Babe Paley’s “Perfect” Life Was A Beautiful Lie D
On her deathbed, the beautiful socialite Babe Paley made a confession that was so dark it shocked the room into silence. From the time she was in the cradle, Babe Paley’s parents wanted great things for their little girl. A debutante at 18 years old and a high society wife at 25, Babe certainly got those great things.
But they came at a heartbreakingly high price. Babe was born Barbara Cushing on July 5th, 1915 to prominent brain surgeon Harvey Cushing and his well-heeled socialite wife Katherine. As the youngest of five children by a long shot, she was the spoiled favorite baby of the family, reportedly 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 into a great beauty. Society dubbed the sibling trio the fabulous Cushing sisters. But of the three, Babe would be the most famous and the most tragic. Like so many 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 woman of her day. As one admirer later commented, “So great is her beauty that no matter how often I see her, each time is the first time.” But her debutante fantasy came to an abrupt end. Early in 1934, Babe was driving home from a society party on Long Island when she got into a horrific car accident.
Her front teeth were knocked clear out, and she had to suffer through extensive dental surgery on her mouth and jaw. The results, however, were surprising. 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. And rest assured, Babe was about to make her mark. In 1935, shortly after her debutante ball and accident, Babe moved to New York City to be with her sisters, taking up a series of fashion jobs before ending up at Vogue as an editor in 1939.
It was a date with destiny. Although everyone adored Babe for her style, her smarts, and her exquisite beauty, she had eyes for only one man, Stanley Grafton Mortimer, Jr. On the surface, 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 finally made it. Or so people thought. Stanley and Babe’s marriage was picture-perfect on the surface, and they quickly had two children, a son named Tony and a daughter named Amanda. But behind closed doors, they were hiding a dark secret.
In 1943, Stanley had gone off to fight for the Navy, and when he returned, he was sullen, angry, and drinking heavily. Yet, Babe wasn’t much better. Many sources close to Babe claim that, especially at this stage in her society career, she neglected her children to focus on climbing the social ladder.
As her own daughter, Amanda, put it, “Their relationship was virtually nonexistent, and that this was her choice, not mine.” As we’ll see, this only got worse as time went on. Babe and Stanley officially divorced on May 29th, 1946, after just 6 years of marriage. She got a comfortable $40,000 trust fund in the settlement to take care of the children, and the split became the number one gossip of cafe society.
Before the divorce went through though, Babe caused a scandal all by herself. With the paperwork still in limbo, Babe started seeing CBS media mogul William Paley, and some considered his backstory sordid. Paley had also just recently separated from his wife, the powerful Dorothy Hart Hearst, because he found her too much of a handful.
For her part, Dorothy later called Bill cold as ice. Although Bill was frequently unfairly ostracized because of his Jewish background, even his friends had harsh things to say about him. One Paley acquaintance 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 terrified Babe, but didn’t stop her from taking the plunge.
Four days after Bill Paley’s divorce was official, Babe married him in July 1947. While Babe was just 32 years old, Bill was over a decade her senior at 45. Everyone who saw them that summer recalled how he beamed with pride at his wife, though some recollections make her seem like a trophy.
As one high society connection put it, “They dress up anything they touch. Putting her in a room is like putting in a bouquet of flowers.” Although everyone wanted the Paleys at their dinner parties, they kept themselves deliberately scarce. Unless you were an extremely close friend of the family, you likely couldn’t even get them on the phone.
Your only chance was to send them a formal letter, which Babe might reply to. Their inner circle then was the crème de la crème of New York society. Babe and Bill famously socialized with the writer Truman Capote, but their first meeting was something of an embarrassment. One day, a friend asked the Paleys if he could bring along Truman to a vacation.
The Paleys said yes, but only because they were expecting President Harry Truman. Nonetheless, after the misunderstanding cleared up, Babe became fast friends with Capote. And with him came infamy. Before long, Capote had dubbed Paley one of his beautiful swans, his own inner circle of glamorous socialites like Slim Aarons and Gloria Guinness.
