Babe Paley Was Beautiful And Damaged

On her deathbed, the beautiful socialite Babe Paley made a confession that was so dark it shocked the room into silence. Babe was born Barbara Cushing on July 5th, 1915, to prominent brain surgeon Harvey Cushing and his well-heeled socialite wife, Catherine. The little girl became iconic early on. As the youngest of five children, she was the spoiled favorite baby of the family, leading to her lifelong nickname, Babe. Babe’s big sisters, Minnie and Betsy, soon married into the fabulously wealthy Astor and Roosevelt families, and Babe herself was turning out to be quite the high-class looker. The sibling trio were quickly the talk of the town, and society dubbed them the fabulous Cushing sisters.

Like many self-respecting socialites, Babe had a debutante coming-out ball in 1934 when she was just 18 years old. It cemented her as one of the most stylish women of her day. As one admirer commented, “So great is her beauty that no matter how often I see her, each time is the first time.” But Babe’s time in the sun almost got eclipsed in one night. Early in 1934, Babe was driving home from a society party on Long Island with her beau when disaster struck. She got into a horrific car accident, and she didn’t walk away unscathed. The force of the impact knocked her front teeth out, and she had to suffer through extensive dental surgery on both her mouth and her jaw. The immediate aftermath of the surgery was intense and unsettling, with Babe covering the ghastly bruises on the lower half of her face with a chiffon handkerchief whenever company came over. Yet, when she healed, people were astonished and envious to find that her false teeth made her smile even more beautiful.

In 1935, shortly after her debutante ball, Babe moved to New York City to be with her sisters, taking up a series of jobs in the glamorous world of high fashion before ending up at Vogue as an editor in 1939. While there, everyone adored Babe for her style, her smarts, and her exquisite beauty, but she only had eyes for one man. While working at the magazine, Babe met Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. On the surface, Stanley Mortimer was everything Babe could have asked for in a suitor. Well-connected and high WASP aristocracy, Mortimer was also as physically perfect as Babe herself. They married on September 21st, 1940, in East Hampton in a tasteful, understated ceremony. Babe had apparently finally made it.

After all, Stanley and Babe’s union seemed picture-perfect. The happy high-society couple quickly had two children, a son named Tony and a daughter named Amanda. But behind closed doors, it was a totally different story. In 1943, Stanley had gone off to fight for the Navy in World War II, and when he returned, he was sullen, angry, and drinking heavily. But Babe wasn’t much better. Many sources close to her claim that, especially at this stage in her society career, she utterly neglected her children to focus on climbing the social ladder. As her own daughter Amanda put it, their relationship was virtually non-existent, and that was her choice, not mine.

Even worse, eventually, Babe had enough of Stanley, and she officially divorced him on May 29th, 1946, after just six years of marriage. She got a comfortable $40,000 in the settlement to take care of the children, and the dramatic split became a huge source of gossip for the cafe society. But while the divorce paperwork was still in limbo, Babe started seeing CBS media mogul William Paley, a 45-year-old over a decade her senior. And his backstory was more than a little suspect. William Paley had also just recently separated from his wife, the powerful Dorothy Hart Hearst, because he found her too much of a handful, and Dorothy later called Bill “cold as ice.”

In fact, although Bill was unfairly ostracized from much of society because of his Jewish background, even his friends had harsh things to say about the man. One Paley acquaintance, the socialite Fleur Cowles, said that Bill was like one of the cats of the jungle; he prowled around in search of money-making. Meanwhile, other friends noted his raging temper, which frequently terrified Babe. In addition to all this, it’s likely the pair, whatever feelings were involved, were also shamelessly using each other. Sure, they might have been in love, but Bill Paley was also a shrewd man who wanted a high-society WASP to legitimize his empire. Meanwhile, Babe was looking for a sugar daddy who would take care of her.

