When Truman Capote published an excerpt from his long-awaited novel in 1975, he exposed the most private pain of his closest socialite confidantes to the entire reading public. The betrayal was so complete that Babe Paley, his favorite among the glamorous women he called his “swans,” never spoke to him again. She was already privately dying of lung cancer at the very moment her trusted friend chose to reveal her husband’s infidelity in thinly fictionalized form. Babe was the youngest of three sisters from Boston who were raised by their mother with a single, unspoken instruction: marry the richest, most powerful men in America.
All three succeeded beyond what their mother could have imagined, marrying into the White House, one of the nation’s oldest fortunes, and the leadership of a broadcasting empire. Their father, Harvey Williams Cushing, was a pioneering neurosurgeon regarded as the father of modern neurosurgery. He described the hormonal disorder that still carries his name, Cushing’s disease, and taught at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Yale before settling his family in Boston. Their mother, Catherine Stone Cushing, came from a socially prominent Cleveland family and reportedly treated her daughters’ marriages as a calculated business venture, cultivating their education and social introductions with the discipline her husband brought to his medical research.
Minnie, born in 1906, was the eldest. Betsy followed in 1908, and Babe arrived in 1915. All three entered New York society as debutantes whose beauty and poise made them the subject of considerable public fascination. Minnie was the first to secure the kind of marriage her mother had prepared them for.
In 1940, she married Vincent Astor, heir to one of America’s oldest and most storied fortunes, built through fur trading and Manhattan real estate. The match elevated the family’s social standing, but the marriage was reportedly unhappy. Vincent was described as somber and difficult, and the couple increasingly lived separate lives. Persistent rumors swirled that the marriage had never been physically consummated.
Minnie divorced Vincent in 1953 and quickly remarried James Whitney Fosburgh, an artist whose homosexuality was an open secret in their social circle. Vincent Astor remarried Brooke Astor, whose charitable work with the Astor fortune made her one of the most celebrated philanthropists in American history. Minnie, meanwhile, cultivated a glittering artistic salon and positioned herself as a genuine patron of the arts. Betsy’s own marital ambitions carried her directly into the White House.
In June 1930, she married James Roosevelt, eldest son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when Franklin was still governor of New York. When Franklin won the presidency in 1932, Betsy found herself inside the innermost circles of American political power. Her relationship with her father-in-law grew genuinely close, stirring resentment in both her husband and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Betsy occasionally served as an informal White House hostess, standing in for Eleanor at official functions.
The marriage to James could not withstand the pressures of political ambition and family tension, and the couple divorced in 1940. Betsy’s friendship with Franklin reportedly remained warm for the rest of his life. Babe became the most famous of the three sisters. She began her career as an editor at Vogue and was inducted into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1958.
Her first marriage to sportsman Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. produced two children and ended in divorce in 1946. In 1947, just four days after his own divorce was finalized, Babe married William S. Paley, founder and CEO of CBS, described by many as the father of American broadcasting.
Paley, who had faced antisemitic exclusion in elite New York society, gained the social pedigree he sought through Babe, while she gained access to his considerable wealth, a mutually beneficial arrangement friends often described in candid terms. Behind Babe’s flawless public image, her marriage carried significant private strain from her husband’s persistent infidelity. She worked tirelessly to keep that pain hidden behind an unshakable public composure. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s, she cultivated an extraordinarily close friendship with Truman Capote, who referred to his favorite society confidantes as his swans.
Babe confided in Capote with a level of trust she rarely extended to anyone else. In 1975, Capote published “La Côte Basque, 1965” in Esquire, an excerpt from his unfinished novel Answered Prayers. The piece contained thinly veiled portraits of his closest society friends, weaving together private confidences gathered over years into a narrative anyone in their circle could recognize. One passage was widely understood to portray Babe and William Paley’s marriage, exposing the husband’s infidelity to the reading public.
Every member of Capote’s circle of swans severed ties with him permanently, effectively ending his standing in the social world he had spent decades chronicling. In a cruel convergence, Babe had been diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, one year before the Esquire piece appeared. A lifelong smoker, she had been advised to quit, but by the time she complied, the damage had progressed too far. She underwent surgery in 1975 to remove a lung, which severely limited her physical activities.
She approached her own death with the meticulous attention that had defined her adult life, planning every element of her funeral, down to the food and wine served to mourners, and wrapping pieces of her jewelry collection individually as final gifts for friends and family. Babe Paley died on July 6, 1978, one day after her 63rd birthday. Her funeral was held at Christ Episcopal Church in Manhasset, Long Island. Truman Capote was conspicuously not invited.
The months surrounding Babe’s death brought an extraordinary concentration of loss to the family. Just three months before, James Fosburgh, Minnie’s second husband, had died. Minnie had been quietly battling her own cancer diagnosis throughout this period. She died on November 4, 1978, just four months after Babe, leaving Betsy as the only surviving sister.
Following her divorce from James Roosevelt, Betsy married John Hay “Jock” Whitney in 1942, a man whose family fortune considerably exceeded even the Roosevelt family’s prominence. The marriage was by nearly every account a genuine love match. Jock’s interests spanned horse racing, art collecting, and philanthropy. The couple’s public life reached its peak when Jock was appointed United States Ambassador to the Court of St.
James’s, serving in London from 1957 to 1961. Betsy and Jock had two daughters together, naming them with the Roosevelt name, a gesture suggesting her fondness for her former father-in-law never faded. Jock Whitney died in 1982. Betsy remained an active philanthropist until her own death on March 25, 1998, at the age of 89, having spent her final two decades as the sole surviving member of the once-famous trio.
Their mother achieved her singular goal: all three daughters married into extraordinary wealth and social prominence. Yet the fuller story reveals what those marriages cost in genuine happiness, private heartbreak, and the premature deaths of two of the three sisters within months of each other. The story of the Cushing sisters remains a portrait of mid-century American high society that captures both the glamour and the real human cost of lives lived so entirely in the public eye.