November 1975, Esquire magazine hits the news stands. On page after page, Truman Capot’s latest work unfolds. The story is called Lacot Basque, 1965, an excerpt from his long- aaited novel. Society women across Manhattan pick up their copies over morning coffee. They begin to read, and within hours, the telephone lines are burning.
Because there, thinly disguised in Capote’s pros, are their own secrets, their affairs, their humiliations, their private confidences laid bare for the world to see. One woman in particular reads the story and realizes what has happened. Babe Paley, the most elegant woman in New York, the queen of high society, Capot’s closest friend.
He has betrayed her and the life she spent decades perfecting is about to unravel. But Bab’s story doesn’t begin with betrayal. It begins in Boston decades earlier with three sisters and a mother who had one clear vision for her daughters. They would marry into power no matter the cost to their hearts.
The making of American royalty. Harvey Kushing was one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in America. A professor at John’s Hopkins, Harvard, and Yale, he pioneered techniques in brain surgery that saved countless lives. His name would eventually be attached to Cushing syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder he discovered.
The medical world revered him. Patients traveled from across the country to be treated by him. He was brilliant, dedicated, consumed by his work. But for all his medical brilliance, Dr. Cushing wasn’t the one running the household. That job belonged to his wife, Catherine Craing, a woman everyone called Goggsy.
Goggsy had a clear philosophy about life, one she instilled in her three daughters from their earliest days. Marriage was a business. Love was nice if you could manage it, but security, status, and wealth were what truly mattered. She had climbed the social ladder herself through determination and strategic connections, coming from a respectable Ohio family, but not the absolute upper echelons.
She had married well when she wed Harvey Cushing, a promising young surgeon who delivered on that promise. But she expected her daughters to climb even higher. They would become what she herself had not quite managed to be. American aristocracy. They would marry men whose names appeared in history books, whose fortunes shaped industries, whose social connections opened every door.
The eldest daughter was Mary, always called Minnie. Born in 1906, she was the first to learn Gog’s lessons. Next came Betsy in 1908 and finally in 1915 came Barbara whom everyone called Babe. The three Cushing sisters grew up in an atmosphere of privilege tempered by ambition. They were wealthy by any standard, living in beautiful homes, attending the best schools, traveling to Europe in summers.
But Goggsy never let them forget that privilege could be fleeting, that the real security came from marrying the right man. The girls had an older brother, William, who attended Yale. In 1926, he was killed in an automobile accident near New Haven. The death devastated the family.
Harvey threw himself even deeper into his work, spending long hours at the hospital, finding solace in saving other people’s children since he couldn’t save his own. Goggy turned to seances, desperately trying to contact her dead son’s spirit, seeking some connection that death had severed. The loss cast a shadow over the household that never quite lifted, and it made Gogsy even more determined that her daughters would have secure, protected futures.
She couldn’t protect William, but she could ensure that Minnie, Betsy, and Babe married men powerful enough to shield them from life’s cruelties. The girls learned their lessons well. They attended the right schools, made the right connections, learned how to move through elite circles with grace and confidence.
Minnie and Betsy went to Westover School in Connecticut, where daughters of the wealthy learned to be ladies. Babe followed them there, graduating at the top of her class. But more importantly than academics, they absorbed their mother’s central teaching. A woman’s value was determined by whom she married.
Beauty was an asset. Intelligence was useful. But the ultimate goal was to capture a husband who could provide wealth, status, and social position. The girls were beautiful, each in her own way. Minnie had a bright, vivacious quality that drew people to her. Betsy possessed a quieter elegance, more refined and controlled.
And Babe, the youngest, had the most extraordinary looks of all. Those violet blue eyes, that perfect bone structure, that innate sense of style. She could wear anything and make it look designed specifically for her. But beauty alone wasn’t enough. Goggy groomed them in the arts of conversation, fashion, entertaining.
She taught them how to be charming without being forward. How to attract the right kind of attention, how to make powerful men feel important. She taught them to listen, to laugh at jokes, to be interested in what mattered to the men they wanted to attract. By the time they reached their teenage years, the Cushing sisters were among the most sought after young women in Boston society, and Gogsy was ready to deploy them.
