The Swans of Fifth Avenue

“But Truman wasn’t a man. He wasn’t a woman. He was an unearthly creature, a genius.”

Truman’s unique identity transcends common human labels. He’s a brilliant mind beyond gender. The beyond-human diction alludes to the preface and epilogue, where Benjamin presents Truman as the otherworldly creature surrounded by swans.

“[H]ow can we be friends if we don’t gossip together?”

Truman poses this question to Babe, turning gossip into a symbol of bonding. Truman, Babe, and the rest of the swans grow their friendships through their conversation, and the conversation is frequently about other people.

“Truman, you could charm the rattle off a snake.”

Diana Vreeland stresses Truman’s seductive characteristics, and her observation is ironic. The twist is that Truman is often compared to a snake; he’s the covert but vicious creature looking to harm.

“‘Don’t air your dirty laundry outside the family,’ Mother had said a million times.”

Gog’s idiom foreshadows Answered Prayers and Truman’s betrayal of Babe. Yet Babe didn’t know she was airing her “dirty laundry”—she thought she was confiding in her best friend.

“I stuck out my chin and I twirled and twirled, the best, the biggest, the most beautiful star in the whole damn parade!”

Truman reveals the kind of performance that had enabled him to survive his childhood sense of abandonment. He continues to engage in similar acts of overcompensation as an adult, as he tries to escape the anxiety of not being loved.

“It’s not easy, you know, trying so hard to—to act as if everything is just fine. To put on a united front in the face of such gossip.”

While many of the swans think that Ann Woodward should be conventionally punished for her actions, Babe appreciates the effort that she—and her mother-in-law—are making to carry on.

“They all were entranced by her neck, that long, lovely pipe stem holding up her flower of a head.”

Gloria often reflects on her youthful beauty and the things that it got her. She shows the ability to turn herself into an aesthetic object—a thing that is not even human.

“The room was no longer a diorama of money and taste, arranged by the best decorators in town, […] [but] now it was a circus tent. A hideous circus tent.”

Even the most well-appointed spaces, such as the Paleys’ suite at the St. Regis, cannot provide a complete refuge from sadness. Here, the room changes to match the change in Babe’s mood.

“Suddenly Truman was sick; sick of these people and their dramas and their selfishness, their favors. Their very wealth and privilege, which they used to get what they wanted, used to get him, ensnare him, make him feel ugly and dirty and sordid.”

After Slim asks Truman to cheer her up, Truman feels like a commodity, and he begins to see the swans and their privileged circle in a new light. This is a key turning point for him: The glittering world he once longed to enter is not what he thought it was.

“That dandelion simply didn’t belong.”

C.Z. Guest’s blunt statement about the dandelion evokes her sense of Truman’s outsider status. He’s not a rich person, nor is he a swan, so he doesn’t “belong” in the world of beauty, wealth, and fame, suggesting he, unlike Babe, can leave.

“Today, I just pretended I was someone else. It was fun, in a way. Not to be me, just to be a person. A normal person.”

Even though Babe’s “normal” means shopping at Bergdorf’s on her own, rather than with her personal shopper, the pathos of her desire to be someone else—or, rather, no one else—is clear.

“The tragic waste of lives not unlike his own […] lives of men abandoned by their parents, treated like crap, like dirt, like fungus, all their lives.”

Truman connects his life to the lives of the In Cold Blood murderers Dick and Perry. This description of Truman’s early life suggests the psychic need the swans might initially have filled for him.

“Babe, dear, I simply mean that little Truman has a bit of a sting to him, don’t you think?”

Betsey uses figurative language to warn her sister about Truman. Like a bee, he has the capacity to inflict pain despite his apparent harmlessness.

“She was getting too tired for this, Gloria thought darkly. She’d spent her life reinventing herself.”

Gloria’s experience at the Black and White Ball is more exhausting than entertaining. She realizes that she and her friends cannot keep up with the younger women who are now setting the terms of fashion and style. No amount of reinvention can fully combat the effects of age.

“Bill still sleeps with everyone but me, and I’ve told you that so many times before, it’s a broken record, but in its way it’s the truest thing of my life, the one thing I can count on.”

Babe uses a cliché—“broken record”—to emphasize Bill’s predictable behavior. The “broken record” applies to Babe’s life in general. She and the swans repeat the same behaviors—luncheon, gossip, shopping, affairs, and so on.

“[B]eneath the beauty, they were all so goddamned lonely.”

This realization belongs to all the swans who meet for lunch at La Côte Basque on that infamous day in 1975. As much as they want to despise Truman and minimize his role in their lives, they cannot entirely expel him from the past—nor would they want to.

“He’s a mess. Very remorseful, if you want to know. Very afraid for you.”

Though Bill comes across the archetypal toxic husband, Truman humanizes him to Babe. In speaking of Bill, Truman is also speaking covertly about himself.

“After ‘Mojave’ was published, Esquire begged Truman for more. And more was what they got.”

The repetition of “more” stresses the pressures of beauty, wealth, and fame. The magazine wants another juicy story, and Truman gives them what they want.

“Because being rich, she’d found out, wasn’t really that much fun. […] What good was money, without fun?”

Ann Woodward confronts The Price of Beauty, Wealth, and Fame—it’s not “fun.” Like Babe, Ann feels trapped, and death is the one sure way that both women can escape.

“[Babe] grimaced through it as she’d never grimaced through the carnage of In Cold Blood.”

The image of Babe grimacing through “La Côte Basque 1965” reveals her pain at reading about herself and her friends. Seeing her best friend air her “dirty laundry” is worse than reading about murderers.

“I started it, Truman, but then I fell asleep. And then someone threw the magazine away while I slept.”

Bill Paley adds caustic humor to the fraught situation. His flippant reply to Truman turns “La Côte Basque 1965” into a disposable commodity.

“Babe Paley did her makeup one last time, with the same calming sense of ritual she’d always had when she’d looked in the mirror.”

The “broken record” of Babe’s life continues. On the day she dies, she still puts on her makeup. The stark image of Babe applying makeup on the day of her death—and her knowledge that this is what she is doing—adds extra sorrow to the already sad scene.

“She’s an artist, […] [i]t just happens that the product is herself instead of a canvas or a sculpture or a poem.”

Truman makes the case that Babe is an artist. Her life wasn’t shallow or meaningless. Her beauty and style were as important as a work of art or literature.