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?
(Page 3 of 4)
SLOANE SIMPSON TITLED ANOTHER PIECE OF THE FILM she had saved “Ski Acapulco,” as if it were a road movie, and indeed, the two people appearing in it look like movie stars. There is a Mexican man with a perfect tan and a �awless torso, and there is a beautiful woman in a bathing cap, as long legged and trim waisted as a twenty-year-old. It takes a while for the action to get started: Sloane learns to get up on water skis, Sloane and the man ski, the man does elaborate tricks on skis, and the bay of Acapulco, sans the high-rise hotels that would soon line it, serves as a romantically conspiratorial backdrop. Judging from the body language and silent laughter of the film, it’s apparent that the man was one of Sloane’s many lovers there.
“This is an escape place,” said one longtime Acapulco resident. “It always has been.” The Acapulco of the late fifties and early sixties was a society in transition: It looked like the end of the road but was, in fact, the beginning of one. Home to one of the most wildly beautiful coastlines in the world—the white sand beaches are encircled by perilous cliffs and intractable vegetation—it is effusively sensual and incessantly sensuous, a place for people who want to forget, either for a short time or an extended period. For many years there were no roads leading into Acapulco: In the forties it was a glamorous hideout for assorted mobsters, movie stars, corporate honchos in need of R and R, curiously titled Europeans, and, of course, Texans with their own planes. “It was the greatest place in the world, and it will never happen again,” said gallery owner Jan Lavender.
With the creation of the road from Mexico City in 1955, however, Acapulco began a slow transition, maintaining the aura of romance and exclusivity as it appealed to larger and larger groups of people. The mountainside resort known as Las Brisas, for instance, offered postage stamp—sized swimming pools outside each and every casita, partly to meet the romantic needs of honeymooners but also, in the words of a former manager, “for the midwestern millionaire who couldn’t swim and his wife who had varicose veins and wouldn’t go to the beach.” It became, literally, a playground for the rich, a beautiful place where the beautiful people built beautiful homes in which to entertain other beautiful people, those who shuttled between Marbella, Monte Carlo, Palm Springs, and other hot spots on the social circuit.
Not that any of this mattered at all to Sloane Simpson when she arrived in Acapulco in 1960. Like so many people drawn to the place in the early days, she had simply run out of options. New York had nothing to offer her, and she had been feeling cramped sharing the New Hope house with her mother, who had been widowed in 1946. Then, on a visit to Acapulco, she dined with the manager of the Pierre Marqués, a new J. Paul Getty—owned luxury hotel there. He had a peculiar proposal: Would Sloane want to run his gift shop? If this proposition seemed beneath a woman who had been the first lady of New York and the wife of the ambassador to Mexico, well, those titles hadn’t done much for her lately. Sloane bolted for Acapulco. It was, after all, one of the few places in the world where the presence of a former glamour queen behind a hotel gift shop counter would not seem extraordinary.
In fact, Simpson had never abandoned Mexico and by then had earned the particular psychic credentials necessary to settle in Acapulco. Along with being in rather desperate economic straits, in the mid-fifties she had fallen in love with the very married father-in-law of Marianne Rivas, who would later become a close friend. The prominent, prosperous Mario Rivas owned two hotels, conveniently located in Mexico City and Acapulco. Traveling with her mother, Sloane met her lover frequently, to the growing consternation of the Mexican aristocracy. In Acapulco, for instance, they began each day by skiing across the bay, an action that may or may not have been responsible for the affair’s being written up in True Magazine, spreading the scandal to the States. “She really thought he was going to divorce his wife and marry her,” said one observer. “That was not Mexican. They just thought she was silly.” The ultra-Catholic Mexicans who had once loved Simpson now turned on her—to them she was a home wrecker and a tramp. In America it tarnished her reputation for refinement and elegance. (“A fatal mistake,” in the somewhat hyperbolic opinion of auto rental magnate and old friend Warren Avis.) But as they’d say in Acapulco, where men stashed their girlfriends, her behavior simply added to her consequence.
