Poor, beautiful Babe Paley. In the penultimate episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, Naomi Watts’s swan queen meets her untimely demise, succumbing to complications from lung cancer the day after her 63rd birthday. In the episode, “Beautiful Babe,” Babe passes away in her Long Island home dreaming of Tom Hollander’s Truman Capote and surrounded by family, including her husband Bill Paley (Treat Williams) and four of their children. But according to the series, her relationship with one daughter remains fractured even as Babe is dying. In real life as well, it seems Capote’s favorite swan—the most glamorous of the flock—had a sometimes fraught relationship with her own progeny, far more than her perfectly crafted veneer would suggest.
The episode begins with a barn-burner of a fight between Babe and Bill, who hurl insults at each other after Babe reveals that she only has a few months to live. “Your daughter feels she was a minor consideration in her life,” Bill says to Babe. “And that she came after all the myriad ways of showing the world your beauty and your perfection.” Babe has nothing but venom for Bill in response. “Were you a model parent with your barely-disguised contempt for your son, whatever he did?” she spits back. At the end of their fight, Bill promises to do his best to get their daughter Kate to return home before Babe’s death.
Babe’s health deteriorates over the course of the episode, and, in her final hours, she and Capote reunite in a dream sequence that comes complete with swans in bathtubs, a diaphanous pink gown, and fireworks. As a healthy and beautiful Babe dreams of Truman, a dying Babe lies in bed at Kiluna Farm, the Paleys’ Long Island residence, as Bill and three of her children, two boys and a girl, watch on. “I was too late to fix it all,” says dream Babe to Truman. Then a fourth daughter, presumably Kate, joins the others, clasping Babe’s hand in her own. “Mother. You’re not too late, mother,” she says as Babe expires.
The real-life Babe and Bill Paley shared six children in total. Bill had Jeffery and Hilary from his first marriage; Babe had Stanley and Amanda from her own first marriage. Together, they also had two biological children, Kate and Billie. But while the Paleys had the sheen of a much wealthier Brady Bunch, the reality of their blended family was less harmonic. Sally Bedell Smith’s 1990 Vanity Fair article, “Babe,” suggests that Babe’s devotion to perfection and glamour affected her ability to be a devoted, attentive mother. “She once told me she did all the wrong things,” a friend of Babe’s told Smith. “There were too many Christmas gifts to compensate for the guilt.”
Jeffrey and Hilary lived with their mother—Bill’s first wife, Dorothy Hearst—and according to Smith, visited their father only “every other weekend for Sunday luncheon” and for a few weeks each summer at Kiluna Farm, while the other four lived with Babe and Bill on Long Island. There, the children were intentionally kept at a distance from their parents. “Even at Kiluna, Tony, Amanda, Billie, and Kate lived apart,” writes Smith. “They occupied a five-bedroom cottage that was separated from the main house by a game room. The cottage had its own living room and kitchen as well as a playroom in the attic adjoining the bedrooms for the cook and nanny who oversaw the children.”
The children seemed to both feel and internalize this distance. “It was a strange household,” Amanda told Smith. “So fragmented and wacky.” As tastemakers and arbiters of the New York social scene, the Paleys were not overly present in their children’s lives. “Our parents weren’t there, and when they came, we were all clamoring for attention,” Amanda said. This led to a fracturing among the children: “There was no bonding,” she continued. “We were all looking out for ourselves.”
Jeffrey was an excellent student and a member of his boarding school’s championship-winning basketball team. His father saw him play just once, according to Smith, and otherwise returned to his school only for graduation. Jeffrey briefly worked for his father at WCBS, but apparently it was a disaster. “He heard nothing but criticism from Bill,” Dorothy told Smith. “It was clear Bill didn’t want him there.” Hilary had a better relationship with her father, and allegedly idolized her stepmother—so much so that she took eventually took a job at Vogue, just as Babe had done.
Bill and Babe’s biological children, meanwhile, rebelled against their family in various ways. Kate, whom Smith describes as “the most wounded of all birds,” was diagnosed with alopecia at a young age, a condition that was particularly hard for a perfectionist such as Babe to stomach. “For a time Kate had to sit in the sun on the terrace at Kiluna while a nurse rubbed bear grease on her head,” writes Smith. Babe would buy Kate wigs with “buster brown bangs” to hide her lack of eye brows. Kate would go on to attend but not graduate from Rhode Island School of Design, and distance herself from the family by getting involved with the downtown bohemian arts scene—not speaking to her parents for almost seven years. “Kate practically disappeared, and bad-mouthed Bill and Babe all the while,” family friend Leonora Hornblow said, per Smith. Kate eventually became an artist and grew comfortable with her alopecia, painting portraits of herself sans wig.
