A Good Time Was Had, (Bill and Babe Paley)
[Signed by John Baragwanath] Baragwanath. A Good Time Was Had. First Edition. 1962. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in fair condition. Jacket shows tears, chipping, and a faded spine.
In this unjustly forgotten memoir, John Baragwanath cites his friend (and occasional guardian angel) Bill Paley’s maxim, ‘The past always seems crazy when viewed through the reducing-glass of time.” Had Paley only known. A reducing-glass pales in comparison to the fun house mirror of tell-all biographies, novels based on facts but not tethered to them, and television and movie dramatizations about those associated with Truman Capote. All present fragments of the truth but should be recognized as just that. Consider this another fragment, perhaps with more probative value than most. John Baragwanath not only knew Bill Paley; he adored him. This memoir concerns more than that—Baragwanath was married to the Algonquin Roundtable’s Neysa McMein and had many adventures on his own. Right now, however, it is his fond recollections of Babe and Bill that are a welcome contrast to the more melodramatic aspects of their lives that have become catnip for biographers. In one comic episode, Baragwanath recounts a prank Babe and her friend Judy Montague played on him (with an assist from David O. Selznick). In another chapter, he recalls the kindness Babe and her sister Minnie showed him following his wife Neysa’s death.
“[T]he ‘fabulous’ Cushing girls … are not fabulous at all; they are just charming, well brought up people, somewhat dissimilar in looks, kindly, generous, with a keen sense of fun, but with a deep feeling of social obligation. They love their friends and adore each other.”
--John Baragwanath