In a bedroom overlooking Fifth Avenue, a woman is wrapping jewelry. Not for a party, for a funeral. Her own. She is 62 years old. She is dying, and she is doing what she has done her entire life, everything [music] perfectly. Her name was Babe Paley, the wife of the man who built CBS, the woman that Truman Capote who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s called the most perfect person he had ever known.
He also published her deepest secrets in a national magazine while she was receiving chemotherapy. This is the story of what it costs to be called perfect. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Crown Files. For those who are new here, Crown Files tells the stories of the women who stood beside power, the duchesses, the heiresses, the women whose names appeared in the society pages every week, whose photographs were cut out and [music] kept, whose style was studied and imitated and envied by millions, [music] the women who paid the private price for
very public lives. Tonight’s story is about one of them. She was called by everyone who knew her, by every magazine that photographed her, the most perfect woman in New York. Her name was Barbara Cushing Paley, Babe to the world, the youngest daughter of a celebrated Boston surgeon. A fashion editor at Vogue before anyone knew her name, and then, from 1947 until the last day of her [music] life, the wife of William S.
Paley, the man who built CBS, who turned American television into the most powerful thing in the country, who owned the airwaves that 60 million people listened to every single night. She was on the international best-dressed list 14 times. In 1941, Time magazine named her the second best dressed woman in the world.
Her photograph, composed, composed, always composed, appeared in Vogue, in Harper’s Bazaar, in Town & Country. She tied a scarf to her handbag one afternoon, [music] and within weeks women across the country were doing the same thing. She let her hair go gray instead of dying it, and that too became a trend.
She mixed an emerald cut diamond ring from Cartier with a cheap plastic bangle from midtown drugstore, and somehow it looked like genius. Truman Capote, who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s, who wrote In Cold Blood, who was perhaps the most celebrated writer of his generation, called her the finest thing he had ever seen. “Mrs.
P had only one fault,” he once said. “She was perfect.” Otherwise, she was perfect. He meant it. He also meant something else by it, but we will get to that. What we are here to tell tonight is not the story of Babe Paley’s style. It is not the story of her homes, though the homes were extraordinary. It is not the story of the dinner parties at Kiluna Farm, the 80-acre estate in Manhasset, Long Island, where the gardens were designed by Russell Page, and the dinner menus were archived to avoid repeating a single course from one visit to the next. It is the story of
what lay beneath all of that. Because there is always something beneath, there is always a price. And in Babe Paley’s case, the price was paid very quietly, over 30 years, in a marriage that the world considered a fairytale, and that she considered at her loneliest a kind of beautiful prison. She had two men in her life who mattered to her more than any others.
One was her husband. One was her best friend. Both of them had the power to break her. Both of them did in different ways, at different moments, for different reasons. And Babe [music] Paley, who had been trained since childhood to absorb every blow without letting it show, absorbed them both. She wore the right clothes. She attended the right parties.
She stood beside the right man at the right events. And underneath all of it, underneath the turban she wore to cover what the chemotherapy had taken from her, underneath the perfect handwriting on the cards she placed inside each carefully wrapped parcel of jewelry, she was, as Capote himself wrote, perfectly alone.
This is her story. Tonight, we begin at the beginning. Not with the triumph, but with the education that made it possible. Boston is not a city that forgives weakness. It is a city of old money and older expectations, where the correct families have been marrying each other for 200 years, and where a woman’s value, however unspoken, however dressed up in the language of charm and breeding, is measured almost entirely by who she becomes after she leaves the house her father built.
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Barbara Cushing was the third daughter in a family that produced nothing but ambition. Her father, Harvey Cushing, was one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in the world. A man who held a Pulitzer Prize, who trained surgeons at Johns Hopkins and Harvard and Yale, who was spoken of with a kind of reverence that made even powerful men lower their voices.