In 1934, Babe made her debut at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and while ordinary Americans stood in breadlines, the Cushing debut was lavish, glamorous, everything that high society expected. The photographers loved Babe. She had those extraordinary looks, that effortless elegance.
Time magazine would later rank her the second best dressed woman in the world, beaten only by Wallace Simpson. But that triumph came later. First, there was the business of finding the right husband. Babe moved to New York and took a job at Glamour magazine, later transitioning to Vogue, where she worked as a fashion editor.
It might have seemed like career ambition, but really it was positioning. She was placing herself where she needed to be among the designers and socialites and wealthy men who could change her life. And in 1940, she met Stanley Mortimer Jr. heir to the Standard Oil fortune. They married the same year. For Babe, barely 25 years old, it seemed like Gogg’s plan had worked perfectly.
Meanwhile, her sisters had already made their own strategic matches. Minnie had caught the eye of Vincent Aster, one of the wealthiest men in America. The Aster name was practically royalty in New York circles. Vincent had recently divorced his first wife, and at 35, Minnie became his second wife in 1940. The ceremony was small, almost secretive, but the implications were enormous.
A Cushing girl had married into the Aster dynasty. Betsy had perhaps the most spectacular early success. In 1930, she married James Roosevelt, the eldest son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When FDR became president in 1933, Betsy suddenly found herself in the White House. She became close to the president himself, which created tension with her husband and with First Lady Elellanena Roosevelt, who resented the young woman’s influence.
But for a while, Betsy Roosevelt was exactly where Goggsy had dreamed her daughters would be, at the very center of American power. On the surface, everything looked perfect. Three beautiful sisters, three magnificent marriages. The press dubbed them the fabulous Cushing Sisters. And society magazines couldn’t get enough of their photographs, their parties, their impeccable taste.
They seemed to have everything. But those perfect marriages were hiding some very imperfect realities when perfect isn’t enough. Minnie’s marriage to Vincent Aster was troubled from the start. Vincent was older, somber, deeply awkward in social situations. Minnie, despite being in her mid30s when they married, had a bright, vivacious spirit that clashed with his withdrawn nature.
They spent more time apart than together. Vincent would go on long sailing trips, sometimes for months, while Minnie established herself as a patron of the arts in Manhattan. She created a glittering salon, surrounding herself with artists, writers, musicians. Rumors began circulating that the marriage had never been consumated. Other whispers suggested Minnie herself preferred women, though she kept such matters extraordinarily private.
What was clear was that the marriage wasn’t working. Betsy’s first marriage fell apart, too, though for different reasons. James Roosevelt resented his wife’s friendship with his father. FDR genuinely liked Betsy, enjoyed her company, confided in her in ways that made his son jealous. Elellanena Roosevelt, already dealing with her husband’s infidelities and health problems, had no patience for another young woman seeking her husband’s attention.
The marriage lasted a decade before ending in divorce in 1940. But Gogsy wasn’t finished. A divorced daughter wasn’t a failure. It was an opportunity for an upgrade. She immediately began looking for a better match for Betsy and she found it in John Hay Whitney, universally known as Jock.
The Whitney family wealth made the Roosevelts look modest by comparison. Jock was cultured, politically connected, genuinely kind. Betsy married him in 1942, and this time it took. Their marriage would last until his death in 1982, and by all accounts, they were genuinely happy together. It was perhaps the only Cushing marriage where love and ambition actually aligned.
Babe’s first marriage to Stanley Mortimer produced two children, Stanley Grafton Mortimer III and Amanda, but little happiness. Stanley was an advertising executive, wealthy and well-connected, but the spark just wasn’t there. He was respectable, suitable, exactly the kind of match Goggy had encouraged, but there was no passion, no deep connection.
They divorced in 1946. Babe was 31, beautiful as ever, but starting over. In the world of high society, divorced women had limited options. They could fade into obscurity or they could find an even better match than the first. Gogsy naturally expected the latter. And then in 1947, Babe met William S.
