RUSH: I've got a picture here of Mayor Doomberg and Amanda Burden (who used to date Charlie Rose), who was the daughter of "Babe" Paley.
In 1938, Paley began working as a fashion editor for Vogue in New York City. Her position at Vogue gave her access to designer clothes, often given in exchange for Babe’s high profile and glamorous image. In 1941, Time magazine vote her the world’s second best dressed woman after Wallis Simpson and before Aimée de Heeren. She was also named to the best-dressed list in 1945 and 1946.
Paley set about to cultivate and create a picture-perfect social world.
In addition to lavish entertaining, Paley maintained her position on the best-dressed list fourteen times before being inducted into the Fashion Hall of Fame in 1958. She regularly bought entire haute couture collections from major fashion houses like Givenchy and Valentino SpA. Her personal style was inspirational to thousands of women who tried to copy her, but as Bill Blass once observed, “I never saw her not grab anyone’s attention, the hair, the makeup, the crispness. You were never conscious of what she was wearing; you noticed Babe and nothing else.”
Her personal, unconventional style was enormously influential. A photograph of Paley with a scarf tied to her handbag, for example, created a trendy tidal wave that millions of women emulated. She often mixed extravagant jewelry by Fulco di Verdura and Jean Schlumberger (jewelry designer) with cheap costume pieces, and embraced letting her hair go gray instead of camouflaging it with dye. In a stroke of modernism, she made pantsuits chic. Her image and status reportedly created a strain on her marriage to William S. Paley, who insisted that his wife be wrapped in sable and completely bejeweled at all times.
While working at Vogue, she met and married oil heir Stanley Grafton Mortimer, Jr., in 1940. Though her mother preferred that she marry a powerful man with a title, she generally approved of the union. She and Mortimer had two children: Amanda Jay Mortimer (later Burden) and Stanley Grafton Mortimer III. Their marriage ended by 1946. Several retrospectives have claimed that Babe neglected her children while in pursuit of social status and depended upon the wealth of her husbands to support her lavish lifestyle. Her daughter Amanda has admitted that their relationship was “virtually nonexistent” and that the distance “was her choice, not mine”.
After her divorce from Mortimer, she received a settlement based on a trust fund. She then set out to make a second high-profile marriage. In 1946, she met William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Paley was phenomenally wealthy, with an interest in the arts and a desire to be a part of New York’s café society. With Babe’s social connections, beauty, and style, Paley stood a greater chance of being granted entrée into a society which, until that time, had effectively shut him out. For Babe, Paley offered wealth, security, and worldliness. Barbara “Babe” Cushing Mortimer and William S. Paley married in 1947 and the couple had two additional children, Kate and Bill Jr.
By many biographers’ accounts, Paley was lonely and frustrated as William Paley carried on a chain of extramarital affairs. This psychological battering took its toll on her and her family. She was constantly under the scrutiny of society and the media, who pressed her to maintain the unrealistic image of a social and fashion goddess. These external pressures, as well as a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, finally affected her health.
A heavy smoker, Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974. She planned her own funeral, right down to the food and wine selections that would be served at the funeral luncheon. She carefully allocated her jewelry collection and personal belongings to friends and family, wrapped them in colorful paper, and created a complete file system with directions as to how they would be distributed after her death.
Paley finally succumbed to lung cancer on July 6, 1978, the day after her 63rd birthday. She was interred in the Memorial Cemetery of St. John’s Church, Cold Spring Harbor, New York. On his death in 1990, Bill Paley was interred next to her.
Long after her death, Babe Paley remains an icon in the world of fashion and style. “Babe Paley had only one fault,” commented her one-time friend *Truman Capote. “She was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect.”
Many fashion designers and interior decorators continue to reference Babe Paley’s style in their own creations. Paley and her “swans”, much like Jacqueline Kennedy during the 1960s, exemplified a young, attractive and affluent class that many Americans aspired to join.
*Capote was openly homosexual. One of his first serious lovers was Smith College literature professor Newton Arvin, who won the National Book Award for his Herman Melville biography in 1951 and to whom Capote dedicated Other Voices, Other Rooms.[31][32] However, Capote spent the majority of his life until his death partnered to Jack Dunphy, a fellow writer. In his book, “Dear Genius...” A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote, Dunphy attempts both to explain the Capote he knew and loved within their relationship and the very success-driven and, eventually, drug and alcohol addicted person who existed outside of their relationship.
Amanda Jay Mortimer Burden (born 1944) is the director of the New York City Department of City Planning and chair of the City Planning Commission.
Born Amanda Jay Mortimer, she is the daughter of socialite Babe Paley (1915–1978) and her first husband, Stanley Grafton Mortimer, Jr. (1913–1999), an heir to the Standard Oil fortune. She is a descendant of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, and a granddaughter of Dr. Harvey Cushing, the "Father of American Neurosurgery" and Pulitzer Prize winning author.
In an interview for New York magazine, she cited her stepfather's influence on her design sensibilities, noting the Canadian black granite she chose for the esplanade was the same stone he selected in 1964 for "Black Rock", the CBS headquarters.
Burden's meticulous approach has been criticized, however, by some real estate developers, who have stated that she is imperious and arbitrary, using her seat in government to dictate the composition of buildings and insist on architectural innovation. Burden has been a major force in saving the High Line and transforming it into the world-renowned park that it is today.
Eliot Brown writes in The New York Observer, "Now nearly eight years into her tenure, and with the possibility of another four seeming rather likely, Ms. Burden is an increasingly powerful and apparently emboldened force in the Bloomberg administration—one whose often forceful views are imprinted and emblazoned on nearly every major skyscraper, mall, public plaza and large development that rises in city limits."
Burden has been married twice. Her first husband was Shirley Carter Burden, Jr. (1941–1996), a multimillionaire descendant of Commodore Vanderbilt and a great-nephew of the actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr.. At the time of their marriage on 13 June 1964, Carter Burden was a student at Columbia Law School. An owner of The Village Voice and New York magazine and later a New York City councilman, he worked as an aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, sparking his wife's interest in social justice and inspiring her to pursue a teaching career. They had two children, Flobelle Fairbanks Burden and S. Carter Burden 3rd, before divorcing in 1972. Their son, S. Carter Burden 3rd, is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the managed web hosting provider Logicworks. Her second husband was Steven J. Ross (1927–1992), the head of Warner Communications; they married in 1979 and divorced in 1981.
Burden has had a continuing relationship with television personality Charlie Rose since the early 1990s.