Her mother, Katherine, called Kate by everyone who mattered, was the other kind of architect entirely. Harvey built minds. Kate built marriages. She had, according to Laurence Leamer’s account in Capote’s Women, one wish for her three daughters. Not happiness, exactly. Not love in the soft sense of the word. What Kate Cushing wanted for her girls was that they marry well, marry up, marry into the kind of money and position that would carry them beyond anything Boston could offer into the highest rooms of New York and
Washington and wherever power happened to be gathering that decade. The lesson took. The eldest, Minnie, married Vincent Astor. The middle sister, Betsy, married James Roosevelt, the eldest son of Franklin and Eleanor, and later the enormously wealthy John Hay Whitney. And Barbara, the youngest, the one they called Babe, simply because she was the baby, watched all of this from the beginning and understood what it meant.
The world had a place for women like her and the entrance fee was beauty and composure and knowing exactly when to be seen and when to disappear. She was 17 when she understood it completely. In the autumn of 1934, on a road somewhere outside Boston, there was a car accident. According to Lima’s account, it left her with bruises and blemishes and scars and it knocked out her front teeth, those specific small catastrophes that the young face with a particular horror.
She went into surgery. When she came out, she was, if anything, more beautiful than before. The reconstruction had given her cheekbones a finer line, a sharpness that photographs would love, unblemished and perhaps even more heightened, as Lima would later write. She was 19. And she understood something now that she had not understood before.
Beauty was not a gift, it was a material. It could be shaped, repaired, maintained, deployed. It could be taken away and it could be restored. The question was not whether you had it, almost every girl in her circle had some version of it, but whether you understood what it was for. She understood. By the time she arrived at Vogue in the late 1930s, she was already learning the second language of her real education, the grammar of other people’s desires, how a room should feel when a powerful man enters it, which flowers last longest in
winter light, how to remember the names of a hostess’s children. She worked as a fashion editor, not for the byline, not for the salary, but for what it taught her about how the world looked at women and how women could learn to look back. Her first marriage to Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., the grandson of a Standard Oil founder, a correct match by every measure her mother had established, lasted six years.
He was an oil heir and veteran and the war, according to what those close to them later said, changed him in ways he never fully recovered from. He returned with a cruelty that drank, with moods that swung without warning, with a coldness that filled the rooms of their house on Long Island. They had two children. They had the right address.
They had none of the things that actually sustain a marriage. She divorced him in 1946. The settlement was $40,000. In the gossip columns, it was a scandal. In Babe’s mind, it was a calculation and she was already running the next one. Because she had met someone. She had met someone who needed exactly what she had been her entire life trained to provide.
William S. Paley was the founder and chief executive of the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS. He had taken a small radio network in 1928 and built it by sheer force of personality and competitive fury into the most powerful media company in the country. By 1947, CBS was in every living room in America. It broadcast the voices that millions of people trusted more than their own neighbors, and its founder was a man of prodigious appetites for art, for influence, for the company of beautiful women, and almost no patience for the
social barriers that had kept his family out of the better clubs on Long Island because they were Jewish. Babe had what he needed. She had the lineage, the manner, the friendships with the families who controlled those clubs and those parties and those rooms. Her sisters had married a Roosevelt and an Astor.
She moved through old money as easily as breathing. She was, in Lima’s phrase, the key to a door that Bill Paley had been standing outside for years. And Bill had what Babe had been raised to need. He had money of a scale she had not encountered before apartment at the St. Regis, an 80-acre estate in Manhasset, houses in the Bahamas, a villa in Jamaica.
He had power that was larger and louder and more real than anything her father’s reputation had given the family. They married on the 28th of July, 1947. She left Vogue the same week. She never went back. What she did instead was something that, in another era, might have been called a career. She made their world. She decorated the apartment at the St.
Regis with Billy Baldwin. She transformed Kiluna Farm, the 80 acres in Manhasset, into something that people who were invited there remembered for the rest of their lives. She hired Russell Page to design the gardens. She created what she called the secret garden, a small enclosed space behind the tall azalea hedges near the pond, where no camera ever followed her.
She archived the dinner menus so that no guest was ever served the same meal twice. She remembered names. She remembered children’s birthdays. She made every room feel somehow inevitable. From the outside, it was the picture of everything her mother had wanted for her. From the inside, it was something she was still learning how to live with.
Because there was one thing that no amount of dinner menus or archived seating charts or perfect gardens could answer. There was one thing her education had not prepared her for, or perhaps had prepared her for too well, the lesson that Kate Cushing had never quite articulated but had always implied.
