What did Truman Capote’s swans have in common? Enviable cheekbones, closets full of couture, and advantageous marriages, certainly—but they were also all heavily featured in the pages of our very own magazine. (Vogue was actually where Babe Paley, then Barbara Cushing, worked as a fashion editor for nearly a decade, starting in 1938.)
Through the pages of Vogue, these swans announced their marriages (and second and third), and welcomed the world into their superbly designed homes. There were stories, too: In 1967, Capote chronicled his summer bobbing along the Adriatic sea on the yacht belonging to Italian socialite Marella Agnelli; that same year, Lee Radziwill launched her somewhat short-lived interior design career with the sugary article “Find a New Job: Lee Radziwill.” Suffice it to say, Vogue and the swans have history.
Ahead of the premiere of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, we took the opportunity to sift through our archives to once again spotlight this to-the-manner-born circle. Below, you’ll find Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, Slim Keith, and Lee Radziwill (we’ve also included Marella Agnelli and Gloria Guinness, who get no air time in the series but are no less swan-material) photographed by the greats: Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Toni Frissell, and John Rawlings. And because Capote loved a scandal, we also unearthed an image of his black swan, Ann Woodward, (photographed by Horst P. Horst in 1949), whose tragic story Capote would later exploit in his infamous piece “La Côte Basque, 1965.”
Babe Paley
Paley’s Vogue debut came in 1937, when she was featured in an accessory story photographed by Cecil Beaton, “Personal Effects of the Season.” Her appearances outrank any of her fellow swans—it might have had something to do with her being on Vogue’s masthead but it also helped that she had a collection of highly photogenic rooms (from her apartment at the Manhattan St. Regis, which Billy Baldwin ensconced in a foulard-like fabric, to her beach house in Jamaica’s Round Hill). She also had some of the best jewels around; her wedding-day portrait from 1940 is strikingly modern and deserves a place on all bride-to-be’s Pinterest boards.
Babe Paley; Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, December 1937