On a November afternoon in 1975, Babe Paley sat down in her Fifth Avenue penthouse and opened the new issue of Esquire. By the time she closed it, her closest friendship was over. She did not cry. She did not call him.
She read the story he had written, closed the magazine, and gave one quiet instruction to her staff. He was no longer welcome in her home. After almost two decades of friendship, she would not speak to him again. The woman who cut him off was, at that moment, probably the most admired woman in America.
Truman Capote himself had once said her only fault was perfection. Husbands envied Bill Paley for marrying her. Designers waited to see what she would wear. She had been on the international best-dressed list so many years in a row that they had eventually retired her into the Hall of Fame.
She also had two sisters. Together, the three Cushing sisters had married a Roosevelt, an Astor, a Whitney, and the man who built CBS. Three daughters of a Boston brain surgeon, all marrying at the very top of mid-century American power. There has not really been anything quite like them before or since.
It did not happen by accident. Their mother built it. She laid the foundation: a woman from Cleveland with three beautiful daughters and a clear eye for what was possible. She picked the schools.
She picked the summers. She did not live to see the picture come fully into focus, but the picture was hers. This is the story of what she set in motion. It is also the story of what it cost.
Because on that November afternoon in 1975, when one of those daughters closed a magazine and stopped speaking to her closest friend, something else closed, too. The most carefully built life in America turned out, in the end, not to be untouchable. There were rules in the Cushing house. The first one was silence.
When Dr. Harvey Cushing came home from the hospital, no one spoke unless he spoke first. The staff knew. The wife knew.
The five children knew. He went into his study, sometimes for hours, and the family ate without him. By the standards of the early 1920s, he was probably the most important brain surgeon alive. He had taken a field of medicine that killed almost everyone it touched and dragged the survival rate up by sheer obsessive work.
He operated on the wealthy, on wounded officers from the Great War, on patients whose names made the front pages. He would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for a biography he wrote of his old teacher. He was born in Cleveland in 1869. His wife, Katherine Stone Crowell, was born the same year in the same city.
They had known each other since they were children. They married in 1902 and had five children together, three of them daughters. Harvey was the genius of the house. Katherine was the engine.
They moved a lot in the early years: Cleveland, then Baltimore, where Harvey trained at Johns Hopkins under the great William Osler. Finally Boston in 1912 when Harvard offered him the position he had been waiting for. They bought a large house in Brookline, a leafy suburb where the better Boston families went when they wanted to be near the city without quite living in it. Brookline was not glamour.
It was old money sitting under low ceilings, eating early, preferring not to be noticed. The opposite of New York, in other words. And Katherine, by every account that survives, was watching New York. She had grown up in Cleveland when it still mattered in the late 1800s, when it was full of new industrial money.
Her own family was comfortable but not rich. Close enough to the great American fortunes to know what they looked like. Far enough away to have no claim on them. She also grew up knowing she was beautiful—and knowing what beauty could be exchanged for if a girl played the long game.
When she had three daughters of her own, she started playing it. The children came in a particular order. William Harvey Jr. arrived first in 1903, the firstborn son, being prepared eventually to follow his father into surgery.
Mary Benedict, called Minnie, came three years later. Then Betsy in 1908. Then a second son, Henry Kirk, called Harry, in 1910. Finally, almost a decade after Minnie, the youngest, Barbara—Babe.
The three daughters went to Westover, a girls’ boarding school in Connecticut that prepared the right kind of daughters for the right kind of marriages. They learned French. They learned how to walk into a room. They were taught, in ways never said out loud but absolutely understood, that their job was to marry up.
The older boy matters because the story is about to lose him. And the loss of that boy is the moment when Katherine’s quiet plan for her daughters shifted into something harder, more deliberate, almost a mission. He was 23 years old, in his last year at Yale, and by every account a likable young man. William Harvey Cushing Jr.
—Bill to the family—was the firstborn, the one his father expected eventually to put on a white coat and take over the surgical legacy. In June of 1926, he was driving a car on a road outside New Haven. There was an accident. He was killed.
That is most of what is known with certainty. Some accounts say the car overturned. Some say another vehicle was involved. The contemporary newspaper coverage was brief, the way coverage of private family tragedies often was in that period.
A Yale senior, the son of the famous Dr. Cushing, dead before commencement. A short obituary. A funeral.
Then silence. Harvey Cushing was at that moment at the top of his profession. He was finishing the biography of William Osler that would win him the Pulitzer six months later. He was operating on patients whose recoveries were being written up in medical journals across two continents.
He was, in the language of the period, a great man—and his son was dead, and there was nothing surgery could do about it. Katherine took it differently. The accounts, mostly filtered through her daughters’ later memories, describe her as quieter afterward. Not visibly broken, not theatrical, just changed.
A friend of the family later said she developed a habit of stopping mid-sentence as if she had remembered something, then continuing without finishing the thought. She had four children left. The two surviving sons would go on to live quieter lives. Harry became a doctor.
He did not become his brother. But the daughters were a different calculation. Minnie was 20. Betsy was 18.
