Truman's Swans

Lee Radziwill, adjusting her masque and getting ready for Truman Capote's 'Black and White Ball' at the Plaza Hotel, New York City, 1966

Now, lean in, darling, because I am only going to whisper this once. There are stories that belong in the papers, and there are stories that belong between us. The affair of Sunny von Bülow is very firmly the second kind. It has everything. Money so old it has grown its own atmosphere, a husband with a monocle’s worth of charm and a murderer’s worth of motive, and a woman so gentle, so accommodating, so devastatingly passive, that one almost wonders if the world simply decided to take advantage. Martha Sharp Crawford, or 'Sunny' as she was known due to her pleasant disposition, was born in 1932 in Manassas, Virginia, to the kind of family that does not need to announce itself. Her father, George W. Crawford, was an executive at Columbia Gas and Electric, and when he died, she was just four years old, barely old enough to understand loss but perfectly positioned to inherit it. He left behind a fortune of approximately $75 million. In 1932 dollars. Which is to say an incomprehens...

  Madame Nicole Alphand, wife of the French ambassador, in the grand salon of the French Embassy in Washington D.C., 1960, photographed by Slim Aarons Considered a leading hostess during her time in Washington, an invitation to the Alphands was considered the most prized invitation, next to being invited to dine at the White House. Born Nicole Mérenda, she was, by most accounts, one of those women people described as “among the most elegant in the world.” And for once, it didn’t feel like exaggeration. In 1958, when she married Hervé Alphand, the French ambasador to the United States, she stepped into diplomacy at its most theatrical: Washington in the age of John F. Kennedy. The Alphand residence became a stage for dazzling receptions. But Madame Alphand herself remained something quieter. Not invisible but edited. The kind of woman who could host a roomful of power and still feel like its best-kept secret. She died in Paris in 1979, leaving behind no manifesto, no grand statement...

Lee Radziwill, kicking it with Mick and Bianca Jagger in Montauk, New York, 1972

"I’d rather have bad things written about me than be forgotten" Pamela (Digby Churchill Hayward) Harriman

  C.Z. Guest with her daughter Cornelia, at the circus in Palm Beach, Florida, 1965, photographed by Bert Morgan