What broke these erstwhile soulmates apart is the saddest story I’ve ever heard
On Sept. 1, three months after Jamaica opened its borders to international tourism, the legendary boutique hotel at Round Hill, owned in part by Ralph Lauren, who also styled 36 guestrooms in its collection of 27 villas, has officially reopened.
In its own private cove tucked away from the hubbub of touristic Jamaica, Round Hill sits in a cocoon of sugary sand near Montego Bay. Elegant and understated, it remains faithful to its heritage as a playground for the old rich, with the likes of Adele Astaire, Oscar Hammerstein, the Marchioness of Dufferin, and the Viscount and Viscountess Rothermere, once owning a piece of it.
But that’s not where I want to go. Where—or when—I want to go is back in the ‘50s, when the historical “it” couple Bill and Babe Paley owned Cottage 26 in Round Hill, the one where Babe Paley, Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley, ever the doyenne of the New York social scene, was captured in the now iconic photograph in a pale pink blouse and bright red pants, finished off with a striped scarf and a hat in hand.
It was taken by photographer to the socialites Slim Aarons at the poolside of Cottage 26 in 1959 against a backdrop of lime-green loungers, wicker side tables, rattan chairs, and pineapple-patterned coral cushions. Round Hill, now owned by Lauren and his wife Ricky, was just one of the many places in which Babe, New York’s super-swan, nested, which included her St. Regis apartment in New York, an oceanfront family home in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, a property in New Hampshire, and a 34-hectare Long Island estate.
Aarons also took a photograph, now equally famous, of her with her husband, CBS founder William S. Paley, and their esteemed, then beloved houseguest, Truman Capote, as they took refuge in Jamaica from the hurly burly of their New York lives.
If I could, I would eavesdrop on those loving conversations among the evergreen trees between Babe and Truman, all those secrets and revelations, all the gossip on society, where Truman played his role to the hilt as literary darling, shoulder to cry on, listening ear, dapper arm in which to launch themselves into the social whirl of Balenciagas, Valentinos, Givenchys, and Schiaparellis for Babe and her inner circle of swans, the likes of Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, C.Z. Guest, Pamela Churchill, Marella Agnelli, and Mona Williams, later Mona von Bismarck.
If I could, I would stop Babe from revealing too much. I would sneak into Truman’s room, and tear his notes into pieces or, invoking the powers of the Akan deities of Jamaica or the Caribbean winds, cast upon him the spell of forgetfulness.
It might appear that his friendship with the New York swans, even with Babe, was the research phase of his planned roman à clef that, as he described to People magazine, he was constructing like a gun. “There’s the handle, the trigger, the barrel, and, finally, the bullet,” said Truman. “And when that bullet is fired from the gun, it’s going to come out with a speed and power like you’ve never seen—wham!”
It never crossed his mind that it would all backfire on him, or that it would blast away what he truly treasured, his friendship with Babe. When all hell broke loose after the first instalment of the book, “La Côte Basque 1965,” came out in the November 1975 issue of Esquire, he would tell anyone who would listen, “What did they expect? I’m a writer, and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?”
All literature is gossip. What in God’s green earth is Anna Karenina or War and Peace or Madame Bovary, if not gossip? —Truman Capote
“La Côte Basque 1965” was to be part of a larger work Answered Prayers, which Truman hoped to be his answer to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. It remains unfinished, although there is talk the complete manuscript is hidden somewhere in California. Random House launched a mad hunt for the manuscripts after Truman’s death on Aug. 25, 1984 to recoup some of the $750,000 it had advanced to him on a three-book contract, but no manuscript was found. Truman’s friend Joanne Carson, the second wife of TV host Johnny Carson, claimed to have been given the key to a safe-deposit box, in which Truman purportedly kept his files, but he didn’t tell her where the box was. “The novel will be found when it wants to be found,” he said.
Or maybe Truman tossed it to oblivion after taking to heart what Vogue editrix Diana Vreeland, whom he must have run into now and then at Studio 54 after his rejection from café society, used to say by way of advice, “Always have a glass of champagne before making a decision,” except that he took more than champagne, he would take half a bottle of vodka or scotch in one swig and lots and lots of cocaine.
The prize Truman paid for the publication of “La Côte Basque 1965,” which betrayed the confidences of his New York friends, was “the love of his life,’ Babe Paley, who at that time had been diagnosed with lung cancer, to which she would succumb on July 6, 1978. “God, did he pay for it!” said Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacky Kennedy Onassis, of how Truman suffered the consequences of his book venture. He and Babe never spoke again after it was published. As American gossip columnist Liz Smith had put it, “After ‘La Côte Basque,’ he was never happy again.”
So take me back to 1959 in Jamaica, by the pool at Cottage 26, perchance I could free Truman Capote of his dream of writing a story like a gun that would fire a deadly bullet pointed at him.