Babe Paley

The 2016 Melanie Benjamin novel The Swans of Fifth Avenue depicts Paley alongside Truman Capote and Slim Keith.

Paley died of lung cancer on July 6, 1978, a day after her 63rd birthday. She was buried in the Memorial Cemetery of St. John's Church, Cold Spring Harbor, New York. On his death in 1990, Bill Paley was buried next to her.

A heavy smoker, Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974. In preparation for her impending death, she planned her own funeral, including the food and wine selections that would be served at the funeral luncheon. She allocated her jewelry collection and personal belongings to friends and family, wrapped them in colorful paper, and created a complete file system with directions as to how they would be distributed after her death.

The 1969 Jacqueline Susann novel The Love Machine includes the characters Judith and Gregory Austin, a socialite and television network CEO, purportedly based on Babe and William Paley. Dyan Cannon portrayed Judith in the 1971 film adaptation.

In addition to entertaining, Paley maintained her position on the best-dressed list fourteen times before being inducted into the Fashion Hall of Fame in 1958. She regularly bought entire haute couture collections from famed fashion houses like Givenchy and Valentino SpA. Her style influenced many women, but as Bill Blass once observed, "I never saw her not grab anyone's attention, the hair, the makeup, the crispness. You were never conscious of what she was wearing; you noticed Babe and nothing else."

Paley set about to curate an ideal social world for herself. The couple had an apartment at the St. Regis and hired interior designer Billy Baldwin to decorate. She and Paley lived there during the week, while weekends were spent at Kiluna Farm, on 80 acres (32 ha) in Manhasset, Long Island, where a succession of landscape architects and garden designers beautified the grounds. The more distant retreat, Kiluna North, on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, was purchased in 1957; there they entertained celebrities who welcomed the privacy.

Upon her second marriage in 1947, Paley left her job at Vogue.

After her divorce from Mortimer, she received a settlement based on a trust fund. In 1946, she met William "Pasha" Paley (1901–1990), who was estranged from his wife Dorothy Hart Hearst (1908–1998), herself the former wife of John Randolph Hearst. Paley was wealthy, with an interest in the arts and a desire to be a part of New York's café society. With Babe's social connections, Paley stood a greater chance of being granted entrée into a society which, until that time, had effectively shut him out. For Babe, Paley offered wealth, security, and worldliness. Following Paley's divorce on July 24, 1947, Babe and Paley were married the following year. Together, Babe and Bill had two additional children:

In 1938, Paley began working as a fashion editor for Vogue in New York City. This position gave her access to designer clothes, often given in exchange for Paley's high-profile image. In 1941, Time magazine voted her the world's second-best dressed woman after Wallis Simpson and before Aimée de Heeren. She was also named to the best-dressed lists of 1945 and 1946.

As a student at the Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut, Paley was presented as a debutante in October 1934 in Boston, with Roosevelt's sons in attendance. Her debut drew attention during the Great Depression and marked the beginning of her social career. She graduated from Winsor School in Boston in 1934.

Barbara "Babe" Cushing Mortimer Paley (July 5, 1915 – July 6, 1978) was an American socialite whose second husband William S. Paley was the founder of CBS. Known by the nickname "Babe" for most of her life, she was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1958.

While working at Vogue, she met and married oil heir Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr. (1913–1999), the brother of Katharine Mortimer and both of an old and prominent New York family, at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in East Hampton, New York, in 1940. Before their marriage ended by 1946, she and Mortimer had two children: