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.
Slim Keith
Though she was no stranger to the limelight (her first husband was Hollywood director Howard Hawks and her second husband was the producer Leland Hayward), Keith has a surprisingly few photos in Vogue. (She did land the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in June of 1943 and had a relationship with Diana Vreeland when the legendary editor helmed the magazine.) In 1949, she was photographed for Vogue by Horst P. Horst for a fashion story on shorter coats (this red woolen style by Trigère). She would pop up again in snapshots taken in Capote’s aforementioned yacht story from 1967.
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C.Z. Guest
C.Z. Guest was the swan left out Capote’s scandalous unfinished novel Answered Prayers and thus remained in touch with Capote till the end. She spent most of her time in the garden on her property in Old Westbury—she even wrote a book about it, “First Garden,” with an introduction by Capote and illustrations by Cecil Beaton, naturally. In 1956, Guest was photographed by Karen Radkai modeling a dress by Mainbocher. “Guest has the figure and grace to make any couturier sigh with pleasure,” Vogue wrote at the time.
Lee Radziwill
Radziwill’s first two Vogue shoots featured the socialite sitting beside her not-yet-famous sister: Jackie Kennedy. The two debutantes were the talk of the town and received the Vogue treatment in 1951, photographed by Cecil Beaton. The accompanying text wrote: “The Misses Bouvier, young and beautiful daughters of Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss and John V. Bouvier, now live in Virginia. Miss Jacqueline Bouvier (left), after two years at Vassar and one at the Sorbonne, is taking her degree at Georgetown University. Her sister, who is at Sarah Lawrence, made her début this winter in Virginia and New York.” Though Vogue would go on to cover Jackie heavily, Lee was certainly not overlooked. She’d be photographed several times throughout Vogue’s history, especially in interior features of the homes she decorated—from the dazzling “Turkish” room in her London flat in 1966 to her Georgian country house outside of London in 1971 to her Parisian apartment in 2003.
Marella Agnelli
Like her fellow swans, Agnelli had many ties to Vogue. In the early 1950s, after studying art and design at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian, Agnelli (born Donna Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto) moved to New York to assist photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, who was a regular contributor to Vogue with his surrealist imagery. But that was after her Vogue debut in 1949 (when she was featured in an aristro-heavy portfolio of stylish Romans—when she was referred to as a Neopolitan princess) and before her wedding to Fiat scion Gianni Agnelli (which was covered in a multi-page spread in 1954). Once an Agnelli, her even more glamorous lifestyle was a frequent subject of Vogue photos.
Gloria Guinness
Though Gloria Guinness does not make an appearance in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, she was certainly a fixture of Capote’s inner circle. (She was also spared in “La Côte Basque, 1965,”
which heavily alluded to the real-life misbehaviors of William S. Paley, Ann Woodward, and Slim Keith.) What gentility Guinness, née Rubio y Alatorre, lacked in her upbringing (details of her rocky childhood in Mexico were misconstrued by her own conflicting tales), she more than made up for in looks. Three starter marriages (“to the manager of a sugar factory in Veracruz, to a German count [Franz Egon Graf von Fürstenberg-Herdringen], and to the son of an Egyptian ambassador,” led to the big one—Mr. Loel Guinness, who was the scion of the banking billionaire. Vogue was hyper-fixated on Guinness after this final marriage; her first feature came in 1952, and she enjoyed a steady stream of publicity throughout her beautiful life. She was also a contributor to Harper’s Bazaar from 1963 to 1971.
Ann Woodward
Let’s be clear: Woodward was not one of Capote’s swans. But if she were, she’d be his black swan. Woodward took her own life following Capote’s slanderous story that alleged a character that closely resembled Woodward murdered her husband. She was pictured in Vogue twice; below is a photograph of her from Horst P. Horst, which ran in 1948—eight years before the death of William Woodward Jr.
