One day after her 63rd birthday, on the morning of July 6th, 1978, a woman died alone in her New York City apartment. In her final weeks, she had wrapped her jewelry in tissue paper, writing careful instructions on each parcel about which piece should go to which person and in what order. She had planned the luncheon menu for after her funeral and chosen the wines. The world knew her as Babe Paley.
For 31 years, she had been the wife of William S. Paley, the founder of CBS and one of the most powerful men in American broadcasting. She had stood beside him through every dinner, every opening night, every transatlantic crossing, hosting the parties where the country’s most influential people shaped what the nation would believe. Born Barbara Cushing in Boston on July 5th, 1915, she was the youngest of three daughters of Dr.
Harvey Cushing, one of the preeminent neurosurgeons of his generation and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Her mother, Katherine Stone Croll Cushing, understood with fierce social ambition that her daughters were her most valuable capital. The three Cushing sisters became known in New York’s Cafe Society as the fabulous Cushing sisters. Minnie married Vincent Astor.
Betsy married James Roosevelt, the son of the president. For women of their class and time, marriage was not simply a romantic decision but a professional one. Barbara debuted in Boston in October 1934 at a party where several Roosevelt sons were present. The nickname Babe attached itself in those early years, a diminutive that flattered and diminished in equal measure.
In 1938, she took a position as a fashion editor at Vogue, a role she held for nearly a decade. She had a genuine eye for beauty and for the unexpected detail that transformed a correct outfit into a memorable one. She mixed fine jewels with cheap costume pieces and made the combination look intentional. She let her hair go gray when other women her age were reaching for the bottle and made gray seem like the more glamorous choice.
One afternoon, leaving a Manhattan restaurant, she looped a silk scarf around the handle of her handbag. Paparazzi captured it, and within months, women across the country were doing the same. It had not been meant as a statement, but that was the nature of her authority. It was offhand and therefore unchallengeable.
She married for the first time in 1940 to Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. , an oil heir. They had two children together. The marriage lasted six years and collapsed amid the wreckage of the war.
Stanley returned from naval service changed, moody, erratic, drinking more than was manageable. He would later be diagnosed with manic depression. By the time she met William S. Paley at a New York party in 1947, she was divorced with two children.
Paley had been building CBS since 1928, transforming it into one of the two dominant radio networks in the country and positioning it for the coming age of television. Paley was compelling in the way that power, worn comfortably, tends to be compelling. He had conquered the business world but had not conquered New York society. As the son of a Ukrainian immigrant cigar manufacturer, certain doors in that city remained closed to him.
Babe Cushing was the key to those doors. According to biographer Lawrence Leamer, who wrote extensively about the couple, the arrangement was less a romance than a business deal. Bill gave Babe the wealth to live as her mother had always believed she was born to live. Babe gave Bill entrance to a world that had held him at arm’s length.
They married in 1947 and had two children together. The Paley properties included an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a Long Island estate called Kiluna Farm, a villa in Jamaica where Slim Aarons photographed her by the pool in 1959, and a house in Nassau. Babe ran all of it. She was the logistics officer of an extraordinarily ambitious social campaign.
She knew which guest should not be seated next to which other guest and why. She understood that the real work of the room happened in the pauses between courses. Bill was aware of what she gave him. But there was a restless appetite in him that could not be satisfied by any arrangement, however elegant.
He took other women habitually, with a carelessness about concealment that suggested he did not distinguish between what he deserved and what he was accustomed to receiving. Babe had always known. She kept a gold notebook at her side, later reported, a private ledger of the humiliations large and small told to her, a record kept by a woman who was not allowed to speak them aloud. By the worst years, she was smoking two packs a day.
Truman Capote had entered their lives in the early 1950s. He made himself indispensable to a certain social stratum of women he nicknamed his swans by being the one person with whom they could say true things. He called Babe the leader of them all. He wrote that she had only a single flaw: she was perfect.
It sounded like praise but was something more complex, a description of a woman who had submerged herself so thoroughly into performance that the performance had become indistinguishable from the person. Babe told Capote about Bill’s infidelities, about the gold notebook, and according to Leamer, about the suicide attempts. She trusted him with the private record of the marriage that the public version had been built to conceal. Capote was working on a novel called Answered Prayers.
In 1975, he sent an excerpt to Esquire magazine called “La Cote Basque, 1965. ” It ran in the November issue. The story was fiction in the technical sense, but the characters were transparently real to anyone who knew their world. The character of Sydney Dillon was William S.
Paley, rendered intimately and cruelly. The story exposed his affairs and aired the particulars of a marriage Babe had spent thirty years maintaining as a private matter. She simply closed the door. She did not call him or write to him.
The other swans followed her lead. They did not forgive him. Capote was devastated. He drank more and stopped writing entirely.
The masterpiece was never finished. He died in August 1984 of liver failure at age 59, having never spoken to Babe Paley again. In 1974, before the Esquire piece ran, Babe had received a diagnosis of lung cancer. She received the news in the same manner she received everything that threatened her composure.
When chemotherapy made her hair fall out, she tied a silk turban around her head. In 1978, when her doctors told her she had perhaps six months remaining, she began to prepare. She planned the luncheon. She chose the wine.
She wrapped her jewelry in tissue paper and wrote on each package in her careful hand. Bill Paley was not with her when she died. The accounts differ on the precise details of her final days. Her funeral was held at Christ Episcopal Church in Manhasset, Long Island.
Truman Capote was not invited. Bill Paley lived another 12 years, dying in October 1990 at age 89. He never remarried. A quality runs through Babe Paley’s story that is harder to name than tragedy.
She was not powerless. She was the architect of a social world that Paley could not have constructed without her. The dinner tables she arranged were where decisions happened. The relationships she maintained kept CBS insulated from shifts in Washington, advertising, and cultural fashion.
She organized her own memorial with the same care she had given every other gathering she had overseen. When she finally had the occasion to plan something entirely for herself, she planned it with the same attention to other people’s comfort she had always brought to everything else. It was, the most revealing act of her life. She was not merely elegant.
She was rigorous. The tragedy is not that she was wasted, but that she knew the grace was real and the audience was insufficient.