Babe Paley made the best-dressed list 14 times, then entered its Hall of Fame
A brain surgeon's daughter from Boston, Babe Paley rose from an entry-level job at Glamour to fashion editor at Vogue, married the man who ran CBS, and became the socialite Truman Capote called perfect. Then Capote published her circle's secrets, and she never spoke to him again.
Barbara Cushing was born in Boston in 1915, the youngest daughter of Harvey Cushing, a celebrated neurosurgeon who taught at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Yale. He was exacting and mostly absent, buried in his study. At home she was Baby, then Babs, and eventually Babe. With her sisters Minnie and Betsey she formed a trio society pages nicknamed the Fabulous Cushing Sisters; Minnie wed Vincent Astor, and Betsey married first a son of Franklin Roosevelt and later John Hay Whitney.
A 1937 car crash on Long Island, with a drunk driver at the wheel, shattered her jaw and knocked out her front teeth, and surgeons rebuilt both. She had started at Glamour in 1935 and joined Vogue as fashion editor in 1939, where designers lent clothes in return for her visibility. By 1941 Time ranked her second among the world's best-dressed women, behind only Wallis Simpson.
Her first husband, oil heir Stanley Mortimer Jr., came back from wartime Navy service drinking heavily, and the marriage was over by 1946. She then married William Paley, the chief executive of CBS, and left Vogue. The match suited both sides: he wanted entry to a café society that had kept him out, partly through prejudice against Jews, and she gained wealth and security. The couple split their weeks between a St. Regis apartment styled by Billy Baldwin and Kiluna Farm, an 80-acre estate on Long Island. Biographers describe loneliness amid his affairs, and her daughter Amanda called their bond virtually nonexistent.
Her style was copied widely: fine jewels by Verdura or Schlumberger worn alongside costume pieces, a scarf knotted to a handbag, hair left to go naturally grey. Bill Blass said that once you saw her you noticed nothing else. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, she died in 1978, a day after turning 63. Naomi Watts played her in the 2024 series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.
Source: Babe Paley