Babe was 11. Three girls and a mother who had just learned in the most direct way possible that the future was not something you could assume. Plans could be erased on a stretch of road outside New Haven in the time it takes a steering wheel to turn the wrong way. This is the moment Katherine Cushing stopped hoping her daughters would marry well and started making sure they would.
The shift was not announced. There was no speech, no diary entry, no letter that survives saying so. Mothers of that generation did not write down their plans for their children’s marriages because that would have been vulgar. But the shift is visible if you watch what happened afterward.
The summers got longer and were spent in better places. The introductions got more deliberate. The clothes got more expensive. The girls were sent for visits to friends in New York, to families in Newport, to the kind of houses where the right kind of young men appeared at dinner.
Katherine had been playing the long game her whole adult life. After June of 1926, she started playing it faster. Harvey Cushing, the father, the surgeon, the Pulitzer winner, never really recovered from his son’s death. He continued operating.
He continued publishing. By the late 1930s, he was treating a list of patients that included a former German emperor and the wives of senators. But people who knew him noticed that he had become more remote, more impatient, more locked into work. A man who had always preferred his study to his dining room now preferred it absolutely.
He died in 1939 of a heart condition he had been ignoring for years. By the start of the 1940s, when all three Cushing daughters would do something that put them on the front pages of every society column in America, only one of their parents was still alive to see it. That parent was Katherine. She watched all of it.
The first wedding was in June of 1930 at the bride’s parents’ summer place in Brookline. Two hundred guests, white flowers, the kind that cost more in late spring than they should. The groom was 22. The bride was 21.
His father was the governor of New York. Her father was, in the social calculus of the period, almost equally well known, but in a different category. Doctors did not ordinarily marry their daughters into the Roosevelts. Katherine had pulled it off anyway.
The groom’s name was James Roosevelt, eldest son of Franklin and Eleanor. A Harvard man, recently graduated, vaguely aimed at a business career he was not particularly suited for. Tall, charming, weak-chinned in the family way. The Roosevelts of Hyde Park had been prominent for generations, but Franklin was not yet president.
He was governor of New York, finishing his first term. Two and a half years later, almost everybody would know who he was. When Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency in November of 1932, Betsy Cushing Roosevelt became something her mother had probably not specifically engineered but had absolutely created the conditions for. She became a daughter-in-law of the president of the United States.
She was 24 years old. The years that followed are the most interesting and least understood part of Betsy’s life. She moved with James into a fluid orbit around the new administration. Eleanor traveled constantly during the early New Deal years, and somebody had to host the smaller dinners, the visiting dignitaries, the Sunday lunches that did not warrant the First Lady’s full attention.
Betsy filled in. She was charming. She knew how to seat a table. She had been raised by Katherine Cushing, which meant she had been preparing for this kind of work since before she could read.
Eleanor noticed. Eleanor did not love what she noticed. The relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and her oldest son’s wife was, by every honest account, cool. Some biographers have made it actively hostile.
Others have softened it to mutual wariness. The most credible reading is that Eleanor saw in Betsy something she herself had never quite been: a polished, socially confident woman who moved through the rooms of power as if she belonged there. Eleanor had been raised in those rooms and had never felt at home in them. Betsy had been raised in Brookline and treated them like a job she had been hired for.
There was also the matter of the children. James and Betsy had two daughters, both born during the first Roosevelt term. The girls were photogenic. They appeared in newspapers.
They were, briefly, among the most photographed children in America. Eleanor adored her grandchildren. She did not, in the same way, adore their mother. Almost all of what is known about the Eleanor and Betsy dynamic comes from people who were watching them from the outside.
The two women themselves did not write extensively about each other, and the letters that survive are polite. The famous tensions are real, but the texture of them is filled in by biographers, friends, and gossip columnists who had their own reasons to make the story sharper than it probably was on any given Tuesday. When biographers say Eleanor preferred James’s second wife, that is documented. When they say Betsy found the White House years stifling, that is also documented.
The exact temperature of the bad blood between them is more interpretation than evidence. What is not in dispute is how the marriage ended. By 1939, Betsy and James were finished. He had begun an affair with a nurse named Romaine Schneider, whom he would marry within months of his divorce.
The divorce was finalized in 1940. For most women of her time, a divorce at 31 would have been a problem. A scandal, certainly. A demotion in the marriage market, almost always.
For Betsy, it was a clearing of the runway. She had two daughters. She had nine years of moving in the highest circles of American power. She had learned what it looked like to be the wife of an important man, and she had decided she wanted a different important man.
Two years later, she got one. 1940 was not just the year of Betsy’s divorce. It was also the year her older sister became Mrs. Vincent Astor, and the year her younger sister, who had never been considered the family beauty until somebody looked again, made the first of two marriages that would put her on every magazine cover in America.
Three Cushing weddings, three Cushing news cycles, in the space of a single year. Even Katherine, who had been working toward this for the better part of two decades, must have been a little startled at how it landed. From the outside, Minnie’s marriage to Vincent Astor looked like the most successful of any Cushing daughter. Vincent Astor was the wealthiest of the three husbands his mother-in-law would eventually collect.