The lesson that said, “Find the best position in the room and then learn how to stay in it, whatever the cost.” The cost, she was beginning to understand, was considerable. But that understanding would come later and with it a friendship she did not expect with a small man who arrived in her life entirely by accident, somewhere over the Caribbean, in the summer of 1955.
Somewhere over the Caribbean in the summer of 1955, a private plane belonging to William S. Paley was carrying a small group of friends toward the Paley cottage in Jamaica. The friends included David and Jennifer Selznick. He, the legendary producer of Gone with the Wind. She, a woman of the kind of sharp social intelligence that Babe Paley particularly valued.
The Selznicks had asked if they could bring along a friend. >> Bill Paley had said yes. He thought the friend’s name was Truman. He thought it was President Truman. It was not President Truman. It was a short, slightly built man in his early 30s. His name was Truman Capote. By 1955, he was already one of the most talked about writers in the country.
>> Babe looked at him. He looked at her. They fell [music] instantly in love. By the time they got to Jamaica, they became inseparable. From the outside, it looked extraordinary. [music] There was the apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue, where a 7-ft Picasso dominated the living room. She was the most imitated woman in America.
A photograph of her would appear, and within weeks, thousands of women were tying scarves to their handbags. She was also, by her own interior accounting, the loneliest. Because the man she had married had gotten what he needed, and now he was busy getting other things. Bill Paley was not a woman lover.
He was a womanizer. He trawled bars and private clubs, his preferences running to blondes and models. Babe knew. She was a doctor’s daughter, trained in the observation of symptoms. The late returns. The particular quality of her husband’s attention. She said nothing. [music] What she had instead was the life itself.
The curated, magnificent, endlessly maintained performance of a perfect marriage. According to Laurence Leamer, Babe Paley did not have friends in the conventional sense. The women of her circle were companions, rivals, ornaments, not friends. Truman Capote was different. He was brilliant, uninhibited, capable of an intimacy that bypassed all social distances.
He made her laugh. She told him things she had never told anyone about Bill’s affairs, the humiliations she had swallowed, the gap between the life she appeared to live and the one she inhabited. He told her, “Look upon being Mrs. William S. Paley as a job, the best job in the world. Accept it and be happy with it.
” She accepted it. She was not happy. What neither discussed was the book, the one he called his masterpiece, the one he referred to as Answered Prayers. He was building something with her secrets. Village. [music] In 1955, there was only a woman who had not laughed in a long time and a man who made her laugh again.
It was the beginning of the end. For 20 years, Truman Capote was the best thing in Babe Paley’s life. That is not a romantic statement, though Capote himself would occasionally make it sound like one. It is simply a fact understood by anyone who looked closely at the shape of her days during those two decades. He called every morning.
He appeared at her apartment unannounced with flowers or gossip or both. He sat beside her at dinner and made the whole table feel like the only table in the world. He arrived in Palm Beach and in Jamaica and at Kiluna Farm and in every other place the Paleys occupied. And wherever he arrived, Babe was more alive than she had been before he got there.
She was often called the most beautiful woman in the world, Laurence Leamer wrote. And Truman just like looking at her, admiring her incredible panache. But it was more than that. It was considerably more than that. Capote later said, and this is a statement he made in more than one conversation, to more than one person, that Babe Paley was the most important person in his life.
>> [music] >> I was her one real friend, he said, the one real relationship she ever had. We were like lovers. She loved me and I loved her. He said this with the absolute conviction of a man who believed it. He may in fact have believed it entirely. She believed it, too. And for her, belief in it mattered in a way it did not quite matter for him.
Because for Babe, the friendship was not one relationship among many. It was the only relationship of its kind she had ever permitted herself to have. There were the Swans, the women Capote collected and named and celebrated with a proprietorial fondness that was itself a kind of possession.
Gloria Guinness, whose elegance was so total it sometimes frightened people. Slim Aarons, who was droll and competitive and whose friendship with Babe ran alongside a low steady current of rivalry that neither of them ever fully acknowledged. C.Z. Guest, the ash blonde Boston Brahmin who seemed to move through every room as if she had designed it herself.
