The Swans of Fifth Avenue

by Melanie Benjamin

  Not her. Not Slim.

  Who’d called her that, in the first place? Bill Powell? Probably. He was the first movie star she’d met, when she was barely fifteen, escaping, running, charging away from a tyrant father who tried to control her even after he left, a sad, broken mother, a bitchy sister; the ghost of a dead brother hovering over the entire town of Salinas, California. So as soon as she could, she vamoosed, driving away in a convertible, heading toward a resort in the desert, already starring in the movie of her life. There, she found herself—her young, golden, slim self—surrounded by actual, honest-to-God movie stars: Bill Powell, for instance. Men who took her under their wing, at first, waiting until she grew up. Just a little.

  And when she did, she met Howard Hawks, another daddy. God, how she had a thing for the daddy figures! She didn’t have to pay an analyst fifty bucks an hour to figure out why. Classic story: Daddy left. Little girl spends her life trying to replace him.

  Howard brought her into Hollywood finally, firmly, where she discovered, to her own surprise, that she didn’t want to star in movies. It was so much more fun to be involved in the making of them, on the arm of one of the best directors in the business, Howard Hawks. Howard fetishized her, to tell the truth; he was fascinated by how she spoke, her chin tilted down, eyes looking up, her voice throaty and full of answers to unasked questions. Howard made her read his scripts, rewriting the women characters’ dialogue as she would say it. He made sure their costumes were tailored, like her own wardrobe, even sending her out sometimes to buy an actress’s clothes herself. That’s how much he trusted her taste.

  And he introduced her to more men, and what the hell was he thinking, doing that? She was so young—barely nineteen, then twenty. In love, but not in lust, and Howard knew that and so did she. And he surrounded her with Gary Cooper—rather stupid, but gorgeous as a mountain, those dimples! That surprised grin! Clark Gable—not stupid at all, although he dared you to think he was. A barrel of a man, broad-shouldered and -hipped; Clark never looked quite right in a tux, but he was a woman’s own wet dream in a flannel shirt and jeans.

  And Papa. Finally, always, Papa. Had she ever been sexually attracted to him? Not in the conventional sense; the man was a mess. You could see how he’d been gorgeous when he was young; the bones were there, like archaeological ruins beneath a windblown canvas tent. But when she’d met him, back in the forties, Ernest Hemingway was no longer interested in things such as grooming and hygiene. He’d found a look—safari shirt; baggy, ratty shorts or pants; scruffy beard—and kept it, no matter the season or occasion. And he so rarely bothered to bathe, or wash his clothes, or trim his toenails, or clean his fingernails.

  Yet. He was so muskily, powerfully masculine. More than any other man she’d met, and that was saying something when Clark Gable was a notch in your belt. So it was that, and his brain, his heart—poetic, sad, boyish, angry—that drew her. And he wanted her. Slim could see it in his hungry eyes, voraciously taking her in, no matter how many times a day he saw her; each time was like the first time after a wrenching separation. He made no bones about it, not even in front of Howard.

  And Howard got a kick out of it. To tell the truth, it turned him on. It made him tear her clothes off at night, knowing that Papa was just in the next room, or tent, brooding about her, dreaming about her. To tell the truth, she got off on it, as well.

  Well, why not? Sex is great. Sex is all. Was, anyway.

  Oh, hell. When did it vanish, sex? When did it leave, pack up its bags, and take up residence elsewhere, leaving only a polite thank-you note for your gracious hospitality?

  “I’ll have another,” Slim whispered, waving her glass, then tipping it for one last drop. The ice slid down and rattled her teeth.

  “Your lipstick has come off,” Marella observed sleepily.

  “So’s yours.”

  “I’ll reapply it.” And Marella opened her purse and actually brought her lipstick out, before all four realized what she was doing and gasped. Gloria slapped her hand in horror.

  “Babe would never do that,” Slim admonished her. “Babe Paley would never apply lipstick at the table.”

