"To Truman Capote, Babe represented the ultimate in style. She was the genuine article. “I was madly in love with her,” he said. “I just thought she was absolutely fantastic! She was one of the two or three great obsessions of my life. She was the only person in my whole life that I liked everything about. I consider her one of the three greatest beauties in the world, the other two being Gloria Guinness and Garbo. But Babe, I think, was the most beautiful. She was in fact the most beautiful woman of the twentieth century, and with the single exception of Gloria, who was sort of neck and neck with her, she was also the most chic woman I’ve ever known. When I first saw her, I thought that I had never seen anyone more perfect: her posture, the way she held her head, the way she moved.
“She was the most important person in my life, and I was the most important person in hers. I was her one real friend, the one real relationship she ever had. We were like lovers; she loved me and I loved her. The only person I was ever truly in love with was her. She once joked that her analyst said that she loved me more than anyone else, more than Bill or her children, and he thought she should have an affair with me. It was one of those jokes that wasn’t actually a joke. He was right; we had a perfect rapport. We had an understanding: if I suspected she was feeling bad about something, no matter what time of the year it was, I would send her lilies of the valley, without any note. And she would do the same for me. She once told me that she had bought her funeral plot on Long Island and that there was a place for me, because she wanted me to be buried beside her. I was her sounding board and the only one who really knew her. She always said to me, ‘There’s only one person in the world who could hurt me, really hurt me, and that’s you. You could do something. I don’t know what it would be. But I know that you’re the one person in the world that could ever really, really hurt me."