Marella Agnelli, the Italian aristocrat who was, in certain seasons, the only woman whose style came close to Babe’s. These women were Babe’s world. They were not her confidants. What she and Truman had was different in kind. It was built on a foundation that the other friendships in her life were not equipped to bear the foundation of actual disclosure.
She told him the things she did not tell anyone else. She told him about Bill’s infidelities year after year in the particular detail that only someone living inside that knowledge could provide. She told him about the silences in her marriage, the specific geography of loneliness that can exist inside a very large, very beautiful house.
She told him about the gap, the permanent gap between the woman the world photographed and the woman who sometimes sat alone in the secret garden at Kiluna Farm and felt the afternoon get dark around her. Capote received all of it. He held it. He never appeared to judge it. He was, in this sense, the confessional she had never had, the one place where the performance could come briefly, carefully down and where Babe Paley could be something other than the second best dressed woman in the world.
He was also working. This is the fact that in the golden warmth of those years did not register the way it should have. Truman Capote was always working. It was the condition of his existence. The notebook was never entirely closed. The ear was never entirely off duty. The material of other people’s lives was never quite separate from the material of the page.
He had said as much more than once in interviews and in conversation. He had told people that he was building something enormous, a novel to rival Proust, a reckoning with American society of a kind that had never been written before. He called it Answered Prayers. The title came from Saint Teresa of Avila.
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. Nobody paid much attention to the title. They should have. He had been working on Answered Prayers since the early 1960s. He spoke of it often enough that it had become a kind of social fixture, Truman’s great unfinished book, the one that would make everything before it look like warming up.
He had told his publisher it would be the defining literary event of the decade. He had told his friends it would be the definitive portrait of the world they all inhabited. He had told Babe, who listened and believed him and loved him for his ambition, that it would be magnificent. What he had not told her, what he perhaps had not told himself, not in those exact terms, was that the world he was and the confidences she had given him were not merely the things a friend keeps safe and warm and private.
They were, in his notebooks, already turning into sentences. In November 1966, Capote threw the party of the century. He called it the Black and White Ball. He held it at the Plaza Hotel in New York on the Monday after Thanksgiving. The guest list, 500 people, selected with a ruthlessness that made the exclusions as famous as the invitations, was the most talked about document in New York society that year.
Princess Lee Radziwill was there. Lauren Bacall was there. Frank Sinatra. Katharine Graham. Norman Mailer. Lyndon Johnson’s daughter. Before the ball itself, the Paley’s hosted a small dinner at their apartment, Capote among the guests, as he almost always was. It was the apex of everything. The most glamorous world in the country and Truman at the center of it and Babe beside him and the whole machinery of their social universe turning at full speed.
She could not have known, sitting at that table, that the machinery had already begun to consume itself. Because even then, even in the middle of the champagne and the black and white masks and the extraordinary convergence of power and art and money that was the Black and White Ball Capote was writing, he was always writing, and the women he called his swans, the women who had given him their secrets and their trust and their extraordinary interiors, were already on the page.
The book was not finished. It would not be finished for years. It would not, in the end, ever be finished. But one chapter was. One chapter was already done. And one morning in November 1975, nine years after the ball, a year after Babe had received the diagnosis that told her she was dying, that chapter would arrive at newsstands across the country inside the pages of Esquire magazine.
By then, the friendship would be over. By then, a woman named Ann Woodward would already be dead. And Babe Paley, who had kept every secret, who had swallowed every humiliation, who had survived 30 years of a marriage that was, at its most honest, a business arrangement, would pick up a copy of Esquire and read her own life, thinly translated, in the prose of the only person she had ever truly trusted.
But before all of that, there was 1974. There was the diagnosis. There was the first moment that the armor Babe had spent 60 years perfecting began, quietly and without announcement, to show its first crack. In 1974, Babe Paley was 58 years old, and she had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for most of her adult life.
It was a nervous habit, the kind that a woman of her generation and her particular temperament acquired and then maintained as a form of self-management, a way of giving the hands something to do while the rest of the body held still. She had been told, at various points, that she should stop. She had not stopped. The cigarettes were part of the architecture of her composure, and composure was not something she was willing to dismantle.
In 1974, the doctors gave her the diagnosis, lung cancer. She received the news the way she received most difficult information directly, without visible collapse. She was, after all, a surgeon’s daughter. She had grown up in a household where the clinical language of illness was as familiar as the weather, where you named the thing and then you addressed it.
