In 1941, an American magazine ranked Barbara Cushing Paley as the second most elegant woman in the world, behind only Wallis Simpson. She was in her twenties, worked in the fashion department of a magazine, and had no fortune of her own. Seventeen years later, the same magazine inducted her into its hall of fame. By then, she was married to the man who had built the Columbia Broadcasting System from sixteen radio stations.
Her middle sister was married to one of the ten richest men of the era. Her older sister spent nearly thirteen years married to a member of the Astor family. None of the sisters attended university. Their father was a surgeon, the fourth generation of doctors in a Cleveland family that lived partly on inherited commercial rents. Their mother, who left behind few words of her own, was described by two biographers as organizing her household around the matter of choosing husbands for her daughters.
In a 1953 report on a divorce, Time magazine described two of them as the daughters of the late brain surgeon Harvey Cushing who married millionaires. The accounting of wealth was visible even amid the news. Then, in the fall of 1975, the youngest sister’s closest friend revealed her husband’s infidelity to a national magazine under a pseudonym that anyone in their circle could decode within a paragraph. She was suffering from lung cancer at the time, with only twenty-one months left to live.
By the mid-1950s, Barbara Cushing Paley, known since childhood as Babe, had turned weekend management into a discipline. At Kiluna Farm, an eighty-acre estate in Manhasset purchased by her husband from publisher Ralph Pulitzer in 1938, she oversaw a domestic staff of twelve. Guests arrived to have their luggage unpacked and repacked by servants upon departure. Baths were drawn, clothes were washed and folded, and every morning fruit, flowers, new books, and three newspapers were delivered to each bedside.
Lady Mary Dunn, who had seen many English houses comparable to Blenheim Palace, said the Paley household lived at a level of luxury she had not seen in pre-war England. Diana Vreeland put it more precisely, saying the three sisters had refined sensibilities, minds passionate about beautiful things, and a sharp eye for their own features. At one moment, they were exceptional.
Here lies the part that fashion journalism omitted. The woman who ran that household grew up in a doctor’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts. She started working at nineteen for a modest salary at a magazine called Glamour. She lost all her front teeth in a car accident before turning twenty. Her husband, William S. Paley, was the son of an immigrant cigar maker from Ukraine who bought sixteen eastern radio stations for $400,000 in 1928 and turned them into a national network.
Neither was born into the world they now decorated, and both understood the purpose of the decoration. Sally Bedell Smith, whose biography of Paley remains the most detailed account of their marriage, wrote that he wanted an unparalleled wife to demonstrate his success and treated her as a symbol of pride. Smith also wrote that Babe felt she had become his possession, his most valuable belonging among an ever-expanding collection. He had money, influence, and appetite. She provided taste, lineage, a Protestant pedigree, and a face that topped best-dressed lists.
The Cushing story is usually told as a story of glamour. It is more interesting than that. It documents a professional family that managed to penetrate the American upper class. Three sisters, born in 1906, 1908, and 1915, married six men between 1930 and 1953. Among those six were the eldest son of a sitting American president, the heir to the largest private real estate holding in Manhattan, one of the wealthiest men in the world, and the founder of a media empire.
The eldest sister spent five years as Vincent Astor’s mistress before marrying him, one week after her younger sister’s wedding. The youngest sister married William Paley four days after he announced the settlement of his divorce from his first wife in Reno for $1.5 million. The pattern was described in 1953, and in the decades that followed, as ambition. Later journalism used harsher words.
What was never recorded was any documented act of cruelty committed by any of the three sisters toward anyone. That distinction is worth noting. When cruelty arrives in this story, it comes from outside the family and strikes the youngest sister with explosive force.
Before all that, there was a house in Brookline with five children, a father rarely present, and a mother known as Gogsie. Everything the three sisters became was shaped in that house. It began with a man who cut into the human brain for a living.
Harvey Williams Cushing was born in Cleveland on April 8, 1869, the youngest of ten children. He was the fourth generation of physicians in his family. The Cushings were not landowners or industrialists. They were doctors who accumulated professional reputation, a network of patients, and a collection of downtown buildings over three generations in one Ohio city. Harvey earned his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1891 and his medical degree from Harvard in 1895. He worked at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore from 1902 to 1912, living next door to Sir William Osler, the most famous physician of his era.
In 1911, he became chief surgeon at the new Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. From 1912 to 1932, he was professor of surgery at Harvard. He finished his career at Yale as professor of neurology from 1933 to 1937. The disease that bears his name was described by him. He is considered, along with Ernest Sachs, a pioneer of neurosurgery.
In 1925, Oxford University Press published his biography of Osler in two volumes. In 1926, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography, worth $1,000 at the time. A surgeon winning a Pulitzer for writing the biography of his former neighbor was an extraordinary asset for a family with three daughters. The daughters used that asset for the rest of their lives.
The question on which the rest of the story depends is whether the Cushings were wealthy. The honest answer has two parts, and both must be stated together because the popular narrative omits one of them. The first part comes from Cleveland historical records. Harvey Cushing’s share of income from long-term leases on downtown commercial properties owned by his father and his grandfather’s heirs was a major source of his income at a time when he earned a modest salary from university-affiliated hospitals.
The Cushing Building was erected by his grandfather Erastus in 1868 and 1869. Among its first tenants was John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The Cushing Building at 224 Euclid Avenue was built by his father Henry Kirk in 1874 and leased in 1893 to George H. Bowman for 99 years. That commercial lease provided income long after all who signed it had died. It is the solid foundation of this entire family.
The second half of the family history is equally documented but takes a different direction. The Chicago Tribune, reviewing David Grafton’s 1992 biography of the sisters, stated plainly that the family was not wealthy but belonged to what was once considered the respectable middle class. The father built a wealthy client base on the East Coast through his Harvard Medical School education. The paper portrayed the family as a generation of strivers seeking social advancement who improved their position thanks to advantages provided by previous generations.
Encyclopedic references classify them as upper-middle-class Bostonians, which at the time was implicit praise. When the youngest daughter made her debut in Boston in 1934, her parents did not fund the dinner dance. Her middle sister, already married into the Roosevelt family, paid for it. The magazine that covered the event described it as extravagance within their means.
None of the three girls attended university. Given the fortunes of the men they later married, which reached tens and hundreds of millions, the vast difference becomes clear. These were not heiresses marrying middle-class men. They were daughters of a famous doctor, raised on inherited Ohio rents, who married men whose wealth far exceeded anything they grew up with.
No details of Harvey Cushing’s estate were ever revealed. No legal value, no will, no total amount. He died in New Haven on October 7, 1939, at seventy, from complications of a heart attack, and was buried in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. He died ten months before his youngest daughter’s first wedding. The man whose name was the key to the sisters’ success missed four of the six marriages that brought them fame.
