Don't Call Me Diva: Babe Paley
Before celebrity culture ate the face of America, there were women who were true trend-setters, cultural influences, and power-brokers. These were women who made presidents and fashion institutions, who would have scoffed at the notion of "celebrity" as we see it today - these were women who were genuinely celebrated, not attention-addicted fools faking sex tapes for fame.
It's past time we returned to what celebrity should be about - things and people worth celebrating - and remember a little something of the forgotten women who made the world. I'll do my best to get the ball rolling with Babe Paley, a name you don't hear much these days but who was responsible for setting the tone for women's fashion and roles throughout the late-middle 20th Century.
"Babe Paley had only one flaw: she was perfect. Other than that, she was perfect"
That was Truman Capote speaking, and despite his tendency to lie, cheat and bastardize, in this regard he might have been telling the truth: Paley was once crowned by Vogue as the inventor of a style described as "effortless chic achieved at great effort."
Sound like any women you know of? Make the jump to read more about the woman who started cultural trends in her sleep.
One of Capote's "swans," the society women he befriended and then betrayed (and who, in turn, allowed Capote to torture himself by becoming their trained sycophantic monkey), Paley seemed destined for the good life - as the daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winning author and famous neurosurgeon, young Barbara Cushing had the world laid out for her pleasure. As did her two sisters - one married an Astor and the other, a Roosevelt (the famous Cushing Sisters: Babe, Betsey Roosevelt Whitney, and Minnie Astor Fosburgh). By the time she'd married the love of her life, CBS chairman William S. Paley, Babe - as she'd come to be known - was gorgeous, rich, and in the thick of everything.
For three decades Babe Paley ruled the best-dressed lists, imprinting her trademark faux-effortless style on the 50s, 60s and 70s. Pantsuits. Allowing gray hairs to show. Junk costume jewelry with couture gowns. Babe Paley helped fashion and society take each of these steps forward. Once, she started a trend that persisted for decades entirely by accident: in a hurry to leave home one day, Babe wrapped a scarf around the handle of her purse. She was spotted by photographers and the rest is history - women everywhere began scarfing their purses, all because Babe was in a hurry to get out the door.
No Ana Wintour, Babe Paley was renowned for having as beautiful a spirit as she had a face, and it's perhaps this trait that earned her some of her most lavish praise. Said one admirer, "So great is her beauty that no matter how often I see her, it's the first time." Oscar de la Renta put it another way:
"Paley chic, that says, 'I'm rich, but I don't have to flaunt it.'"
Paley's kindness had its drawbacks, as it was founded largely on insecurity - and it may have been her insecurity that brought her close with the equally-afflicted Truman Capote. While Capote became a regular confidant of Babe's, in that very gay-man-meets-rich-woman kind of way, he didn't share her innate kindness. So when the never-quite-finished Answered Prayers began debuting as serial installments in Esquire, Babe was devastated. That's because Capote's final work, a desperate lunge for money and quickly-evaporating fame, was a thinly-disguised tell-all of Babe's social circle that revealed far, far too much.
Babe Paley had once remarked that Truman Capote was the only friend she'd ever allowed close enough to truly hurt her, and he proved her to be correct. Although Capote was blacklisted from the society crowd virtually overnight, Babe soon grew ill with lung cancer, and her husband refused to allow Capote to speak with his former friend during her last days. Paley, however, will be remembered as the progenitrix of all things "shabby chic" and the woman who began the now-celebrated art of spending lots of money and time on one's appearance with the goal of looking as if you've spent very little money or time on one's appearance. And that, at least, is worth celebrity.
tiny dancer
Posted to Etc., Hot Stuff on 13 November 2007
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