On May 4, 1960, Leland Hayward’s divorce from Slim Keith was finalized in Carson City, Nevada. That same day, he married Pamela Churchill. There was no waiting period, no interval of reflection.
Hayward was the most successful theatrical producer in America, the man behind *South Pacific* and *Mr. Roberts*, with *The Sound of Music* about to open. He had ended one marriage and begun another with the efficiency of a set change between acts.
The woman he left behind was Slim Keith, born Mary Ray Gross in Salinas, California. She had been the love of his life and the hostess of his world.
The woman who replaced her was Pamela Digby Churchill, the former daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill. She had spent the postwar years being maintained by a succession of Europe’s wealthiest men)Skip and arrived in New York in 1959 with a depleted fortune and the specific intention of acquiring an American husband.
Slim Keith had been introduced to Hollywood by William Powell. She inspired the creation of Lauren Bacall. She was pursued by both Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway. She was one of Truman Capote’s celebrated swans.
But she did not survive the betrayal by a best friend who stole her husband while she was traveling in Europe.
Slim was born on July 15, 1917, in Salinas, California, the same agricultural valley John Steinbeck was turning into American literature. Her father, Edward Gross, owned successful fish canneries in Monterey, placing the family in the upper tier of coastal California society. The Steinbeck family 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’s nightshirt caught fire near the fireplace. The family rushed to extinguish the flames, but the burns were too severe. Buddy died shortly after.
Her father, absent at the time, placed full blame on his wife. He never forgave her. The estrangement was slow and vicious. During the divorce proceedings, he pulled Slim out of school and tried to bribe her into publicly siding with him against her mother, offering a horse, a boat, even a car.
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.
After the divorce, Slim was sent to a Dominican convent school in San Rafael, where the nuns found her too tall, too restless, and too drawn to the world outside the gates.
At 16, Slim simply left, reportedly at her mother’s quiet encouragement. She climbed behind the wheel of a large yellow Packard roadster convertible and pointed herself toward Death Valley.
She checked into the Furnace Creek Inn, a resort that attracted wealthy eccentrics and Hollywood refugees. There she encountered William Powell, the suave star of *The Thin Man*. Powell 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. Soon she had relocated to Los Angeles, where she was a regular at parties alongside Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.
On August 30, 1938, at the Clover Club, the most fashionable gambling nightclub in Los Angeles, Slim noticed a tall, gray-haired, immaculately dressed man watching her. He was director Howard Hawks, known as the Silver Fox, fresh off the commercial disappointment of *Bringing Up Baby*.
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. She was the first beautiful woman he had encountered in years who answered with a flat refusal. The refusal itself was the quality that captivated him.
They married on December 10, 1941, reportedly three days after Pearl Harbor. Gary Cooper walked Slim down the aisle in place of her absent father.
Hawks was not emotionally available. She later wrote that he was slightly frightened of movie making and she suspected surprised that he was able to do it at all. He described his emotional core as a thermometer stuck at about six degrees below normal.
He had affairs with almost every attractive woman in his orbit, including actresses Ann Dvorak, Joan Crawford, Dolores Moran, and Ella Raines. But the period of their marriage was the richest stretch of his career: *Only Angels Have Wings*, *His Girl Friday*, *Ball of Fire*, *Air Force*, *To Have and Have Not*, *The Big Sleep*, and *Red River*.
The creation of Lauren Bacall was the strangest and most consequential act of the marriage. 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 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.
The scriptwriter Jules Furthman admitted taking Bacall’s most memorable lines directly from conversations with Slim, including the famous whistling scene. 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.”
Hawks’s financial conduct after the divorce was deeply ungenerous. He resisted paying child support for Kitty, arguing that Slim’s subsequent husband would have far more money.
Slim arrived in Havana in the mid-40s with Baby Kitty and settled into life at Finca Vigia, Ernest Hemingway’s hilltop compound. It was there that she first encountered Leland Hayward, who had come to Havana with David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones.
Hayward was born in Nebraska City on September 13, 1902. He had built a 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.
Both Slim and Hayward were still legally married when the attraction became undeniable. 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 50s were the decade of their flowering. Hayward’s Broadway productions included *Mister Roberts*, *South Pacific*, *Gypsy*, and *The Sound of Music*. Slim’s world was furnished by this success in the most literal sense.
Her friendship with Babe Paley deepened during these years into something closer to sisterhood. It was through Babe that Slim met Capote, and it was in the universe orbiting the Paleys and the Haywards that Capote found the material that would eventually detonate in all their faces.
It was Diana Vreeland who introduced Slim to Truman Capote at one of her dinner parties. Capote in that period was the most dazzling literary presence in New York, with *Other Voices, Other Rooms* and *Breakfast at Tiffany’s* behind him and *In Cold Blood* ahead.