The one who attended all of them, and who reportedly arranged most of them, was his wife. Katharine Stone Crowell was born on November 29, 1870, in Cleveland, the granddaughter of Ohio congressman John Crowell. She knew Harvey Cushing from childhood, and accounts suggest that marrying him became the primary goal of her life. She waited ten years for him to complete his studies and establish his practice. They married in Cleveland on June 10, 1902.
Ten years is a long time to remain in a position. It is the first documented case in this family of a woman treating marriage as a project with a timeline. Within the family, she was called Gogsie, sometimes shortened to Gogs. But a warning must be stated before anything else: no letter, diary, interview, or personal document of Katharine Stone Crowell Cushing has ever been found. She died on May 8, 1949. Everything attributed to her comes from David Grafton’s 1992 book about the sisters, Sally Bedell Smith’s biography of William Paley, or family memories recorded decades after her death.
Grafton mentions that Gogsie told a New York Times columnist she fully expected her daughters to marry the highest ranks of European nobility or the wealthy aristocracy of America. Grafton also quotes a family member describing the method. This relative said the Cushing sisters and their mother were like a small family firm where decisions about each sister were put on the table, discussed, examined, and put to a vote. Gogsie Cushing, like her daughters, had an opinion and a vote. Unlike them, she had veto power.
A family that votes on its daughters’ futures, with the mother retaining veto power, is not a family drifting toward successful marriages. It is a committee with a mandate. Kirkus Reviews, assessing Grafton’s book, described the girls as apt pupils of a strong-willed mother who considered marriage a business. Sally Bedell Smith, working independently from different sources, reached the same conclusion in different terms. She wrote that Gogsie had one essential mission in life: preparing her daughters for successful marriage, creating a world for their husbands, and pleasing those husbands through indulgence.
The Deseret News summarized the principle in one line: she instilled in her three daughters the belief that a successful marriage must come above all other considerations, including happiness. Two independent biographers reaching the same conclusion is as close to evidence as this type of family history gets.
The cartoon version of Gogsie Cushing shows her counting other people’s money. The record contradicts that twice. When her middle daughter became engaged to James Roosevelt in 1930, Grafton records that the mother considered his lineage pure but greatly discounted his inheritance prospects because his grandmother Sara managed a family fortune estimated at $2 million. She approved the marriage anyway. Social position in this family was purchased with something less than money.
Seventeen years later, she had doubts about William Paley despite a fortune that made every other son-in-law look modest, because his parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who made their money in the cigar trade. It was about class as much as money. The second example dates precisely the family’s antisemitism. The physical arrangements of the weddings produced official documents. Kate Cushing rented the East Hampton house where her youngest daughter married in September 1940. Six days later, her eldest daughter married Vincent Astor in Kate Cushing’s own house. Seven years later, her youngest daughter married William Paley at her mother’s house in Manhasset.
Three of the six weddings took place in locations controlled by the mother. That is what control means. The other half of her life is routinely ignored. Yale records indicate that with her husband’s demanding surgical schedule, Kate was largely left to manage the household and raise five children alone. In 1926, she lost her eldest son, William Harvey Cushing, killed in a car accident near New Haven while a Yale undergraduate at twenty-two. Her husband responded by throwing himself into work. She was devastated.
A woman who buried her eldest son and then placed her three daughters at the top of American society within twenty years is not a caricature, whatever else she was.
The three daughters arrived in Baltimore and Boston four and nine years apart. Mary Benedict Cushing, always known as Minnie, was born on January 27, 1906, in Baltimore, where her father was then at Johns Hopkins. Betsey Maria Cushing was born on May 18, 1908, also in Baltimore. Barbara Cushing was born on July 5, 1915, in Boston, the fifth and last of five children, raised in Brookline where the family settled in 1912. At home they called her Babe, the shortened name that became the most famous debutante nickname in post-war American society.
The family lived at 305 Walnut Street in Brookline from 1912 until 1933, spending summers at Little Boar’s Head on the New Hampshire coast. Babe attended the Winsor School in Boston, then Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut, graduating in 1933. Her sisters received the same level of education, which is to say basic. None attended university at a time when daughters of academic families commonly did. That omission was not accidental in a household centered on marriage.
Instead, they were educated in the arts of surfaces. They became among the most prominent practitioners in the country. Minnie left first for New York to study painting. Magazines later credited her as a pioneer of working women in New York. Betsey married at twenty-one. Babe followed her sisters to Manhattan and got an entry-level job at Glamour magazine in 1935 because she wanted to be where they were.
Between those two periods, two events shaped the youngest sister more than any education. The first was her brother’s death in 1926 when she was eleven. The second was a car accident. Sally Bedell Smith’s account dates the accident to 1934. Wikipedia dates it to 1937. The published biography is the stronger source, so 1934 is the better date. The discrepancy is real, and the best approach is to state both years and move on.
She lost all her front teeth, needed extensive bridgework, and underwent jaw reconstruction. Acquaintances later claimed her face became more beautiful than before. No report confirms cosmetic surgery. That claim belongs to the category of hearsay rather than events. A young woman whose social value was measured by her appearance had her face rebuilt by a dentist and a surgeon before she turned twenty. She remained on best-dressed lists for forty years.
The debut took place in October 1934, a dinner dance for 400 people at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Betsey hosted and paid for it, not her parents. That is the most telling budget item in the family. Three Roosevelt sons, Franklin Jr., James, and John, served as ushers because Betsey had married the eldest of them four years earlier. The youngest Cushing daughter entered Boston society on her sister’s money while the president’s sons worked the door. The family’s wealth was social, not financial, and the family used it without hesitation.
Then Babe went to work. At Glamour, she started at the bottom. In 1939, she moved to Vogue as a fashion editor under Edna Woolman Chase. The building also housed Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland. Photographer Horst remembered her arriving hungry for information, wanting to know everything about fashion and Paris. She remained connected to Vogue until 1947, with absences for the births of two children. The woman later described as a decoration held a paying job at a magazine for twelve years. The taste that decorated Kiluna Farm was acquired on a salary in an office alongside the best editors in New York before there was any money to spend on it.
By the mid-1930s, the arrangement had settled. Minnie was in Manhattan training as a painter with artistic sensibility. Betsey was in the White House deputizing for the first lady. Babe was learning the universal language of clothing from its writers. Their mother had three daughters in the two cities where America’s status was determined, and their marriages had not yet begun.
The eldest was about to disappear for five years into the private life of New York’s richest real estate owner. William Vincent Astor was the grandson of the man who built the family fortune in fur and then Manhattan land. He inherited that fortune younger than expected. His father, John Jacob Astor IV, went down with the Titanic in April 1912. The son inherited the wealth at twenty or twenty-one.