  “She never had to,” Pam marveled. “How is that possible? I’ve never seen Babe’s lipstick ever smear or fade.” Slim, she noticed, had apparently applied her makeup with a trowel, and now it was sliding down her face, like melted frosting. Poor Slim. She did look like the wreck that she was; the bitter, resentful wreck who still behaved as if she was Leland’s rightful widow.

  But Pamela simply was not to blame. Men, the dear boys, did need to be taken care of, and American women were particularly bad at that, so intent on having their own fun. Babe really was the only American woman of her acquaintance who knew how to keep a husband. Whereas British women, well, they were born knowing how to take care of men, their own—and everyone else’s.

  Pamela had grown up possessing the gift: how to soothe and flatter and caress and purr and then ignore, just when the flattering and caressing got to be a bit too much. She knew how to cast a wide net and keep things friendly, no matter how distastefully they might end, so that she would be able to use one lover to help another, politically or in business. These men were grateful to her, and had paid her handsomely, set her up very well, and for a long time, after that disaster of a first marriage to Randolph Churchill (Oh, Randy, the only thing you ever gave me of any value was your name!), that had been enough. But then, one day she realized she was well into her thirties and known only as a courtesan, not a wife. And in the twentieth century—the prosaic, unromantic twentieth century—wives were more highly prized than mistresses. So she looked around and saw a husband who wasn’t being cared for, and determined to rectify that. Yes, well, it was rather a shame that the husband happened to belong to a friend of hers. But that was water under the bridge, in her opinion.

  Oh, these Americans. They did tend to carry on and on about such things. Yet, of course, they did have the most money, the best houses, and the finest food, the most divine restaurants. She’d not regretted throwing in her lot with them, not once. Not even now, with wretched Truman causing such a row. It was still preferable to living in a drafty flat in London or Paris with her veiny hands and crepey bosom, wondering how she was going to pay her bills, clinging to the Churchill name like a tiara, a tarnished, dusty old tiara long out of fashion.

  “Babe puts her lipstick on,” Gloria was saying, rather fuzzily. “Then she powders it. Then she puts it on again. Oh, and before she puts it on, she puts something else on her lips. I forget.”

  “But even if it did fade,” Slim slurred, “she would never, ever apply it at the table. Babe Paley would die first.”

  Marella gasped; no one spoke for a long moment. Gloria glared at Slim, whose eyes, behind those cat’s-eye glasses, were now brimming with tears.

  “Oh, damn,” Slim said. “Damn. I didn’t mean to say that—I didn’t mean—”

  “I hate Truman,” Gloria snarled. “I despise him. But I don’t want to lose him. I don’t want to lose them both—oh, what hell it is, Slim! What hell it is to grow old! Men don’t ever grow old, they just get more and more distinguished, desirable, even—look at some of these old farts, our husbands, still on the prowl! Babe is lucky—yes, I said that! She’ll never grow old. Old and undesirable. Like me. Like all of us.” Gloria’s voice quavered; her hand was trembling as she raised her champagne flute to her lips. She never voiced these fears, these demons that chased after her with flaming daggers.

  “I wonder,” Slim mused, as if she hadn’t heard Gloria at all, and perhaps that was for the best. “Speaking of men, I wonder.” Her hand shook as she adjusted her eyeglasses, so that she could see properly again. “What do you think Bill Paley’s going to do to the little homicidal maniac? What on earth do you think Bill is going to do to Truman, after this?”

  Pam shuddered, her cleavage bouncing; Marella grimaced.

  “Whatever it is,” Gloria growled, those Latin eyes gleaming dangerously,
“I do hope I’m there to see it.”

  CHAPTER 8

  …..

  William S. Paley was hungry.

  William S. Paley was always hungry; his mother never failed to remind him how exhausted she had been when he was a baby, feeding him ’round the clock, until finally she just couldn’t take it anymore and weaned him early. She also never failed to remind him how she hadn’t had to do that with his sister, who was a much more reasonable child in every way.