She began chemotherapy. The treatments made her hair fall out. She bought silk turbans. This detail, small, specific, quietly devastating, tells you almost everything you need to know about Babe Paley in the last years of her life. Another woman might have retreated. Another woman might have let the illness excuse her from the performance, might have used the diagnosis as a reason to finally, at last, stop holding everything so precisely in place.
Babe Paley did not retreat. She folded the turban around her forehead with the same care she had always given to everything she wore, and she went to dinner. She appeared at the theater. She attended the parties. Women across New York noticed the turbans and began wearing them. She had turned dying, as one observer later put it, into an accessory.
But what no one could see, what the turban was designed, among other things, to prevent anyone from seeing, was what the diagnosis had done to the interior of her life. Because the cancer had arrived in the same season as something else, something that was moving quietly and without her knowledge, toward a point of detonation.
Truman Capote had, for years, been telling anyone who would listen that Answered Prayers was nearly done. It was not nearly done. It was, in the private assessment of the people at Random House, who had been waiting for it since 1966, a cause for considerable alarm. The advance had been paid. The deadline had passed.
The book existed in fragments, chapters scattered across notebooks and hotel stationery and the backs of cocktail napkins, assembled and disassembled and reassembled in a sequence that kept changing. He had told Babe it was magnificent. He had told his editor it was magnificent. He had told everyone it was magnificent.
Under the pressure of a publisher threatening to reclaim the advance, Capote agreed to submit a chapter, a single chapter. He would give it to Esquire, who would publish it as a preview of the larger work to come. He chose the chapter he called La Côte Basque, 1965, named after the restaurant on West 55th Street where, for a certain class of New York woman in a certain decade, lunch was a kind of currency.
The chapter was fiction. That was its official designation. The names had been changed. The characters were composites or claimed to be. A socialite named Lady Ina Coolbirth, based transparently on Slim Keith, sat at the restaurant and talked. And in the course of that conversation, she told stories, stories about people in their world.
Stories about things that had happened or that were said to have happened at private parties and in private bedrooms and in the particular intimacy of marriages that the public imagined as perfect. One of those stories concerned a media executive named Sidney Dillon. The name was barely a disguise. Sid, Dill, Bill.
The letters rearrange themselves with an ease that anyone in their circle would recognize immediately. The chapter was submitted to Esquire in the autumn of 1975. An advanced copy was sent, as was customary, to certain people mentioned in the text. One of those people was a woman named Ann Woodward. Ann Woodward had been a model and a socialite, and she had shot and killed her husband, a banking heir, named William Woodward Jr.
in 1955 in a bedroom of their Long Island estate in circumstances that a Nassau County Grand Jury had ruled accidental. The shooting had never stopped following her. It had defined her in the way that a single night can define a person across decades in a society with no patience for forgiveness. Capote had written about Ann Woodward before.
He had told the story at dinner parties for years with a relish that she found unbearable. And now it was in print. Ann Woodward received her advanced copy of La Côte Basque. She read it. And then she took a handful of barbiturates and did not wake up. Her death spread through the Swans world like a cold current moving through still water. Slim Keith called Babe.
C Z Guest called Slim. The names moved from telephone to telephone across the apartments of the Upper East Side in the gray October light. Nobody said quite what they were feeling because what they were feeling was too large and too frightening to name directly. What they were feeling was the first intimation, not yet certainty, not yet the full understanding of what had been done that Truman Capote had written about them.
That the book, the magnificent book, the great Proustian novel of their age, had used the material they had given him, had used their lives, had used their secrets, had used the things whispered over luncheon in the back of taxis, and in the quiet corners of parties where they thought no one was listening. Except that someone had always been listening.
Someone had always been writing it down. Babe heard about Ann Woodward. She heard the rumors about the chapter, about what was in it, about who could be recognized in its thin fictional disguise. She could not yet bring herself to believe what the rumors were saying about her own life, her own marriage, her own most private disclosures.
Truman was her friend. Truman was the person she trusted more than anyone on earth. Truman had promised her, had he not promised her, had it not been understood between them, in the way that some things are understood without being said, that what she had told him was hers, that it would stay between them, that it was safe.