Accounts of its size vary across four sources. Time magazine in 1953 reported he inherited $65 million from his father. The New York Times in 1960 estimated his fortune at about $70 million, mostly real estate. Another magazine in 1990 used the same figure. An earlier New York Times report from 1959 put it at $87 million. Forbes’s 1918 list of the richest Americans ranked him twelfth with $75 million. Estimates range from $65 million to $87 million, mostly Manhattan land under buildings owned by others.
Their country house, Ferncliff in Rhinebeck on the Hudson, covered 2,800 acres and included a 40,000-square-foot casino building designed by Stanford White. This is the man Minnie Cushing became involved with in 1935, when she was twenty-nine and he was forty-five. Her painting lessons in New York had removed her from Boston long before her sisters left home. Magazines of the time treated her independence as a new phenomenon worth documenting.
She became Vincent Astor’s mistress. They lived together for five years before marrying. Astor was married to Helen Dinsmore Huntington during the early years of their relationship. The divorce did not come until 1940. During those five years, Minnie acquired what contemporaries described as a saintly reputation for enduring his cruelty. That phrase summarizes much in few words about their daily life.
Astor himself was one of the most eccentric figures of his generation. Known to everyone as VA, he belonged to 38 clubs, smoked 50 cigarettes a day, was deeply superstitious, and was fascinated by penguins to a degree his friends found hard to explain. He was also, by any measure available in 1935, the largest private real estate owner in New York City. The woman who married him would assume a position in American society without any steps.
Minnie waited. In September 1940, the wait ended. They married around September 27 in a small ceremony at her mother’s house, six days after her younger sister’s wedding at a rented house in East Hampton. Two Cushing daughters married within one week. One into the Astor family, the other into a family descended from the first Chief Justice of the United States. In nine days, a Boston surgeon’s family became an American institution.
The Astor marriage shows the limits of the entire strategy. The couple had no children. The marriage lasted, in the terminology of the time, nearly thirteen years. It ended in September 1953 in a court in Pocatello, Idaho, on grounds of mental cruelty, a common claim at the time that reveals nothing about what actually happened. No settlement details were found. No amount should be stated publicly because none exists in the records.
What can be stated is what happened six years later. Vincent Astor died of a heart attack on February 3, 1959, at sixty-seven, in his apartment on East End Avenue. His will was probated two days later in Dutchess County Court. His estate was valued at more than $127 million, of which about $99 million was securities. Two million dollars went to his widow. Twenty-five other bequests totaled $827,500. A sum of $25,000 went to his first wife, with a statement of deep love and respect. His second wife, who waited five years to marry him and spent thirteen more years married to him, was not named in the document at all.
For thirteen years, Minnie Cushing was Mrs. Vincent Astor, mistress of Ferncliff. In the end, she inherited nothing at all. The first wife’s name appeared for $25,000. Anyone wondering whether these marriages were a reliable financial vehicle will find the answer in that document. They were not.
Meanwhile, the second Cushing sister contracted a marriage that carried no wealth, and did so deliberately. In June 1930, Betsey Maria Cushing married James Roosevelt II. She was twenty-one. He was a Harvard Law student and the eldest son of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. His father was then governor of New York, two years from the presidency. Reports make clear this was the first prestigious marriage of a Cushing daughter, undertaken with full awareness of the financial situation. The family knew in advance that the Roosevelt lineage carried no significant wealth.
Betsey married him anyway. What she received in exchange for the missing money was access to the White House. Throughout the 1930s, she served as hostess there on many occasions when Eleanor Roosevelt was traveling, which was often. The president reportedly adored her and admired her elegance. Betsey attended the 1939 Hyde Park picnic where hot dogs were served to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, an event retold so often it became national lore. A Cushing daughter from Brookline was present at that event.
Imagine what that meant at the time. A surgeon’s daughter from a Cleveland lineage stood in for the First Lady of the United States at official functions, in years when most women of her class were still arranging flowers for their own weddings. No amount of Astor land could buy that position. The family had it by 1933.
The couple had two daughters. Sara Delano Roosevelt was born on March 13, 1932, and lived until October 2021. Kate Roosevelt was born in 1936 and died in 2002, having first married William Haddad, a Kennedy aide, then Franklin A. Thomas, president of the Ford Foundation. Betsey was the first of the sisters to marry. For seven of the ten years her marriage lasted, her father-in-law was President of the United States.
The marriage itself did not last. In 1938, James Roosevelt went to Hollywood as an assistant to producer Samuel Goldwyn, and the family moved west with him. Then comes the documentary structure of the separation, which deserves to be presented in order because the popular account of it is wrong in a specific and repeated way. James Roosevelt filed first, charging his wife with desertion. A caption on a negative from the Los Angeles Daily News, now held at UCLA, shows Betsey Cushing Roosevelt arriving in Los Angeles to file her divorce suit. It notes the couple had been married ten years before the separation. It states she moved from Los Angeles to New York with her two daughters. The photo is dated February 29, 1940.
Betsey responded with a countersuit. The New York Times published the news on February 20, 1940, under a headline indicating she had put the property question at issue. On March 8, 1940, the Times reported that James Roosevelt had been divorced on the coast and that his wife had obtained a temporary decree. She was granted custody of her two daughters with alimony. During the proceedings, she was photographed with her lawyer, Basil O’Connor, who had been the president’s former law partner.
The correction: there was no custody battle. No document mentions a contested custody suit over Sara and Kate. The story that one of the Cushing sisters fought the Roosevelt family in court over her children is pure invention inserted into the timeline through retelling. What is documented is a contested suit, a countersuit, a decree in her favor, and a mother who had already taken her children to the East Coast before papers were served.
Financial details are unavailable for a technical rather than mysterious reason. Both crucial New York Times reports are locked behind restrictions that have not been lifted. The alimony amount, child support amount, and property settlement remain unknown. No financial figure for the Roosevelt divorce can be established. Any text citing one is speculation.
The clear outcome is that Betsey Cushing, at thirty-one, was divorced with two young daughters, bearing a prestigious family name acquired through marriage, but possessing no wealth. Her sister was living with Vincent Astor. Her younger sister was working at Vogue. According to her biographers, her mother immediately began the process of finding a second husband for her middle daughter. This time, money was at the top of the list.
The man who met the requirements was among the richest of the era. He owned a horse stable, a stake in a film studio, and a reputation no one in Brookline would call suitable. John Hay Whitney, known to everyone as Jock, inherited a trust fund upon his father’s death on May 25, 1927. It was estimated at $20 million in references, equivalent to about $344 million in 2023 dollars. In 1942, Time described him as heir to a $27 million trust fund. Both figures are reported because both were printed. He then inherited four times that amount from his mother.