He owned hotels, real estate, a yacht the size of a small naval vessel, and a magazine called Newsweek. He was a director of half a dozen banks and railroads. He was, by net worth, in the top handful of men in the United States. When Minnie Cushing married him in September of 1940, six months after his divorce from his first wife was finalized, the New York papers ran the story as a kind of coronation.
Inside, it was something else. Vincent had been a difficult man for as long as anyone had known him. He was the son of John Jacob Astor IV, the famous Titanic victim, and he had been 13 years old when his father died on the ship. He inherited what was, at that time, one of the largest fortunes in America.
He inherited it without his father, without his mother’s affection, and without much in the way of preparation for what wealth on that scale does to a young man if nobody is around to push back on him. He grew up to be tall, awkward, prone to dark moods. People who liked him said he was shy. People who did not described him as cold, withholding, occasionally cruel.
He had been married once before to Helen Huntington, a woman from old New York money. That marriage had failed quietly. He divorced her in the spring of 1940. Six months later, he married Minnie.
Minnie was 34. By the standards of her time and class, she was getting late to the marriage table. Her younger sister Betsy had already been married, divorced, and was about to remarry. Her youngest sister Babe was already married, in fact had married before either of them.
Minnie was the eldest and the last unattached. Vincent solved the gap. What he did not do was make her happy. The Astor marriage lasted 13 years.
The houses were beautiful: a Manhattan townhouse, the family estate at Ferncliff up the Hudson, a place in Bermuda. The yacht, the Noma—the kind of vessel that could cross oceans and frequently did. Vincent and Minnie entertained. They appeared at the right charity events.
Minnie did the work of being Mrs. Vincent Astor with the same training her sisters were applying to their own marriages. From a distance, the result looked indistinguishable from a happy life. People who saw them up close saw something else.
Vincent drank. Vincent had bad days that turned into bad weeks. Vincent had political opinions that ran sharply to the right of his social circle and an uncomfortable habit of testing people at dinner to see which way they would jump. There is one of the stranger footnotes of the Cushing story.
In the 1930s, before he married into the family, Vincent Astor had been running a private intelligence circle for the President of the United States. It was called The Room. Vincent and a small group of wealthy Americans, most of them with connections to international travel and shipping, gathered information for FDR off the books on a strictly informal basis. It was the kind of arrangement that would not be legal today.
In 1935, it was just dinner with the president on the Noma. So when Minnie Cushing became Mrs. Vincent Astor in 1940, she did not just marry the richest man in America. She married a man who had been in and out of the White House for years already.
None of that fixed what was wrong inside the marriage. Minnie was, by most readings, the gentlest of the three sisters. She liked gardens. She liked quiet rooms.
She liked friends who stayed for long lunches and did not feel they had to perform. She was married to a man who could not really do any of those things without effort, and who, when the effort failed, made the people around him pay for it. She lasted 13 years. By the early 1950s, the marriage was openly unhappy.
Vincent had begun seeing other women. Minnie had begun, very quietly, building her own life on the side: friendships in the art world, a circle of younger painters and writers who treated her with a softness her husband did not. One of those friends was a painter named James Whitney Fosburgh. He was four years younger than Minnie.
He was thoughtful, easygoing, and one of the kindest men in her life. He was also, by the discreet understanding of the period, gay. When Minnie divorced Vincent Astor in 1953, everybody assumed the next chapter for her would be the standard one: a wealthy divorcee in her late forties settling into a quiet life, leveraging the Astor name for the rest of her years. Minnie did something stranger.
She married Jim Fosburgh. The marriage was, in the formal sense, a marriage. They lived together, traveled together, hosted together. Whether it was a romantic marriage in the sense most people use that word is a question that cannot be fully answered from outside.
What can be said is that everybody who knew them said Minnie was, for the first time in her adult life, visibly happy. She had been Mrs. Vincent Astor for 13 years, and had been admired and pitied in roughly equal measure. She was Mrs.
James Fosburgh for the next 25 years until his death, and the pity stopped. Vincent Astor, for his part, married a third time within months of the divorce. His new wife was a woman named Brooke Russell Marshall. Brooke would survive Vincent by half a century, run the Astor Foundation, become the most photographed older woman in New York, and cement her place in the city’s history as the Mrs.
Astor of the second half of the 20th century. The name Astor, in American memory, now belongs to her, not to Minnie. Minnie was probably fine with that. There is a photograph of Babe Cushing taken in 1938 when she was 23 years old, working as a fashion editor at Vogue.
She is looking at the camera the way women in that period were taught to look at cameras: slightly downward, slightly amused, lips closed. Her hair is pulled back. She is wearing something simple. The photograph is black and white and not particularly remarkable except for one thing.
You can already see it. The thing the next 30 years would build a religion around. The face, the poise, the quality of attention she paid to her own appearance which was so total that it stopped looking like vanity and started looking like work. Babe was the youngest Cushing daughter, the family afterthought.
Almost a decade behind her sisters. She had not been considered the family beauty as a child. Minnie was the eldest and the gentlest. Betsy was the cleverest and the most socially ambitious.
