When their newborn son Patrick Kennedy died, Truman sent the bereaved parents flowers and a seven-line letter of condolence. “I keep thinking what power a great writer has,” Jackie responded. “All the things you write move people. It is a selfish thought—but if all you have written all your life was just training to write those seven lines which were only seen by me—and Jack—I am glad you became a writer.” On the first anniversary of the assassination he gave her a porcelain rose. Obviously touched, she wrote, “Dear Truman, thank you for thinking of me always—in times that are difficult for me with such beautiful things.” He wrote her another letter after the murder of Bobby Kennedy in June, 1968, and she replied: “All the times of insouciance so long ago, when we all first knew each other—and now these numb, numb letters we write—”
They remained friends a year or two more, until he made the mistake of bragging about their intimacy. They were so close, he said, that she invited him into her bedroom while she was dressing to go out for the evening. That indiscretion was repeated to her, and it was enough to cause her to drop him, as she had many other people in her life. When they saw each other afterward, as they inevitably did, they spoke as if nothing untoward had occurred. But they were no longer friends.
“There is some Myth for every man,” said Yeats, “which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all that he did and thought.” Truman’s myth can be expressed not by words but by an image: the young Nina sweeping into the fusty old house on Alabama Avenue, dazzling him with her sleek silk dresses, making him dizzy with her fragrance, then, after a day or two, driving away again, leaving him choking in a cloud of red dust, lonelier and more forlorn than if she had never come at all. To his child’s eyes, she was the embodiment of sophistication, and it did not matter that by the standards of Park Avenue or Lake Shore Drive she was still a country girl, that her clothes were not really smart, or that her perfume was common and inexpensive. She was a symbol of style, and his memories of her visits helped to shape his entire life.
“Style is what you are,” he was to conclude. It was not just a glittering, shiny surface; it was a Platonic ideal, a way of looking at the world and a manner of living, and all of the extraordinary women and most of the men he admired had it to one degree or another. Money could not buy it, but real style, the grand style he prized most, was nonetheless impossible unless it was watered daily from a deep well at a prominent bank. “When I was young,” he confessed, “I wanted to be rich, terribly, terribly rich. My mother, after divorcing my father, married a rich man, but they were upper-middle-class rich, and that’s worse than being poor. There’s no taste in middle-class rich. You must be either very rich or very poor. There’s absolutely no taste in between. I was sent to some good schools, but I hated the rich boys. They had no taste. I’ve always known rich people, but I was so aware of not being rich myself.”
In fact, he was obsessed not so much by money as he was by many of those who have it. He was not interested, except in rare cases, in the Old Line rich, the ancestor-worshiping blue-bloods of Boston or Philadelphia. And he was of course bored by the vulgar rich, shopping-center magnates from Ohio and oil barons from Texas or Oklahoma. It was the other rich who fascinated him, New Yorkers mostly, but Europeans too, people of power and achievement who knew, as he himself did, the difference between what was stylish and what was merely expensive.
He looked upon those special few—the stylish rich—the way the Greeks looked upon their gods, with mingled awe and envy. He believed that money not only enlarged their lives; it also excused them from the ordinary rules of behavior—or, indeed, any rules at all. “He explained to me that when you are a very, very rich girl, you don’t marry the same way a real girl marries,” said Carol Marcus. “You marry the way another person travels in a foreign country. You stay there until you tire of it. Then you go elsewhere.”
Like Arch, he regarded the rich as heaven’s anointed, the only truly liberated people on earth. “The freedom to pursue an esthetic quality in life is an extra dimension,” he explained, “like being able to fly where others walk. It’s marvelous to appreciate paintings, but why not have them? Why not create a whole esthetic ambiente? Be your own living work of art?” Although he never had the cash to buy his own wings—or very many expensive paintings, for that matter—he was resolved that at the very least, he would be granted a guest membership in the celestial society of those who did.
