On a November morning in 1975, Babe Paley picked up the latest issue of Esquire magazine at her Fifth Avenue apartment. She had been dying of lung cancer for a year, and had been wrapping her jewelry in tissue paper, tucking small white cards inside each parcel with the names of the people she would leave behind. She was sixty-two years old. She had spent her entire life being called perfect.
What she read on page 110 would take from her the one thing she had kept for herself: the belief that the only person she had ever truly trusted would never use what she had given him. Barbara Cushing was the youngest of three daughters of Harvey Cushing, one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in the world. Her mother, Kate, had one ambition for her girls: that they marry well, marry up, and move into the highest rooms of New York and Washington. The lesson took.
The eldest sister married Vincent Astor. The middle sister married James Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor’s eldest son, and later the wealthy John Hay Whitney. Barbara, called Babe because she was the baby, understood from childhood that the world had a place for women like her, and the entrance fee was beauty, composure, and knowing exactly when to be seen and when to disappear. In the autumn of 1934, at seventeen, she was in a car accident outside Boston.
The crash left her bruised and scarred and knocked out her front teeth. Surgery restored her face, and by some accounts refined it, giving her cheekbones a sharper line that photographs would love. The experience taught her something she never forgot: beauty was not a gift but a material, something that could be shaped, repaired, maintained, and deployed. By the late 1930s she was working as a fashion editor at Vogue, learning the second language of her real education: the grammar of other people’s desires.
Her first marriage, to Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. , the grandson of a Standard Oil founder, lasted six years. It was a correct match by every measure her mother had established, but the war changed Mortimer in ways he never recovered from. He returned with a cruelty that drank, moods that swung without warning, and a coldness that filled the rooms of their Long Island house.
She divorced him in 1946, with a settlement of forty thousand dollars. She had already met someone who needed exactly what she had been trained to provide. William S. Paley had built CBS from a small radio network in 1928 into the most powerful media company in America.
By 1947, its broadcasts reached millions of living rooms every night. Paley had prodigious appetites for art, influence, and beautiful women, and almost no patience for the social barriers that had kept his Jewish family out of the better clubs on Long Island. Babe had the lineage, the manner, and the friendships with the families who controlled those clubs. In the words of the account that preserved her story, she was the key to a door that Bill Paley had been standing outside for years.
Bill had what Babe had been raised to need: money on a scale she had never encountered, an apartment at the St. Regis, an eighty-acre estate in Manhasset, houses in the Bahamas and Jamaica. They married on July 28, 1947. She left Vogue the same week and never went back.
She made their world. She decorated the apartment; she transformed Kiluna Farm into something people remembered for the rest of their lives. Russell Page designed the gardens. She created what she called the secret garden, a small enclosed space behind the tall azalea hedges near the pond, where no camera ever followed her.
She archived the dinner menus so that no guest was ever served the same meal twice. She remembered names and children’s birthdays. From the outside, it was the picture of everything her mother had wanted. From the inside, it was a marriage she was still learning to live with.
Bill Paley was not a man who loved women; he was a man who pursued them. He trawled bars and private clubs, his preferences running to blondes and models. Babe knew. She was a doctor’s daughter, trained in the observation of symptoms: the late returns, the particular quality of her husband’s attention.
She said nothing. She had the life itself, the curated, magnificent, endlessly maintained performance of a perfect marriage. In the summer of 1955, aboard Bill Paley’s private plane heading to Jamaica, the Selznicks brought along a friend. Bill thought the name was Truman, President Truman.
It was not. It was Truman Capote, the thirty-something writer already famous for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Babe looked at him. He looked at her.
They fell instantly in love, of the kind that turned them into inseparable companions. For twenty years, Truman Capote was the best thing in Babe Paley’s life. He called every morning. He appeared at her apartment unannounced with flowers and gossip.
He sat beside her at dinner and made the whole table feel like the only table in the world. He later said, in more than one conversation, that Babe Paley was the most important person in his life. For Babe, the friendship was not one relationship among many; it was the only one of its kind she had ever permitted herself. She told him things she had never told anyone: about Bill’s infidelities, year after year, in the particular detail only someone living inside that knowledge could provide.
About the silences in her marriage, the specific geography of loneliness inside a very large, very beautiful house. About the permanent gap between the woman the world photographed and the woman who sometimes sat alone in the secret garden and felt the afternoon get dark around her. Capote received all of it and never appeared to judge it. He was also working.
Since the early 1960s, he had been building a novel he called Answered Prayers, a reckoning with American society that he claimed would rival Proust. He told his publisher it would be the defining literary event of the decade. He told Babe it would be magnificent. What he had not told her was that her confidences, and the confidences of the other women he called his Swans, were already turning into sentences in his notebooks.
In November 1966, Capote threw the Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, the party of the century, with five hundred carefully selected guests. It was the apex of everything, the most glamorous world in the country, and Truman at the center of it and Babe beside him. Even then, he was writing. Nine years later, in 1974, Babe Paley was fifty-eight, and she had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for most of her adult life.
The doctors gave her the diagnosis: lung cancer. She received the news directly, without visible collapse. She began chemotherapy. The treatments made her hair fall out.
She bought silk turbans, folded them around her forehead with the same care she gave everything, and went to dinner. She appeared at the theater. Women across New York noticed the turbans and began wearing them. She had turned dying into an accessory.