She was still holding that belief when November came. She was still holding it when the magazine arrived at the newsstands, the November 1975 issue of Esquire, page 110. She picked it up. She read the first paragraphs. She read a sentence that she recognized, then another, then a detail, a specific, small, intimate detail that could only have come from a single source.
From her. >> [snorts] >> She read it a second time. This is what you do when you have read something that cannot be true and that is true. You go back to the beginning and you read it again, more slowly, with a different quality of attention, the way a doctor re-reads a result that does not match what she expected to find.
You look for the error. You look for the place where you misread the sentence, where the meaning you took from it was the wrong one, where the specific detail that seems to point directly at your life is, on closer examination, pointing somewhere else. Babe Paley was a doctor’s daughter. She knew how to re-read. There was no error.
The chapter called La Côte Basque, 1965, was, in its official designation, fiction. The names had been changed. The restaurant was real, the actual La [music] Côte Basque on West 55th Street, where the tablecloths were white and the murals were blue, and where a certain class of New York woman had been having a certain class of lunch for decades.
The characters were claimed to be composite. The events were said to be imagined, but the details were not imagined. The details were the kind that do not arrive through imagination. They arrive through conversation, through the particular, intimate, late afternoon conversations that Babe had been having with Truman Capote for 20 years.
The kind of conversation where you say the thing you have never said to anyone else, because you are with the one person you trust not to use it. The character of Sidney Dillon, the media executive whose infidelities were described in the chapter with a specificity that made several people in their social circle put the magazine down and reach immediately for the telephone, was not a composite.
He was Bill Paley. The details were Bill Paley’s details. The indiscretion described the particular nature of it, the specific shape of the humiliation that Babe had carried in private for years and disclosed to no one but Truman was her private knowledge given in confidence now printed in a national magazine with a circulation of 1 million readers. She had told him that.
She had told him that specific thing in a private room believing it would stay there. It had not stayed there. According to Kelly Greenburg Jeffcoat who spent more than a decade researching the swans and the world they inhabited, what Babe felt in that moment was not rage. It was something harder to name and harder to recover from an absolute disbelief.
From Babe’s perspective, Greenburg Jeffcoat said, it was an absolute disbelief that someone that she had trusted more than her husband, more than her children, more than her sisters, more than her female friends, that this person that she had given everything to, she just couldn’t conceive of him ever doing that. She picked up the telephone.
She called Slim Keith. “Have you seen Esquire?” she said. Slim had seen it. Slim had read it and Slim was operating in those first hours with the particular clarity of a woman who has been hurt and has decided very quickly that hurt is a luxury she cannot afford. Ann Woodward was dead. The story that Capote had written about her had reached her before it reached the public and she had not survived it.
Slim told Babe this. She said that Ann was dead because of what Truman had written. She said that at least they were still alive. According to accounts recorded in Laurence Leamer’s Capote’s Women, Babe’s response to this was very quiet. “Well,” she said, “I want to die, too.” There is no record of how long the silence lasted after that.
There is no record of what Slim said in reply. What we know is that the call ended, and that Babe Paley did not speak to Truman Capote again, not that day, not the following week, not in the 3 years that remained of her life, not one word. This is worth dwelling on, not because silence is unusual between people who have been hurt.
Silence is the most common human response to the unbearable, but because of its duration and because of what it cost her. Capote tried, in the weeks that followed, to explain himself. He had written to the Swans. He had telephoned. He had deployed the full arsenal of his charm and his remorse and his considerable capacity for justification.
He had said, to anyone who would listen, “What did they expect? I’m a writer.” As if this explained it, as if this answered it. It explained nothing. It answered nothing. Because what the Swans had expected, what Babe had expected, specifically and precisely, was what she had been promised implicitly by 20 years of friendship.
She had expected that the things she had given him in trust would be kept in trust. She had expected that the man who called her the most important person in his life would treat her accordingly. She had expected that the friendship was what it had appeared to be and not, as it had turned out to be, a long and patient act of collection.
The other Swans cut him off as well. Slim Keith, C. Z. Guest, Gloria Vanderbilt. The world that had made Capote possible, the rooms he had inhabited, the tables he had sat at, the parties he had attended, the entire glittering architecture of the life he had built inside their circle, closed around him like water closing over a stone.