Paley, the founder and president of CBS. Bill Paley was everything Gogsy had taught her daughters to value. He was extraordinarily wealthy, immensely powerful, a man who had built an empire in the new world of television broadcasting. He had started with a struggling radio network and transformed it into the Colombia broadcasting system, the Tiffany network, the gold standard of American television.
He counted presidents among his friends, controlled what millions of Americans watched every night, wielded influence that extended far beyond entertainment. He was also Jewish, which caused some raised eyebrows in the anti-semitic circles of high society. The Old Money families, the WPS, who controlled New York’s social registers, had long excluded Jewish families regardless of their wealth.
But Bill Paleley’s power and money were impossible to ignore. And more importantly, Bill wanted Babe. He wanted her beauty, her taste, her social connections, her ability to move through the circles that had largely closed to him. He wanted access to the world she represented, the old money elegance that his neuvo reach fortune couldn’t quite buy on its own.
For Babe, Bill represented security on a scale she had never imagined. The Mortimer family was wealthy, but Bill Paley was wealthy beyond measure. He could give her everything, and he did. They married in July 1947 in a ceremony that cemented their status as one of the most powerful couples in New York. Babe quit her job at Vogue.
She didn’t need to work. Her job now was being Mrs. William S. Paley and it was, as Truman Capot would later tell her, the best job in the world. Bill lavished her with everything money could buy. They maintained an apartment at the St. Reges Hotel decorated by the famous interior designer Billy Baldwin, filled with art and antiques worth millions.
They had an 80 acre estate called Kuna Farm in Manhasset, Long Island, where they entertained the most elite guests in America. They had homes in Jamaica, in Nassau, villas in Europe. They traveled on private planes, stayed in the finest hotels, attended the most exclusive parties. Bill bought babe jewelry that made even other wealthy women gasp.
He ensured she had access to every designer, every fashion house, every resource she needed to maintain her position as the most elegant woman in New York. Together they had two more children, William Cushing Paley and Kate Cushing Paley, adding to Bab’s two children from her first marriage. They counted presidents and royalty among their friends.
Frank Sinatra performed at their parties. The most powerful people in America sought invitations to their dinners. Babe’s fashion sense became legendary, influencing trends across the country. She was inducted into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1958 and remained there for 14 consecutive years.
Designers fought to dress her. She could tie a scarf around a handbag handle and create a trend that lasted decades. Photographers worshiped her. Ceil beaten, Richard Avdan, Slim Arenss, all of them captured her image. And those photographs defined an era of American elegance. But what no one saw, what couldn’t be photographed, was the loneliness.
Bill Paley was a philanderer, conducting affair after affair with minimal discretion. He would bed actresses, socialites, employees, anyone who caught his eye. He made little effort to hide these relationships, and the humiliation for Babe was constant. She would hear the gossip, see the knowing looks, endure the pity of other women who knew what her husband was doing.
He expected Babe to be perfect, to look perfect, to entertain perfectly, to be the ultimate trophy wife. But he offered little emotional support, little genuine intimacy, little of himself beyond his need for her to enhance his image. She was in many ways an expensive possession, beautiful, displayed, maintained, and ultimately rather sad.
Friends who knew her well spoke of her loneliness, her isolation, the effort it took to maintain that perfect facade day after day, year after year. She smiled for the cameras, hosted the dinners, wore the designer gowns, and inside she was dying from the emptiness of it all. Still, she played her role flawlessly. That’s what Cushing women did.
They endured. They smiled. They maintained the facade because walking away meant losing everything their mother had taught them to value, the artist and the millionaire. While Babes settled into her gilded cage and Betsy found happiness with Jock Whitney, Minnie made a choice that shocked everyone. In 1953, after 13 years of an unhappy marriage, she divorced Vincent Aster.
The Aster fortune was hers for the taking. the social position unassalable. But Minnie walked away from it. Her family was horrified. Goggy had spent decades engineering these perfect matches, and now Minnie was throwing it all away. But Minnie had discovered something more valuable than money. Authenticity. She had fallen in love with James Whitney Fosberg, a painter of modest means and reputation.
More scandalously, Fosberg was openly homosexual, something everyone knew but no one openly discussed. He moved in artistic circles, had cultivated taste, understood beauty in ways that Vincent Aster never could. Minnie married Fosberg in 1953, and together they created a life that was genuinely fulfilling to her.
