Short Cuts: Episode I 
Sloane, Alone
She had been a famous fashion model from Dallas, a glamorous first lady of New York, and the queen of the Acapulco jet set—but when she died last year at age eighty, hardly anyone even remembered who she was. How did Sloane Simpson start with so much and end up with so little?
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New York City and beautiful Texas women have always done well by each other, and Sloane was probably one of the first to sense the mutually advantageous relationship. New Yorkers like �air and personality, qualities that the ambitious daughters of wealthy Texans had to spare; they couldn’t apply their smarts to running the family businesses, so they developed that peculiarly feminine leadership quality known as style. In the forties Sloane’s insistence on doing things her way attracted the attention of New York society: “You know,” she told a friend, looking for something to wear in the garden, “the cowboys wear those denim pants.” By wearing her Levi’s in public, Sloane launched an enduring trend. Her taste won her a spot on the international best-dressed list, her moves a job on every good runway from Hattie Carnegie to Pauline Trigere. “She wasn’t arrogant, but she was very proud,” said the legendary fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, a longtime Simpson friend. “She was completely self-assured.”
In a post-war world in which attachment and domesticity were the social norms, Sloane was a free spirit, the embodiment of a secret female fantasy to go it alone. Simpson was brie�y married to a polo player named Carroll Dewey Hipp—an arrangement friends suggest was largely to appease her socially demanding mother. After that episode, however, Sloane seemed far more selective. One heartsick Brazilian suitor tumbled off a horse during a date in Central Park and was so mortified he apologized to Sloane with a large aquamarine ring. “He was a nice man to know,” recalled a woman acquainted with them both. “He would have given part of Brazil to be married to her.” Sloane, however, kept the ring and declined the offer. “She never pretended she would marry him,” the friend explained in her defense.
In fact, Sloane did not like doing anything she did not want to do, which is why she almost missed what would become the crucial moment in her life. Asked to appear at a fashion show at the Grand Central Palace convention center in 1948, Sloane wavered. Once there, however, she must have brightened when Eleanor Lambert introduced her to the mayor of New York. (“I wanna meet the brunette,” he had said.) The press certainly appreciated the magic of the moment, the point at which Sloane’s charmed life took on even more charming dimensions: She was one of the prettiest models in New York; he was the raucous William O’Dwyer, an enchanting Irish immigrant who had brawled his way up from street cop to Brooklyn district attorney before being elected mayor in 1945. Because O’Dwyer was a 58-year-old widowed public official and Sloane was a 32-year-old divorcée, the love affair was carried on in some secrecy—“The romance of Mayor O’Dwyer of New York and Miss Sloan Simpson was a mystery again tonight after both spent the day … denying wedding rumors,” noted the Times—but after Sloane received dispensation from the New York Archdiocese, the two were married in a small service in Florida in 1949. Manhattan reacted as only a style-obsessed city can. Miss Simpson Selects Blue for Her Wedding Ensemble trumpeted the Times’ front-page headline, describing in the place usually reserved for global news her navy-blue suit, blue velvet beret, and blue suede shoes with matching blue pocketbook.
In short order Sloane stepped into what may have been one of the most important jobs for a woman in the U.S., that of first lady of New York City. She appeared on the cover of Life in a cowboy hat and pearls, presaging Jackie Kennedy with a tour of the redecorated quarters at Gracie Mansion, Manhattan’s mayoral residence. She borrowed Irish paintings from the Metropolitan Museum, she hauled out her own tea service when she found none there, she rearranged the drawing room seating so that more people could sit close to the mayor. In social New York, these were seismic changes. “[S]he charmed politicians with her good looks and her ability to be gay without being a �ibbertigibbet,” Life wrote. “Friends of ebullient Bill O’Dwyer say he is thriving, as husbands should, under his young wife’s shrewd management. … ‘I,’ she says, ‘am the ‘no’ department.’”
Unfortunately, Sloane had taken on her Manhattan role just as her husband’s show was closing. Just one month after O’Dwyer’s 1949 reelection, a Brooklyn newspaper began a series describing local gambling operations and police payoffs that implicated the mayor. (Though Simpson insisted on her husband’s innocence throughout her life, one union representative would testify at a corruption hearing that he had given O’Dwyer an envelope containing $10,000 cash on the porch at Gracie Mansion.) Seven months after the election and after a Bronx Democratic boss interceded with President Harry Truman, O’Dwyer and his lovely bride were sent packing to Mexico. The mayor had been named ambassador, and Sloane Simpson O’Dwyer’s Mexican fairy tale had begun.