He was not invited to the parties. He was not seated at the tables. The calls he made went unreturned. He had written the book. He had burned the world. But Babe’s silence was the one that mattered most to him. He knew it, and she knew it, and it was perhaps the only leverage she had left, the only thing she had not given him, could not give him, because it was not a confidence or a secret or a piece of private knowledge. It was simply her absence.
Simply the withdrawal of herself from the relationship that he had said was the most important in his life. She gave him her absence. She gave it completely. And she went on living, if that is the right word for what the next three years were without him. She was dying. She had been dying since the diagnosis in 1974, and the dying was continuing in the way that dying continues.
Not dramatically, not all at once, but in the steady accumulation of small losses, the gradual narrowing of what the body will agree to do. The chemotherapy continued. The turban remained. She appeared at the events she could still attend, and she appeared at them perfectly, because that was what she knew how to do.
And because perfection was, by now, not a performance, but a reflex. Bill Paley was still there. He was her husband, and he remained her husband. He had read the Esquire chapter, had read the character of Sidney Dillon, had recognized himself in it with the certainty of a man seeing his own face in an unfamiliar mirror, and what he had felt about it, Babe never said.
She had spent 30 years not saying what she felt about Bill’s behavior. There was no reason to start now. There was, in fact, considerably less time in which to start. In the evenings, in the last year of her life, she sat in the apartment at 820 5th Avenue, the Picasso still on the wall, the Bonnard still over the Louis the XVI cabinet, and she wrapped things carefully, methodically, with the same attention she had given to the dinner menus and the seating charts and the flower arrangements of 30 years.
She wrapped her jewelry in tissue paper. She tucked a small card into each parcel with a name written on it in her handwriting. She was distributing herself, the material version of herself, the beautiful accumulated objects of a life lived in the highest rooms of the country, to the people who had not left her.
Not to Truman, not to him. She was 62 years old, and she was dying, and she was doing what she had always done. She was making sure that everything would be in order when she was no longer there to maintain it. What she could not make orderly, what resisted to the end, the meticulous filing system of her grief, was the unanswered question at the center of everything.
The question she had whispered once, in a less guarded moment, into the darkness of a room where she had thought she was safe. The fear that ran beneath the turban and the tray of wrapped jewelry and the perfectly maintained composure of her final years, that she had never been truly loved. That she had given everything, her beauty, her name, her secrets, her silence, her 30 years, >> [music] >> and that what she had gotten in return was a husband who used her, and a friend who sold her, and a world that admired her enormously and knew her not at all.
She did not say this out loud. She had been trained from the beginning not to say it out loud. But it was there, in the secret garden at Kiluna Farm, in the silk turban, in the small white cards [music] tucked into the tissue paper, in every carefully maintained surface of a life that had been, from the outside, everything her mother had wanted for her.
And Babe Paley, who had never once in 63 years allowed anyone to see her without her armor on, went on wearing it. To the end. On the morning of the 6th of July, 1978, in an apartment at 825th Avenue in New York City, Barbara Cushing Paley died of lung cancer. She was 63 years old. She had turned 63 the day before.
The Picasso was still on the wall. The Bonnard was still over the cabinet. The apartment was exactly as she had left it, which is to say, it was exactly as she had always maintained it, with the kind of attention that does not allow for a cushion out of place, or a flower past its prime.
She had been a precise woman. She had remained precise to the end. The parcels were already wrapped. The cards were already written. The instructions she had left for the jewelry, for the funeral, for the wine that was to be served at the reception afterward, were filed in a system that her household could follow without confusion, because Babe had never trusted confusion, and she had not been about to start trusting it in the last months of her life.
Her funeral was held at Christ Episcopal Church in Manhasset, Long Island, the church nearest to Kiluna Farm, the 80-acre estate where she had created, over 30 years, the most beautiful version of the life she had been given. The guests came in the kind of clothes she would have approved of. The wine was the wine she had selected herself, French, expensive, correct.
People who had known her for decades stood in her garden and raised their glasses to a woman who had spent those same decades making sure that every glass raised in her presence was exactly the right glass holding exactly the right thing. Truman Capote was not there. He had not been invited. The instruction, unspoken but absolute, had been observed without exception.