His friend Oliver Smith likened him, not altogether whimsically, to a cat that once lived in Smith’s Brooklyn Heights garden. “He was just an alley cat that wandered around the neighborhood eating whenever he could. He was thin—very, very thin—and he would stand on the porch looking wistfully into the kitchen. He was determined to get into the house, but I didn’t want him. I had four other cats, which was a big enough feline population. Well, we eventually fed him on the porch, but still didn’t allow him in. Finally he got himself into the kitchen, and of course now he just rules the house. He’s huge! He can’t get enough to eat. Truman’s craving for a luxurious environment was something like that cat’s.”
In all the world there was no more brilliant an assemblage than the regal women Truman now called by their first names. What drew him to these elegant swans was not just their beauty, riches and style—he disliked many women who had all three. What captured his imagination, what made his favorites shine so brightly in his eyes, was a quality that was essentially literary: they all had stories to tell. Few of them had been born to wealth or position; they had not always glided on serene and silvery waters; they had struggled, schemed and fought to be where they were. They had created themselves, as he himself had done. Each was an artist, he said, “whose sole creation was her perishable self.”
He installed perhaps a dozen—no more—in his pantheon of class and beauty. There was Gloria Guinness, for example, a Mexican by birth, who after years of poverty and privation had emerged triumphant as the wife of Loel Guinness, a member of one of Britain’s great banking families. There was Barbara Paley, in Truman’s eyes superb and unsurpassable. Like her two sisters, she had been groomed to marry wealth and had achieved her goal by becoming the wife of the founder of CBS. There was C. Z. Guest, who, rebelling against the Boston society in which she was born, had worked as a showgirl and had posed nude for Diego Rivera—the picture he painted hung for a time above the bar of Mexico City’s Reforma hotel. Then, her rebellion over, she married Winston Guest, the beneficiary of ancient trust funds, and settled down to a life of parties and horses.
There was Slim Hayward (later Slim Keith), who had listened to his heartbreaking little monologue in Copenhagen. Slim was born Nancy Gross in Salinas, California. Her slimness—hence her nickname—and distinctly American beauty had so impressed Carmel Snow that during the mid-forties, Mrs. Snow had featured her in almost every issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Howard Hawks, her first husband, had used her as the model for his screen heroines, including Lauren Bacall, and Leland Hayward was so taken with her wit and high spirits that he had divorced Margaret Sullavan to become her second husband. There was Pamela Churchill, Winston’s ex-daughter-in-law, whose magnetic charms eventually lured Hayward away from Slim herself; and there was Marella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat king Gianni Agnelli and “the European swan numero uno,” in Truman’s words.
If their stories had a novelistic quality, so did his own, and the role he reenacted is familiar to readers of classical French fiction: that of the young outsider who, with nothing more than charm and the force of his personality, conquers the most elite society of the great metropolis. It was what Julien Sorel had done in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, what Lucien Chardon had done in Balzac’s Lost Illusions, and what Proust’s narrator, Marcel, had done in Remembrance of Things Past. And it is what Truman did in his own life. To his mind there could have been no better match between affection, his almost worshipful adoration of the lovely swans in whose aloof armada he now paddled, and profession: he was aware that every one of them could
become a memorable character in a great work of fiction.
It was then, most probably, in that period of excited conquest in the mid- and late fifties, that he conceived of himself as the American Proust, a writer who would someday do for the modern American rich what Proust, laboring through the night in his cork-lined room, had done for the French aristocracy of the belle époque. In a way, he said, he regarded Proust as his mentor. Proust had not influenced his writing style—Flaubert would always be the master there—but he had set a personal example. “I always felt,” Truman confessed, “he was a kind of secret friend.”
Fortunately for him, his adored swans enjoyed his company as much as he enjoyed theirs. Their love of gossip was as consuming as his own, and as long as they believed themselves exempt, which they naively did, they laughed when he skewered the others in their group, and they were diverted by his considerable talent for stirring up discord—the other side of his Pygmalion complex.
