyone involved as appropriate as something Babe herself would have wanted, as the logical conclusion of the silence she had maintained for 3 years.
On August 25th, 1984, at the age of 59, he died at the Los Angeles home of Joanne Carson. Liver disease, complicated by the multiple drug and alcohol dependencies he had developed across the final decade of his life, was the cause. The last 10 years had been a slow and very public disintegration. The talk show appearances where he was visibly impaired, the social events where people who had once admired him now watched him with something between pity and contempt, the inability to work, the failure to produce the pages that would
justify the sacrifices he had made. Answered Prayers was never completed. What chapters were published, of which La Côte Basque 1965 inches was the most notorious and most devastating, represented the entirety of what existed in any form that could be given to readers. Any remaining chapters, which Capote claimed to have written and stored somewhere safe, were never produced.
The manuscript, if it ever fully existed, did not survive him. This is the detail that history has treated with the appropriate harshness. He destroyed the most intimate friendships of the most productive years of his life for material he never used. The novel that was supposed to justify the betrayals, the work of genius that was supposed to make the destruction of Slim Keith’s trust and CZ Guest’s friendship and Gloria Guinness’ loyalty and Babe Paley’s silence not just excusable, but necessary.
It does not exist. What exists is a magazine chapter, a great deal of suffering and six years of Capote’s own decline before his death. Slim Keith, who had been among his closest friends, never forgave him. CZ Guest, who had welcomed him into her family’s life for two decades, never forgave him. Marella Agnelli was finished with him.
And Marella Agnelli was a woman who did not make that kind of decision carelessly. Gloria Guinness, one of the most sophisticated women in Europe, wanted nothing further to do with the man who had used her as material. The swans who had allowed him proximity to their private lives, who had told him their secrets on the reasonable assumption that he was their friend and not their stenographer, had those secrets published in Esquire while they were still alive and well and visible in the social world those secrets described. His masterpiece was
the wager he staked their trust against, and he lost everything on both sides of the bet. Babe took her silence to the grave, and then her silence became permanent. What Babe Paley built over the course of 63 years deserves to be understood on its own terms rather than solely as the context for a betrayal.
A version of a woman was built, honed, and refined across four decades that was genuinely and lastingly influential. The Hermes scarf on the handbag is still happening today on streets in Milan and Paris and New York and Tokyo executed by women who have no idea they are replicating a gesture made in New York probably on an ordinary morning by a woman solving a practical problem with characteristic elegance.
Her understanding of proportion, occasion, and the relationship between individual elements within an overall composition. These are not trivial contributions to the visual culture of the 20th century. The best-dressed Hall of Fame was not a consolation prize for sustained effort. Recognition of a coherent, original aesthetic intelligence that had operated at the highest level of its field for more than a decade is what it represented.
At Kiluna Farm and at 960 Fifth Avenue and at the houses in Jamaica and the Bahamas a domestic world of extraordinary quality and thoughtfulness was constructed. The entertaining she produced was not merely lavish, though it was lavish. Considered is the more precise word. Full of thought about the specific people involved and what would give each of them particular pleasure.
Guest rooms calibrated to their individual occupants. Flowers sent from the farm to friends in the city. Dinners organized around the conversational chemistry of the specific people at the specific table. Genuine intelligence and genuine care produced these things. And they were remembered with genuine warmth and genuine longing by the people who received them.
Babe Paley entertained the way great editors edit, by being invisibly, perfectly present. By making the event feel as though it had organized itself, while in fact organizing every element of it herself. The question that remains, the one that does not have a comfortable answer, is whether any of it was worth what it cost her.
The chronic infidelities of a husband who treated his marriage as a social asset and his wife as a component of that asset, endured in public silence for 30 years. The particular loneliness of a woman whose perfection made genuine intimacy nearly impossible. Who could only be fully honest with one person in the world and who chose for that one person, a man who was quietly recording everything she said.
Cancer accelerating through a body that weighed 80 lb at the end. The absence of the one friend who might have helped her face it. The friend she had correctly and permanently dismissed. A husband who went to parties while she was dying and remarried in the year of her death. The answer, honestly, is probably not. No external achievement, however real, compensates for a private life that exacts this kind of payment.
The Cushing training produced exactly what it was designed to produce. A woman of extraordinary public accomplishment who had learned very early and very thoroughly to make herself small in precisely the ways that the important men in her life required. Harvey Cushing’s rigorous, brilliant, emotionally absent example set the template.
Bill Paley’s infidelities were absorbed in silence for three decades. Capote’s betrayal was absorbed in silence for 3 years. The training for silence started early and ran deep. What she did not do in the end is equally instructive. No public rage, no interviews in which she settled scores, or explained herself, or demanded recognition for what she had endured.
No memoir was written, no biography authorized that would have set the record straight on her own terms. She simply continued to be Babe Paley impeccably and completely until she couldn’t anymore. At 80 lb, 1 day after her 63rd birthday, in the most elegant apartment in New York, she died. Her friend had already destroyed his career attempting to write the novel that would have justified what he did to her.
Bill would remarry before the year was out. Babe’s children would carry the particular inheritance of having watched both parents perform a marriage at great cost to at least one of them. No complaint was left on record. No public word about Truman Capote or the magazine or the 3 years of silence that followed it was ever spoken for attribution.
History reconstructed her feelings from the silence itself, which is the most Babe Paley thing possible. That even her deepest wound was communicated in the language of perfect composure, without melodrama, without visible effort, without a single visible crack in the surface she had been maintaining since before most people in the room had been born.
In the end, the image that remains is this. A woman setting down a magazine in November 1975 in a room she had designed with absolute precision in a life that had cost her everything she had and making a final irrevocable decision to not rage to not explain to not seek resolution or closure or any of the other things that people in pain are told they need to seek.
Just to close the door quietly the way a well-raised woman closes a door with no slamming, no excess, no drama that might later require explanation. The door closed Babe Paley walked away from it. Looking back was not something she did. In a life defined by performance, that choice was the most authentic thing she ever did.
It was also, perhaps, the only thing in her life that was entirely, irrefutably, completely her own.