Hence the Pierre Marqués. “It was a terrible boutique,” recalled a close friend of Sloane’s. “Dreadful sandals and guayabera shirts.” Ever the professional, Sloane spruced it up, spending her time fashioning party gowns to order and delivering them to cruise ship customers herself. She even attempted to design the perfect bikini—early on she had scandalized the Mexicans by being the first to wear one on the beach in Acapulco—berating her seamstresses and exhorting a close friend in New York to find the best underwiring for the bra tops. “She had a hard time getting started,” said John Whyte. “She was starving there.” In fact, when she left the Pierre Marqués to open a shop of her own, her Mexican partner left her in a lurch by pulling out, and the business collapsed. In desperation Sloane arranged a trip back to the U.S. in 1964 to finally ask O’Dwyer, with whom she had remained friendly, for money. Going through customs she got the news: “You’re Mrs. O’Dwyer?” the agent asked, eyeing her passport. “That embezzler husband of yours just died.”
At that point a more cautious person might have questioned the value of living entirely according to one’s own rules, but Sloane just downsized: The good family silver that had once been featured at Gracie Mansion and the embassy in Mexico City was now used for smaller gatherings, she traded apartments with friends in New York and Los Angeles when she needed a trip, she exchanged her designer clothes for big straw hats and colorful native garb that were, conveniently, appropriate for her new locale. If casual love affairs had left her virtue a bit tarnished—“I’ve had the morals of an alley cat,” she would confess many years later—she had not lost her ability to charm. A man she had encouraged at a beach sing-along would subsequently receive a songbook in the mail; a man who had lost touch with his daughter decades back would find that Sloane had orchestrated a reunion. By then nicotine had coarsened her laugh and deepened the lines in her face, but she remained game for anything. “I would have done anything for her,” said Warren Avis.
Still, Sloane was in a bind. She consulted a numerologist, who suggested that she add an e to her first name. Acceding, she told a friend, “Maybe it will make things better.”
IN AN ADVERTISEMENT FEATURING SLOANE SIMPSON that ran in the sixties, she is supposed to look like she is having a good time. She is wearing what became a trademark straw hat, a scarf, large earrings, and a Pucci print or a variation of one. One of those ersatz antique telephones is pressed to her ear, and her eyes, fringed with thick false eyelashes, are as wide as her smile, as if she were overhearing or passing on a delectable piece of gossip. The headline on the poster is “Sloan Simpson exposes Acapulco.” The ad touts a new service of Braniff International: Call Sloan.
“For years an exclusive Jet Set resort,” the copy began, “Acapulco has long been shrouded in mystery. Now Sloan Simpson, a charter member of the Jet Set, exposes their innermost secrets.” What followed was a sampling of the tips Acapulco travelers could glean by simply calling Simpson upon their arrival, from restaurant listings to baby-sitters to other, more esoteric concerns. “Where can I find a handsome, devilish, charming man who looks like an El Greco and cares only for me? In heaven. Do I have to bring my mother? Only if she is young for her age, likes to swing, is good looking and will not cramp your style.”
The poster was the creation of Wells, Rich, and Greene, the premier ad agency of the time, for its most visible client, Dallas-based Braniff International. In 1965 the carrier inaugurated a �ight to Acapulco, the first U.S. company to do so. Texans were behind the deal: Dallasite Harding Lawrence ran the airline, and the route was made at the urging of Braniff board member and Dallas financier Troy Post, who had designs on Acapulco. It was Lawrence’s ad executive wife, Mary Wells, who made Braniff the most stylish airline in the sky—in an age of regulated fares and routes, the company painted its planes bold colors and dressed its stews in Pucci-designed uniforms to attract status-conscious customers. Overnight the �ight south became the airborne equivalent of a tony Texas car pool: Originating in Dallas, it stopped in Houston and then in San Antonio before moving on to Mexico, picking up the state’s fastest crowd at every stop. Clearly, Braniff needed a very special person to be its public face in Acapulco.
Sloane’s salvation, then, was not the numerologist but Mary Wells, who saw success in institutionalizing what came naturally to Sloane. All the chips in her social veneer—the ex-husbands, the reduced circumstances, the insistence on doing things her way—looked good in Acapulco, where it could be perceived that Sloane had thrown off the burdens of city life to live free south of the border. By the mid-sixties Acapulco had shifted from a society of individualists to a society of followers (“Watch me,” international socialite Gloria Guinness once told a friend. “I’m gonna tell all these people they should cut off their blue jeans and fringe ’em and they’ll do it”). And Sloane, pushing fifty but still beautiful, was perfect for the carefree but sophisticated image Braniff, and Acapulco, wanted to project.
My Library