The Whitney fortune was three generations old and was precisely the type for which a Brookline family was designed. By the 1970s, he was among the ten richest men in the world. His name was associated over the years with Hollywood financing, thoroughbred horse racing, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Museum of Modern Art. His first wife was Elizabeth Altemus, a society woman. He separated from her and was known for a reputation as a reckless man that contemporaries did not attempt to change.
On March 1, 1942, he married Betsey Cushing Roosevelt in Manhattan. About thirty people attended, including her two daughters and a group of Secret Service agents, because her former father-in-law was a wartime president and the children were his grandchildren. Dorothy Paley, then married to William Paley and unaware she was witnessing the formation of her successor’s family, said the groom would be terribly bored. Her husband disagreed. His response was the most accurate statement made about this marriage. He said Jock would not be bored because he would get everything exactly as he wanted. That is what happened. The marriage lasted forty years.
Kirkus Reviews, summarizing David Grafton’s account, wrote that Betsey replaced herself with a man of equally high lineage and greater wealth. Then it added the most important result: Betsey alone found marital happiness alongside wealth. The Deseret News called the marriage a flawless love match. Jock Whitney adopted her two daughters after the marriage, which required the consent of their father, the president’s son. That single legal act transformed Roosevelt granddaughters into Whitneys officially. Its effect on the family’s status exceeded any wedding in the story, and it was done quietly.
The house was Greentree at Manhasset on Long Island’s North Shore, 438 acres with a staff of twenty. In 1951, the couple donated fifteen acres of it for the construction of North Shore Hospital, a gesture that would convert new money into old status within a generation. A friend said years later, in a London obituary, that the Jock Whitneys were very modest, as modest as one can be with a quarter of a billion dollars. That is an accurate and expressive description.
From 1957 to 1961, Whitney served as United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Betsey Cushing of Brookline, Massachusetts, spent four years as an American ambassador’s wife in London. Twenty-seven years earlier, her mother had promised a gossip columnist that her daughters would marry European nobles or wealthy Americans. Her middle daughter now enjoyed that nobility in a house provided by the United States government.
Art collecting was an aspect of the Whitney marriage that outlasted all family members. Over more than half a century, John Hay Whitney and his wife assembled, through the Frick Collection, one of the finest American collections of nineteenth and early twentieth-century French art. The numbers associated with this collection are startling today. John bought Renoir’s “Bal du moulin de la Galette” in 1929 for $165,000. In 1990, it sold at auction for $78.1 million. When the collection sold at Sotheby’s in 1999, led by a Cézanne, it brought $128.3 million. Picasso’s “Garçon à la pipe,” given to the foundation Betsey established, sold in May 2004 for $104 million.
In 1990, Forbes estimated her personal fortune at $700 million and placed her among the twenty-five richest women in the world. Compared to her father’s modest hospital salary and her mother’s rented wedding venues, her rise was enormous within one generation. She was also, by her family’s account, the happiest sister. She is the only one of whom that is said without qualification.
While Betsey was preparing for life as an ambassador’s wife, her younger sister was ending a marriage that began in a rented East Hampton house and ended in a courtroom after six years. On September 21, 1940, Barbara Cushing married Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. The bride’s mother rented the house where the wedding reception was held specifically for the occasion.
The groom was, theoretically, everything the family had aspired to for two decades. His father descended from John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, and was known in New York as a champion at polo more than as a retired Wall Street broker. His mother was Katharine Telford, daughter of Henry Morgan Telford, a founder of Standard Oil. Diana Vreeland, who knew all parties, described him in few words: the handsome young man, everything perfect.
Then come the accounts, and here this marriage differs from its coverage. Stanley Mortimer inherited $50,000 from his grandmother, Mrs. Telford. The couple, according to reports, did not possess great wealth. They lived in a small three-story apartment on Manhattan’s East Side with a maid and a cook. Babe continued working at Vogue. A Standard Oil family name, a Chief Justice in the family tree, capital of $50,000, and a working wife. That was the true financial picture of America’s most famous beauty in 1941, the year a national magazine ranked her second only to Wallis Simpson among the world’s most elegant women.
Six days after that wedding, her elder sister married Vincent Astor at their mother’s house. The contrast between the two September 1940 weddings encapsulates the family’s entire strategy in miniature. One daughter chose marriage without capital. The other chose capital without much affection. Neither outcome was accidental. Both were discussed and voted on.
The Mortimer marriage produced two children: Stanley Grafton Mortimer III, called Tony, born in 1942, and Amanda J. Mortimer, born in 1944, though some accounts say 1943. In 1943, the father joined the Navy and went to fight in the Pacific. He returned home in 1945 drinking heavily and with severe mood swings. He was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. An accurate account of this period should be precise. A man returning from the Pacific war ill is not a villain in any story.
What the records establish is the chronology. The marriage did not survive his return. Babe divorced him on May 29, 1946. He left a trust fund of $40,000 for the two children, who remained with their mother. $40,000 in 1946 was a modest sum for two children, not a fortune. Mortimer himself lived until 1999. Before the divorce was final, she had already begun dating William S. Paley.
Compare those two facts, because here the word in the title of this story begins to prove itself. Her first husband was of Standard Oil lineage, possessed $50,000, and suffered from an illness he did not choose. Her second husband was chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System, with a stake in his company valued at $9.8 million in 1946, a year in which his salary and dividends exceeded $800,000. The overlap between the end of her first marriage and the beginning of her second is documented in reports. There is no room for interpretation.
These are calculations made in an era when a divorced woman with two small children and no capital lacked tools, and marriage was the only tool she had been trained to use. They are also the calculations her mother had spent thirty years instilling.
Her career continued meanwhile, and it deserves recording because it is usually omitted. She joined Vogue in 1939 on the fashion staff and remained associated with the magazine until 1947, taking leave for each of her two children’s births. She was on the world’s best-dressed list in 1940 and 1941, and from 1944 onward she remained on it every year until 1957. She was a working editor, dressed better than the women she photographed, held a paid job through marriage, two children, war, and divorce.
The image that persists in popular memory of Babe Paley is of a decorative object in a beautiful room. The documented image is of a professional woman who understood precisely the value of her appearance in the market and was about to sell it at the highest price ever paid. The buyer was a man her mother had not wanted in the family.
On July 24, 1947, details of William Paley’s divorce from his first wife were announced in Reno. Dorothy Hart Hearst received $1.5 million. Her opinion of the man, given years later, was that he was cold as ice and could not be ruder. Four days after that announcement, on July 28, Barbara Cushing Mortimer married him at her mother’s house in Manhasset. Three weeks past her thirty-second birthday, she stood beside a man of forty-five. One source gives the wedding date as July 23 rather than July 28. This contradicts the New York Times obituary and the published biography, both of which confirm the ceremony took place four days after the divorce announcement. July 28 is the correct date, and the discrepancy is worth stating rather than hiding.