They maintained close ties with New York’s artistic and homosexual communities, hosting salons where creativity mattered more than stock portfolios. It wasn’t the life Gogy had envisioned, but it was honest. Minnie had broken free from her mother’s script, even if it meant sacrificing the Aster name and fortune. Her relationship with her sisters remained close.
Despite their different paths, the Cushing sisters stayed connected through regular lunches, phone calls, visits. They had been raised as a unit, trained together for their roles in society. That bond didn’t break just because many had chosen a different path. But there was one person who understood them all perhaps better than they understood themselves.
a tiny man with a high-pitched voice, sharp wit, and an insatiable appetite for gossip. His name was Truman Capot, the confidant who knew too much. By the 1960s, Truman Capot was one of America’s most celebrated writers. His novela, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, had become a cultural phenomenon, transformed into a beloved Audrey Hepburn film.
His true crime masterpiece, In Cold Blood, had redefined the genre, become a massive bestseller, made him wealthy beyond imagination, and established him as a serious literary artist. But more than writing, Capot loved society. He loved the parties, the gossip, the glamour, the beautiful people. And society loved him back, at least for a while.
He was a strange figure for high society to embrace. Small, effeminite, with a high-pitched voice and flamboyant mannerisms, he should have been excluded from the most elite circles. But Capot had a gift for charm, for making people feel special, for entertaining with his sharp wit and endless supply of stories.
He could walk into a room and become its center within minutes. He made the rich and powerful laugh. He made them feel interesting. And perhaps most dangerously, he made them feel understood. Capot cultivated friendships with the most powerful women in New York. He called them his swans, these elegant creatures who glided through the highest circles with grace and beauty.
He would lunch with them at Lacot Basque, the famous French restaurant on East 55th Street where society gathered. He would talk to them for hours on the phone, gossiping, sympathizing, advising. He attended their parties, traveled with them, became a fixture in their lives. There was Lee Radzil, Jackie Kennedy’s sister, trying to establish her own identity beyond her famous sibling, CZ Guest.
the Boston Brahman with her ash blonde hair and impeccable breeding. Slim Keith, the California transplant who had married three times, always trading up. Gloria Guinness, the international jet setter, married to a banking heir, and above them all, Babe Paley, beautiful, perfect, tragic babe. Capot became especially close to Babe in the early 1960s.
They developed what seemed like a genuine friendship, something deeper than his relationships with the other swans. They would spend hours together, lunching at Lacot Basque or the Colony, talking on the phone late into the night, confiding in each other. Babe told Capot things she told no one else about Bill’s affairs which grew more brazen as the years passed, about finding evidence of his infidelities, about the humiliation she endured.
She told him about one particularly awful incident involving Bill and an actress, stained sheets that Bill tried to hide before Babe returned home, about her loneliness in this marriage that looked so perfect from the outside. about the desperate effort it took to maintain her perfect facade, to always look beautiful, always be charming, always play the role of the ideal wife when inside she felt hollow and used.
Capot listened, sympathized, offered advice. He told her to stay with Bill, to view being Mrs. William S. Paley as the best job in the world. A position of power and influence that was worth the personal sacrifices. Accept it, he said. Be happy with it. Make peace with what it is rather than mourning what it isn’t.
Babe trusted him completely. She believed he was her true friend. Perhaps the only person who really understood her, who saw past the perfect exterior to the lonely woman underneath. She confided in him as she would a therapist, a brother, a best friend. She gave him access to her most vulnerable self.
What Babe didn’t fully understand was that Capot was storing all of it away. Every secret, every confession, every moment of vulnerability. He was working on what he called his magnum opus, a novel called Answered Prayers. and he was going to put all of it in the book. He had been planning it for years, talking about it endlessly, promising it would be his masterpiece, greater even than in cold blood.
He thought of it as a priest grand novel of manners, a sweeping portrait of American high society that would secure his place in literary history. He had a contract with Random House. He had advances that eventually totaled a million dollars. He just had to finish it. But Capot had problems that were getting worse.
