People
Slim Keith (born Mary Raye Gross; 15 July 1917 – 16 April 1990)
Slim Keith (born Mary Raye Gross; 15 July 1917 – 16 April 1990) was an American socialite and fashion icon of the 1950s and 1960s, and, alongside her close friend Babe Paley, one of the original members of Truman Capote's "Swans." Married three times, to a film director, a Broadway producer, and a British banker, she is remembered as much for her own effortless, tomboyish style as for having shaped Lauren Bacall's screen persona from scratch.
Biography
Mary Raye Gross was born on 15 July 1917 in Salinas, California, the daughter of Edward Gross, a businessman who owned several canneries in nearby Monterey, and Raye Nell Boyer Gross, who later renamed her daughter Nancy.
Her childhood was marked by tragedy. In the winter of 1928, her younger brother, Buddy, died after his nightshirt caught fire. The accident fractured the family. Her father blamed her mother for it, and the couple eventually divorced.
When Edward Gross tried to win his daughter's loyalty with the promise of a car and a horse, Nancy chose to stay with her mother instead, a decision that left her permanently estranged from her father.
She was sent to a Dominican convent school in San Rafael, and briefly considered a career in opera before deciding the discipline it required wasn't for her. By twenty two, she had appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar.
It was around this time that the actor William Powell, struck by her looks, is said to have given her the nickname that replaced her own name for the rest of her life: Slim. Powell introduced her to the publisher William Randolph Hearst and his companion, the actress Marion Davies, connections that opened the door to Hollywood itself.
There, Keith met the director Howard Hawks, who told her within moments of meeting her, "You're the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. You're going to marry me." He liked that she had no interest in acting herself and no ambition to use him for a part. They married in 1941, with Gary Cooper giving her away.
Keith later wrote of Hawks that he was exactly the package she had wanted: the career, the house, the cars, the yacht. What she got, in return, was a marriage undermined by his repeated infidelities.
Professionally, though, her instincts proved sharper than his. Keith spotted a young model named Lauren Bacall on a Harper's Bazaar cover and urged Hawks to bring her out to Los Angeles for a screen test. He did, and modeled Bacall's entire persona in To Have and Have Not on Keith herself, her mannerisms, her clothes, even her own nickname, which became Bacall's line to Humphrey Bogart in the film.
Keith is also credited with helping launch the careers of Joanne Dru and Ella Raines, two other actresses who shared her long-limbed, understated look.
In 1946 Keith Slim won a Neiman Marcus Fashion Award, one of American fashion's highest honors, and would remain on international best dressed lists for years.
Keith and Hawks divorced in 1949. That same year, she married the Broadway and Hollywood producer Leland Hayward.
Keith later called Hayward the one true love of her life. He left her in 1959 for the socialite Pamela Churchill, later Pamela Harriman, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1960. "When I lost Leland," she wrote, "I lost the best part of my life."
Her third and final marriage, in 1962, was to the British banker Kenneth Keith, who became Baron Keith of Castleacre, making her Lady Keith. She left him in 1972, after a decade of marriage.
Like Babe Paley and C.Z. Guest, Keith was part of Truman Capote's innermost social circle for decades, and, like them, she became one of his casualties.
When Capote's unfinished novel Answered Prayers thinly disguised his high society friends for public consumption, Keith recognized herself in the mordant, gossiping Lady Ina Coolbrith.
Unlike C.Z. Guest, who forgave him, Keith banished Capote from her life entirely and never spoke to him again.
One biographer, Sally Bedell Smith, later argued the real model for Lady Coolbrith may in fact have been Pamela Harriman, the very woman who had taken Hayward from her, an irony neither Capote nor his subjects ever bothered to untangle in public.
Keith spent her final years in New York, traveling and keeping to a quieter social life than the one that had once made her famous. A lifelong smoker, she died of lung cancer in Manhattan on 16 April 1990, at seventy two.