[GennadiyRom]

April 19, 2007

Present at the Creation, and End,
of Nouvelle Society
By GUY TREBAY



D. Gorton/The New York Times
LEADING LADY Pat Buckley, with her dog, Beep, at home in 1976.





Larry Morris/The New York Times
Mrs. Buckley, in pants and a coat by Calvin Klein in 1975, the year she was named to the Best Dressed Hall of Fame.



AT a certain point in the evolution of any social group, the décor changes. Death claims the fixtures of one period, and they are naturally replaced. This is not necessarily cause for general lamentation, and yet there is reason to think that the death on Sunday of Pat Buckley, the fund-raiser, socialite and wife of the conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., at 80, marked not just the end of one privileged woman’s journey, but perhaps also of a particularly lively and irreplaceable era in New York.

It is not just that, as Oscar de la Renta said on Tuesday, Pat Buckley “had a big life.” It is not, as the Vogue contributor William Norwich remarked, that Mrs. Buckley belonged to a particular group of prominent women reared to “know food, know how to run a house, know how to garden, know how to decorate,” and also raise millions for charitable causes. And it is not just that she represented a time when wealthy women actually paid for their own clothes and were not generally available as props to be hired along with the cocktail glasses to dress up the openings of designer boutiques.

It is that Mrs. Buckley, her friends said, understood the difference between merely having wealth and putting it to interesting use. This is probably not an insignificant distinction in a city like our own.

“Pat Buckley was probably the last of the breed who did not have self-aggrandized fame,” said Richard Keith Langham, a decorator who collaborated with Mrs. Buckley in fitting out her Park Avenue maisonette with acid-green walls and black ceilings, dining chairs covered in chartreuse spotted leopard-print satin and Aubusson tapestries turned into rugs.

She may have enjoyed a friendly discount when she bought clothes from good friends like Mr. de la Renta and Bill Blass. But she never employed a personal publicist, having obtained through marriage a lifetime of good copy; never employed a stylist, typically did her own makeup and arranged her slightly wild looking mane with the aid of dime-store products like Dippity-do.
“Now, we’re in a faux time, with these girls borrowing the dress and borrowing the jewels,” said Louise Grunwald, the widow of the editor and ambassador Henry Grunwald. “But Pat was real, and her type really doesn’t exist anymore.” That it is unlikely to return almost goes without saying. “There was the leisure of time before, and realistically no one has that time anymore,” added Ms. Grunwald, referring to what now seems like the long Jamesian hours in which to devote oneself to dressing well, appointing a fine household and then filling it with lively company. But, like Kitty Carlisle Hart, another social fixture who died yesterday at 96 (her obituary appears on Page C13), Mrs. Buckley seemed to have found a deft way to balance a taste for the good life with a tacit obligation to perform good works; it was estimated that, during the 30 years she served as a chairwoman of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s annual gala, she raised an estimated $75 million for the hospital.

“The society thing now is all about a club or a restaurant,” said Paul Wilmot, the publicist and a longtime friend of the Buckleys. With Pat Buckley, as Mr. Wilmot claimed, there was no particular social program and no more aggressive dinner table agenda than to secure good gossip since, in social terms, anybody who rated an invitation had probably already arrived.

“Pat liked to do things at home,” Mr. Wilmot added. “She called herself an Arab wife, making sure everything was perfect for everybody, good food, good wine.” There were cigarettes in monogrammed sterling cups on the dinner table (her own brand was Merit). There were soufflés prepared by the chef the Buckleys employed for decades. There were gin rummy games in the library after dinner, at 2 cents a point.

“Obviously, a lot of people aren’t set up to do it,” said Mr. Wilmot, meaning live as the Buckleys did, and this is certainly true of those among us whose forebears somehow forgot to become barons in oil (Mr. Buckley’s family) or timber (her Canadian father) and thus arrange to endow us with private incomes. But wealth alone can hardly account for the command Mrs. Buckley exercised for decades over a certain stratum of social New York.

“She was larger than life, with the cigarette going and the giant hair and the big eyes and the oversized jewelry,” Mr. Wilmot said. Like many people born into great privilege, she was naturally unabashed in her eccentricity, driving an enormous stretch Lincoln that once bore a Pat Buchanan sticker on the bumper; commandeering a stranger’s limousine when caught outside Bloomingdale’s in the rain; trying to run a flock of Canada geese off her Connecticut lawn by installing stereo speakers that trumpeted the cry of a dying swan; reveling in the loopy pronouncements of her friends.

“I loathe fat people,” Mrs. Buckley’s close pal, the late socialite and clotheshorse Nan Kempner, once remarked to a tabloid reporter. “I really have a hang-up. I can’t stand flesh. You know, that jiggly-wiggly fat.” And while the press subjected the emaciated socialite Mrs. Kempner to a roasting, Mrs. Buckley stood firm by her friend. “One of the things I like about Nan is that she is so utterly, totally, deliciously politically incorrect,” Mrs. Buckley said.

Does it signify the end of civilization that social arrival in New York now is orchestrated by hired handlers and validated by paparazzi? Not really. Does it really matter that there are no obvious replacements for fixtures like Nan Kempner, who died in 2005, or Pat Buckley — women whom Harold Koda, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, characterized as “pronounced in their personalities, their tastes, and personas”? Perhaps not.

Yet it is worth pointing out that, lacking any real aristocracy, New York will always have a place for outsized characters like Mrs. Buckley, women able to serve as self-appointed arbiters, to add scale and theater and relief to the horizon, to maintain codes of urbane behavior and to keep alive some of the city’s core myths.

“She was the most sophisticated human being I’ve ever met,” said Peter Rogers, the retired advertising executive famous for creating the campaign, “What Becomes a Legend Most,” for Blackglama mink, advertisements that featured many of the great Hollywood stars and Broadway legends of the 20th century. “Pat was fabulous looking. She was right-to-the core funny. She had standards, a good heart and glamour.” She was the sort of person whom, he added “you wanted to toast anytime she walked into a room.”



Mario Tama/Getty Images
ON THE TOWN Pat Buckley, with her husband, William, in 2002.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[GOLAGLULT]

What a duchess. They just don't make 'em like that anymore.

Tributes from those who knew her here:

http://TinyURL.com/2af9lj