Luis Fernando Romo
Updated Friday, February 2, 2024-21:31
'Celebs' Truman Capote: the hatred of his mega-rich friends whom he skinned
Literature Truman Capote, the author whose exile and social rejection plunged him into alcohol and drugs
If England gave birth to the Mitford sisters, the United States gave birth to the Cushings. Minnie, Betsey and Barbara grew up to be bait for some of the great fortunes
made in the economic and industrial expansion of the Gilded Age
. Since his father was Dr. Harvey Cushing, founder of neurosurgery and 1926 Pulitzer Prize winner for the biography of his mentor Sir William Osler, the young women were already sailing in crystal clear waters favored by the social current.
Minnie married an Astor, Betsey a Roosevelt and a Whitney, and Barbara married Stanley Mortimer Jr., one of the heirs of Standard Oil, and William S. Paley, founder of CBS. The latter stole media attention from her sisters and appropriated all social relevance in the 60s when Truman Capote chose her as her favorite swan. Yes, there were others with exquisite style, like Slim Keith, CZ Guest, Marella Agnelli or Lee Radziwill, but in the words of the author of In Cold Blood
"Babe Paley only had one flaw: she was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect ".
These goddesses of beauty return from the past in
Feud: Capote vs. The Swans
(HBO Max), where Ryan Murphy revisits the decline of the iron friendship between the chronicler and his traveling companions at the most distinguished parties of New York high society.
Capote betrayed them. Repository of their secrets, he decided to open the safe to steal a piece of their privacy with the publication in
Esquire
magazine in November 1975 of the story La Côte Basque. 1965. A preview of what was going to be the unfinished novel Prayers Attended, which contained just under 12,000 words. They paid him $25,000. In those lines he revealed that Babe Paley's husband had been unfaithful with the governor's wife. Plucking the swans was his social suicide.
He fell into the underworld of drugs and alcohol
and, dragged by that spiral of self-destruction, he died at the age of 59 in 1984.
Gloria Guinness, Truman Capote and Babe Paley (right). The writer became embedded in the New York jet set and became very influentialGETTY
STYLE ICON
Although each of those goddesses built their own metanarrative with an unfathomable dream background, Babe Paley was the only one who did not emerge from her own dream. She was never a false effigy of elegance
because she constantly showed herself to be true to herself.
Her purity of style crystallized in certain patterns that today continue to be the champion of her exquisiteness, like when she decided to tie a scarf to her bag. Portrayed by the master of light Horst P. Horst and devourer of haute couture by Balenciaga, Givenchy and Valentino, Babe remains unbeatable with the record of appearing 17 times on the International Best Dressed List created by Eleanor Lambert, creator of the Gala Met. Only Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, and Jacqueline Kennedy could shadow part of her wake.
Without a doubt, she was a
proto-influencer.
The image she gave off inspired the mannequins arranged in the windows of Lord & Taylor, the oldest luxury department store in the United States. In addition, it boosted the career of a bankrupt Halston, as was evident in the Neflix miniseries of the same name when the designer, played by Ewan McGregor (52), comments:
"It only takes one person from high society to change everything.
If "If the right person wears my clothes, every woman in America will. All it takes is a 'yes' from the most sophisticated woman in New York... And I just talked to her."
Tatler
, the bible of high society, published that "she was the doyenne of the New York social scene, Truman Capote's most beloved swan and a style icon of the 20th century" and her close friend Gloria Vanderbilt wrote that "
she "She has edited herself into a mold of perfection
and she has certainly achieved this in her style, her houses, her garden, her parties, in everything."
Truman Capote at the famous New York nightclub Studio 54 dancing with CZ Guest, one of the most important socialites of high society.GETTY
When admiring it, it was thought that it was as cold as an iceberg, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the same way that she combined haute couture with ready-to-wear, she was also eclectic in her treatment
"since everyone imagined her to be very uptight and snobbish,
but in reality she was not like that. She remembered everyone's name and was always interested for their families," his hairdresser Monsieur Marc once recalled, with whom he shared confidences at lunches and exchanged cooking recipes. This was one of Babe Paley's great passions along with gardening, traveling and charcoal drawings as children. She was such a delicate being that one of her friends revealed that "she was about to travel to China when they told her that those in charge of carrying the luggage were older ladies. Suddenly she decided to pack a single suitcase to carry herself because it gave her It's a shame that an older person took care of your luggage.
In 1938 she began working as a fashion editor at Vogue and two years later she married for the first time to Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., with whom she had two children, Stanley (82) and Amanda (80). It seemed like a stable relationship, but it fell apart in 1946.
The socialite was not cut out to be a spinster,
so she did not tremble when billionaire William S. Paley wanted to marry her in 1947. With this attractive businessman of Jewish origin who dressed in Huntsman of Savile Row he had his daughter Kate (74). Her relationship with her offspring went through various ups and downs as Babe was often addicted to her own social life which caused him extreme pressure to live up to her reputation for grace and beauty. She was also quite unhappy on some occasions
during her marriage to William because she was popularly aware of her fondness for outside women
belonging to exclusive New York circles.
During their first years of marriage, the Paleys resided in a Louis XVI-style apartment in the luxurious St. Regis hotel built by John Jacob Astor IV - who died in the sinking of the Titanic - where Marlene Dietrich had a
pied-à-terre
and Salvador Dalí He used to spend almost every winter in one of his best suites. In front of the main door was one of their favorite restaurants, La Côte Basque, a dozen steps away, which would soon change their lives. Exquisite and exclusive,
the family did not move until they found their paradise on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,
the most exclusive area of New York that Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Arden and Meyer Guggenheim had chosen to live.
The author of 'In Cold Blood' walking through the streets of New York with Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy.GETTY
2nd ROOMS
After an arduous search, they chose 820 Fifth Avenue.
Their 20-room apartment occupied the entire ninth floor,
around 600m2 of living space, which was decorated by three teams of interior designers, Sister Paris and Albert Hadley, whose agenda included Brooke Astor and Ann and Gordon Getty, Billy Baldwin who had just decorated the White House for the Kennedys and whose clients were Greta Garbo or Barbara Hutton, and Maison Jansen, hired by King Alfonso XII, the magnate Charles B. Wrightsman and the Shah of Persia.
To get an idea of the power of Babe and William, in the lobby hung majestically
The Boy with a Horse
(1905-1906), a 220.3 cm x 130.6 cm oil on canvas painting by Picasso that is currently in the MoMa from New York. Equally delicate were the interiors of his other residences in Lyford Kay (Nassau, Bahamas) and Kiluna Farn, 32 hectares in Manhasset (Long Island, New York) that hid a secret garden. The echoes of the parties still resonate in that property where the menus were printed so as not to repeat them in the future and the guests left and entered along a path oblivious to the indiscretions.
Hosts love hosting Grace Kelly or David O. Selznick,
producer of
Gone with the Wind
(1939).
Babe Paley created her own story since she was introduced to society in 1934 in Boston. Over the next four decades she became the dean of American socialites in whose mirror her heirs learned to look at themselves.
A heavy smoker of two packs of cigarettes a day,
she died in 1978 at the age of 63 due to lung cancer. With Babe Paley an era ended when her dreams were only available to a few.