In the end, Babe married Bill Paley in July 1947. The ceremony occurred a mere four days after Bill Paley’s divorce became official, which you can bet high society didn’t fail to notice. But Babe made sure she and her new husband were never snubbed from society by doing the snubbing themselves. The Paleys ingeniously kept themselves deliberately scarce. Unless you were an extremely close friend of the family, you didn’t have a hope of getting them on the phone, much less at a dinner party. Your only chance, bizarre as it was, was to send them a formal letter, and then Babe might reply. It was around this time that she met the man who would ruin her life.

Babe and Bill were so exclusive they famously even hobnobbed with the writer Truman Capote, though actually their first meeting was nothing short of embarrassing. One day, a friend asked the Paleys if he could bring along Truman to a vacation. The Paleys said yes, but being so high-class, they actually only said so because they were expecting President Harry Truman. After they cleared up this misunderstanding, Babe became fast friends with Capote. Before long, Capote had dubbed Paley one of his beautiful swans, adding her to his inner circle of glamorous socialites like Slim Keith and Gloria Guinness. Babe soon became Capote’s favorite, and he once confessed, “I was madly in love with her.”

The high living continued. Babe had so many near-priceless jewels she kept them in a bank vault and would drive down and unlock them whenever she wanted to wear them. She reportedly also bought up entire collections from couture brands like Valentino and Givenchy for her personal closet. There was no doubt she was the queen of New York, but that title did come with infighting. Though Babe pretended she was above all the fame-mongering of her socialite life, she was often jealous of her fellow swans, in particular of Gloria Guinness, who was almost her equal in style and influence. To one-up her rival, Paley liked to remind people that Guinness had started out as a Mexican nightclub worker. Gloria, giving as good as she got, once invited Babe over to her private yacht and assured her it was going to be a casual affair and that Babe needn’t bring her best clothes. The first night on the yacht, Gloria emerged from her cabin dripping in diamonds and insisted they have a formal dinner ashore. After that, Babe made sure to always pack her Sunday best no matter what.

As time wore on, Babe got even more of a reputation for her perfection as a hostess. She went to painful lengths to satisfy her guests, making sure no one ever had to unpack and that every bedroom was always stocked with food, flowers, and newspapers. She also started keeping a little gold notebook at every dinner party she held, writing down the flaws so she could do better next time. The trouble was, a lot of this insistence on perfection came as much from Babe’s husband Bill as from Babe herself. Bill very openly wanted Babe to look like his trophy wherever he went, yet he had little patience or empathy for the amount of time and effort it took for her to maintain her looks to his standards. Early in their marriage, Babe confessed that she stopped setting her hair before bed because he didn’t want her doing her hair at night.

Within a few years, Bill’s finicky demands turned Babe’s life into a waking nightmare. One day, a lamp got damaged just as the Paleys were leaving for a trip to Europe, and it was still broken when they came back. Terrified of what her husband would say, Babe called her sister and begged her to run over and get it out of the house. “I don’t care what you do with it, just get it out of his sight.” Furthering the dysfunction, Babe once confessed to Truman Capote that she and Bill hadn’t had intimate relations for years. Eventually, it got so bad that they hadn’t slept with each other for an entire decade, reportedly, and it was Bill who spurned Babe. As one confidant admitted, it wasn’t that she denied him; he just lost interest.

To add insult to injury, although Bill lost interest in Babe, he didn’t lose interest in other women. Bill trolled bars and clubs to pick up models and up-and-coming starlets and went to Hollywood on business trips that were really for pleasure. More than that, his type was the exact opposite of Babe. Instead of her slim, dark looks, he preferred busty blondes in the vein of Marilyn Monroe. Bill’s infidelity deeply wounded Babe, who started to believe that she wasn’t attractive to men or attractive, period. She all but resigned herself to celibacy and a barren marriage bed, with some of her friends even claiming that the style icon was actually asexual.

Babe was even desperate enough to risk social purgatory and try divorce, but this had a tragic end too. It was actually Truman Capote who talked her out of it, and with some very harsh words. He apparently told her, “Look, you don’t have any money and you’ve got four children. Think of them. Bill bought you.” After that, Babe reportedly took a nap, thought it over, and then never mentioned divorce again. Completely neglected by her husband, Babe started taking up more and more with a coterie of male friends she dubbed her laughing men, like Truman Capote. The companions were witty, urbane, and mostly platonic. Mostly. According to rumors, Babe had a fling with an American ambassador in the 1960s for a couple of months and then moved on to a banker. These flings all ended eventually, however, and Babe was still stuck in her loveless marriage.

