Well, where do I start? Nancy “Slim” Keith was one of those New York women that they don’t make ’em like anymore, and “’em,” in this case, is everyone. In the vein of Diana Vreeland’s famous line, “There’s only one very good life and that’s the life you know you want and make it yourself,” Keith was both charm incarnate and largely self-created—helped along by a series of advantageous marriages (the last of which was to Sir Kenneth Keith, which left her well-kept and titled Lady Keith), the various pleasures and pitfalls of which she detailed extensively in a very much worth reading 1990 autobiography, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life. (Editors note: worth it for the photos alone.) One of the book’s anecdotes? She went to see Clark Gable off as he departed for Europe in 1947 and later received a postcard from him: “You were wonderful.” When her jealous paramour (and eventual second husband) Leland Hayward asked just what exactly she had done so wonderfully? “I was just wonderful being wonderful.” And that was pretty much true.
Introduced into Hollywood society by actor William Powell at age seventeen, she soon met William Randolph Hearst and was well on her way: While married to director Howard Hawks, she “discovered” a young Lauren Bacall on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and had her cast in Hawks’s To Have and Have Not. “For [Hawks], I was a fabulous armpiece, the ultimate decoration, the embodiment of the Hawks woman. It wasn’t about the woman herself, it was about a look. Howard liked a no-nonsense femininity. His woman could be chic, she could be sexy, but you’d better believe she could also make a ham and hoe a row of beans,” writes Keith, and Bacall’s character vamps and flirts with Bogart in the film wearing Keith’s clothes and speaking Keith’s lines, including the one which lives in infamy and silver-screen dreams: “You know how to whistle, don’t you?”(An aside: I once had a boyfriend who called me “Slim.” I never should have ended it.)
But about those clothes: There’s a reason that Keith is an evergreen style icon. Out of a slew of society swans—and they are legion—she epitomized a certain sort of proto-American sportswear ideal: the Northern Californian all-American dream girl; cool, but not one of Hitchcock’s ice queens. She wasn’t as “perfect” as Babe Paley or as hyper-chic as Nan Kempner, but she held her own, opting for a long, lean silhouette: sporty, easy clothes that accented her lithe figure and delicate features that she could still move in. She looked as at home holding court with Vreeland at a cocktail party as shooting pheasant with longtime pal Ernest Hemingway, as comfortable clinched with Truman Capote at the Stork Club as cavorting with Clark Gable. Of her appearance, she writes: “It was about good looks, brains, taste, and style . . . The only ingredient I brought to this recipe was the recognition that, while you have to be natural, you also have to be different . . . In my day, different meant not having your hair done in a pompadour and adorning it with a snood, or not trying to hide your intelligence behind a sea of frills. I somehow knew there was a glut in that market. I opted for a scrubbed-clean, polished look. I thought it was more important to have an intelligence that showed, a humor that never failed, and a healthy interest in men.” Look, if those aren’t words to live by, I don’t know what are. Go forth and channel the ultimate American dream girl.