On August 1, the couple sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to England, France, Italy, and Switzerland. One newspaper of the time summarized the significance of the marriage in a single sentence, describing Paley as the first Cushing son-in-law without distinguished social standing. Astor, Roosevelt, and Whitney had passed that test. The chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System, one of America’s wealthiest self-made men, did not, because his father made cigars and his parents came from the Russian Empire. The bride’s mother’s doubts before the wedding were recorded, and they were not about his wealth.
What followed is documented with unusual precision, and it revealed the cruelty of the social system the Cushings had mastered. The Paley marriage appeared in the New York Social Register for 1948. The couple did not appear in any subsequent edition. No published notice of expulsion was found, no stated reason, no correspondence. Only the fact of their names in the 1948 register and then their absence. There was no formal expulsion, and it should not be described as such because the mechanisms of that world were never formal.
Evidence gathered from clubs points to it clearly. In the early 1950s, the Metropolitan Club in Washington flatly rejected Paley’s name. Philip Graham of the Washington Post, who supported the nomination, was told the club wanted to withdraw the name because Paley was Jewish. Babe asked her friend Susan Mary Alsop to help the couple settle in Bar Harbor, Maine. Susan Mary received no response and later learned that her mother, in conjunction with the Reverend Malcolm Peabody, had prevented the Paleys from joining the Bar Harbor Club. She heard her mother say they could not accept Jews. Long Island country clubs also closed to them for the same reason.
Joan Payson, who happened to be Jock Whitney’s sister and thus Betsey’s sister-in-law, warned a business partner about Bill Paley because he would exploit him terribly. This was the family Babe Cushing joined by marrying outside it. The couple’s response to all of this was the most impressive thing about them, and Sally Bedell Smith documented it in one line. She wrote that at Kiluna, Round Hill, and Squam Lake, they created their own club with their own rules. If established institutions would not accept them, they built parallel institutions and made them more attractive than the originals.
Within a decade, a weekend invitation to the Paleys became the hardest invitation in the United States. Men who had rejected them previously were applying for it. The marriage produced two children. William Cushing Paley, called Billy, arrived on March 30, 1948, weighing six pounds. Kate Cushing Paley was born in 1950. Babe also acquired two adopted children, Jeffrey Paley and Hilary, adopted by Bill and Dorothy as infants in 1938 and 1939. By 1950, she was thirty-five, wife of America’s most famous broadcaster, mother or stepmother to six children, and mistress of an eighty-acre Long Island estate with a staff of twelve.
Sally Bedell Smith’s verdict on this achievement was blunt. She said Babe had found exactly the kind of rich, successful man she had been raised to marry. Diana Vreeland, watching from inside the fashion world, was less impressed and more precise. She said there was a prevailing impression about that marriage: the two were not made for each other, and they were not perfect.
Twenty-eight years later, a magazine article would make the hidden meaning of Vreeland’s statement national entertainment. Before that, years passed that cemented her legend and maintained it daily with effort no one outside her home saw. In 1958, the best-dressed list inducted her into its hall of fame. She had appeared on that list in 1940 and 1941, then every year from 1944 to 1957, and again in 1974. Remaining on a list compiled by strangers for fourteen consecutive years is not an accident of birth or luck with a dressmaker. It is work performed at the highest level without interruption.
There was Kiluna Farm in Manhasset, eighty acres with a main house that Time described as seventy-five years old and rambling, with sagging floors, in the owner’s words, but comfortable. There was an apartment at the St. Regis Hotel decorated by Billy Baldwin, who later said every Paley house reflected her refinement and deep calm. There was Kiluna North on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, purchased in 1957. There was Jamaica, Round Hill on a 100-acre peninsula near Montego Bay, opened as a resort in 1952. Its shareholders included Noël Coward, Adele Astaire, Oscar Hammerstein, and Bill Paley. The Paleys paid $120,000 in the early 1950s for a three-bedroom pavilion on a rocky promontory. In the late 1960s, they sold that house for $250,000 and rebuilt another next to the club at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas.
At Kiluna, the level of service was unmatched. Twelve staff members unpacked and repacked guests’ luggage, drew baths, returned clothes folded, and delivered fruit, flowers, new books, and three newspapers to every bedroom each morning. Babe supervised all of it herself. She told a CBS executive why she did it: if the house were not full of guests on weekends, she could not live with him. She was frank about her taste, saying they never went to debutante balls and that she considered them hell. Her hairdresser, Mr. Mark, said everyone imagined her affected and arrogant, and that she was not at all because she remembered everyone’s names and always asked about their families.
A Town & Country writer noted she walked and spoke like a queen, rarely raised her voice, did her correspondence every morning, and would not eat or smoke until she had offered what she was eating or smoking to her guests. A saying circulates constantly online, usually attributed to Truman Capote, that her only flaw was her perfection. No original printed version of this saying has been found. It is closer to what seems true than to what was said. The documented evidence is stronger.
Now for the price, paid three different ways. The first was physical. By the mid-1960s, she smoked more than two packs of L&M cigarettes daily. She suffered from severe migraines every four or five months, each lasting two or three days. Slim Keith described watching her have one: a blood vessel would begin to pulse in her forehead, and then she would walk on tiptoe and darken her rooms. She took Miltown tranquilizers and saw a psychiatrist regularly, in a decade when a woman in her position was expected to do neither and admit to nothing.
Her second capital was her children, and the documentation here is disturbing, coming mostly from the children themselves. At Kiluna, the four resident children lived in a five-bedroom cottage separate from the main house, with a playroom, their own living room and kitchen, and a governess. Amanda described the house as strange and fragmented. She said the parents were not there, and when they came, all the children competed for attention, so each thought only of himself. Paley himself admitted the priority, saying he paid far more attention to Babe.
Kate developed alopecia totalis at age three and lost all the hair on her body. Her mother arranged psychiatric care and an expensive wig for her. Kate later distanced herself from her parents for seven years. Billy said his parents thought he was crazy, that he was sent to a psychiatrist at ten, expelled from schools, and that he both loved and hated his parents, so he left. A friend of Babe’s remembered her saying she had made every mistake, that Christmas gifts were so numerous they did not ease her guilt. Jane Tierney summarized it in five words: she ran institutions, not families.
The third currency was the marriage itself. By the mid-1960s, its price was being paid secretly among a small circle of friends who had been told everything. Among those friends was a writer from Alabama who had never entered a house like Kiluna until she brought him into it. While the youngest sister was being portrayed, the eldest sister was dismantling her marriage, and she did so in a jurisdiction chosen for convenience.
In September 1953, after a marriage of nearly thirteen years with no children, Mary Cushing Astor obtained a divorce from William Vincent Astor in Pocatello, Idaho, on grounds of mental cruelty. Time published the news in one paragraph in its Milestones column. That paragraph deserves quotation for its casual cruelty. It identified the plaintiff as the eldest of the three beautiful daughters of the late brain surgeon Harvey Cushing who married millionaires, then named the other two husbands: the chairman of CBS and financier John Hay Whitney.