Indeed, Babe was Capote’s favorite, and as he once confessed, “I was madly in love with her.” Capote’s anointment cemented Babe’s position as the queen of New York, but this position was precarious. For one, keeping up with appearances was expensive. The socialite 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 also reportedly bought up entire collections from couture brands like Valentino and Givenchy for her personal closet. Babe was also often jealous of her fellow swans, in particular Gloria Guinness, who was almost her equal in style and influence. Paley often liked to remind people that Guinness started out as a Mexican nightclub worker, but Guinness didn’t take these comments lying down.
One holiday, Gloria invited Babe over to her private yacht, assuring her that it was going to be a casual affair and that Babe needn’t bring her best clothes. However, the first night on the boat, Gloria emerged from her cabin dressed in diamonds and insisted they have a formal dinner ashore.
Paley made sure to always pack her best after that. Paley was also a consummate hostess, and she went to painful lengths to satisfy her guests. Precisely organized, she made sure no one had to unpack and that every bedroom was stocked with food, flowers, and newspapers. As their friend Lady Mary Dunn once recounted, you could hardly get into the bedroom for the flowers.
Sometimes, Babe also started a new trend completely by 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 an instant sensation that women all over the world began to copycat.
We know now, though, that all this effortless perfection masked great tragedy. For all the opulent dinner parties and the jet-setting yacht vacations, there was a rot at the heart of Babe Paley’s marriage. Namely, Bill Paley expected Babe to be perfect. He was exacting in his demands, so much so that Babe started keeping a little golden notebook at every dinner party, writing down the flaws so she could do better.
Whenever she sent out invitations to dinner parties or other soirees, she always made her secretaries snip off the stamp edges by hand because she thought they looked more elegant that way. Yet, even though Bill wanted Babe to apparently look like his trophy wherever he went, he also seemed to have little patience or empathy for the amount of time and effort it took her to maintain her looks.
Early on into their marriage, Babe confessed that she stopped setting her hair before bed because that was the time reserved for him, and he didn’t want her doing her hair at night. Accordingly, when Babe’s hair started to go gray, she naturally panicked about what Bill would think. Yet, somehow, she managed to turn this into another fashion moment.
After deciding to let her natural gray go through, Babe started another instant trend as all the other socialites clamored to grow the dye out of their own hair. But, her marriage was still fraying at the seams within a a years. By the time the Paleys were the toast of New York, their marriage had developed some chilling habits.
One day, a lamp got damaged just as they were leaving for 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. Sadly, their problems in the bedroom were still worse.
Babe once confessed to Truman Capote that she and Bill hadn’t had intimate relations for years. Eventually, they hadn’t slept with each other for a decade. And it was Bill who spurned Babe. One confidant admitted, “It wasn’t that she denied him. He just lost interest.” Instead, his interest lay somewhere else entirely.
Bill found comfort in other women. Women who could not have been more different than Babe. He frequented bars and clubs to pick up models and upcoming starlets, not socialites, and went to Hollywood business trips that were really for pleasure. More than that, his type was busty blondes in the vein of Marilyn Monroe. Very much not Babe’s looks.
Bill’s infidelity deeply wounded Babe, who started to believe she wasn’t attracted to men or an attractive woman, period. She all but resigned herself to celibacy and to barren marriage bed, with some of her friends even claiming that the style icon was actually asexual.
Truman Capote once claimed that while in the throes of her agonizing unhappy marriage, Babe tried to kill herself multiple times. Neither attempt succeeded, and Babe woke up still married and still miserable. Evidently, Babe was desperate enough to try divorce until Capote talked her out of it. He told her, “Look, you don’t have any money, and you’ve got four children.
Think of them. Bill bought you.” Babe apparently took a nap, thought it over, and never mentioned divorce again. Instead, she got back at Bill in other ways. Completely neglected by her husband, Paley 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 rumor, in the 1960s, Babe had a months-long affair with an American ambassador. She then moved on to a banker, and this man may have been the one who spurred her into seriously considering divorcing Bill for that seemingly first and only time. The flings all ended, however, and Babe just grew more unhappy.
