She sat for a long while, her ears ringing with the whispers of all New York outside her window. Finally she sipped some water, until she felt she could speak in a normal tone. She would not allow her voice to quaver; she would not dissolve into tears. She was Barbara Cushing Mortimer Paley—her mother’s daughter, after all. When she finally felt composure settle over her like a silk shawl, she picked up the phone.
“Slim? Slim, have you read the new issue of Esquire? And Truman’s story?”
“No.” Slim sounded sleepy, and Babe realized it was rather early in the day. But first thing this morning, after another restless, sleepless night, she’d had an urgent need to read the story, and so she’d asked her maid to go out and buy an issue, hot off the newsstand.
Odd, she had thought at the time, that Truman hadn’t sent a copy himself, as he always did. But then, he was away in California, preparing to make a cameo in a movie. Absurd, to think of it—Truman in a movie! But then so many things were absurd these days.
“Slim, go out right now and buy it. Then read it and call me. Call me right away.”
“Babe, are you all right?”
“Just do as I said.”
Babe hung up the phone, bit her lip, reached down for the magazine, and read the thing again. It was not easy to read; she grimaced through it as she’d never grimaced through the carnage of In Cold Blood. The Clutter family’s gruesome wounds had nothing on what was dripping from the pages of Truman’s latest—story.
And the thing was—oh, the damnable thing was—Babe could hear Truman’s voice in every word. Absolutely in every word, phrase, inflection. As if he were seated at her dinner table, or they were gathered around the terrace of Round Hill, or the two of them were curled up with Slim in a private cove in the garden at Kiluna with a thermos of martinis snuck out of the house, laughing like naughty schoolchildren. Always listening to Truman talk and talk and talk, outrageous, hysterical, but just to them. Only to them.
Not to the world.
Babe skimmed through the first part of the “story”—it wasn’t that, not really. It was a poisoned pen letter, a grievance, a mockery. She skimmed through it, sucking in her breath as she read about a typical lunch at La C?te Basque, narrated by Lady Ina Coolbirth, gossipy, catty—and sounding and acting an awful lot like Slim Keith, “a big, breezy, peppy broad” who happened to be married to a dull English lord. And who grew louder and drunker as the story progressed.
In the story, Lady Ina gossiped and catted about a parade of the rich and famous—Jackie Kennedy looking like an exaggerated version of herself, Princess Margaret so boring she made people fall asleep, Gloria Vanderbilt so ditzy she didn’t recognize her first husband.
And then who should enter but “Ann Hopkins,” and the entire lurid Woodward tale was laid out, by Truman’s pen, for everyone in Keokuk, Iowa—people who had no business knowing about it in the first place—to salivate over. Babe winced as she read how Lady Ina wondered about Ann and her mother-in-law, “What do they have to talk about, when they’re alone?” For Slim had asked that exact same question once, long ago. In front of Truman.
But it was when Truman—or rather, Lady Ina—started to tell the tale of Sidney Dillon that Babe felt nauseated. She had to go to the bathroom, press a cool cloth against her head, take another drink of water, before she could read the tale again.
The tale of a man, a “conglomateur, adviser to presidents.” A Jew, the story emphasized; a man forever on the outside looking in. A man with a wife named Cleo, “the most beautiful creature alive.” A man who had many affairs.
One in particular: a slovenly mess of a one-night stand involving bloodstains, sheets, a cool, collected blond shiksa whom he desired for the sole purpose, evidently, of making up for his Jewishness, for seeking revenge upon the Protestant world that wouldn’t have him in their clubs. Seeking revenge in the most disgusting, sordid way.
Babe set the magazine down once more, just as the phone rang.
“Babe?” It was Slim, breathless, cautious.
“Yes.”
“I read it. I’m—I’m horrified. Beside myself. That little twerp! How dare he put such bitchy words in my mouth? How dare he make me the centerpiece—‘Lady Ina,’ my ass. It might as well say ‘Lady Keith’!”
“Did you read the part about the man? Sidney Dillon?”
There was a silence, and Slim finally whispered, “Yes.”
“Who do you think it is?”
“I really don’t know.”
“You don’t?”
“I have no idea, Babe.”
“I’m not sure who the woman in the story, the mistress, is supposed to be. But I think I know who the man could be.”
Slim didn’t answer for a moment. Then she began to sputter anew. “I’m so furious, I’ll kill that bastard, absolutely kill him, just wait until everyone reads this—and Ann Woodward! Poor Ann Woodward! He murdered her, Babe, that’s what happened. You know she was found with the magazine in her hands? He drove a woman to suicide, Babe! And he used me to do it!”