Time coined the phrase in 1953. It settled the debate that continues today. The Cushing strategy was not discovered by contemporary journalists looking backward through a feminist lens. It was identified by a national news magazine in a divorce announcement while the three sisters were still married and reading.
Then there is the story society told about how the divorce was obtained, and it must be accurately described as such. The widely circulated account is that Vincent Astor would only agree to the divorce if his wife found a replacement for him. In this account, Minnie first approached Janet Newbold Bush, who refused, saying she did not like Astor anyway, then asked what would happen if he survived her, so Minnie brought Brooke Russell Marshall. References that address this account classify it as a story often told in social circles. That is a warning, not evidence.
What can be verified is the chronology, which is astonishing in its speed. The Idaho decree was issued in September 1953. Vincent Astor married Roberta Brooke Russell Marshall on October 8, 1953, about two weeks later. In the same October, Minnie Cushing married the painter James Whitney Fosburgh. Three marriages and one divorce within six weeks. The woman at the center of the story separated from New York’s largest private real estate owner.
In that second marriage, the sister who had been the most calculating became the most interesting. Fosburgh was a Yale graduate, a Manhattan painter, a lecturer in art at the Frick Museum, and a World War II glider pilot. His painting of John F. Kennedy appeared in full color on the cover of Life magazine on November 5, 1965, with a memorial essay on the Kennedy presidency. He also painted Truman Capote, and that portrait was exhibited at the New York Public Library in Bryant Park. That detail would acquire a certain irony within a decade.
Multiple accounts, including Kirkus’s review of Grafton’s biography, describe Fosburgh as an impeccable aristocrat and openly homosexual. A specialist bookseller who examined the family papers concludes that Minnie remarried not for money but for compatibility. Nothing in the records contradicts this. They established a literary salon, and it succeeded. The Fosburgh house in Katonah and their Manhattan address became meeting places for painters and museum curators. The collection they assembled was serious rather than decorative.
It included works by Cézanne, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, Renoir, Walter Sickert, William Nicholson, and Pavel Tchelitchew, plus a Houdon bust of Jefferson that Fosburgh bought cheaply at a small auction house and displayed in the Katonah window overlooking the bay. Alongside this, she served as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty-six years, longer than most museum directors’ tenures. She also served as curator of the City of New York and as a member of the Yale Art Gallery board. During World War II, she worked with the Ships Service Committee and the City of New York War Fund and supported the Henry Street Settlement.
The eldest Cushing daughter, after failing to receive a single dollar from the Astor estate, spent the second half of her life doing the unglamorous committee work that actually holds American cultural institutions together, married to a man who earned his living as a painter. Six years after her divorce, when Astor’s will was read in Dutchess County and her name was absent from a document distributing more than $127 million, she had been married three times and lived a full life. Her own estate was never found. No record exists of what became of the paintings she bought with Fosburgh. That is a significant gap in this family’s records.
She outlived her husband by a few months and her younger sister by a few weeks, all in the same fateful year. Before that year arrived, the youngest sister acquired the friend who would define her posthumous reputation. By the mid-1960s, Truman Capote had gathered around him a group of women he called his swans. Babe Paley was the first. The group also included Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Lee Radziwill, and C.Z. Guest.
What he gave them was what their husbands did not: precise, continuous, delightful attention. Slim Keith described her first meeting with him: she was charmed, he was not only intelligent but captivating, so brilliant at conversation that when he began talking about his weaknesses and eccentricities, one could not help but admire him immediately. What they gave him was material, and he later admitted this without shame.
The Capote-Babe Paley friendship was among the strongest, cemented at Kiluna, Round Hill, on yachts, and at lunch tables at La Côte Basque on East 55th Street, where the swans gathered. By 1965, the Paley marriage had not been physical for over a decade. The couple lived increasingly separate lives. What held them together was habit, shared social life, material comfort, and Babe’s public identity as his wife.
Michael Dann, who worked for Paley, described his behavior clearly: his boss was unfaithful but discreet. One friend described his taste in partners as exciting but vulgar-looking. Another said flatly he was not a lover of women but a womanizer. By all accounts of those involved, those relationships were not romantic affairs, which made answering them more difficult in some ways. Betsey Whitney, who had become her sister’s confidante, was deeply upset by the situation and objected publicly to what she called constant marital infidelity.
Marietta Tree gave the most humane account: Babe wanted Bill with every fiber of her being, and he did not reciprocate that feeling. He loved her and always would, but she was not the center of his life, nor was anyone, and that was very hard for Babe to accept. Capote himself, telling the story years later, believed the sense of betrayal had taken hold early, and that after three years of marriage she nearly wanted to separate. He also mentioned her belief that Paley married her for her sister and her sister’s husband more than for herself, since having Mrs. Whitney and Mrs. Astor with her was like acquiring the whole family.
Babe Paley was never the innocent woman who learned of her husband’s infidelity from a magazine. She had known for years. She discussed it with her sister and friends. At one point, she seriously considered divorce. During a ten-day trip in France, she asked a single friend about his annual income, then asked if she could live on that amount. The friend realized immediately he was watching a woman planning the costs of divorce. She did not go through with it. Irene Selznick believed she would not have taken such a risky step, and because Bill was extremely intelligent. One of Paley’s close friends said that if he had known his wife was seriously considering another man, he would have acted like a gang leader. Paley never forgave the friend she had trusted with her secret.
A correction is worth making here because it repeats everywhere. The story linking Paley to Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s is unconfirmed. Babe confronted him about it, and he convinced her he had no relationship with the actress. Sally Bedell Smith concluded that the Monroe connection was one of the cases where Paley’s reputation as a womanizer overshadowed the truth. The documented pattern used the movie star and ignored her.
Smith’s summary of what Babe understood about her situation is the sentence that makes the coming betrayal clear. It consists of four words: Babe realized she had made a Faustian bargain. She traded her private life for a public one, and she told a writer the details of that bargain. That writer, drinking heavily by 1974 and without a major book in a decade, was under contract for a novel he could not complete.
Another fact from this period must be stated before events turn, and it comes from Capote’s biographer who knew him well. When asked about the source of Paley’s information, Gerald Clarke answered in three words: Paley, of course. The husband told the writer about the affair, and the wife told the writer everything as well. In July 1975, the writer read the result aloud to his biographer beside a swimming pool in Southampton.
The November 1975 issue of Esquire appeared in early October. It contained a story of fiction titled “La Côte Basque, 1965.” It was approximately 11,000 words long, though one source says 13,000, and that dispute remains unresolved. It was the second excerpt Esquire published from Capote’s unfinished novel, after “Mojave” in June, which caused no stir. The story concerns a long lunch at the restaurant where the swans lunched, narrated through the gossip of a woman called Lady Ina Coolbirth.