Babe had been for most of her childhood the little one who tagged along. Then she grew up, and somebody looked again. By the late 1930s she was working at Vogue, which in that period was less a job than a kind of finishing school for daughters of good families who wanted to be in Manhattan. She was not writing serious editorial.
She was helping arrange shoots, choosing accessories, being looked at by photographers who could not quite believe their luck when they realized that the new girl in the office had cheekbones that did not require lighting. She married for the first time in 1940. His name was Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. —Standard Oil money on his father’s side, four generations deep.
Tall, handsome, charming in the easy way that men born into that kind of money are often charming. He had been to Yale. He played good tennis. He had the kind of upbringing that prepared a man for a life of country clubs, bond trading, and not very much else.
The wedding was in September of 1940, three weeks before Minnie married Vincent Astor. Two Cushing weddings in a single autumn. Katherine in Brookline must have felt that the years of summer visits and careful introductions were finally producing the harvest she had been planting for since the death of her son 14 years earlier. Babe was 25.
Stanley was 27. They moved into a Manhattan apartment, started a family, and looked, on paper, like exactly the kind of marriage everyone had expected Babe to make. The marriage was a disaster within five years. Stanley went to war in 1942 and came back from the Pacific theater changed.
Many men did. He had what would now be called post-traumatic stress and was then called nothing in particular. He drank. He drank heavily.
He drank in the way that turns a charming man into a difficult one, then a difficult one into a stranger, then a stranger into someone his wife dreads coming home in the evening. They had two children: a son, Stanley III, called Tony, born in 1942; a daughter, Amanda, born in 1946. By the time Amanda was born, the marriage was effectively over. Babe was 31 years old, the mother of two small children, married to a man who could not stop drinking and could not be reached when he was.
She made the decision that her sister Betsy had already made, and her sister Minnie would eventually make. She left. The divorce came through in 1946. Almost immediately, she met Bill Paley.
Bill Paley is one of those figures who can take over any room he walks into, including a paragraph. He was the founder of CBS. He had built it out of a small Philadelphia radio operation in the late 1920s and turned it by the late 1940s into one of the most powerful broadcasting companies in the world. He was Jewish, the son of a cigar manufacturer in Chicago, and he had pulled himself up through New York’s media world at a speed that made the old guard nervous.
He was also, by every measure that mattered to him, an outsider in the social world he most wanted to be inside. He was already married when he met Babe. His wife was a woman named Dorothy Hearst, a Hearst, a divorcee from the Hearst family, who had given him two children and a foothold in Manhattan society. He divorced her in 1947.
He married Babe Cushing Mortimer two days later. The speed of it told you something. Bill Paley had decided that Babe was going to be his entrance ticket into a part of New York he had not been able to reach on his own, and he had decided it with the same focused intensity he applied to acquiring radio stations. Babe, for her part, had decided that the second husband was not going to be another good-looking alcoholic from a Yale class.
She was going to marry a man who built things, a man who was going to be richer in ten years than he was the day she married him. A man whose name would mean something to her sons when they were grown. Bill Paley was that man. The marriage was not, in the conventional sense, a love match.
It was something both more ambitious and more tactical than that. It was a pact, carefully negotiated by two extremely intelligent adults who had each already failed at one marriage and were not going to fail at the next one for the same reason. He would give her a life nobody else could give her. She would give him the social access he had not been able to buy, no matter how much he had spent trying.
What neither of them seems to have predicted was how much they would actually come to need each other. Bill, for the rest of his life, would call her the most beautiful woman he had ever known. Babe, for the rest of her life, would never publicly say a critical word about him, even after she discovered, fairly early, that he was incapable of being faithful. They built a life together.
Houses, trips, children—his and hers—blended into a household that would eventually include four. They were photographed everywhere. They became, in the Manhattan of the 1950s, the couple. Not the loudest couple.
Not the richest couple. The couple. By the time Katherine Cushing died in December of 1949, two years into the Paley marriage, all three of her daughters were married into the highest tier of American wealth and influence. Betsy was about to become Mrs.
John Hay Whitney. Minnie was Mrs. Vincent Astor. Babe was Mrs.
William Paley. Katherine had done it. She did not live long enough to see what came next, which was Babe becoming something her mother had not specifically aimed at and could not have specifically engineered. Not just a wealthy man’s wife, not just a society hostess.
Something stranger and more public. An icon—a face the country wanted to look at. Slim Keith remembered the apple. This was sometime in the late 1950s at a lunch in Manhattan.
Slim, who was herself one of the most stylish women in America and not easily impressed by other women’s surfaces, had come to Babe Paley’s apartment for a small private meal. There was an apple on the table. Babe picked it up, ate it, and put it down. Slim said later that she had never seen anyone eat an apple that way.
She did not even know what the way was, exactly. Just that Babe had done it, and that watching her do it had been like watching a small piece of choreography that the rest of the world had not been told about. That kind of detail is what made Babe Paley famous. Not the clothes, exactly.
