The Swans of Fifth Avenue(59)

So now he was throwing a party. The most swellegant, elegant party evah.





—

LATER, TRUMAN SAID THAT the morning the invitations went out, he made five hundred friends and fifteen hundred enemies.

Only one of these was an exaggeration.





CHAPTER 13


…..





A summit. A counsel. Of utter fabulousness.

The day before Truman’s party, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, accompanied by her sisters, Minnie Cushing Astor Fosburgh and Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley, sailed into the Palm Court at the Plaza. Her head held high, she didn’t slow down, only barely nodded at a ma?tre d’ who scurried ahead of her to pull out a chair just as she sat down at an intimate table, one of her own choosing. Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney did not wait to be told where to sit, not even at the Plaza.

It was afternoon tea; all around them were adorable little girls dressed in pink dresses with matching hair ribbons, white gloves, patent-leather shoes, accompanied by indulgent parents or grandparents. There were other—lesser—socialites present, too, and out-of-towners who couldn’t help but gape at the trio of fabulously dressed women, all with cheekbones as prominent as their good breeding, but the triumvirate paid the tourists no attention. This was a sister meeting, a ritual from their childhood. Long ago, their tribunals had centered around who could borrow whose hair ribbon, or what birthday present should they pool their money for and purchase for their mother. But as they grew up and into the beauty and elegance laid out for them, like their school uniforms, by their mother, the conferences had turned to more serious matters, usually presided over by Gogs. Minnie’s long affair with Vincent Astor, for instance, had been discussed and dissected and determined to have run long enough at one of their summits; Vincent found himself proposing soon after. And Babe’s miserable marriage to Stanley Mortimer had come to a merciful end after one of their conclaves; Gogs and her daughters had weighed the pros and cons and finally determined that Babe could remove herself with her reputation intact. And so, she did.

There had been no summit, however, when Babe decided to marry Bill.

Tea, too, was a constant from the sisters’ youth; back in the big Cushing house in Brookline, their mother, Gogs, had introduced the ritual of afternoon tea, ostensibly for the family, but before long it became a salon of a sort, a place where the best and most socially desirable of the medical and academic communities could “drop in.” Every afternoon, a tempting assortment of tea and punch and finger sandwiches and pastries would be spread in the drawing room and a crush of people would arrive; the Cushing sisters grew up watching their mother preside over the tea table and flit among her guests, seeing to their every wish and comfort. Their father, however, rarely attended; he was always in surgery.

The girls watched—and it wasn’t for amusement; Gogs insisted on their being involved in the preparations long before they were old enough to take part in these elegant soirees. They observed their mother see to every detail, no matter how small: the spotlessness of the aprons worn by the Irish servant girls, the ritualistic polishing of the silver, the placement of the cherries atop the pink-iced tea cakes.

There would often be music, a harpist or a pianist, some Cambridge student hired for the day. Other homes, even in Boston during those playful years of the 1920s, early ’30s, might have also served cocktails in silver shakers accompanied by cheese biscuits, but not Gogs. She stuck to tradition: to bone china, English tea, lemon and sugar, clotted cream for the scones.

Betsey Whitney, Minnie Fosburgh, and Babe Paley, then, were more than capable of hosting elaborate spreads in their own homes, and they often did, but why hide themselves away all the time? It was time for a sister summit, so naturally, they went to the Plaza, for their mother had raised them to be seen and admired.

“I don’t believe Mother ever had tea outside her own drawing room, did she?” Betsey, who was not the eldest but acted it, inquired as she removed her gloves. She was a shorter version of Babe, with the same cheekbones, but her coloring was less vivid; her hair a lighter shade, her eyes not quite as dark, her skin not quite as creamy. But Betsey had the more regal air; she could manage to look down her nose at anyone, even if she were the smallest person in the room.

Minnie, the eldest—and kindest, Babe always insisted—sister, shook her head. Minnie was the tallest, the most down-to-earth; she didn’t have Betsey’s imperiousness nor Babe’s uncertainty. She didn’t have their deep-set brown eyes, either, although she was the thinnest. She would have been gawky had she been anyone else’s daughter but Gogs’s.

Babe smiled fondly. “No, Mama never did like to dine in public, did she? She always felt the best hospitality could be found at home.”

A waiter handed Betsey—how did he know she was the leader? He simply did—a beautifully lettered menu, but she waved it away. “Champagne, and Darjeeling. An assortment of sandwiches and pastries, but no sponge cake—I can’t abide sponge cake. No onions on the sandwiches.” Then she turned back to her sisters as the waiter bowed and hurried away.

“I like onions,” Minnie protested. Her cheeks flamed as she resumed an argument that had begun when she was ten and Betsey eight. “Just because you don’t doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have them.”

“Onions aren’t proper for ladies. Do you want your breath to offend? Didn’t Mama teach you anything?” Betsey shook her head and turned to Babe for backup.