Anyone who had sat at those tables recognized within one page that Lady Ina Coolbirth was Slim Aarons. Sidney Dillon, the Jewish financier married to a perfect Protestant wife, was William Paley. Cleo Dillon, the perfect wife, was Babe. Ann Hopkins, described in the story as a woman who deliberately killed her husband and explicitly as a murderess, was Ann Woodward, who shot her husband in 1955 and was acquitted after it emerged she mistook him for a burglar.
The story also names real people explicitly as minor guests at the table. Among them is Mrs. William S. Paley, lunching with her sister, Mrs. John Hay Whitney. Thus Babe and Betsey Cushing appear in the text itself twice. Once under their married names at their usual table, and once under pseudonyms, where one of them is insulted in the most vicious way a wife can be insulted in print. That repetition is the cruelty itself. A writer of Capote’s precision does not place the real woman in the room where he strips naked his fictional version of her.
The Dillon plot describes an act of infidelity committed by the husband in the marital bed with a governor’s wife, portrayed as social revenge rather than desire, followed by a night of frantic cover-up within the house, detailed with humiliating physical specificity. The wife discovers it and responds with exaggerated courtesy beginning with “darling,” telling him he was sleeping deeply and peacefully. Three days before the issue reached newsstands, Ann Woodward committed suicide with sleeping pills. No source proves she saw an advance copy. The connection popular accounts draw between the story and her death is inference, not fact. Her mother-in-law accused Capote anyway, saying Ann shot her son and Truman killed her.
Capote had been warned. In July 1975, beside Gloria Vanderbilt’s pool in Southampton, he read the draft aloud to his biographer, Gerald Clarke, who told him plainly what would happen. Every writer who has covered this story since has quoted Capote’s answer, eleven words to the effect that they were all too stupid to know who they were. Clarke identified the irony precisely: ordinary readers would not recognize the character, but everyone inside the circle would. Everyone except Paley’s wife.
Babe Paley did not recognize her marriage in the story. On an October morning, she called Slim Keith and asked if she had seen the magazine, then asked if the man in the story was Bill. The woman portrayed as Lady Ina Coolbirth had to explain to her that the humiliated wife in the story was herself. John Richardson explained the mechanism: Bill’s affairs were not the talk of the town until Truman’s story appeared. The information was old. Her sister knew it. Her friends knew it. She herself had known it for nearly twenty years and had filed for divorce over it. What was new was that anyone who bought a magazine now knew it too.
The story was described in language that would be repeated at every lunch table in the city for a year. The man who wrote it was the only person outside her family she had told everything. Epps Bourne set the context: this was an era when no one discussed even the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair, let alone the affairs people were having. The answer to where the story came from comes from the biographer who was in the room when it was read aloud. The source was Paley himself. The husband supplied the raw material. The wife supplied the wound. The friend combined them in a magazine article.
Her response took no more than a day. She cut him off from the society she had devoted her life to building. Babe Paley never spoke to Truman Capote again. There is no sentence in this entire story clearer than that one, and every source consulted agrees without reservation. Charlotte Curtis, the New York Times society columnist with knowledge of the household and its circle, used one word to describe Babe’s state: destroyed. John Richardson said she was disgusted with La Côte Basque.
Then the machine she had built at Kiluna, Round Hill, and Squam Lake, the parallel institution created because established clubs rejected her husband, turned against the writer with complete efficiency. The Paleys never mixed with him socially again. They led what one report described as a mass exodus of friends who shunned him. Imagine what that meant in 1975. Capote had spent twenty years as America’s most sought-after guest. Within weeks, he was a man who could not reclaim his table. Vanity Fair’s later summary of the season was that Truman’s ostracism became the prevailing one.
John Steinbeck offered the best attributed explanation for why Babe chose as she did, and it deserves careful mention because it is the only real window into her logic. According to Steinbeck’s account, Truman did not understand Babe’s nature: she had to be loyal to her husband first, and Truman would therefore be the one excluded. Compare that to everything the marriage record shows. She had known about the infidelity for two decades. She considered separation and decided the risk was too great. She built her adult identity on being William Paley’s wife, and that identity was her only capital, since she entered the marriage with nothing.
Capote’s story attacked the one thing she could not afford to lose, and he attacked it publicly. So she chose the marriage, which is what she had been raised to do in Brookline. She paid for that training by giving up the only friendship in which she had been allowed to be honest.
The reactions of others in the circle were similar, though their responses differed. Slim Keith, whose story was told in full, said Coolbirth was a reflection of herself, that she adored Capote, and that she was disgusted by his exploitation of friendship and his miscalculation. Capote tried to reach her by phone and telegram. Reports indicate her interest in him afterward was limited to the possibility of a libel suit. One woman sued and lost. Lee Radziwill said years later she did not think he realized what he was doing because he paid dearly for it, and things got worse from then on.
The Village Voice delivered its verdict in a brief phrase: Capote turned La Côte Basque into a slaughterhouse of hatred. Kelly Greenberg Jephcott described the effect as like a bomb going off. Everyone turned against him afterward. He became a persona non grata. The general public learned the truth four months later. On February 9, 1976, Liz Smith published a column in New York magazine decoding the roman à clef for ordinary readers. Only then did Esquire’s editors realize the scale of what they had published.
The May 1976 issue appeared with Capote himself on the cover, dressed in black, holding a knife. He never apologized. His public stance was defiance. His fixed position was that he was a writer, that he used everything, and that these people could not think he existed only for their amusement. He told Joan Carson they knew he was a writer and he did not understand the reaction. He protested to Lee Radziwill that he was a journalist and everyone knew that. Before publication, he expected no one to be upset unless they were left out. Some material had already circulated within the group and in gossip columns, so the outrage was not about the novelty of the information. The crime was the choice of venue and the betrayal of confidence. All consulted sources agree on this.
Gerald Clarke, who knew him better than anyone who wrote about him, offered an explanation that makes the entire episode almost unbearable. He suggested that now, with Babe dying, Capote was avenging her in the only way he knew: by mocking the man who had caused her all that pain. Whether or not that was his motive, it is the only explanation that fits the chronology, because by October of that year, Babe Paley had been living with lung cancer for twenty-one months.
In the first days of January 1974, a small tumor was discovered in one of Babe Paley’s lungs. On January 18, a surgeon at New York Hospital removed a third of the lung. The tumor was malignant. At fifty-eight, she had been smoking more than two packs a day for at least a decade. In the spring of 1975, another tumor appeared. On May 12, the remainder of her right lung was removed. Note the date because it matters. The Esquire story appeared on newsstands in October 1975, five months after the second operation.