Not the jewels, although those mattered. What made her famous, what made other women in her circle slightly insane, was the way she moved through her own life as if every gesture had been thought about in advance, and yet none of them looked thought about. She walked into rooms in a way you could not quite reproduce by trying. She arranged a vase of flowers with two stems and made hostesses with forty stems feel they had done it wrong.
The best-dressed list started noticing her in the mid-1940s. By the early 1950s, she was on it most years. By 1958, the list retired her into its Hall of Fame, which in practical terms meant that the editors had decided it was no longer fair to keep including her since she always won. Bill Paley loved this.
Bill Paley was a man who had spent most of his adult life trying to be admitted into rooms he had not been born into, and now he was married to the woman the rooms were arranged around. Wherever Babe sat at a dinner became the head of the table. Whatever charity she put her name on raised more money than the year before. Whatever designer made her something appeared soon afterward in the wardrobes of half the wives in Manhattan and Long Island.
The thing people often miss is how much of this was work. Babe slept with a maid in the next room because she did not like to do her own hair in the morning. Her clothes were laid out the night before by the maid who knew the schedule of every event Babe had agreed to attend that day and dressed her accordingly. There were sometimes three changes of clothes between waking up and dinner.
Hair was redone, makeup retouched, jewelry rotated according to the lighting of the venue. None of this was unusual for women in her position. What was unusual was that Babe did it more carefully than any of them and made it look like she was not doing it at all. People who studied her up close said the trick was that she did not break character.
Most society women, even the very polished ones, had a moment at the end of the evening when the smile dropped, the shoes came off, the cigarette got lit a little too quickly. Babe did not have that moment. She lit her cigarettes the same way at midnight as she had at noon. She kept her posture in the back of a car at the end of a long night.
Her staff said she was easier to dress at the end of a long day than most women were at the start of one. The cigarettes ended up mattering. Babe smoked constantly, three packs a day by some accounts. She held a cigarette the way other women held flowers.
Several generations of American women learned to smoke from looking at pictures of Babe Paley. She would die of lung cancer at 63. There were the houses. There was the apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue, which Bill had had renovated to her specifications, and which she redecorated several times over the years she lived there.
There was Kiluna Farm on Long Island, an estate where the Paleys hosted weekend parties that became famous, in part because they were not actually that large. Twenty people, twenty-four people, a small number of carefully chosen guests in a setting that had been arranged for them as if it had been arranged for nobody in particular. There were other houses in Jamaica and the Bahamas and elsewhere, each one decorated with the same exact eye. The guest lists, by the early 1960s, were one of the strangest collections of people in American social history.
Old money sat next to new money. A senator might find himself next to a fashion designer. A Hollywood director might be seated across from a European princess. The mix was Babe’s.
She was doing something nobody else in her social class was quite doing yet: treating her dinner table as a curated thing, the way a museum curator treats a wall. Who balances whom? Who needs to be heard out? Who has just been through a divorce and should be put far away from the person whose divorce they caused?
If you wanted to know what mattered in mid-century American culture, you went to dinner at Babe Paley’s. Outside the apartment, things were not always as composed. Bill was unfaithful. He had been unfaithful in his first marriage and was unfaithful in this one almost from the beginning, in a pattern that the women in their circle understood and that Babe herself understood.
There was nothing particularly secret about it. The names of the women he saw were known. Some of the women were friends of Babe’s. Some were wives of friends of Bill’s.
Babe never spoke about it publicly. She never confronted him in any way the staff witnessed. She kept the household running, kept the dinners coming, kept the magazines photographing her, and kept a private grief that almost nobody outside the marriage was allowed to see. What she had built was a fortress.
The fortress was made of taste and discipline and beautiful objects and the absolute refusal to let her surface crack in front of anyone who had not earned the right to see it crack. There were very few people who had earned that right. One of them was a very small man from Alabama. He had been writing his way into her life since the middle of the decade, gradually, the way a clever guest sits closer to the host every dinner until the night he finally gets the seat next to her.
By 1955, he had it. By 1960, he was, by some measures, the most important person in her life outside her marriage. By the time it ended, twenty years later, he had cost her more than her husband ever did. Truman Capote met Babe Paley in 1955.
He was 30 years old, turning 31. He had already published Other Voices, Other Rooms, the novel that had made his name in 1948, and had since put out two story collections and a Broadway play. He was famous in the way ambitious young writers in 1950s Manhattan were famous, which involved being the most interesting person at the table without being the richest. He was also in person almost impossible to overlook.
He was very small. He had a high voice. He spoke in a southern lilt he had never tried to lose. He told stories the way certain children tell stories, with absolute confidence in the listener’s attention.
And by the end of any meal he was at, the table belonged to him. Bill Paley invited him on a flight to Jamaica in early 1955. Babe was on the trip. They sat near each other for several hours.
By the time they landed, the friendship had started. Within a year, it had become the central friendship of both of their lives outside their marriages. What Babe gave him was access. He sat in on her famous Manhattan lunches with the other women in her circle: Slim Aarons, who had been through three marriages; C.
