Barbara “Babe” Paley was one of the most photographed and admired women of the 20th century, yet in the final months of her life, she openly told friends and CBS executives that she could not stand her own husband. The woman who had spent three decades as the perfect consort to media titan William S. Paley stopped pretending, asking one network president, “How do you put up with him? ” It was the final, bitter unmasking of a marriage that had defined the golden age of American high society.
Babe and her sisters, Minnie and Betsy Cushing, were raised in Boston by a mother, Kate, whose ambitions were as precise as her household. Kate drilled into her daughters that they were extraordinary, and she spent years cultivating relationships with photographers, society figures, and even Lady Nancy Astor to secure their ascension. Her husband, the famed neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, was brilliant but often absent, a void their mother filled with relentless social strategy. Betsy was the first to marry, wedding James Roosevelt, the son of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
She charmed her father-in-law so completely that she became his White House hostess, pouring his tea, swimming with him, and accompanying him to Warm Springs, a closeness that bred jealousy in both her husband and Eleanor. Her marriage collapsed when Jimmy fell in love with his nurse, and she divorced him in a settlement that made national news. Minnie was pushed by her mother into a marriage with Vincent Astor, one of the richest men in America. It was a union of expectation, not passion, and society whispered that it was never consummated.
After her mother’s death, Minnie orchestrated her own release, persuading Vincent to grant a divorce by arranging for him to meet Brooke Marshall, the widow he would soon marry. A month after her settlement, Minnie married the artist James Fosberg, a gay man, trading an Astor fortune for intellectual freedom. Babe, the youngest and most beautiful, married Stanley Mortimer Jr. before divorce, then set her sights on William Paley.
Paley, the son of an immigrant who built CBS, was desperate for the social legitimacy Babe provided. She hesitated, but his devotion during an illness won her over, and they married in 1947. She brought him refinement; he gave her a world of unimaginable wealth, yet their marriage became a gilded arrangement in which she described herself as a “very expensive ornament. ”
Babe built a reputation as a style icon, making the best-dressed list repeatedly and entering the Fashion Hall of Fame in 1958.
At home, though, she faced private devastations. Her daughter Kate developed alopecia and lost all her hair, a condition Babe worked desperately to conceal. Her son Billy, sent away to boarding schools, rebelled into drugs, later reflecting that he loved and hated his parents at the same time. Babe found a confidant in Truman Capote, who became a constant companion to her and Bill for two decades.
She shared the loneliness of her marriage, her fear of aging, and the emptiness beneath her immaculate surface, never suspecting that Capote was recording everything. In November 1975, Esquire published an excerpt from his novel-in-progress, *Answered Prayers*, that thinly disguised Babe and Bill as characters in a scandalous story about infidelity. Babe read it, called a close friend, and then made an ironclad decree to her family: Truman Capote was never to be spoken to again. Capote tried to reach her, wrote letters, and enlisted mutual friends, but Babe never spoke to him again, calling him the snake who had betrayed her.
At the same time, her health was failing. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, she endured multiple surgeries and experimental treatments, yet maintained her public composure until the very end, when her anger finally spilled out against the man she had spent a lifetime pleasing. Babe died on July 6, 1978, the day after her 63rd birthday, dressed in an imported lace bed jacket, her hairless head wrapped in a silk turban, her makeup meticulously applied. Minnie died just four months later of cancer, a quiet end for the sister who had walked away from an Astor fortune.
That left Betsy, who had enjoyed the happiest marriage of the three in her union with Jock Whitney, a partnership of genuine devotion. Jock died in 1982, and Betsy lived on at their estate until her death in 1998, leaving behind a fortune estimated at $700 million. The sisters had risen from Boston propriety to the summit of American power, married into dynasties, and defined an era of elegance. Their mother’s ambition had delivered wealth and status, but the cost, measured in fractured marriages, estranged children, and private loneliness, was staggering.
The society they ruled has vanished, and their names have faded with it, leaving only the question of what the relentless pursuit of perfection ultimately buys.
