RIP: Nan Kempner

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"My dear," she said in an interview in Vanity Fair earlier this year: "Wait till
you discover the wheelchair. You go to the front of every single line. They push
you right through… I tell you, it's First Class Plus."

Nan Kempner
(Filed: 06/07/2005)

Nan Kempner, the New York society hostess who has died aged 74,
inspired the novelist Tom Wolfe to coin the term "social X-ray" when describing
the skeletal ladies-who-lunch on the Upper East Side in Bonfire of the Vanities;
addicted to haute couture, she entertained on a grand scale, whilst fitting in
regular trips to London, Paris, Gstaadt, Venice and the Caribbean for fashion
shows, parties, skiing and sun-bathing.

An insatiable shopper - for nearly four decades she never missed
the couture shows in Paris - Nan Kempner's love of fashion had begun at an early
age. Her mother, she would say, dressed "divinely", while her grandmother "was
unbelievable. I come from a long line of clotheshorses". She bought her first
couture gown - a white satin sheath dress with a white satin mink-trimmed coat -
in 1958, from the first collection by the young Yves Saint Laurent, who was
designing for Dior.

Her mother refused to pay for the dress so, as she later
recalled, "I cried and cried until I got them down to a price I could afford".
Saint Laurent, keen to meet such a tenacious potential customer, asked to see
her, and the two became lifelong friends. She went on to attend every one of his
couture shows, missing only one, when her father died.

It was her love affair with couture that fuelled Nan Kempner's
desire to stay so thin, as she was then able to fit into the samples worn by the
models, which were usually half-price. But money was no object and her husband,
an investment banker, "was very generous and understanding". Over the years she
built up a collection of gowns that was worthy of a museum.

"My husband, Tommy, thinks it's hysterical," she said recently,
"because he used to think it was an extravagance, and it now turns out that I
was an art collector!" When her collection outgrew their 16-room apartment in
Manhattan, she converted their children's former bedrooms into walk-in
wardrobes.

Somewhat surprisingly for someone who looked as if she survived
on a diet of celery sticks, in 2001 Nan Kempner published RSVP: Menus for
Entertaining from People Who Really Know How. With advice on how to serve foie
gras in "a compact penthouse on the Left Bank", and feeding your guests after a
boar hunt in the Loire Valley, it was more like Hello! magazine than a recipe
book, illustrated by glossy photographs of Nan Kempner's friends in their
luxurious houses.

But the life of a glittering clotheshorse was not without its
hazards. The Kempners lost millions of dollars worth of jewellery in a burglary
during the 1970s; Nan Kempner had only just replaced it when she was held up at
gunpoint in her apartment and robbed again. She also had to undergo several
operations after she broke her hip, having tripped in her bedroom whilst wearing
a pair of 8-inch John Galliano heels.

But she faced every tribulation with equanimity and when
emphysema, brought on by years of heavy smoking, rendered her unable to move
without a portable oxygen tank, she was typically upbeat. "My dear," she said in
an interview in Vanity Fair earlier this year: "Wait till you discover the
wheelchair. You go to the front of every single line. They push you right
through… I tell you, it's First Class Plus."

Nan Field Schlesinger was born in San Francisco on July 24 1930.
Her father, Albert "Speed" Schlesinger, was a successful car dealer, while her
mother, Irma, was a "self-feeder, meaning she had her own dough". Nan was an
only child, as were both her parents, and she grew up in splendour at Pacific
Heights, one of San Francisco's richest neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, the house
was regularly burgled; on one occasion her mother lost two mink coats, a mink
jacket, a sealskin coat and a baby lamb coat.

Young Nan's lonely childhood was relieved by playing with her
vast collection of dolls and attending fashion shows with her mother. But at the
age of 12 she was sent to a diet specialist after she was deemed to have put on
too much weight. Ordered to eat "sandwiches" where the bread had been replaced
by iceberg lettuce leaves, she consoled herself by poring over recipe books
containing descriptions of forbidden rich food.

After the Sarah Dix Hamlin School for Girls and Connecticut
College for Women, Nan spent a year at the Sorbonne before meeting Thomas Lenox
Kempner, a member of the German-Jewish aristocracy of Manhattan. They married in
1952 and their relationship thrived on the understanding that she travelled to
all the fashion shows and bought extravagantly, while turning a blind eye to his
occasional infidelities. She claimed not to mind, she said in a recent interview
in Vanity Fair, "as long as they're attractive". They did separate briefly after
he had a seven-year relationship with a fellow socialite whom she described as
"that disgusting woman".

Never one for political correctness, on one occasion Nan Kempner
caused a furore after saying in print that she loathed fat people. But on the
whole she was refreshingly self-deprecating; her father told her "you'll never
make it on your face, so you'd better be interesting", and she tried her best to
do so.

Nan Kempner served on the boards of several charities and benefit
committees and gave occasional lectures on couture at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York. She had spells as a special editor of Harper's Bazaar magazine,
a design consultant for Tiffany & Co and as an "international
representative" for Christie's. But she admitted that she never knew what to
write when she was filling in travel documents. "I'm not rich enough to be a
real philanthropist," she explained. "And I loathe being called a socialite. So
I write 'housewife'."

Shopping remained her greatest passion. At the age of 72 she
still bought mini-skirts (but only for the beach) and revealed that her recent
purchases had included an Etro bikini with a matching poncho. "I tell people all
the time I want to be buried naked," she once said. "I know there will be a
store where I'm going."

Nan Kempner, who died on Sunday, is survived by her husband, two
sons and a daughter.

(c) Daily Telegraph

Comments

[ex-martinto.livejournal.com]

просто женщина мечты для посетительниц третьяковского проезда. я думаю, все клоны оксаны робски хотели бы до писка прожить свою жизнь именно так, но для этого кроме прочего ведь нужно еще невероятное sense of dignity...

[recordaras.livejournal.com]

Divine...