Z. Guest, who had been raised in old Boston society and married into Pittsburgh steel money; Gloria Guinness, who was Mexican and improbably elegant; Marella Agnelli, Italian aristocracy and married to the head of Fiat; and later Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s younger sister. Truman called these women his swans. The name was supposed to be a compliment.
Swans were, in his telling, beautiful women who glided across a surface they had spent their whole lives perfecting—and who, like actual swans, were paddling underneath where nobody could see. He understood, in a way most of their husbands did not, how much these women had to do every day to look like they were doing nothing. Babe was the lead swan. The closest to him, the most photographed alongside him through the late 1950s and into the 1960s.
He was at her dinners. She read his pages. He called her every morning, sometimes more than once. He told her things he told nobody else.
She, for the first time in her adult life, told someone things she told nobody else. What she told him is the part that matters. Babe had been the most discreet woman in Manhattan since the day she married Bill. She did not complain about her husband.
She did not gossip about her marriage. She did not, with anyone, share the daily texture of being married to a man who was unfaithful, occasionally cruel, and demanding in ways that nobody outside the apartment saw. With Truman, she did all of those things. He listened.
He remembered. He did not write any of it down at the time, but he was the kind of writer who remembered without writing down, and Babe knew that. And she told him anyway. That is a kind of trust that costs something to build.
It also has a price if it breaks. For most of the fifteen years between the start of the friendship and the late 1960s, it did not break. It got bigger. In Cold Blood was published in 1966 and made Truman, almost overnight, the most famous serious writer in America.
When the book came out, he decided to throw a party. The Black and White Ball was held at the Plaza Hotel on November 28, 1966. It was, by general agreement, the social event of the decade. Truman had been planning it as the celebration of his arrival.
He dedicated the ball to Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. This was the detail that got noticed not by the general public, who barely knew Katharine Graham at the time, but by every woman in Truman’s circle who knew that the formal honoree of the most important party of the year had been chosen carefully—and that the choice was not Babe. There are several theories about why he did this. The simplest is the most credible.
If Truman had honored Babe, the party would have felt like a Paley event. By choosing Katharine Graham, who was a recently widowed publisher he barely knew socially, he made the party feel like his own. He moved himself to the center of it. The Swans, including Babe, became guests.
Babe came. She wore white, carried one of Halston’s masks, and danced with her husband and with Truman. There is a photograph of her that night taken by one of the staff photographers in which she is looking at Truman across the room while he is talking to someone else. The look is hard to describe.
It is not jealous. It is not hurt. It is the look of a woman who has just understood something about a friendship she has been counting on for ten years and who is making a quiet decision to keep counting on it anyway because she has nobody else to count on the same way. Whatever the look meant, the friendship continued.
They had nine more years. In those years Truman drank more, took more pills, and started telling people he was working on a great book. It was supposed to be his masterpiece. It was supposed to be called Answered Prayers, and it was supposed to be a comic novel about the very rich.
He told everyone about it. He took advances. He told his Swans. He told his Swans more than he should have.
What Babe did not know, what none of them knew, was that he had already begun writing scenes from the book. He had been writing them for years. The scenes were drawn from things the Swans had told him. He had changed the names slightly in some places.
In other places, he had not bothered. In the autumn of 1975, Esquire magazine published the first of those scenes. Babe Paley sat down in her apartment on Fifth Avenue and opened the new issue. By the time she finished the chapter Truman had given them, she understood three things.
He had been taking notes the entire time. He had betrayed every woman who had trusted him. And the most important friendship of her adult life was over. She closed the magazine.
She did not call him. She gave one quiet instruction to the staff. He was no longer welcome in her home. She would, for the next two and a half years until she died, not speak to him again.
The story was called “La Côte Basque, 1965. ” It ran in the November issue of Esquire. The format was fiction. A writer named P.
B. Jones, who was a thinly disguised version of Truman Capote, sat at La Côte Basque with a friend named Lady Ina Coolbirth, who was a thinly disguised version of Slim Keith. They drank. They gossiped.
Lady Ina told stories about other people in the restaurant. Other people in the restaurant told stories about each other. By the end of the chapter, almost every important figure in Babe Paley’s social world had been described doing something they would not have wanted described. The names were changed.
The names did not need to be changed. Anyone who read the Manhattan papers, anyone who had ever been to a dinner at the Paleys’, anyone who knew which playwright had been married to which actress could identify every character in the story within ten minutes. Sidney Dillon was Bill Paley. Cleo Dillon was Babe.
The governor’s wife in the long set piece in the middle of the chapter was Marie Harriman, the wife of Averell Harriman, former governor of New York. Lady Ina herself was Slim. The thin fiction was, in places, transparent enough that Capote had not bothered to change first names. The set piece in the middle is what destroyed him.
Lady Ina in the story tells the narrator about an evening years earlier when Sidney Dillon, the great media figure married to the most beautiful woman in New York, had taken the governor’s wife to a hotel for the afternoon. The encounter is described in detail. It does not go well. The governor’s wife is menstruating.