He bestowed on Slim the nickname Big Mama, called her droll and supercharged, 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, and so shrewd a conversationalist that when he led with vulnerabilities and quirks, you could not help but take an instant liking to him.”
The swans were Capote’s precisely curated inner circle of women who combined extreme wealth, extreme elegance, and extreme access to the private lives of the most powerful men in America. Babe Paley was his supreme favorite.
The swans trusted Capote because he had earned their trust through years of attentive, devoted friendship. They did not reckon until it was too late that the exchange was not equal. He was collecting, and they were simply living.
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 of his life.
Meanwhile, Pamela Digby Churchill had arrived at a crossroads in Paris. She was 38, beautiful, broke, the succession of wealthy European lovers having run its course. Prince Ali Khan, Gianni Agnelli, Baron Elie de Rothschild, and Stavros Niarchos were all behind her. She needed an American husband.
One evening in New York, 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?
The charitable interpretation of Babe’s call is simple hospitality. 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. 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. 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 would keep him in Central Europe for months, making regular side trips to Paris. Pamela made sure she was always there when he arrived.
Slim’s failure to see the affair was not a failure of intelligence, but of imagination. She could not conceive that someone she was dining with was simultaneously sleeping with her husband.
On May 4, 1960, the day Hayward’s divorce from Slim was finalized, he married Pamela Churchill in Carson City. There was no interval.
Slim had been the wife of the most successful theatrical producer in America, embedded in the highest reaches of New York social life. She had been replaced on the same day, without 24 hours of pause.
Her grief was not simply romantic, but existential. She had no clear understanding of her finances, no idea how much money she had or what she needed to live on, and she dealt with the collapse while traveling through Europe.
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. Those who knew all three women overwhelmingly believed Babe had made the call to redirect Pamela’s predatory attention from her own husband.
The double betrayal destroyed Slim’s faith in the social architecture she had spent two decades building. The architecture that assumed the women in her circle would protect each other’s marriages rather than cannibalize them.
Pamela’s subsequent trajectory confirmed her specific nature. After Hayward’s death in 1971, she married Averell Harriman on the day of the funeral. She used the fortune to become a Democratic Party figure, was appointed ambassador to France by Clinton in 1993, and died at the embassy pool in Paris in 1997, in the same country where she had seduced Slim’s husband.
After the devastation, a friend arranged a blind date for Slim with a British banker, Sir Kenneth Keith. As he walked up the stairs of her apartment, Slim imagined her future arriving. The only obstacle was his accent.
They married in 1962. Kenneth Keith was knighted in 1969, making Slim Lady Keith, and 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.
She left him in 1972, reportedly more emotionally wrought about saying goodbye to the household servants, who had shown her more warmth than her husband.
In November of 1975, Esquire magazine published an excerpt from Capote’s unfinished novel *Answered Prayers* titled “La Côte Basque, 1965.” The excerpt caused an immediate and ferocious scandal.
The main character was Lady Ina Coolbrith, a thinly disguised Slim Keith, who holds court at the restaurant and 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, the most personally damaged by the revelations, was gravely ill with cancer and died in 1978 without reconciling.
Capote’s descent into alcoholism and drug addiction accelerated, and he died on August 25, 1984, at 59. His reported last words were “beautiful babe.”
Slim Keith’s fashion influence was profound and lasting. She offered a sharply different aesthetic at a moment when American femininity was defined by elaborate hairdos, corseted waists, and aspirations toward European glamour.
“In my day, 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,” she wrote. “I somehow knew there was a glut in that market. I opted for a scrubbed-clean, polished look.”
She was named best-dressed woman of the year in 1946, an honor she dismissed as “about as empty as Miss Butterfat Week in Wisconsin.”
She is credited with enabling the careers of Lauren Bacall, actress Joanne Dru, and actress Ella Raines, all three of whom bore a physical resemblance to Slim. The Hawks woman archetype 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 by Simon and Schuster 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. The title itself was characteristic of the woman who had insisted on being exactly who she was since the day she refused to be bribed by her father.
Lauren Bacall wrote of her, “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 story was dramatized in Ryan Murphy’s 2024 series, *Feud: Capote versus the Swans*, with Diane Lane playing Slim. In the series, Slim is reimagined as the driving force behind the Swans’ collective decision to ostracize Capote.
Slim Keith’s life poses a resonant question. What is the cost of being the most interesting person in any room?
She was betrayed by two of the closest people in her life. The husband who was her greatest love. The brilliant friend who turned her confidences into literature.
She survived everything. The brother burned to death in front of her. The father who tried to buy her loyalty. The emotionally frozen director. The husband stolen by the best friend. The literary betrayal by the writer she had trusted.
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.”