She was born in 1917 in the lettuce fields of California’s Salinas Valley, the middle child of a prosperous cannery owner and a mother who preferred to call her Nancy. Her father was a volatile man who kept three enemies in his head—Catholics, Jews, and Christmas—and the household ran on his moods. Her brother Buddy was his favorite; her sister Tedy, a cold beauty. Nancy learned early to move quietly and ask nothing.
In December 1928, Buddy’s pajama sleeve caught fire at the hearth. Their mother smothered the flames with a braided rug, but the burns were fatal. The boy who held the family together died before dawn. In the wreckage of grief, her father stopped speaking to the living.
He sent the two girls to a convent school north of Carmel with a single suitcase each. There, Tedy punished her sister with silence and contempt. A year later, her father arrived at the convent gate with an offer. A horse.
A sailboat moored at Moss Landing. A Model A Ford at fifteen. In exchange, Nancy would testify to a judge that her mother’s negligence had caused Buddy’s fire. The statement would free him from support and absolve him of guilt.
She was thirteen, but she understood the price. She remembered her mother attacking the flames with a rug, and her father standing rooted. She said no. “I won’t lie.
” He left with the warning that she would regret it. Her sister fled east at sixteen, and for a time the family collapsed into silence. Nancy spent a summer with her mother, patching a roof and stretching stew bones, learning to speak around the open trench of Buddy’s absence. But her own escape was already taking shape in the heat of Death Valley.
At sixteen, she ran away from school and took refuge at the Furnace Creek Inn, the luxurious oasis at the center of the desert. There she met William Powell, the movie star in his prime. He saw a tall, elegant girl with a sharp tongue and gave her the name that would define her: Slim. Powell introduced her to the most exclusive circle in America.
She mixed with William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, traded jokes with Cary Grant, and drew the attention of Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway. By twenty-two, she had appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and made the magazine’s best-dressed list. She had not yet made a film, but she had made herself into a star. In 1938, at a party, she met Howard Hawks.
The director was obsessed. He was already married to Athole Shearer, who had legal restrictions that made divorce nearly impossible, but Hawks pursued Slim relentlessly. After three years, the obstacles cleared, and they set a wedding date: December 11, 1941. Four days before the ceremony, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the country went to war.
On the day of the wedding, Slim hesitated at the top of the stairs and told Gary Cooper, who was walking her down the aisle, that she couldn’t marry him. He calmed her, and she went through with it. As Mrs. Howard Hawks, Slim became her husband’s unofficial story editor.
He brought her a script called Everybody Goes to Rick’s, which she dismissed as sentimental. He turned it down. The project was later filmed as Casablanca. As the marriage wore on, Hawks began to rewrite their shared history, inflating his own role, and Slim found it dishonest.
Then he set out to find an actress who looked like her—and Slim, flipping through the very magazine that had once featured her, pointed out Betty Bacall. Hawks recreated his wife on screen, gave Bacall her nickname, and then fell in love with his creation. But Humphrey Bogart won her instead. Hawks turned his fury on Bacall, threatened her career, and began a very public affair with her co-star Dolores Moran, whom Slim nicknamed “Dollarse.
” In 1946, Slim gave birth to their daughter, Kitty, but Hawks showed no interest in the child. The marriage had already collapsed into contempt. Slim fled. She left the baby with a nanny, traveled to New York, and then to Cuba to stay with Hemingway.
On one hunting trip, her shotgun accidentally discharged close enough to Hemingway’s head that only luck spared him. She was casting about in the ruins of her marriage. In the spring of 1949, on the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Nacional in Havana, she met Leland Hayward, a Broadway producer who was also married. The affair was conducted with the precision of wartime code—telegrams, fabricated errands, and discreet hotel operators.
Their year of stolen afternoons nearly collapsed when Leland fell gravely ill with pneumonia. Howard Hawks came to the hospital, saw Slim at his bedside, and blessed the pairing. Leland recovered. The two divorces were arranged.
In December 1950, Slim and Leland married in Santa Barbara. The marriage opened a new decade of dinner parties, Henry Fonda arguing politics beside Senator John Kennedy, Greta Garbo laughing beside Tennessee Williams. Leland was the love she’d been moving toward for decades. But in 1959, Pamela Harriman arrived, and Leland was drawn away.
He proposed to Pamela while still married to Slim. On May 4, 1960, the day his divorce from Slim became final, Leland married Pamela. Slim spent the night alone. The betrayal that finished her public life came later.
She had introduced Truman Capote to the circle of wealthy socialites he would call his swans—Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, C. Z. Guest, and Slim herself. Capote collected their confidences with patience and charm.
In 1975, he published “La Côte Basque 1965” in Esquire, an excerpt from his unfinished novel Answered Prayers. Under the thin disguise of a fictional character named Lady Ina Coolbirth, he exposed Slim’s secrets, mocked her choices, and rendered the intimate revelations she had shared in confidence. The friendships shattered. Babe Paley burned her letters.
Slim never spoke to Capote again. Asked if forgiveness was possible, she answered that forgiveness is for priests and fortune cookies. The 1960s closed with her marriage to Kenneth Keith, an English banker from an old family who offered stability instead of passion. She accepted.
They married in 1962. When Kenneth inherited the barony of Castleacre in 1969, she became Lady Keith. The marriage was cordial, orderly, and flat. She left him with little drama, asking only for the London flat she had restored and a stipend.
In 1972, she returned to New York alone, carrying three suitcases and a notebook. She did not spend her later years clinging to youth. She kept her gray hair, refused cosmetic surgery, and traveled widely, moving through intimate gatherings instead of seeking the spotlight. On April 16, 1990, at the age of seventy-two, she died of lung cancer at New York Hospital.
Her life left traces across American culture. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window included a nod to “Slim Hayward” in 1954. In 2006, Hope Davis played her in Infamous. Melanie Benjamin’s novel The Swans of Fifth Avenue examined her friendship with Babe Paley and her rupture with Truman Capote, and the television series Feud: Capote vs.
the Swans placed her at the center of the scandal with Diane Lane’s portrayal. Each version returned to the same fact: the woman born Nancy Gross had built her own life, and no one else would be allowed to own it.