In November 1975, an issue of Esquire magazine hit newsstands across America. Inside it, thinly disguised as fiction, was the exact shape of Barbara “Babe” Paley’s marriage. The dying woman read it and recognized every humiliation her husband had handed her for three decades—printed for the whole country to see, delivered by the one friend she had trusted with the truth. Babe was one of three Cushing sisters, raised by a mother who treated marriage as the family’s real profession.
Their father, Harvey Williams Cushing, was the founder of modern neurosurgery, a famous and deeply respected surgeon who was not, by the standards of the families his daughters would eventually marry into, rich. His wife, Catherine “Gogsy” Crowell Cushing, understood the machinery of society better than almost anyone. She had three daughters and a plan for each of them. The household’s trajectory shifted permanently in 1926, when the only son, William Harvey Cushing, was killed in a car accident near Yale.
He was in his 20s. After that, whatever ambition the family held for the next generation belonged entirely to the three surviving daughters. Betsy, the middle daughter, born 1908, married the eldest son of a man who would be president within three years. Her 1930 wedding to James Roosevelt II took place before Franklin D.
Roosevelt reached the White House. Once the administration began, Betsy frequently stepped in as hostess at official functions when Eleanor Roosevelt traveled. She had two daughters, Sarah and Kate. The picture-perfect marriage stayed intact until 1938, when James relocated to Hollywood to work for producer Samuel Goldwyn, and Betsy followed.
Two years later, the marriage was over. The divorce was finalized in 1940. Betsy received custody of both daughters. James would marry three more times and remain minimally present in his daughters’ lives.
In March 1942, Betsy married John Hay Whitney, known as Jock, a man who formally adopted both of her daughters from her first marriage. He was not the kind of man her mother’s method had been designed to identify. By the 1970s, he ranked among the ten wealthiest men in the world, with a fortune built across investments, publishing, and horse racing. Biographers describe this second marriage as a genuine love match.
It lasted 40 years, until Whitney’s death in 1982. By every surviving account, it was the one marriage in the family that nobody ever had to survive. Betsy would become one of the most significant private art collectors and philanthropists of the 20th century, giving tens of millions of dollars to medical schools, hospitals, and museums. In 1990, a Renoir from her collection sold at Sotheby’s for $78.
1 million, then the highest price ever paid for an Impressionist painting at auction. After her own death in 1998, her full collection brought $128. 3 million. She was the only Cushing sister whose fortune belonged to herself alone.
Minnie, the eldest daughter, born 1906, was already a substantial person in her own right before her wedding. She served as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York City Center, and the Yale University Art Gallery, and led fundraising during the Second World War. In September 1940, she married Vincent Astor, a man who had inherited what was then the largest inherited American fortune of its generation. His father had died aboard the Titanic in 1912, leaving the 20-year-old Vincent a position Forbes later estimated at $75 million.
He had contracted mumps at his first wedding in 1914, a documented illness that left him permanently unable to father children. He spent much of his adult life trying to rehabilitate a family name associated with slum housing, selling off tenement holdings and redirecting portions of the fortune toward the Vincent Astor Foundation. Vincent spent enormous stretches of time at sea aboard his yachts, the Noma and the Nourmahal. Once, in 1938, he undertook a secret civilian intelligence voyage to Japan at the personal request of President Roosevelt.
Minnie, left largely to her own devices in New York, built a salon that drew artists, writers, and musicians into her rooms. The marriage ended quietly in divorce in September 1953. Within a month, Minnie remarried. Her choice was James Whitney Fosburgh, a portrait painter, far less wealthy or prominent than Astor.
Society was startled that a woman who had left the largest fortune in the country would deliberately choose a more modest life the second time. Together, they built a serious art collection, and her salon became a significant cultural gathering point, drawing Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams. One detail from the divorce outlasted every other. When Astor asked for his freedom, he needed a next wife already lined up.
According to multiple sources, he approached one candidate who reportedly turned him down flat, telling him she did not even like him. It was Minnie who suggested Brooke Russell, the woman who married Astor that October, outlived him by 48 years, and became a celebrated philanthropist in her own right. The youngest sister, Babe, born 1915, faced a different set of circumstances. In 1934, when she was 18, a car accident on Long Island shattered her jaw and knocked out her front teeth.
Months of surgical and dental reconstruction followed. She still made her formal debut that October at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel with a rebuilt jaw and reconstructed front teeth. Nobody in the receiving line detected anything unusual. By 1935, she had an entry-level job at Glamour.
By 1939, she was a fashion editor at Vogue. Within two years, Time magazine ranked her the second best-dressed woman on the entire planet, behind only Wallis Simpson. The most photographed face in American fashion had been quite literally rebuilt before it was famous. In September 1940, the same year both her sisters navigated major turns in their own marriages, Babe married Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr.
