On May 4, 1960, the day Leland Hayward’s divorce from Slim Keith was finalized, he married Pamela Churchill in Carson City, Nevada. There was no waiting period, no interval of reflection. The most successful theatrical producer in America—the man who had staged South Pacific and Mr. Roberts and was about to open The Sound of Music—had ended one marriage and begun another on the same day.
The woman he left behind, the tall, golden Californian who had been the love of his life and the hostess of his world, had been replaced with the efficiency of a set change between acts. The woman who replaced her was Pamela Digby Churchill, the former daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, who had spent the postwar years being maintained by a succession of the wealthiest men in Europe and who had arrived in New York in 1959 with a depleted fortune and the specific intention of acquiring an American husband. The woman she acquired that husband from was Slim Keith, who had inspired the creation of Lauren Bacall, been pursued by Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway, and been one of Truman Capote’s celebrated swans. Slim Keith was born Mary Ray Gross on July 15, 1917, in Salinas, California, the same agricultural valley John Steinbeck was turning into the terrain of American literature.
Her father, Edward Gross, owned several successful fish canneries in Monterey, placing the family in the upper tier of coastal California society, and the Steinbecks were among their social acquaintances. The domestic atmosphere was closer to Steinbeck’s bleak fiction than his romanticized California. When Slim was 11, her 8-year-old brother Buddy was standing near a fireplace one evening when his nightshirt caught fire. Slim, her sister, and her mother rushed to extinguish the flames, but the burns were too severe, and Buddy died.
Their father, absent at the time, fastened onto the tragedy as a weapon, placing full blame on his wife, and he never forgave her. Edward eventually left the family, and during the divorce proceedings he appeared at Slim’s school, pulled her out of class, and attempted to bribe her into publicly siding with him against her mother, offering a horse, a boat, even a car, on the condition that she declare her mother responsible for the death, which would have allowed him to eliminate his child support obligations. The 13-year-old Slim saw through the manipulation. “I love my mother,” she told him.
“I am staying with her. ” Her father turned and walked away. She would not see him again until he was on his deathbed. The childhood in Salinas established the emotional architecture of her entire adult life: the father who tried to buy her loyalty and abandoned her when she refused taught her that men’s affection was conditional and revocable.
The quality she developed was not bitterness, but a steely refusal to be destroyed by the departure of men she loved, the survival mechanism of a child who had learned at 13 that she could watch someone leave and still be standing when they were gone. The defining act of Slim’s self-invention came at 16 when she climbed behind the wheel of a large yellow Packard roadster and drove to Death Valley. She checked into the Furnace Creek Inn, a classy resort near the Nevada border that attracted wealthy eccentrics and Hollywood refugees, and there she encountered William Powell, the suave star of The Thin Man. Powell noticed the tall golden girl immediately, dubbed her the Slim Princess, a nickname she shortened to Slim and never relinquished.
Through Powell she was introduced to William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies and invited to San Simeon, the legendary hilltop castle that was the nerve center of American celebrity. Very soon she had relocated to Los Angeles, where she was a regular at parties alongside Gary Cooper and Cary Grant, and where both Clark Gable and the young Ernest Hemingway pursued her with serious intent. On August 30, 1938, at the Clover Club, the most fashionable gambling nightclub in Los Angeles, Slim was dancing when she noticed a tall, gray-haired, immaculately dressed man watching her from the edge of the room. He was the director Howard Hawks, fresh off the commercial disappointment of Bringing Up Baby and about to enter the richest creative period of his career.
He was 42, she was 20, and he asked the standard Hollywood question: so, she wanted to be in movies? No, she said, and she meant it. Hawks was startled because she was the first beautiful woman he had encountered in years who answered with a flat refusal. The refusal was the quality that captivated him.
They married on December 10, 1941, reportedly three days after Pearl Harbor in Pasadena, with Gary Cooper walking Slim down the aisle in place of her absent father. The period of their marriage was the richest stretch of Hawks’s career: Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, Air Force, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Red River. But the strangest and most consequential act of the marriage was the creation of Lauren Bacall. One afternoon, Slim was leafing through Harper’s Bazaar when she came across the March 1943 cover: a young woman in a black suit clutching a red handbag in front of a red cross office.
The woman had a quality of cool self-possession that Slim recognized because she saw it every morning in her own mirror. The young woman was Betty Joan Perske, not yet 19, born in the Bronx. Slim brought the magazine to Hawks and suggested he look at the girl. Hawks contacted her, arranged a screen test, and set about transforming Betty Perske into Lauren Bacall, a persona constructed largely in Slim’s image.