His drinking had escalated from social to serious. He was using drugs heavily, cocaine and pills, whatever would keep him going. His ability to write had deteriorated. He hadn’t published a significant work since in Cold Blood in 1966. The pressure was mounting. Random House kept extending deadlines. Capot kept promising the book was almost done, that he was just polishing it, that it would be worth the wait.
But the truth was, he was falling apart. He would show up at dinner parties already drunk, monologue incoherently before passing out at the table. He was becoming unreliable, embarrassing, a shadow of the brilliant writer he had been. In 1975, desperate for money and attention, Capot convinced Esquire magazine to publish an excerpt from answered prayers.
The chapter was called Lacot Basque 1965, named after the restaurant where his swans gathered for lunch. It appeared in the November 1975 issue. Capot left New York immediately afterward to work on a film role in Los Angeles. He knew the chapter would cause a stir. What he didn’t realize was that he had just detonated a bomb that would destroy his entire social world.
The excerpt was a series of gossipy vignettes told through the eyes of a narrator clearly based on Capot himself. And in those vignettes were the secrets his swans had shared with him, barely disguised. One story was about a media tycoon called Sydney Dylan in the story who has an affair and tries to wash bloodstained sheets before his wife discovers them.
Anyone in New York society knew this was about Bill Paley. Babe had confided that story to Capot in private, a humiliating moment from her marriage. Now it was published in a national magazine for everyone to read. Other secrets appeared too. Affairs, embarrassments, petty cruelties. The swans recognized themselves immediately, and they were devastated.
These weren’t just breaches of privacy. They were profound betrayals of trust, violations of the most basic codes of friendship. Capote had sat with these women, listened to their pain, promised his discretion, and then he had sold their secrets for money and literary glory. The unraveling, the reaction was swift and total.
Babe Paley, who had been Capot’s closest friend, never spoke to him again. Not a single word. Others followed her lead. Lee Radzil cut him off. Slim Keith consulted lawyers about a liel suit. CZ guest shut him out of her life. One by one, the swans abandoned him. He became overnight a social pariah. The invitation stopped.
The phone calls ended. The lunches at Lacot Basque were over. Capot was shocked by the intensity of the response. He had convinced himself that his friends wouldn’t recognize themselves in the stories, that they were too dumb to realize who they were. He had been telling variations of these stories at dinner parties for years.
He thought one more telling in print wouldn’t matter. He was catastrophically wrong. Back in New York, he locked himself in his apartment at the United Nations Plaza, sobbing. Friends who saw him during this period said he kept repeating, “I didn’t mean to. I thought they’d come back.” But they didn’t come back.
The damage was permanent. The Swans had loved him, trusted him, made him part of their inner circle, and he had repaid that trust with public humiliation. For Babe, the betrayal was especially painful. She was already sick. In 1974, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking.
The full removal of her right lung in 1975 had severely curtailed her activities. She was weaker, more vulnerable. And then Capot published her secrets. The story of Bill’s affair, the bloodstained sheets, the humiliation she had endured in private was now public knowledge. Everyone knew. Everyone had read it. There was nowhere to hide. She retreated from public life as much as her illness would allow.
She continued her charitable work when she could, still appeared at certain events, always beautifully dressed, always composed. But the light had gone out. Friends said she was devastated not just by the revelation itself, but by the betrayal from someone she had loved and trusted completely. Babe died on July 6th, 1978, one day after her 63rd birthday.
She passed away in her home with her children beside her. Capot was not invited to the funeral. She had made it clear in her final years that she wanted nothing to do with him. The woman who had inspired his devotion, who he had once called perfect in every way, died without forgiving him, and he never forgave himself.
Minnie had followed a different path than her sisters, but her ending was similar. Just 3 months before Bab’s death, James Fosberg passed away. Minnie who had given up the astera fortune for genuine connection with her husband was bereft four months after babe died. Minnie succumbed to cancer as well passing away in November 1978.
Within one year two of the three Cushing sisters were gone. The fabulous sisterhood that had captivated society for decades was reduced to one. Betsy was the survivor. She lived on for another 20 years, outliving her beloved jock by 16 years before passing away in 1998 at age 89. Of the three sisters, she was perhaps the only one who found lasting happiness in marriage.
