I was a devourer of The Best Dressed List back in the day. This was before Instagram crashed into our lives and put paid to such nonsense. Nonetheless, I miss those days when you had to hunt down this kind of specific minituae for yourself. It made such discoveries just that little bit richer regardless of its subject matter. Babe Paley was the list’s lodestar and in my fantasies I would imagine myself being such an individual and living that life. Hey. A girl’s fantasies are no one’s business but her own. I would gaze and gaze at the Horst P. Horst picture of her with a cigarette held close to her face as if it would provide me with the answer to everything.  

Surely to have those looks, those pearls artfully twined around the neck and wrist, that mouth, that slash of red lipstick, those red fingers, that ring, that neck, that almost blank gaze, the key to untold happiness would be mine for the taking... It was the lifestyle too that had me mesmerized. I was never going to live a life devoted to creating a perfect home for a man while looking exquisite, poised and untouchable. It was totally bonkers which was what captivated me. Case in point: her dinner menus were archived to avoid repetition. I think about my signature dish and laugh maniacally. I need to schedule the salmon pasta so it drops off the freakin’ menu.  

And yet her looks were no more startling than my mother’s. My mother with her five children, her occasional mania for vegetable gardens, her causes, and who preferred to read Doris Lessing on the loo than worry about the dinner choices for her tribe. My mother also had the bone structure and the physical presence of any Babe Paley. Just think if Genelle had married into that kind of life? Or to put it another way: if my mother had Babe’s life, maybe she too would have looked this brittle and spectacular. At least she’d have been no slouch with the dinner parties either. I may disparage my mother’s lack of menu planning but back in the day, Babe would have been calling Genelle for the secret sauce on throwing the ultimate knees-up.

From my cultural perch in the present day, I can only imagine the pressure and the crippling anxiety that probably led Babe to suck down two packs of cigarettes a day to keep the madness at a remove. Not to mention her relatively early death in her sixties of lung cancer. But back when she first popped into my consciousness via that ridiculous list, I couldn’t quite work out if I lusted after that life or if it represented a fever dream of the worst sort. Probably a mix of the two.  

The lives of these particular kind of women were exaggerated by their looks, by the men they married, the access to all that lovely loot, their ambition to be a chatelaine of multiple eye-popping properties, the society they moved in. And ambition. Surely ambition was their fulcrum for what they got. Surely she was a key-decision maker for all this, before it went tits up? What stands out for me, along with the inevitable judgement, is the discipline and the rigor to live such a life. For years. Despite—or perhaps because of—the humiliations, the betrayals, the scrutiny, the deals they did with devils, the marriages that must have been loathsome in truly terrible ways. The sheer bloody effort to live such highly curated lives deserves a twisted respect. 

And then I read Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers and the chapter titled La Côte Basque 1965. How to square Truman Capote’s account of her life is a tricky thing. As a reader, I was enthralled with reading what went on behind the facade of such a woman. Surely perfection is meaningless unless the scaffolding behind it is glimpsed. Otherwise it’s a yawn. But equally it’s too lazy to only focus on the titillating version written up in his book. From a writer’s perspective, Truman’s betrayal makes total sense. No one in their right mind isn’t going to witness it and not think ‘material!’ Yes, he was ostracized on publication of the article in Esquire so he got his just desserts but now as I look at images of Babe, Mona von Bismarck, Ann Woodward… it’s not Truman that is the focus. It’s the women and what agonies did they endure to keep their footing? Or was this the deal they made from the get go? They must have known what they were getting themselves in for as they made their way in this ‘rarefied’ world. Truman’s deceit was probably just another shadow behind the brightness of being spectacularly well turned out.

These staged images retain their power but now my focus on Babe is quite different than simply Truman’s ability to spin a yarn.