, an oil heir and sportsman. They had two children, born 1942 and 1944. When Mortimer enlisted in the Navy in 1943, the man who came home from the war was not the same one she had married. He returned withdrawn and drinking heavily, later formally diagnosed with manic depression, a condition poorly understood at the time.
The divorce was finalized in May 1946. Within days of his own divorce becoming final, William Paley, the chairman of CBS, married Babe. The wedding followed the court decree by days. The couple had met in 1946, while Paley was still legally married to his first wife.
The marriage was widely understood as a transaction as much as a romance. Paley was self-made, immensely wealthy through his own effort rather than inheritance, and shut out of large parts of old-line New York society, in part due to the plain anti-Semitism that still ran through that world. Babe’s name and social fluency opened doors that no amount of broadcasting revenue could open alone. In turn, Paley offered wealth on a scale beyond anything a doctor’s daughter could otherwise have reasonably expected.
They settled into an apartment at the St. Regis Hotel, then Kiluna Farm, an 80-acre estate in Manhasset, Long Island, which became one of the most photographed private homes in the country. Weekend guest lists regularly included some of the most famous names in American politics, arts, and industry. Two children followed, William Cushing Paley in 1948 and Kate Cushing Paley in 1950.
Truman Capote, from the early 1950s onward, became one of Babe’s closest confidants. He was part of a small circle of society women he nicknamed his swans, a group that also included Slim Keith, CZ Guest, Gloria Guinness, Mela Agnelli, and Lee Radziwill. Over years of long, unhurried lunches at La Côte Basque, a French restaurant on East 55th Street, Babe told Capote things she told almost no one else: the real shape of her marriage, the loneliness underneath the best-dressed lists, what it actually felt like to be the most envied woman in New York while living inside a marriage her husband was by then chronically unfaithful to. For three decades, the country watched Babe Paley live what looked like the most enviable life in New York.
For three full decades, the privacy of her own home told a different story. Bill Paley’s infidelities ran through nearly the entire length of the marriage, documented across multiple biographical sources as an ongoing pattern, understood and largely tolerated within their social circle. Babe presented a version of her life that gave absolutely nothing away. The cost of that performance did not stay contained to Babe alone.
Her relationship with her children from both marriages stayed distant throughout their lives. Her daughter Amanda would later describe the relationship as virtually non-existent and said the distance had been her mother’s choice. Capote once said, “Babe Paley had only one fault, that she was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect.
” It was a line that sounded like the highest compliment. It was also a description of the trap she was living inside. In November 1975, Esquire published an 11,000-word excerpt from Capote’s long unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, under the title “La Côte Basque, 1965. ” The piece was built around a barely disguised lunch scene at the very restaurant where he and Babe had spent years of confidential conversation.
A character named Cleo Dillon, described as “the most beautiful creature alive,” was transparently Babe. The story detailed her husband’s infidelities in specific, humiliating, entirely recognizable terms. The piece also folded in the 1955 shooting of Anne Woodward’s husband and other affairs belonging to named women in their shared social world. Art historian John Richardson, who knew both Capote and Babe, later recorded that she was appalled.
The public unmasking of the exact private pain she had spent nearly 30 years carefully concealing was complete. Babe cut Capote off completely. She never spoke to him again for the remainder of her life. The rest of the swans reacted with matching fury.
Capote was exiled from the social world that had sustained him for two decades. The novel was never finished. Babe had already been diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, more than a year before the piece appeared. The humiliation compounded suffering already fully underway.
She died on July 6, 1978, one day after her 63rd birthday, at the Paleys’ New York apartment. She never reconciled with Capote. There is no evidence she ever tried to, and no evidence he made any serious or sustained attempt to reach her before the end. Capote died in 1984.
Among his reported final words were two spoken about the woman he had betrayed nine years earlier: “Beautiful Babe. ”
Minnie died in November 1978, four months after Babe, at age 72. Two of the three daughters Gogsy raised to secure their futures through marriage were dead within the same calendar year. Betsy outlived them both by roughly two decades, dying in March 1998 at 89.
Gogsy Cushing died in 1949, certain she had built three successful marriages for her three daughters. She was only right about one of them. and it was not, at the moment of her death, the marriage that looked to the rest of the world like the greatest triumph of the three. Run the ledger one final time.
Minnie married into the biggest fortune in the family’s reach and freed herself from it. Betsy married for love almost by accident and kept it for 40 years. Babe married for exactly what her mother always said mattered most and paid for every single piece of it in a currency her mother’s method had never once thought to account for. A mother can engineer a wedding.
She cannot engineer what happens after it.