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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By then, of course, life in Acapulco had become much more elaborate. It hadn’t been enough that local divers jumped off cliffs with �aming torches to entertain the tourists; now there were enormous discos with roofs that opened to display nightly fireworks and go-go girls dancing in silhouette against the mountains. Sex, which had once been casual, had become ritualized: The single upscale whorehouse had been eclipsed by transvestite revues and a booming business in Mexican beachboys, gay and straight. Dallas’ Troy Post was dreaming up Tres Vidas, “the most exclusive country club in the world,” counting Prince Rainier, among others, as a member.
Nowhere was this kind of social complexity more apparent than in the parties. Once it had been enough to hire an instructor to teach the twist to a gathering on the beach. “The parties were wherever you fell down,” explained one veteran. But as more wealthy and world famous people arrived, boredom and competitiveness set in. The necessity arose for caterers: lavish buffets of shrimp, fish, beef, chicken, and pork tenderloin became the norm. The necessity arose for an Acapulco wardrobe: “When a party is formal that means men are supposed to wear socks,” a hostess told the Times, but in fact the women favored designer dresses with their bare feet. Of course, someone had to organize such lavish productions, particularly to control the guest lists. Sloane Simpson of Manhattan, Mexico City, and the bullrings of Spain was clearly the best person for the job. “Acapulco was the last place that you could get into the jet set,” explained John Whyte. “If you were going down to Acapulco and you wanted to know all the right people, you went to Sloane.”
She had started out planning parties, then hustled her way into a job as a stringer for Women’s Wear Daily, and from there her reputation as a hostess grew exponentially. It may be that Sloane triumphed in Acapulco because she was the only person who was not personally interested in social advancement. “I’m tired of sit-down dinners,” she’d grouse, heading for a picnic on the beach. “Let’s have a lie-down lunch.” She took her poodle to a luncheon for Prince Phillip (the dog surreptitiously snacked off the royal’s plate), served egg salad to Halston and Lady Bird, let Prince Albert bunk in her apartment, and walked the perimeter of Merle Oberon’s villa rather than go shoeless on the marble �oors, as the haughty actress demanded. (“Sloane liked to fight,” noted Marianne Rivas, recalling the time she bounced some party crashers from the Lawrences’ table.) She styled her soirées in opposition to the standard Acapulcan crush, setting up small dinners featuring opera and conversation or something even more unusual. Feting macabre cartoonist Charles Addams, for instance, she wore long braids as the Addams Family’s Wednesday and urged people to come in coffins. “Of the whole retinue, Sloane was the most down-to-earth,” said gallery owner E. G. McGrath. “It came naturally to her to be a star.” (It didn’t hurt that Sloane had taken herself out of the husband-hunting sweepstakes. She liked to say that she would marry again when she found a man with wealth and a title but had not yet found one with both qualifications; while clever, this smartly glossed over the fact that such men now had their choice of much, much younger women.)
Soon enough, the Braniff job was making Sloane and Acapulco even bigger celebrities. “Acapulco is Sloane’s scene,” announced the Call Sloan press release. “She lives here throughout the year and is on a first name basis with all the beautiful people . . . Kirk Douglas, Merle Oberon Paliai, Emilio Pucci, Presidents, Dukes, Counts and Earls, Sloane knows them all. She attends their parties and they attend hers.” It was true that when Bill Buckley wanted to read up on the place, he got Sloane’s version of Acapulco history, and when Peter Sellers wanted a British car and driver, it became Sloane’s duty to oblige. But now, as Braniff’s “Ambassador of Fun,” she was also selling Acapulco to the tourists the jet set disdained: writing Acapulco guides, advising travelers where they could see the stallion that danced while its owner did rope tricks or where they could find Mexican food prepared “for gringo taste buds.”
If it was annoying to be at the beck and call of international socialites and ordinary Texas tourists, Sloane never said so. Perhaps it was because, for the first time, she had taken something for herself in the bargain. “She bought this piece of land and decided to do what she had always dreamed,” said architect Ricardo Rojas. The site was high atop a hill overlooking the bay, shaded by an enormous Indian laurel that was home to a family of bats. In the early seventies she built the two-story white brick hybrid, open to the elements like all Mexican houses on the bay side, but meeting the street straightforwardly, without the mitigating Mexican wall. “Sloanial, not colonial” was the way she described it. Simpson scoured the country to decorate it with Mexican crafts and, in the nicest way, called in favors to cover her costs: A pantyhose mogul and his wife for whom she’d provided introductions loaned her the money to build and then leased the house back from her during the social season for an amount that covered the mortgage. “They gave it to her,” explained John Whyte.