The people who had loved Babe had understood, without needing to be told, that his presence would have been a violation of something she had spent 3 years protecting. Her absence from his life had been her final act of self-possession. In death, it was honored. C.Z. Guest was the one who told him. She called him.
Some accounts say she reached him at his apartment, others that she found him elsewhere, but the substance of the call is not disputed. She told him that Babe was gone. She told him he was not invited to the funeral. Capote had been carrying, for months, an unfinished piece he called Beautiful Babe. It was a eulogy, or something like a eulogy, written in the way he wrote everything, in fits and starts, accumulating toward a completion that kept receding. He had not finished it.
He had not been able to finish it. He read what there was of it. In the version that has been passed down, He read it alone to no one in the quiet of wherever he happened to be and then he put it away. Answered Prayers was never finished. He would spend the remaining six years of his life trying and failing to complete it and when he died in August 1984 at the home of his friend Joanne Carson in Los Angeles, the manuscript was still incomplete.
Whether it was hidden or destroyed or simply abandoned, no one has ever been certain. What is certain is this, the book that was going to be his masterpiece, the great Proustian work of his generation, the thing he had been building from the secrets of the women who trusted him, it does not exist in the form he intended.
The women he used outlasted the work he used them for. Bill Paley went on. He was, as the world had always known him to be, a man of considerable resilience. He attended the funeral. By the accounts of those who were present, he wept in a way that surprised people openly, without the composed distance that his public persona usually maintained.
Whether this was grief for the woman he had married or grief for something he had understood too late or simply the particular shock of losing a presence that had organized his life for 30 years, no one who was there has said precisely what it looked like from the inside. In 1985, Cosmopolitan magazine published a list of the 10 most eligible bachelors in the country.
William S. Paley was on [music] it. He was 83 years old. The irony of this, the octogenarian founder of CBS, the man who had been the most powerful figure in American broadcasting for 50 years, listed among the country’s most desirable single men, was noted at the time with a kind of mordant amusement.
It was later said to have inspired the top 10 lists on Late Night with David Letterman. The joke had a long life. Babe had been dead for 7 years by then. He died in October 1990, kidney failure at 89. His estate was valued at half a billion dollars. His art collection, the Picasso, the Bonnard, the post-impressionists that had hung in the rooms that Babe had created for them, went, by his instruction, to the Museum of Modern Art.
The money went, with considerable generosity, to all six of his children. He was buried at the Memorial Cemetery of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. He was buried beside Babe. The man who had spent 30 years finding reasons to be somewhere other than where she was, who had trawled the bars and the parties and the other lives that were available to him, was placed, at the end, in the ground next to the woman whose patience had outlasted his faithlessness.
Whether she would have found this fitting or ironic or simply another thing to absorb without showing what she felt that is not recorded anywhere. She had not left instructions for how to feel about it. She had left instructions for the wine and the flowers and the distribution of the jewelry. The rest, as it always had been, was for other people to interpret.
Truman Capote said, before the end of his friendship with her, “Mrs. P had only one fault. She was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect. He had said it with love. He had also said it with the writer’s eye that never fully closed, the eye that was always measuring, always noting, always finding in the perfection of another person >> [music] >> the material of something larger.
He had loved her. He had used her. These two facts exist together, and they do not resolve each other. What remains of Babe Paley is what she intended to remain, the photographs, the style, the influence on a hundred women who never knew her name, but who tied a scarf to their handbag one afternoon because she had done it first, the memory of what it looked like to move through a room with complete composure, the archived menus at Kiluna Farm.
The small white cards inside the carefully wrapped parcels of jewelry, each one bearing a name in her handwriting, and somewhere in the memorial cemetery at Cold Spring Harbor, the grave she shares with the man who never quite deserved her. The turban is gone. The secret garden is gone.
Kiluna Farm burned in a fire and was demolished around 1990, and with it the hedges and the pond and the small enclosed space where she used to sit alone until the light changed. Everything she built and maintained and curated with such extraordinary care has passed into the ordinary dissolution of things. What has not dissolved is the question she carried, the one she never answered out loud.