He instructed Bacall to lower her voice, move with lean authority, and deliver lines with the flat, insolent wit that had characterized Slim’s speech for years. The scriptwriter Jules Furthman admitted taking Bacall’s most memorable lines directly from conversations with Slim, including the famous whistling scene: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow. ” The character was named Slim; her screen partner was called Steve, the nicknames Slim and Howard used for each other in private.
But Hawks fell in love with the copy, and the copy fell for Humphrey Bogart. The marriage was effectively over by the time their daughter Kitty was born in 1946. “For Hawks,” she later wrote, “I was a fabulous armpiece, the ultimate decoration, the embodiment of the Hawks woman. ”
Slim arrived in Havana in the mid-1940s and settled into life at Finca Vigia, Ernest Hemingway’s hilltop compound, where she first encountered Leland Hayward.
Hayward was born in Nebraska City, the grandson of a United States senator and the son of Colonel William Hayward, commander of the Harlem Hellfighters in the First World War. He had built a talent agency roster of approximately 150 artists, including James Stewart, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Ginger Rogers, Henry Fonda, Hemingway, and Katharine Hepburn, with whom he had a three-year romantic relationship that she ended when she chose her career over marriage. Both Slim and Hayward were still legally married to other people when the attraction became undeniable, and Hayward’s solution was to telephone Slim at the house she shared with Hawks using a fake foreign accent, a comic deception that Hawks eventually penetrated. They married in 1950 at the home of William S.
and Babe Paley on Long Island. Slim wrote that Hayward had been the one love of her life, a declaration made more devastating by the fact that she wrote it knowing how the story ended. The 1950s were the decade of their flowering. Hayward’s Broadway productions included Mister Roberts, which ran for 1,157 performances and won the inaugural Tony for best play, South Pacific, Gypsy, and The Sound of Music.
Slim’s world was furnished by this success in the most literal sense: opening nights, weekend parties, private planes, the company of the most significant people of their generation. Her friendship with Babe Paley deepened into something closer to sisterhood. It was through Babe that Slim met Truman Capote, the most dazzling literary presence in New York, Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s behind him, In Cold Blood ahead. Capote bestowed on Slim the nickname Big Mama and described her as the swan with the sharpest wit and least patience for pretension.
Slim recalled, “I was enchanted by him. He was not just bright, he was riveting. ”
By 1959 the Hayward marriage had developed fault lines. There had been infidelities on both sides, Slim with Frank Sinatra and screenwriter Peter Viertel, Hayward with the restless temperament he had carried through every relationship.
Meanwhile, Pamela Digby Churchill had arrived at a crossroads in Paris: 38, beautiful, broke, the succession of wealthy European lovers—Prince Ali Khan, Gianni Agnelli, Baron Elie de Rothschild, Stavros Niarchos—having run its course. She needed an American husband. One evening, Babe Paley telephoned Slim and made a request that seemed innocuous: would Slim mind if Babe borrowed Leland to escort the visiting Pamela Churchill to the theater? Why Babe made this call has been debated with considerable heat.
The less charitable and more plausible reading is that Babe, still uneasy about Pamela’s wartime affair with her own husband, Bill Paley, calculated that getting Pamela entangled with someone else’s husband was the most efficient way to protect her own. Slim said yes. Hayward and Pamela left the theater before the performance ended. The affair began that night.
Slim was in Europe at the time, traveling with Lauren Bacall through Paris and Spain, and she had no idea what was happening at home. Pamela, learning the wife was absent and the marriage brittle, invited both Slim and Bacall to a dinner party in Paris. Leland flew over from New York and joined, and for an entire evening Pamela played the gracious hostess to the three of them together without a single visible sign that she was conducting anything other than a social dinner. The following day Hayward flew to Munich to negotiate the theatrical rights to The Sound of Music, negotiations that would keep him in Central Europe for months, with regular side trips to Paris, and Pamela made sure she was always there when he arrived.
Slim, shrewd about almost everything, saw nothing. On May 27, 1959, Hayward proposed and told Pamela he would ask Slim for a divorce immediately. The divorce was processed with a speed that left no space for ambiguity. On May 4, 1960, the day the divorce was finalized, he married Pamela Churchill in Carson City.
Slim had been the wife of the most successful theatrical producer in America, embedded in the highest reaches of New York social life, and she had been replaced on the same day, without 24 hours of pause. Her grief was not simply romantic but existential. She had managed Hayward’s social world, his entertainments, his household, and she suddenly found herself without the scaffolding, discovering that she had been dangerously inattentive to the practical dimensions of their shared life. She had no clear understanding of her finances, no idea how much money she had or what she needed to live on.