Sidney Dillon does not realize this until afterward, when he discovers that the sheets are stained. He spends an hour trying to clean them himself before the maid comes, because he knows that if the maid sees the sheets, the story will be in the columns by morning. The story did not go in the columns. It went in Esquire.
The provenance of the anecdote is, by every credible reading, Babe. Bill had told her about the afternoon in some moment of confession or boast. And Babe had told Truman, the person she told things to. She had not told it as a piece of gossip for general circulation.
She had told it as a wife describing the kind of small, miserable secret that wives in her position carried and had nowhere to put. Truman had put it in a magazine. There were other scenes. A long passage about a society wife who had killed her husband and gotten away with it, widely read as a reference to Ann Woodward, who had shot her husband William in 1955 and been cleared as having mistaken him for an intruder.
Advance copies of the Esquire issue circulated in October. Ann Woodward saw one. She killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills before the magazine reached newsstands. There were sketches of other figures, less central but equally identifiable.
A passage about a wealthy woman’s sexual habits that nobody in the city had trouble assigning to a real woman. A passage about a marriage that ended in violence. A passage about money that had been stolen and never returned. Each of these was based on something one of the Swans had told Truman in private.
He had remembered all of it. The reaction was immediate and absolute. By the end of the first week, every Swan except Lee Radziwill had cut him off. Slim Aarons never spoke to him again.
Marella Agnelli stopped taking his calls. Gloria Guinness made it clear through mutual friends that the friendship was over. C. Z.
Guest cut him off, too, although she would, years later and quietly, let him back in. The only Swan who stayed close from the start was Lee, partly out of loyalty, partly because she had her own reasons for staying close to a man who knew where her sister’s secrets were buried. La Côte Basque, the restaurant, distanced itself from him. The Plaza Hotel, where he had thrown the Black and White Ball nine years earlier, became somewhere he stopped going.
The table at every restaurant where he had been the most interesting guest now had no seat for him. What is genuinely strange is that he seemed not to have expected any of this. Friends who saw him in the days after publication described a man who was honestly puzzled. He told one interviewer a few weeks later that he could not understand why everyone was so upset.
He had thought he was a writer. Writers wrote what they knew. He had known these women for twenty years and he had written them. And now they were behaving as if writing about people was somehow worse than what the people had done.
There is a version of that argument that is true. Truman had not invented the bloody sheets. Bill Paley had done what Bill Paley had done, and Bill Paley had told Babe, and Babe had told Truman. If anyone in that chain had behaved badly, it was not the writer.
But the Swans did not see it that way, and they were not wrong not to see it that way. What Truman had done was take twenty years of intimate friendship and convert it into copy. He had been at their tables. He had held their hands.
He had heard the worst nights of their marriages and written them down as comedy. The fact that the underlying acts were not his did not change what he had done with them. He spent the rest of his life trying to explain. He gave interviews.
He wrote letters. He told friends and people who were no longer friends that the Swans had misunderstood him. That the book had been meant as a tribute. That if they had read it carefully, they would have seen the love in it.
None of them read it carefully. None of them read it at all. Babe Paley never opened the magazine again after that first reading. She did not need to.
She had understood in the time it took to read one chapter what twenty years of friendship had actually been collecting toward. Truman lived another nine years. He gave a television interview in 1978 during which he was so impaired by drugs and alcohol that the broadcast became its own scandal. He published nothing else of substance.
He died in 1984 in California at a friend’s house. He was 59 years old, three weeks short of his 60th birthday. The book that had cost him the Swans was never finished. Babe was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, the year before Truman’s story appeared.
She was 59 years old. She had smoked three packs a day for most of her adult life. The doctors gave her a guarded prognosis. With surgery and treatment, perhaps several years.
Without, less. She told almost nobody. For the first year, she carried the diagnosis privately, attending the lunches she had always attended, hosting the dinners she had always hosted, photographed at the events she had always been photographed at. The work of being Babe Paley continued without interruption.
She had surgery in early 1975. They removed part of one lung. She recovered at Kiluna Farm, walked the grounds with her dogs, and was back in Manhattan within a few weeks, looking in photographs only slightly thinner than before. Then came the Esquire issue.
The timeline matters. Babe was already dying when Truman published the chapter that ended their friendship. The cancer was already moving. She had three years left, and instead of spending those years with the friend who had been the most important person in her life outside her marriage, she spent them not speaking to him.
She had written him out of the time she had remaining. She had her reasons, but the calendar of her last years became, because of his choice, a smaller and quieter room than it would otherwise have been. In 1977, the cancer returned. It had spread to bone.
There was no surgery this time, and no real treatment, only management. She made a project of her own death. She called in her staff and went through the apartment room by room. She decided what would go to which friend.
Jewelry was distributed in advance with notes attached. Her clothes, which had been the most photographed clothes in America for two decades, were packed into trunks and labeled by recipient. Her best pieces went to her daughters and to a small number of women whose taste she trusted to honor what the clothes had been. She paid every outstanding household account in person.
She wrote letters. The people around her said she did not complain. She also planned the funeral. She chose the church.
She chose the readings. She chose the music. She chose what would be served at the lunch afterward, down to the wine. The guest list was hers.