Quiet bored him; he delighted in turbulence. When none existed, he would stir it up, then stand back and watch the results. “It was almost an intellectual solitaire that he played,” said Slim. “He would invent something out of whole cloth, an absolute fabrication, and say, ‘Did you know that X is having a walk-out with Y?’ I would say, ‘Oh, Truman, for God’s sake! That’s ridiculous!’ Then I began to think about it more and wondered: is it that ridiculous? And something usually did come of his invention. Whether he willed it into being or not, I don’t know. But he could cause a lot of trouble.”
Over the years his tales, true and false, helped to wreck more than a few friendships and marriages, including, as it was to turn out, her own. “I can break up anybody in New York I want to,” he bragged to Slim. Some of his old friends, who formerly had found his imitation of Puck endearing, now detected a spitefulness in his gossipy accounts. One of them was Newton, who, after a two-year separation, lunched with him at the Plaza in the spring of 1954. Truman’s mood seemed to have soured in the interval, concluded Newton, who was so upset by their meeting that he cancelled the rest of his stay in Manhattan and fled immediately to the safety of Northampton. That night he once again confided his thoughts about Truman to his diary. “A painful time,” he wrote, “so filled as it was with gossip, malice, and so much unkindliness.”
When he was not busy telling stories about other people, Truman was telling them about himself. He told his new friends about his childhood, about saintly Sook and his eccentric Faulk cousins, even about his sex life. “A friend of mine once went to a dinner at which the host and hostess had just spent a weekend with Truman,” said Glenway Wescott. “They were sophisticated people, but they were still talking about it with their jaws down to their chests. They said that they had never had such an experience. They had asked something about how his homosexuality started, and he sat down and told them about his first orgasm, his first childhood experience, his first older friend, and so on. I thought it was irresistibly funny. What he had discovered was that ladies in society want to know about everything.”
He had also discovered that, surfeited as they were with all the pleasures that money can buy, ladies in society—and gentlemen too—were desperate for amusement. And who could provide better amusement, who had had more practice at it, than Truman? “He was a constant joy to be around in those days,” recalled Eleanor Lambert, a close friend of Gloria Guinness. “Everything was fun about him. He was like a precocious child, so cute and funny; he was able to bring people’s childhoods back to them. He and Gloria laughed all the time. The three of us once visited the Hotel Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, which was supposed to be the nadir of taste. Behind the bar was a giant glass wall. It was the wall of the pool, and while you were sitting at the bar, you could see what the swimmers were doing underwater. They would swim by, and though they didn’t know it, we could see that they were urinating in the water! It was absolutely awful, and I wanted to leave. But Truman and Gloria thought it was hilarious. I couldn’t drag them away.”
Where the wives led, the husbands followed. Even those who had not read his books realized that there was more than a jester behind Truman’s observant blue eyes. “He was such a mercurial, many-colored, many-sided person, like a big mirrored ball with light hitting it at different angles,” said Slim. “But inside that ball was a really extraordinary mind; he was one of the three or four brightest people I’ve ever known in my life. His head excited me immensely! Going to lunch with him in a good restaurant was the most fun there was! But the most rewarding thing of all was to sit alone with him after dinner and just let him go. He was an adored friend.”
It was a small world the stylish rich inhabited in those days. Slim was married to Leland Hayward, for instance, in the garden of the Paley estate on Long Island; the Paleys and the Guinnesses were best friends; and just about everyone had visited one Greek ruin or another on either the Guinness or the Agnelli yacht. Knowing and playing host to Truman became the fashionable thing to do. “Once he got into that part of society, he moved very fast,” said Oliver Smith. “The wealthy find objects that amuse them: that’s history.”