ONE LARGE SIXTEEN-MILLIMETER REEL-TO-REEL FILM of Sloane Simpson’s life remains, many hundred feet of which are devoted to her life in Mexico City. For a woman in exile, she looks quite cheerful: Here she is, hosting a party on the embassy grounds, the enormous nineteenth-century mansion decked out in huge �ags, the lawn sporting women in small hats and wasp-waisted dresses. In another segment she stars in a newsreel, “Hats for an Ambassador’s Wife.” Later she picnics at resorts near the capitol while O’Dwyer, in his bathing suit and smoking a pipe, jaws with other men in bathing suits smoking cigars. Sometimes Sloane looks anxious as she hustles people down a receiving line, but usually she looks dazzling, ever so happy to be there. “At first she really loved Mexico,” said one old friend.
Mexico must have appealed to her in the way it appeals to so many Americans who see a country of infinite resources and unfathomable beauty that isn’t living up to its potential—they assume they can improve it. Sloane arrived with silver place settings for 36 and the belief that she could change the natural order of things with a dinner party. In many ways, she did: She invited prominent Mexican families to embassy parties, she insisted that women be allowed to sit next to men other than their husbands at dinner. “She was the first woman who really had an active part in the embassy,” said Acapulco architect Ricardo Rojas Cañamar. “In those days women were part of the furniture. She broke with protocol.” She even tried to speak Spanish, fracturing the language in ways that charmed her new countrymen. “Me gusta montar caballeros,” she told the president of Mexico, trying to describe her love of horseback riding but accidentally describing another passion. “I like to ride men,” she’d said. Mexico, like Manhattan, fell in love: La Embajatriz, they called her, the ambassadress; in 1951 the Mexico City News even named her woman of the year.
“Sloane was macho,” said one observer. “Sloane was bravado,” topped another. In fact, as so often happens to those who try to change Mexico, the country had seduced Sloane with its ease and sensuality. Soon she was touting native crafts, affecting matador pants, and even trying her hand at bullfighting. “I really don’t fight bulls,” she would correct friends. “They’re cows.”
But if Mexico provided Sloane with a new way of life, O’Dwyer had no such luck. Called back to the U.S. to testify before a Congressional hearing, he was tainted by rumors that he would have to resign his post. He drank and with the drinking grew more and more suspicious of his beautiful young wife, who could tolerate anything but crowding. O’Dwyer’s jealousy eventually poisoned the marriage; later Sloane would tell friends that they might have stayed together if she had been able to stand up to him, but she could not. By the fall of 1952 she was making headlines again, this time denying divorce rumors as she had once denied reports of her impending marriage. “I never even knew there were such rumors until I was questioned by reporters when my train stopped at St. Louis,” she told the press on a visit back East. But by the end of 1953 the news was official: Simpson and O’Dwyer had been granted a temporary separation by Mexico City’s archbishop. Their civil divorce became final in 1954.
Back in circulation, Sloane took off with her mother to Spain, where, to the delight of the international press, she continued her bullfighting career and denied rumors of new romances, including one with the Argentine consul. (On the subject of romance, Simpson often tended toward the opaque. Quizzed about a reputed love affair with a British lord, she declared, “I’ve never been to London.”)
With her divorce final, Sloane returned to the States and a fallow period. She had divorced twice and had run through her money. Her family fortune was long gone, and she had refused any alimony from O’Dwyer. “She thought since she was the one who did the leaving she shouldn’t take any alimony,” said close friend and former model John Whyte. She launched herself as an actress on television and stage but, despite her whiskey voice and tempting sashay, found the limits of the glamour that had once been such a universal passport. (“Wears a trench coat with aplomb,” noted one review.) She regrouped and styled herself as a “celebrity model,” tutoring the likes of Grace Kelly down the runway and toward a Hollywood career. “Sloane wanted to do all that but couldn’t,” said one friend.
Eventually Sloane retreated to a house in New Hope, Pennsylvania, gardened and landscaped, hung her framed news clippings and magazine covers on what she christened her “egomaniac stairway,” and tried, at 44, to make peace with obscurity. But the sixties were beginning, and that was not her style.
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