That same season, Truman Capote was in trouble. Answered Prayers was not nearly done. The advance had been paid, the deadline had passed, and Random House was threatening to reclaim the money. Under pressure, Capote agreed to submit a single chapter to Esquire as a preview of the larger work.
He chose a chapter called La Côte Basque, 1965, named after the restaurant on West 55th Street where a certain class of New York woman had lunch for decades. The chapter was officially fiction. The names had been changed. One of the characters, a media executive named Sidney Dillon, was barely a disguise for Bill Paley.
The details of Dillon’s infidelities, the specific shape of the humiliation Babe had carried in private for years and disclosed to no one but Truman, were not imagined. They had come through conversation, through the particular, intimate conversations Babe had been having with Capote for twenty years. An advanced copy was sent to certain people mentioned in the text, as was customary. One of them was Ann Woodward, a former model who had shot and killed her husband, a banking heir, in 1955 in circumstances a grand jury had ruled accidental.
The shooting had defined her for decades. Capote had told her story at dinner parties for years. Now it was in print. Ann Woodward received her advanced copy, read it, and took a handful of barbiturates.
She did not wake up. The news spread through the Swans’ world like a cold current. Slim Keith called Babe. C.
Z. Guest called Slim. Babe heard about Ann Woodward, and she heard the rumors about what was in the chapter. She could not yet bring herself to believe what the rumors said about her own life, her own marriage, her own most private disclosures.
Truman was her friend. Truman had promised her, had it not been understood between them, that what she had told him was safe. The November issue of Esquire arrived at the newsstands. Babe picked it up.
She read the first paragraphs. She recognized a sentence, then another, then a specific, small, intimate detail that could only have come from a single source: from her. She read it a second time, more slowly, the way a doctor re-reads a result that does not match what she expected to find. There was no error.
The details were not imagined. Sidney Dillon was Bill Paley, and the humiliation Babe had carried in private for years was now in a national magazine with a circulation of one million. What Babe felt in that moment, according to those who researched her story for more than a decade, was not rage. It was a harder thing: absolute disbelief that the person she had trusted more than her husband, more than her children, more than her sisters, could have done this.
She called Slim Keith. “Have you seen Esquire? ” Slim had read it. She told Babe that Ann was dead because of what Truman had written.
She said that at least they were still alive. Babe’s response was very quiet. “Well,” she said, “I want to die, too. ”
Babe Paley did not speak to Truman Capote again, not that day, not the following week, not in the three years that remained of her life.
Not one word. Capote tried to explain himself. He wrote to the Swans, he telephoned, he said to anyone who would listen, “What did they expect? I’m a writer.
” It explained nothing. The other Swans cut him off as well: Slim Keith, C. Z. Guest, Gloria Vanderbilt.
The world that had made him possible closed around him like water closing over a stone. But Babe’s silence was the one that mattered most to him. She gave him her absence, completely. She went on living.
The chemotherapy continued. The turban remained. She appeared at the events she could still attend, perfectly, because perfection was by now not a performance but a reflex. Bill Paley read the chapter and recognized himself.
What he felt about it, Babe never said. In the evenings, in the last year of her life, she sat in the apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue, the Picasso still on the wall, and she wrapped her jewelry carefully, methodically, tucking a small card into each parcel with a name written in her handwriting. She was distributing herself to the people who had not left her. Not to Truman, not to him.
On the morning of July 6, 1978, in that apartment, Barbara Cushing Paley died of lung cancer. She was sixty-three years old. She had turned sixty-three the day before. The parcels were already wrapped.
The instructions for the jewelry, the funeral, and the wine to be served at the reception afterward were filed in a system her household could follow without confusion. The funeral was held at Christ Episcopal Church in Manhasset, near Kiluna Farm. The guests came in clothes she would have approved of. The wine was the wine she had selected herself.
Truman Capote was not there. He had not been invited. C. Z.
Guest was the one who told him. She called him and told him that Babe was gone, and that he was not invited to the funeral. Capote had been carrying an unfinished piece he called Beautiful Babe, a eulogy he had not been able to finish. He read what there was of it alone, and then he put it away.
Answered Prayers was never finished. He spent the remaining six years of his life trying to complete it, and when he died in August 1984, the manuscript was still incomplete. The women he used outlasted the work he used them for. Bill Paley attended the funeral and wept openly, in a way that surprised people.
In 1985, Cosmopolitan published a list of the ten most eligible bachelors in the country, and William S. Paley, at eighty-three, was on it. He died in October 1990 of kidney failure, at eighty-nine. His estate was valued at half a billion dollars.
His art collection went to the Museum of Modern Art. The money went to his six children. He was buried at the Memorial Cemetery of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, beside Babe.
The man who had spent thirty years finding reasons to be somewhere else was placed, at the end, in the ground next to the woman whose patience had outlasted his faithlessness. What remains of Babe Paley is what she intended to remain: the photographs, the style, the memory of what it looked like to move through a room with complete composure, the small white cards inside the carefully wrapped parcels of jewelry. The turban is gone. The secret garden is gone.
Kiluna Farm burned in a fire and was demolished around 1990. Everything she built and maintained with such extraordinary care has passed into the ordinary dissolution of things. What has not dissolved is the question she carried, the one she never answered out loud.