Paley confronted the illness with money and connections, the only way he had ever needed to. He sought treatments abroad, brought in experts from Scandinavia, used his position as a Columbia University trustee to arrange medical services, and sent a CBS news correspondent to Paris to investigate an obscure Swiss clinic. Kitty Miller said Paley’s motive was anxiety about her, that he faced for the first time something he could not control, and that he was extremely averse to any failure.
Through 1976 and most of 1977, her condition seemed stable. That summer, she wrote to Irene Selznick from a yacht near Saint-Tropez that things were going well and Bill was in high spirits. In the fall of 1977, the cancer invaded her central nervous system. Paley reduced his CBS workdays to three or four a week and arranged round-the-clock nursing care at home. She became alarmingly thin and wore Valentino knits to hide it. The drugs and radiation affected her hair. When she saw herself in the mirror, she said she now knew what Kate had gone through.
By early 1978, she was openly hostile to her husband, saying they were trying to erase the fact from her, that Paley did not tell her what they were doing to her, and that she had no say in anything concerning her life. She stopped calling him Bill and began calling him Paley. At Easter, she took to her bed with her King Charles spaniel named Softly. She was on oxygen but with few tubes, and taking morphine frequently. In early June, at her request, doctors began gradually withdrawing nutrition so her life would not be artificially prolonged.
Then Paley found a doctor in Philadelphia with an experimental treatment. He ordered nutrition increased and sent nurses by train with glass bottles to be injected daily. Amanda said it was painful for everyone: her mother had been calm before the new drug, and she had been very brave. After three weeks, the family realized it would not work. In mid-June, she made her last visit to Kiluna, riding around the grounds in a golf cart with her husband, her son Tony, and her daughter Amanda.
She died in the early hours of Saturday, July 6, 1978, the day after her sixty-third birthday, in her New York apartment. She wore a chiffon turban, a lace nightgown, and makeup applied by a trembling hand. Amanda held her hand. The family had summoned Kate at the last moment, and Babe recognized her. The funeral was held at noon on July 8 at Christ Episcopal Church in Manhasset. Four hundred mourners attended, including three Rockefellers, Harrimans, and Vanderbilts. Oscar de la Renta was among the pallbearers.
Bill Paley, Slim Keith, and Irene Selznick wrote a joint eulogy, delivered by the Reverend Frank N. Johnston, describing her as a beacon of perfection in this age of luxury and simplicity. The service lasted forty minutes. Afterward, hundreds went to Kiluna for an outdoor lunch that Babe had planned herself during her final year. Waiters under the columned portico carried silver trays of champagne and her favorite wine, plus arrangements of flowers she had chosen herself worth over $1,500. Paley, three months from his seventy-seventh birthday, stood through the afternoon greeting guests. Leonora Hornblow said she had never seen such a sad face, that he walked upright without shedding a tear. Slim Keith said that at the end of the afternoon, he looked around to thank Babe for everything as if she were still present.
Truman Capote was not invited. Four months later, on November 4, 1978, Mary Cushing Fosburgh died at her Manhattan home after a long illness at seventy-two, seven months after her husband’s death from cancer at St. Luke’s Hospital. One source gives her death date as November 6, which appears to be the publication date of the obituary confused with the death itself. Two of the three sisters died within one year. The one who remained was the one who had been happy: Betsey Cushing Whitney.
Whitney lived twenty years after her sisters’ deaths, spending them distributing what the family had accumulated. Her husband died in 1982. In 1983, she established the Greentree Foundation. She donated $8 million to Yale Medical School, the largest single gift that institution had received at the time, the school where her father had taught. Her will allocated $15 million to New York Hospital and Cornell Medical Center. She gave paintings by Utrillo and Picasso to the Museum of Modern Art and a Toulouse-Lautrec to the National Gallery of Art.
After her death, eight early modern European paintings went to the National Gallery, including a Van Gogh self-portrait painted in September 1889, along with works by Matisse, Braque, Dufy, Vlaminck, Marquet, and the first Van Dongen in the gallery. Museum officials declined to value them. The Frick Collection’s institutional summary notes that John Hay Whitney and his wife Betsey Cushing Whitney assembled over half a century one of the finest American collections of nineteenth and twentieth-century French art.
The calculations of that collection tell the story of the century better than any social essay. The Renoir that Jock bought in 1929 for $165,000 sold in 1990 for $78.1 million. The Picasso given to her foundation brought $128.3 million at Sotheby’s in 1999. The painting given to her foundation sold in 2004 for $104 million. She died on March 25, 1998, at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, the hospital she had helped build on fifteen acres of her own land, at eighty-nine. No cause of death was announced.
Betsey was the last of her family, outliving her sisters by nearly twenty years. Vanity Fair concluded that the middle sister had surpassed her more famous sibling, inheriting old money, social standing, the finest American houses, and a husband devoted to her and her children. Their brother, Henry Kirk Cushing II, lived until 1983 and left no trace in history.
Now for the verdict, and it must be stated honestly. What the records confirm is this. A mother organized her daughters’ upbringing around profitable marriage and held effective veto power over their choices, according to two independent accounts. Her middle daughter financed her youngest daughter’s debut because the family’s assets were social and pooled. The eldest daughter married New York’s largest real estate owner six days after her sister’s wedding, after five years as his mistress. The youngest married the chairman of CBS four days after his divorce settlement was announced.
Three sisters, six marriages, and the right to use the names Astor, Roosevelt, Whitney, and Paley within twelve years, achieved by a family with no capital, no title, and no university degrees among its three members. These are precise calculations sustained over two generations. The word “ruthless” is attributed to their timing, if it has any origin at all.
What the record does not support is cruelty, fraud, or deception toward the men they married, or toward anyone destroyed by their rise. Betsey gave up wealth. Minnie served the Metropolitan Museum for thirty-six years and inherited nothing from the richest man she ever knew. Babe, remembered as the most ruthless of them, was betrayed by the only friend to whom she had told the truth. None of the Cushing sisters committed the most vicious act in this history. It was committed by a man entrusted with the one secret that could destroy her, in a national magazine.
The truth is this. Their rise gave them two of America’s greatest fashion houses, an embassy in London, a place in the Social Register that lasted one edition, a collection now displayed in three museums, and a name that still appears on best-dressed lists half a century after the woman who wore those clothes was buried. It did not give the eldest sister an inheritance, nor the youngest a worthy marriage, nor any of them a home their children remembered with longing.
Katharine Stone Crowell Cushing died in the spring of 1949, ten years after her husband. No financial records of Harvey Cushing’s estate were ever found, so no one can determine the wealth of these three women’s father, only the source of his money. Kate Cushing left no letters or diaries, so no one can know whether she thought the bargain was worth it. Her daughters left the evidence: the ascent was entirely successful, and its cost exceeded its return.