By then the Avenida Costera Miguel Alemán, the city’s main drag, was choked with traffic, the high rises lining the bay always full. Acapulco had grown into the most popular resort in Mexico, and Sloane Simpson, one of its primary boosters, had built the city in the best Texas tradition: without investing any of her own capital.
“SHE HAD A CHANCE TO SELL THE HOUSE,” is the oblique way friends describe the beginning of the end of Sloane Simpson’s 39-year love affair with Mexico. She had shared the place in later years with her aged mother; when she died, Sloane found herself longing for less space and responsibility and so moved herself and her still-famous silver service into a high-rise condominium just off the Costera. Ever sanguine, she positioned her sculpture by Acapulco artist Victor Salmones on the balcony overlooking the bay. Titled Free, it depicted a young nude escaping his shackles. “That’s the story of my life,” Sloane liked to say.
But shortly thereafter, it wasn’t: During the eighties Acapulco, so long a place unto itself, had to learn that it was a part of the rest of Mexico. The government turned its attention to building other kinds of resorts, places for people who would never be featured in Women’s Wear Daily, and at the same time imminent financial collapse forced the devaluation of the peso. Locals—including Sloane Simpson—found their money worth half what it had been the day before. Events in the States also diminished her options: Deregulation of the airline business soon forced Braniff into bankruptcy. Sloane, classified as an “international executive,” was supposed to receive a $1,000 a month pension but instead got one check for $500. The beautiful people could move on—and they did—but by the early eighties, Sloane was trapped. It was possible that Mexico began to look very grim to her, a place where the servants she’d costumed in native garb were no longer enchanting but desperately poor, where haggling and payoffs were not charming local customs but bitter re�ections of the struggles of day-to-day life.
Sloane considered New York but could not afford it, finally opting for the other place she thought she might feel most at home, Dallas. In what seemed like a short time, she gave away many of her belongings—“The best asses in New York sat on that chair,” she told one friend as she parted with furniture—and, using the money she had left, bought two condos at 2525 Turtle Creek in 1989. “I don’t think she would have sashayed off to Dallas if she hadn’t thought she’d be Miss Dallas after being Miss Acapulco,” said one society type. “She expected something she did not get.”
Indeed, the wealthy Dallasites who had needed her in Acapulco did not need her back home. They met with her a time or two and then moved on. “I didn’t really know her,” many of them say today. “I just saw her at parties,” say others. “When she came to Dallas, the first few months she got in touch with me and said she’d love to see me and review old times, but we just never did meet,” said Wendy Reves. “One friend said to me, ‘You know, maybe she just never realized you were as big a fish as you are.’”
Sloane pretended not to care—“The last thing I want to be is a society matron,” she liked to say—and began again, busying herself with the opera guild and, when funds allowed, traveling to Europe. Gamely, she learned to shop for designer discounts at Syms, tried to teach herself to pump her own gas, and at McDonald’s even attempted to order her hamburgers rare. True to her nature, she did not complain, even after a doctor diagnosed her pain and fatigue as lung cancer. “She never got bitter,” said Harry Bowman, a former Dallas Morning News arts writer who befriended Simpson in Acapulco and became her closest confidant and caretaker in Dallas. “She never looked back in anger at anything.” That Sloane might have had unfinished business with Mexico was detectable only by the fact that she never went back—she never even placed a long-distance call. Only rarely did Sloane give in to regret at all. “She was a very successful courtesan,” Simpson told Bowman after the death of the famously seductive ambassadress to France, Pamela Harriman. “And I wasn’t.”
“At least she’s pretty,” Simpson said of the nurse she hired when she became too ill to care for herself. On good days Sloane taught her how to arrange a sickbed when visitors were coming and how to set a formal table. “Use your china. Use your silver,” she urged the woman, who confessed to keeping her good things packed away. “You’re going to miss things in life by waiting.”
When the end came, someone asked if she’d like a priest. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” Sloane replied. Her funeral was sparsely attended, but perhaps that was fitting too for a woman who always lived in the moment. “I’ve had a good life,” Sloane told a friend just before slipping away. “If this is the end, so be it.” By then she had become an archetype anyway, her style imitated by everyone from Lynn Wyatt and Ann Richards to every other Texas hostess who ever let out a whiskey laugh or reached for the good silver without really knowing why.
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