  Bill couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t rise and think, first thing before his feet hit the floor, What am I going to have for dinner? And, of course, before dinner there was breakfast, lunch, snack after snack, dinner after dinner, even; invariably, he was ravenous again around midnight, and Babe had installed a separate kitchen off his bedroom in all their homes, completely stocked with eggs and cheeses and salamis and breads, cookies, sliced vegetables, whole roasted chickens in the refrigerator.

  He was a big man, that was true; not heavy, but tall and rawboned. His stomach was simply the part of his body that claimed most of his thoughts. He didn’t pay much attention to his hands or his feet, or his broad shoulders or even his graying hair, beyond ensuring that the whole machine was always encased in the finest: custom-made shoes and suits from Savile Row and silk ties. But his stomach was always on his mind. Craving everything, fearing emptiness.

  So he rolled his chair away from his desk, the chairman of the board of CBS, and wandered into a little kitchenette off his office; this, too, was always stocked by someone. Maybe Babe; he didn’t really know. He rummaged through the shelves, opened the refrigerator, and questioned his stomach carefully. Did he want a sandwich? Foie gras? Scrambled eggs? Something was required to fill him up again, give him the fuel he needed to get through the day—even though he’d had lunch only two hours ago at 21 with the head of Frigidaire, one of CBS’s biggest advertisers.

  He hated 21. He detested the whole artificial clubby atmosphere of it, the dark paneled rooms, low ceilings, the cast-iron jockeys lined up in front. But he was supposed to like it, he knew; it was one of the places he was expected to frequent—and advertisers expected to be taken—and so he did. He knew how to play the game, when it had to be played.

  Bill decided on a sandwich. Opening up a breadbox, he eyed a large rye bread from Carnegie Deli, not even sliced. There was also an unsliced baguette. He chose the baguette, laid it out on the bread board, and, taking a bread knife, sliced the long loaf lengthwise.

  He hated society, to tell the truth. Even as he yearned for it, collected it, wore it about his neck like a medal. He craved acceptance; he craved the sensation of knowing that he was the most sought after; he and Babe, that is. The Paleys. Mr. and Mrs. The richest, most beautiful, most glamorous couple in New York. That’s what he wanted. He just didn’t want to have to put up with some of the exhausting exercises required to attain his desire, that was all. He left most of it up to Babe, and simply waited for her to tell him what was required of him. Like this evening, for instance. After a long day at work, he’d have to change and go to the Plaza and mix and mingle.

  But that was why he’d married Babe in the first place, wasn’t it? Because she knew society, she knew how to navigate it easily, not clumsily; Babe knew where to go and with whom to be seen. Although it wasn’t as if he’d been some rube off the turnip truck when he’d met her; he was already William S. Paley, chairman of CBS. His first wife, Dorothy, had polished the rough edges, shown him how to dress, where to live, introduced him to art, to performers, politicians, artists; he’d selected her for the job, just as he’d selected Babe, later on, and Fred Friendly to run the news division, and countless other employees, even the most admired faces in the land. They were all his employees, wives included; the famous men and women of CBS, whom he could call on whenever and wherever and they’d show up: Bing Crosby, whom he’d discovered, drunk but singing like an angel, and then turned into one of the first radio crooners. Jack and Mary Benny, personal favorites of his; Jack could make him fall down on the floor laughing with just one flick of a wrist and a long, steady slow burn. George Burns and Gracie Allen; Gracie was a doll, literally. A tiny thing with that crinkly little voice, although he didn’t much care for George. Too sly, too condescending. But he had to admit he’d given the cigar industry a boost.

  Cigars. He didn’t smoke them anymore, but they were still part of who he was: the rich smell of tobacco in his clothes, the slimy feel of the palm leaves in his hands, the small rings declaring “La Palina.” The brand of cigars his father and his uncle Jake had founded and turned into a thriving business. The business he, Bill, was expected to go into as a youth, and he had, learning it from the bottom up, rolling the cigars himself along with the laborers in the beginning, because that’s how his father had first started out. But then he’d heard about this new thing called radio, back in the twenties, and one summer, when he was left in charge of the business in Philadelphia while his uncle and father were on a buying trip to Cuba, he’d approached one of the local radio stations about sponsoring a show—The La Palina Hour. Some bad singer, he recalled, was the star of the show, but it didn’t matter. People listened; people listened to anything broadcast in those days. Sales went through the roof, and he realized there was a lot more to this radio business than he’d thought.