Most of the Swans were on it. Truman Capote was not. Bill, who was almost incapable by this point of making a decision without consulting her, signed off on every choice she presented. She died on July 6, 1978, at the apartment on Fifth Avenue.
She was 63 years old, one day past her birthday. The funeral happened three days later. Everything went exactly as she had specified. Truman, by his own later telling, stood somewhere on Madison Avenue that morning, in sight of the church, and watched the mourners go in.
He had not been invited. He went home and drank. Bill Paley survived her by twelve years and never recovered. He continued running CBS.
He continued being photographed at events. He told anyone who would listen, in interview after interview, that he had been married to the most remarkable woman of his time. The household at Kiluna Farm was kept exactly as Babe had left it. Her dressing room was untouched.
Friends who visited him in his last years described a man living inside a museum he could not bring himself to redecorate. Minnie died four months later, in November of 1978. Her cancer was different from Babe’s. The death was quieter, and the news was reported in the New York papers as a footnote next to the obituaries of more famous people.
By the end of that year, two of the three Cushing sisters were gone. The mother who had built them had been dead for nearly thirty years. The father for forty. That left Betsy.
Betsy would live another twenty years in the houses Jock Whitney had bought her, surrounded by the paintings he had collected, attended by the staff he had hired, watching the world her family had moved through become by stages a different country. She would die in 1998 at the age of 89, the last of the three sisters who had grown up in Brookline under the rules of a silent house and a watchful mother. When she died, The New York Times put her obituary on a back page. By then, the Cushing sisters were history.
By the late 1990s, Betsy Cushing Whitney was the only one left. She lived at Greentree, the Whitney estate on Long Island that Jock had inherited from his father and that she had treated for the next fifty-six years as the center of her life. Jock had died in 1982. Babe and Minnie had been gone for twenty years by then.
Betsy was in her late eighties and walked with a cane. The houses were too big for her, the staff too quiet. Visitors who came in those last years described an old woman who remembered everything and rarely brought any of it up. What she had also done between her sisters’ deaths and her own was give most of the Whitney art collection away.
Jock had spent his life acquiring some of the great paintings of the 20th century: Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Van Gogh. Betsy, who had never been the showy sister and who had no children of her own with Jock, made the decision that the paintings should go to museums while she was still alive to choose where. The Museum of Modern Art received many of the major works. Yale, where Jock had gone to school, received others.
By the time she died, the collection that had been one of the great private holdings in America had been broken up among institutions that would keep the paintings on public walls. None of the next generation of Cushings became Cushing sisters. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive today. Some of them carry the family names.
Some of them do not. None of them, as far as can be told, have built lives that resemble the lives the three sisters built. The world that produced Babe Paley and Mrs. Vincent Astor and Mrs.
John Hay Whitney is not the world of today. The instruments of social power are not the same. The currency is not the same. The mothers are not the same.
Bill Paley died in 1990. He had spent the last twelve years of his life looking for a Babe-shaped hole that nothing in the world could fill. Brooke Astor lived until 2007 and became, by the end, the woman the Astor name belonged to in the public mind, eclipsing Minnie’s tenure entirely. James Roosevelt died in 1991, having outlived three more wives after Betsy.
Truman Capote had died first in 1984, having spent his last decade explaining himself to people who were no longer listening. What is striking, when you put all of these dates next to each other, is how quickly the world the sisters had moved through closed up after they left it. The kind of New York that had a best-dressed list, a Black and White Ball, a society column on the front page of every major paper, a small group of women at a corner table at La Côte Basque arranging the cultural life of the country between courses, did not survive Betsy by very long. The restaurant itself closed in 2004.
The Plaza Hotel changed hands three times in the years after. The Esquire magazine that had published Truman’s chapter became, by the 2010s, a different kind of publication that did not run thirty-page short stories anymore. The era ended when the people who had been at the center of it ended. Katherine Cushing, in Brookline in the 1920s, had set out to put her daughters at the very top of American social life.
She had succeeded so completely that by the late 1940s, all three of them were married into the highest tier of the country’s wealth, media, and political influence. The achievement was, in its own terms, total. There was nowhere higher to put them. But the very top of American social life turned out to be a more fragile location than Katherine had imagined.
It depended on a particular configuration of money, media, geography, and discretion that held together for one generation and not really for the next. The sisters had made it to the room at the top. The room itself was being remodeled while they were still in it. By the time Betsy died alone at Greentree, the room was somewhere most Americans had stopped thinking about.
When Babe Paley distributed her clothes before her death, she gave the best pieces to a few women whose taste she trusted. Several of those women later said that they could not bring themselves to wear the clothes. They were too associated with Babe. To put them on felt like impersonation.
The trunks were stored, the hangers covered, the dresses kept in the dark. Some of them must still exist in attics and storage units in apartments along the East Coast, in the closets of women now in their seventies and eighties who inherited them and never quite worked up the courage to be seen in them. Somebody is wearing one of Babe Paley’s dresses today—or nobody is.
Either possibility tells you something about what the Cushing sisters actually built.