It’s her brother Billie, though, who was the family’s primary black sheep. “I was a strange child,” Billie reportedly said in 1977. “My parents thought I was crazy. I was sent to a psychiatrist when I was 10, got kicked out of schools, started smoking dope when I was 16, and didn’t have many friends.” He and Bill never really got along, Billie once told The Washington Post. “I was too weird for them to believe. And of course I wasn’t a success. I was different, that’s all. I didn’t want to alienate my parents. I love my parents, but I hated them, you know? I just left.”
As an adult, Billie held multiple odd jobs including dolphin trainer, yacht broker, construction worker, photographer, and door-to-door salesman. (He also was supported by two trust funds, writes the Post.) He served the country as a “combat cinematographer” in Vietnam, and started using heroin. According to Smith, he eventually got clean before becoming a drug-treatment counselor.
Stanley, who went by Tony, Babe’s eldest born son, was the opposite of a black sheep. “He was Babe’s favorite, the child with whom she had the closest relationship,” writes Smith. Like a good WASP, he attended Harvard, then went on to get his J.D. from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from Columbia. Apparently, his status as Babe’s favorite ruffled her husband’s feathers. “Tony knew all,” a source told Smith, “and Tony and Bill had a stormy time as a result.”
And then there was Amanda. Arguably, she was the most like her mother, which may have caused friction between the two. “Babe worried about Amanda,” a family friend told Smith. “She was so beautiful.” Amanda went to Wellesley, where she met her first husband, Harvard student Carter Burden, on a blind date. The two got engaged during her sophomore year, and she dropped out of college.
Soon, like the Paleys, the Burdens were fixtures of the New York social scene, with famed fashion designer Halston once calling Amanda “the most beautiful girl going.” Per Smith, she even pushed Jackie O. from the top spot on the annual best-dressed list where Babe had once reigned. All of this may have led Babe to resent Amanda, perhaps unconsciously. “Her mother was extremely competitive with Amanda,” one source close to the Paleys told Smith. “When Amanda started doing all the things Babe did, it made it worse between them.”
Still, a Vogue profile featuring the newlywed Burdens in 1965 painted a close relationship between Amanda and her mother. “Her most intimate friend is still her mother,” wrote the magazine. “She respects her judgment, admires her taste, shares her concern for things of beauty and copies her, trivially but touchingly, in her way of arranging flowers.”
It turns out this may have been slightly embellished. By 2003, Burden was a high-powered urban planner handpicked by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to lead city projects like the development of Battery Park City. In a New York magazine interview from 2002 called “Social Planner,” Burden was candid about her relationship with her mother—or lack thereof. It was “virtually nonexistent,” according to the profile. “It was her choice, not mine. That’s why I don’t like to talk about it. It’s painful,” Burden said.
But while Burden may have been estranged from her mother, she felt a kinship with Bill. “I was extremely close to him,” she told New York of her stepfather. “He had an incredibly good eye, very good instincts. When I worked at Battery Park City, I was actually building things myself with his lessons.”
Elsewhere in the article, a friend of Burdens is quoted saying that Babe “was an unhappy person. There was an enormous amount of competitiveness with Amanda, which she took out on her by making her feel unattractive. She’s had to create her own self-esteem.”
Though Amanda Burden had complicated feelings about her mother, her daughter, Belle Burden, seems to have nothing but love for her grandmother. Belle said as much in a recent essay she wrote for The New York Times headlined, “The Babe Paley in Feud is Not the Woman I Knew.”
Belle accuses Feud of mischaracterizing her grandmother while neglecting to consult her family during production of the series. “I can accept that details are changed when real people are fictionalized,” she writes. “I know it is hard to capture the ineffable magic of someone’s presence. There are no live recordings of Babe, no way for an actress to know how she moved and spoke. What I cannot accept is the theft of my grandmother’s narrative.”
She paints a portrait of Babe that stands in stark contrast to Amanda’s, as a warm, supportive caregiver who loved to make her grandchildren laugh. “My grandmother was wounded by Capote taking the things she told him, changing them, betraying her confidence and her privacy, which she guarded fiercely,” Belle continues. “Now her life has been stolen and twisted again, posthumously, by the creators of Feud.” Belle ends her essay with the following note: “What I wish more than anything is that my grandmother had lived long enough, and been bold enough, to tell her own story, claiming it before anyone had the chance to steal it from her.”
At the very least, Feud attempts to paint a picture of Babe’s final moments that evoke how they actually happened—at least according to Smith’s account. Per Smith, the children gathered on July 5, Babe’s 63rd birthday, to say goodbye to their ailing mother. As the show suggests, Kate was the last to arrive.
“She hovered close enough to death for her family to summon Kate, who had agreed to come only at the final moment,” writes Smith. “Babe was semiconscious, but she talked a bit, and she recognized her long-estranged daughter.” But it was Amanda—the daughter most like Babe— who held Babe’s hand in her final moments on July 6. “Paley and the children sat on her bed, paralyzed with sadness,” writes Smith. “Their vigil lasted until early the next morning, when she died with Amanda holding her hand.”
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