Jock Whitney had been genuinely kind to her, truly loved her, treated her as a partner rather than a possession. Their decades together were by all accounts fulfilling and genuine. But even Betsy had paid a price for the Cushing dynasty. Her first marriage had been sacrificed to ambition and politics. Her mother’s expectations had shaped every major decision of her early life, the price of perfection.
Looking back now, with decades of distance, the Cushing sisters seem like figures from a vanished world. They lived in an era when women’s worth was measured by their marriages. When beauty and taste were currencies as valuable as money, when maintaining appearances mattered more than personal happiness, they were products of Gog’s relentless ambition.
Trained from childhood to capture the richest, most powerful men they could find. And they succeeded. They married into the Aster, Whitney, Roosevelt, and Paley dynasties. They set fashion trends that influenced generations. They presided over the transformation of cafe society into the jetet.
Their photographs appeared in every society magazine. Their names were synonymous with glamour and elegance. By every measure their mother had taught them to value, they were triumphant. But the cost was enormous. Minnie endured years of an emotionally barren marriage before finding the courage to leave.
Betsy navigated the treacherous waters of White House politics in a marriage doomed by jealousy and resentment. And Babe, beautiful, perfect babe, spent her entire adult life as a trophy wife to a philandering husband, maintaining a facade of perfection while dying inside from loneliness. The tragedy of the Cushing sisters wasn’t that they failed.
It’s that they succeeded at exactly what they were raised to achieve. And it still wasn’t enough to make them happy. They had the wealth, the status, the glamour. They wore the best clothes, attended the best parties, lived in the most beautiful homes. But they were trapped by the very success they had been trained to pursue.
Walking away meant losing their identities, their social positions, everything they had been taught to value. So most of them stayed, endured, played their roles until death released them. The betrayal by Truman Capot was perhaps the final revelation of how hollow their perfect world really was.
Capot had been one of them, a trusted member of their inner circle. They had genuinely cared for him. shared their deepest pains with him, and he had sold them out for money and literary fame, reducing their private agonies to gossip foder for public consumption. The swans had been betrayed by one of their own, and in that betrayal was exposed the fundamental emptiness of their gilded existence.
Capot himself never recovered. After the swans abandoned him, he spiraled further into alcoholism and drug addiction. He appeared at parties drunk, mumbling incoherently. His writing career effectively ended. He never finished answered prayers. The few additional chapters he produced were terrible and he knew it.
He died in 1984 at Joanne Carson’s house in Los Angeles, only 59 years old, destroyed by substances and regret. Gore Vidal, never want to miss an opportunity for a cutting remark, said Capote’s death was a wise career move. The Cushing sisters left behind children, grandchildren, legacies of charitable work and cultural influence.
They left behind memories of stunning beauty and impeccable taste. They left behind a standard of elegance that people still reference decades later. But they also left behind a cautionary tale about the dangers of valuing appearance over authenticity, status over happiness, perfect marriages over genuine love. Those of us old enough to remember the 1960s and ‘7s recall seeing Babe Paleley’s photograph in magazines.
Always perfectly dressed, always graceful. We remember hearing about the Cushing sisters, those Boston girls who married so brilliantly. From the outside, it all looked so glamorous, so enviable. Who wouldn’t want to be them? Who wouldn’t want that beauty, that wealth, that access to power? But knowing what we know now, seeing how their stories ended, the shine comes off the glamour.
Minnie found authenticity too late after years wasted in a loveless marriage to Vincent Aster. Babe died young, her body ravaged by cancer, her heart broken by betrayal, having spent decades as an ornament in a loveless marriage. Even Betsy, the lucky one, had to sacrifice her first marriage to her mother’s ambitions before finding genuine happiness.
Goggsy had wanted her daughters to marry well, and they did. But marrying well turned out to mean something very different than living well. The Cushing Dynasty that looked so fabulous from the outside was built on compromise, sacrifice, and the subjugation of genuine feeling to social ambition. The three sisters learned their lessons too well from their mother.
And by the time they realized the cost of those lessons, it was too late to rewrite the story. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.