Despite this, Babe almost never uttered a cross word against her husband, not even to her children. As her daughter Amanda remembered, she never criticized Bill. For Babe, her perfect society image was too perfect to shatter with gossip. When Babe’s hair started to go gray, she naturally panicked about what Bill would think, yet somehow she still managed to turn a midlife crisis into a fashion moment. After Babe determined to accept her hair’s natural shift from dark brunette to shining silver, all the other New York socialites suddenly clamored to grow the dye out of their own hair. Sometimes Babe started a new trend by complete accident. One sunny day, she was on her way to lunch, scarf around her neck, when she realized it was much too warm for the accessory. Instead, she took it off and tied it to her purse, sparking yet another instant sensation that women all over the world began to copycat.

But not all of Babe’s experiences with aging went so well. In fact, her dark side came out. Her daughter Amanda, who was from her first marriage, had turned into a great beauty, and once that happened, Babe started to view her as competition and was often consumed with jealousy over the girl. With Bill Paley, she’d had a girl, Kate, and a boy, Billy, but both heirs all but exiled themselves from the clan in adulthood. In fact, by the time she was in her middle age, Babe’s only close relationship was with her oldest son Tony, also from her first marriage.

She had also long suffered from horrific migraines, which often forced her into dark rooms for days, and she now began taking tranquilizers for the pain. Then, although she regularly met with a therapist for a range of mental issues, Babe also self-medicated her problems by smoking two packs a day. Eventually, all this caught up to her with a vengeance. In 1974, before Babe had even turned 60, doctors diagnosed her with lung cancer, a direct result of her two-pack-a-day habit. At first, Babe handled it like the doctor’s daughter she was. She was unflinching about the likelihood of her survival, and when chemotherapy made her hair fall out, she simply tied a chic turban around her forehead.

What she couldn’t handle was a sharp betrayal by an old friend. In 1975, with Babe’s health still dwindling, Truman Capote published an excerpt in Esquire from his novel in progress. But it wasn’t exactly fiction. Capote had a thinly veiled caricature of himself talking to another socialite who reveals everything about the bedroom indiscretions of a society husband and his prim and proper wife. Everyone in the Upper East Side saw it for what it was: the airing out of Babe Paley’s miserable marriage. Today, some people believe Capote intended the excerpt as a final valiant defense of Babe and an exposé of Bill’s sins. In reality, though, it had the opposite effect. The perfect, image-conscious Babe, who never said a word against her husband, was mortified by the story. She completely expelled Capote from her inner circle, never speaking to him again.

Still, a person can only take so much, and even perfect Babe Paley began to buckle under the pressures of her horrible marriage at the very end. As she grew sicker with the cancer, she began to become less and less cordial to Bill at crucial moments. At one point, she even called up CBS where he worked and asked them, “What’s the old SOB doing today?” Then, when Babe’s health declined almost to its lowest point, she finally got her bitter revenge on her husband. In front of Bill and a room full of people, Babe at last dropped the polite facade and unleashed a slew of insults at her spouse. As one witness remembered, she complained that she had done too many things he had wanted her to do. She knew she was dying. She didn’t have anything to lose.

On July 6th, just one day after her 63rd birthday, the end finally came for Babe Paley. Even during her last breaths, the socialite reportedly found the energy to put on a full face of makeup to stare down death. Unfortunately, her husband’s many infidelities were about to deal her one final insult. Even with Babe on her deathbed, Bill had still been philandering and took up with yet another mistress, Joan, around this time. What’s more, he met his 30-year-old paramour at his granddaughter’s school play. Then, on the day of Babe’s funeral, the photographer overheard as multiple women eyed up Bill and said, “I’m going to marry him.” Well, maybe Babe won in the end, because he never did marry again.

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