He was a frequent visitor to their houses, he had a private stateroom on their yachts, and he was a privileged passenger in their private planes. He had a reserved seat by the fire, and he was there listening when the brandy was poured after dinner, when voices were lowered, hearts were opened, and secrets were passed. Spread out before him were enough plots for a hundred novels: the case histories of showgirls who became great ladies, of kept boys who inherited ducal mansions in the shadow of Notre Dame, of hushed-up society murders, and of all kinds of couplings within the sumptuous smoothness of Porthault sheets. He saw, he heard, and in the back of his mind he recorded everything. Nothing escaped him.
Yet of all the extraordinary tales that were whispered in his ear, none was more remarkable than that of the absurdly small, baby-voiced writer from Monroeville, Alabama, who, all by himself, had climbed to the very peak of golden Olympus.
33
TRUMAN admired all of his swans, but the one who captured his head and heart was in some ways the loveliest of all. “The beautiful darling!” her father had called her when she was a child in Boston, and as long as she lived, that was the universal opinion of Barbara Paley—or Babe, as she was usually called. “So great is her beauty that no matter how often I see her, each time is the first time,” marveled Billy Baldwin, society’s favorite decorator.
Her father was Harvey Cushing, one of the most illustrious American doctors of the century. A man of enormous ambition and energy, he single-handedly transformed brain surgery from a dark and uncertain art into an exact science; in his spare time he wrote a two-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of another renowned doctor, Sir William Osler. Her mother was no less ambitious, using her own talent and energy to mold her three daughters into the kind of women who would attract the richest and most distinguished men in America.
And that is precisely what “society’s three fabulous Cushing sisters,” as the gossip columnists dubbed them, did—twice each. Minnie married Vincent Astor, whose family owned much of New York; she then divorced him for James Fosburgh, an artist and a member of an old Manhattan family. Betsey married James Roosevelt, F.D.R.’s son, then settled on John Hay Whitney, who was as handsome and dashing as he was rich. Babe’s first marriage was to Stanley Mortimer, Jr., with whom she had two children; a model member of the American aristocracy, he was a graduate of St. Mark’s and Harvard, the grandson of one of the founders of Standard Oil, and a descendant of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States. By such standards, her second marriage, to William Paley, with whom she had two more children, was something of a comedown. He was rich, certainly, but he was not an American aristocrat: he was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia who had made his fortune manufacturing cigars.
That did not bother Babe, however, whose “immaculate quality and immense serenity”—Billy Baldwin’s description again—elevated her above common feelings
. All those who knew her considered her character as faultless as her beauty. She had chiseled features, dark hair, exquisitely shaped brown eyes, and a tall, slim figure that made any dress she wore look elegant. Permanently enshrined on the list of the world’s best-dressed women, she made fashion news every time she walked out the door. Whatever she wore or did became instantly acceptable. When she began wearing pantsuits, they suddenly became respectable; when, in middle age, she refused to color her graying hair, smart women all over America threw out their bottles of dye.
Her only apparent defect was that she may have been too flawless to be real, more like a goddess than a creature of earth. As Truman observed in one of his notebooks: “Mrs. P. had only one fault: she was perfect; otherwise, she was perfect.” Try as she might, she could not help keeping most people, including her own children, at a discreet distance. “She was warm but not tactile,” said one of her closest friends. “She was not a toucher. She would never pick up and hold her children, for example, and they suffered from the lack.” She was not, in fact, as confident as she appeared, nor quite as saintly. Although she professed to be embarrassed by her reputation as a stylish trendsetter, or to treat it as a joke, it meant more to her than she liked to admit, and she secretly envied Gloria Guinness, her good friend and chief rival as Queen of Chic. Gloria, she more than once pointed out to Truman, had started her career as a shill in a Mexico City nightclub.
Beautiful Babe, he discovered, was human after all, and lonely on the pedestal on which her looks and breeding had placed her. Perhaps more than any of the other swans, she needed a friend like him, someone with whom she could relax and who in turn would tell her, time and again, that she was a perfect person. “She had an icy exterior,” he said, “but once you got behind that fine enamel outside, she was very warm and very young.”
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