'You can never be too Rich or too Thin'

 

Nan Kempner, the best known of Manhattan's society hostesses made it her life’s work to test the truth of the Duchess of Windsor’s adage that a woman can never be too rich or too thin. Sadly one of the great society icons  died on Sunday, July 3, at her Manhattan apartment. Having known her socially for some years now, I have, like many others wondered how she managed to stay so wafer thin. "My chef " she said to me once with a wink. For lesser mortals like myself, hiring a chef was the beginning of my demise into constant weight gain, and trying to copy Nan by developing a smoking habit, only resulted in a very chronic and politically incorrect cough. I will miss her.

Kempner, the most famous of the New York’s elite - the "social X-rays" as Tom Wolfe dubbed them for their fat-free frames - claimed not to be really well-off, having to make do with a 16-room apartment on Park Avenue and a reputation for single-handedly keeping the haute couture industry in business.

She was thought to have the world’s largest private collection of couture wear, including 250 pieces by Yves Saint Laurent alone. "I spend more than I should," was all she would say coyly, "and less than I want." She was far more ready to talk about her figure, which the designer Valentino compared to a clothes hanger, though in truth it had rather fewer curves. Standing 5ft 9in (1.75m) tall, she weighed just 7st (45kg), testimony to the effects of daily exercise, a lifetime of cigarettes and the desire to look good in an £8,000 dress. Willpower was all in Nan Kempner’s world, which was lit largely by flashbulbs. "I like to be noticed," she once remarked. "I’ve worked hard at it."

To those who mocked her - and there were many - hers was a way of life that was entirely frivolous. She extolled the virtues of plastic surgery and did not help her cause by observations such as "There is really no excuse for anyone to be ugly." Notoriously, she said that she "loathed fat people". Yet her detractors failed to appreciate that she was simply continuing to live in the more stylish age in which she had been raised, a time in which women had few claims to be noticed except for their social accomplishments.

She was almost the last example of the society hostesses of her youth - the likes of Babe Paley and Evangeline Bruce - and it was all the more remarkable that in an era when fame is increasingly proportionate to vulgarity, she should have continued to be celebrated at all.

Despite her waspish gossip and preoccupation with status, Kempner was never vulgar, and there was always a self-deprecating edge to her. She liked to tell the story of how, having been held up at gunpoint in her home, almost the first call she made was to her jeweller, Kenneth Jay Lane. "Kenny," she said, "I’ll take three of everything."

She was born Nan Field Schlesinger in San Francisco in 1930. Her father owned California’s highly profitable Ford motor car dealership and her mother’s consuming interest was fashion. Although Nan took after her father’s looks ("You’ll never make it on your face," he told her, "so you’d better make yourself interesting"), it was her mother’s influence which won out. While she never acquired her grandmother’s taste for matching silk sheets and bed jackets, by her late teens she had absorbed her mother’s precepts that there were only three colours - red, black and grey - and had been chided in person by her style idol, Lauren Bacall, for wearing easy-fitting shoes. Nan spent most of the rest of her life in high heels.

Kempner embarked on her first diet at the age of 12, when a love of sport and kitchen scraps had rocketed her weight up to 10st (63kg). Two years later she took up smoking. Every morning of her life thereafter she trod the scales and monitored her meals accordingly. Though there were those who thought that the cook she employed for 45 years had one of the lighter workloads in New York, in fact Kempner ate sparingly only of carbohydrates and, having risen promptly at 10, began her day with a slice of toast slathered in peanut butter.

After schooling in San Francisco, she had studied art history for a year at Connecticut College for Women and then spent a year in Paris, where she took painting lessons from Fernand Léger. He, realising that there was little point in teaching her anything, gave her her money back.

At 19, she attended her first couture show. Seeing a white sheath dress with mink collar and cuffs, she asked the price and burst into tears on hearing it. A young Saint Laurent gave her the piece to dam the flood and from then on she was his most devoted client. That she could wear the smallest of sizes meant that she was often able to buy outfits at half price and soon they were seen to advantage in Gstaad, Venice, London or on the Côte d’Azur. When her grown-up children left home, she turned their bedrooms into wardrobes.

The funds for her sprees were provided by her husband, Thomas Kempner, the chairman of Loeb, his family firm of bankers, whom she married in 1952. She designed the wedding dress herself. Soon afterwards they moved to London, where with rationing still in force she speedily learned to wheedle an extra egg out of the grocer with a kiss.

On her return to New York, society life became Nan Kempner’s raison d’être. She became a fixture in the social columns, at every party of note (and many that were not) and in the best-dressed lists. In the 1970s she was a regular at Studio 54 and was painted by Warhol. Her prominence brought her work as a consultant for the jeweller Tiffany and for French Vogue and she was an "international representative" for Christie’s. Her real business, however, was entertainment. She was noted for the spaghetti parties she gave at her apartment, where, next to the Picasso and the Magrittes, might be seen the Reagans and Diana, Princess of Wales. Such contacts were put to good use. She gave her time to many charities, and was credited by the Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital with having helped raise more than £50 million for cancer research.

In 2000 Kempner published RSVP, a collection of menus by friends. Though for some years she had suffered from emphysema, which obliged her to breathe with a portable oxygen tank (carried in a suitably chic bag), latterly she had begun to reinvent herself as an authority on style and etiquette. Her tips included: "Never forget your gloves" and "Jewels - put them all on, then take half off."

Three years ago, she and her husband - their marriage, she acknowledged, had not been the perfect façade she projected - gave a ball for 476 of their closer friends to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. "In my dreams," she said later, "I go to that party every night."

Comments

[gringoman]

it fails me to understand how a lady with such good taste could want to wear top like that white one. It did not do her any favour at all.

Posted by: Schulenburg-Taylor, Elisabeth | Tuesday, January 02, 2007 at 03:29 PM

I agree totally. A sophisticated society hostess of a certain age, and then some, like this Nan Kempner, showing us more than we want to see---or that she should want us to see. How could she?

But Alexandra's write-up, dating from my pre-ATB period, was excellent. It reminds one of what she can do and for some reason won't do anymore, at least around this venue. I suspect she's saving the bon-bons for others, delegating us to haul "the white man's burden." Has she let the boors convince her that the haute monde is too "frivolous" for ATB, even if it's really more serious than they are?

[Schulenburg-Taylor, Elisabeth]

It fails me to understand how a lady with such good taste could want to wear top like that white one. It did not do her any favour at all.