  How did he know? Instinct. Gut instinct, from deep within that stomach he so carefully attended. He couldn’t analyze it, not if he tried—and he’d been begged to try, many times over the decades. He just knew. He wasn’t the only hungry person out there. Everyone was hungry for something—food, for sure. But sometimes it was for laughter, sometimes for tears. Sometimes to recognize themselves, sometimes to be jolted into awareness of something novel and even frightening. Hungry for other people, mostly, and radio did that; it brought people together, made them feel less lonely. And so he figured out this radio thing, bought a struggling little network of a few stations around Philly—Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. He got rid of the Phonographic right away.

  And what he, Bill Paley, did was realize fairly quickly that the money was in advertising, not in forcing the small affiliate stations to pay for the programming, the way it had been. He would offer the programming for free, in return for advertising time on each station, and the advertisers would pay for the privilege. And that’s how it worked, even in television. Once he figured out the system, he was eager to move on and let others run it. He still had a hand in programming—he knew what people wanted, and he always felt the privilege of that knowledge—and he’d been lucky enough to figure out that network news could be a powerful force during the war. He’d been damned lucky to have had Ed Murrow already in Europe when war broke out, ready to assume the ultimate mantle of “right man at the right time.”

  But the running of the company, the day-to-day demands, he left to others. Oh, he was in the office all day, signing papers, attending to big decisions, paying surprise visits just to keep people on their toes. He was still Mr. CBS, the face of the company, and he sure as hell knew how to live that life.

  With Babe on his arm, of course.

  Babe.

  He still couldn’t think of her, after how many years now—they’d married in ’47 and it was ’58, so eleven. Eleven years now. And he still couldn’t think of her without shaking his head at his luck. He didn’t have to be told—as he was daily, by total strangers, even—how lucky he was to be married to her.

  How lucky he was that Barbara Cushing Mortimer, the ultimate Boston shiksa, had said “yes” to him. A Jew from Chicago.

  Bill opened the small refrigerator—of course, a Frigidaire—and pulled out several packages of thick white butcher’s paper; he unrolled each and surveyed the contents. Pastrami? Thin Genoa salami? Slices of Angus beef, bloody red at the center?

  He chose the Genoa salami, wrapping the other packages up tenderly, putting them to bed back in the refrigerator. Then he opened a jar of brown deli mustard.

  Cognizance of h
is Jewishness was right up there with his cognizance of his stomach. It was always in his thoughts, his plans, his schemes. Not paramount, and not in any sort of religious sense. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been to temple. But every time a door closed, the slam he heard was a word, and the word was Jew. Real or imagined, there it was. Clubs he could never join. Schools his children could never attend. Women he could never have.

  Yet one of those women had said yes. Was it love that prompted this act of bravery on Babe’s part? Or was it money, all his piles of money?

  Yes. No. Maybe.

  Bill Paley was nothing if not pragmatic, and so was his wife. It was that pragmatism that drew them together in the first place. Oh, God, yes, Babe was beautiful and stunning and fabulous and all that—she lived up to her advertising, that was for sure. But when they met, she newly divorced, he nearly so (well, that counted, right? His intention was to be divorced, anyway. He’d just not gotten around to telling his first wife), whatever passed for physical attraction between them was utterly trumped by shared pragmatism. With her society pedigree, she could get him into places he couldn’t go alone. And he could give her financial stability for her children, and entrée into something more exciting than that staid society she was groomed for. Radio and television, the entertainment industry. This was new, and exciting, and Babe was curious.

  He noticed that right away about her—her curiosity. He appreciated it, to a point. He also had no intention of having a second marriage like his first, a marriage in which the wife taught the husband, and didn’t care who knew it; in fact, took pains to let others see how much she had taught him, how much more she knew about art and politics and all the rest. That had been Dorothy Hearst Paley’s fatal flaw, one she recognized too late.