Not that most could tell. While Babe Paley’s life was falling apart, the rest of the world had almost no idea. Except for her closest confidants, Truman Capote among them, she almost never uttered a cross word against her husband, not even to her children. As her daughter, Amanda, remembered, she never criticized Bill.
In her later years, Babe Paley had to deal with another problem entirely. Jealously over her own daughter, Amanda. Now fully grown, Amanda had turned into a beauty, and Babe reportedly started to view her own daughter as her competition, driving an even bigger wedge into their already strained relationship.
Sadly though, Babe’s relationship with Amanda might have been the healthiest one in her family. With Bill, she’d had a girl, Kate, and a boy, Billy. But both heirs all but exiled themselves from the clan. Babe’s only other close relationship was with her oldest son, Tony, who, much to her husband’s jealousy, she drew in as a confidant.
With the stresses of Bill’s infidelities and keeping up her beauty, Babe began experiencing health issues and engaging in destructive coping mechanisms. Throughout her life, she suffered from migraines that astounded even her closest friends. Though she only experienced an attack two to three times a year, they would last four days, forcing her into dark rooms with tiptoeing housekeepers.
To help her cope with the pain, Paley even started taking a strong dose of tranquilizers. Moreover, although she regularly met with a therapist for a range of mental issues, she also self-medicated her problems with two packs of cigarettes a day. Eventually, it caught up with her. In 1974, before Babe had even turned 60, doctors diagnosed her with lung cancer, a direct result of her nervous smoking 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. But, darker days were ahead. In 1975, with Babe’s health dwindling, Truman Capote made a cruel and fatal error against his favorite swan.
That year, he published an excerpt from his novel in progress in Esquire, titling it “Côte Basque 1965” after the chic establishment many socialites frequented. But, rather than fiction, it was a gaudy tell-all about Babe’s biggest secret. Throughout “Côte Basque”, Capote had a thinly veiled caricature of himself talking to another socialite who reveals everything about the indiscretions of a society husband and his prim and proper wife.
Everyone in the Upper East Side saw it for what it was, a publication of Babe Paley’s miserable marriage. Unfortunately for Capote, Babe’s response was swift and brutal. Today, many people believe Capote intended the excerpt as a valiant defense of Babe and an exposition of Bill’s sins, especially now that she was dying.
In reality, though, it had the exact opposite effect. Babe was mortified, and she not only rushed to close ranks around her husband, she expelled Capote from her circle, never speaking to him again. Still, she did manage some vitriol for Bill in the end. At this time, Babe finally began to buckle under the pressures of her marriage.
As she grew weaker, she began to become less and less cordial to Bill at crucial moments. At one point, she even called up CBS, his domain, and asked them, “What’s the old SOB doing today?” in reference to her husband. As Babe’s health truly declined, she got a bitter revenge that shocked the room into silence. In front of her husband and a room of people, Babe finally dropped the polite facade and unleashed a slew of insults toward Bill.
She complained that she had done too many things that he wanted her to do, one source recalled. She knew she was dying. She didn’t have anything to lose. For the high society Babe, this outburst was scandalous, but perhaps not unwarranted. With Babe on her deathbed, Bill took up with another mistress, the unrelated Joan Cushing, a 30-year-old whom he’d met at his granddaughter’s school play.
On July 6th, just one day after her 63rd birthday, the end finally came for Babe Paley. Despite the tragedies that had preceded it, it was an end fitting for the woman who had almost everything. Even during her last breaths, the socialite reportedly found the energy to put on a full face of makeup to stare down death.
When Babe passed at last, she also did it exactly how she wanted it. Besides extensively cataloging her jewelry collection in her will, she planned her own funeral down to the very last detail, and made sure her family carried out her exact wishes. For all this planning, though, her memorial still had one more scandal. On the day Babe Paley was buried, while Babe’s old friends stood in awe of her floral arrangements and thoughtful touches, the photographer reportedly overheard a salacious detail.
Multiple women at the tables were eyeing up Bill Paley and saying, “I’m going to marry him.” Thanks for watching History Exposé. If you love uncovering the best stories in history, hit like and subscribe to keep exploring with us. If you enjoyed this video, check out the videos on screen for more amazing history content.