Then Ernest Hemingway, one of the oldest constants in her adult life, died by suicide at his Ketchum, Idaho, home on July 2, 1961. Two of the most important men she had ever known were gone within 18 months. The specific quality of the betrayal that distinguishes it from an ordinary affair is Babe Paley’s involvement. Whether Babe made the call innocently or to redirect Pamela’s predatory attention from her own husband has never been answered, but those who knew all three women overwhelmingly believed the latter, which meant Slim was betrayed not by one friend but by two: the friend who stole her husband and the friend who arranged the introduction.
The double betrayal destroyed something larger than a single marriage. It destroyed Slim’s faith in the social architecture she had spent two decades building, the assumption that the women in her circle would protect each other’s marriages rather than cannibalize them. After the devastation, a friend arranged a blind date with a British banker, Sir Kenneth Keith. They married in 1962, and Kenneth was elevated to the peerage as Baron Keith of Castle Acre in 1980.
The marriage was one of mutual convenience rather than passion. Slim wanted stability and a title after the Hayward catastrophe, and Kenneth wanted a glamorous, well-connected companion, and neither pretended otherwise. She left him in 1972. After Hayward’s death in 1971, Pamela renewed contact with Averell Harriman, her original wartime love, married him later that year, used the fortune and reputation to become a Democratic Party figure, was appointed ambassador to France by Bill Clinton in 1993, and died at the American Embassy pool in Paris in 1997, in the same country where she had seduced Slim’s husband nearly four decades earlier.
In November 1975, Esquire magazine published an excerpt from Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers titled La Côte Basque, 1965, named for the Manhattan restaurant where the swans regularly lunched. The main character was a thinly disguised Slim Keith, portrayed as a hard-drinking, husband-hunting divorcee who unleashes torrents of society gossip, including scandalous revelations about the infidelities of a powerful media executive modeled on Bill Paley. Other characters included thinly veiled portraits of Babe Paley and the other swans, complete with recognizable private details that could have come only from years of intimate access. Capote had taken the sacred trust of friendship and turned it into literary ammunition.
Slim banished him from her life, refused all subsequent calls and telegrams, and never spoke to him again. Babe Paley, gravely ill with cancer, died in 1978 without reconciling. Capote’s descent into alcoholism and drug addiction accelerated, and he died on August 25, 1984, at 59. The La Côte Basque betrayal was the third great betrayal of Slim’s adult life: the Hayward betrayal by a woman she trusted socially, the Hawks betrayal by a man she trusted romantically, and Capote’s by a man she had trusted with the specific material of her inner life, the confidences shared during years of friendship converted into fiction for the entertainment of strangers.
Slim Keith’s fashion influence was profound and lasting. “In my day,” she wrote, “different meant not having your hair done in a pompadour and adorning it with a snood, or not trying to hide your intelligence behind a sea of frills. I somehow knew there was a glut in that market. I opted for a scrubbed-clean, polished look.
I thought it was more important to have an intelligence that showed, a humor that never failed, and a healthy interest in men. ” She was named best-dressed woman of the year in 1946, appeared on the Harper’s Bazaar list almost annually through the 1960s, and Diana Vreeland put her on the magazine’s cover at 22. She is credited with enabling the careers of Lauren Bacall, Joanne Dru, and Ella Raines, all three of whom bore a physical resemblance to Slim, which meant the Hawks woman archetype, the lean, insolent, low-voiced beauty who treated powerful men as equals, was not a single performance but a template Slim had created that Hollywood reproduced across multiple actresses and multiple decades. In her final years, Slim collaborated with writer Annette Tapert on her memoir, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, published in 1990.
She completed the manuscript shortly before her death and never saw it published. Having been burned by Capote’s literary betrayal, she was strategic about what she disclosed, learning from the pain of what Truman had done. Lauren Bacall wrote in her own memoir, “The best things about Slim were her gift for total friendship, her original inquiring mind, her great sense of fun, her willingness to accept her friends as they were without judging them. She never pushed.
She just said what she thought. You could take it or leave it. She was loyal and she was funny. ”
Slim Keith died on April 16, 1990, at 72 of lung cancer at New York Hospital, a lifelong smoker to the end.
Her own verdict was typically unsparing: “What I was not blessed with I went out and got. Sometimes the price was too high. But I have never been much of a bargain hunter.
” She had survived everything: the brother burned to death in front of her, the father who tried to buy her loyalty, the emotionally frozen director who created her screen image and then fell in love with the copy, the husband stolen by a friend whose introduction had been arranged by another friend, the literary betrayal by the writer she had trusted with her confidences, and the specific loneliness of a woman whose beauty and wit and intelligence had placed her at the center of every room she entered but had not prevented the rooms from emptying around her one by one.