Nan in full

April 2005 Bob Colacello

Neither age nor illness, or even scandal, can take the sheer fun Out of being Nan
Kempner, who at 74 has perhaps the largest collection of couture clothing, the
sharpest mouth, and the best attitude of anyone in New York society. Chronicling
Kempner's five-decade romp—a whirl of aristocratic weddings and fancy balls in
Europe, Oscar parties in L.A., and endless glamour evenings with New York's "Cat
Pack"— the famous clotheshorse about her feuds, the near implosion of her
marriage, and life with a silver lining

My dear, wait till you discover the wheelchair. You go to the front of every single
line. They push you right through. They push you right on the plane while everybody
else helps you. I tell you, it's First Class Plus. Of course, I'm of an age where
I'm too old to fly anything but first class, thank you."

Nan Kempner, the world's most famous clotheshorse, was telling me about the latest
developments in her battle with emphysema, a disease of the lungs that would have
any other 74-year-old home in bed, not hopping jets to Europe and the Caribbean. In
the past two years, she has been hospitalized for weeks at a time in Switzerland,
London, and New York, and she now carries a portable oxygen tank—"my air," she
calls it—wherever she goes, which is still pretty much everywhere. Always
notoriously thin—she is said to be the model for Tom Wolfe's "social X rays" in The
Bonfire of the Vanities—she is down to 92 pounds from her usual 110 on a five-foot-
nine frame. Nonetheless, she was unwaveringly cheerful during a two-hour interview
over lunch at her Park Avenue apartment, and as nonchalantly stylish as ever, in a
baby-blue cashmere fisherman's sweater, Levi's 501 jeans, and red moccasins. She
devoured every morsel of her three-course lunch: steamed artichoke, cheese soufflé
with green salad, vanilla ice cream and butter cookies, all whipped up by her
Portuguese cook of 44 years, Silvina Barroso, and impeccably served by her butler,
Barroso's husband, Bernardo. "Oh, I just love this sauce," she gushed, dipping an
artichoke leaf into homemade curried mayonnaise. "Isn't that good? I could eat
mayonnaise on my breakfast cereal. If anybody asked me what my favorite food is, it
would be mayonnaise. Second is Skippy's chunky peanut butter. God, I eat it with
strawberry jam on a croissant or an English muffin for breakfast every day of my
life. I eat a breakfast that a trencherman would be proud of.

"I wake up every morning knowing something wonderful is going to happen," she
continued. "Either I see a marvelous painting or I hear a marvelous piece of music,
or I meet somebody new whom I fall in love with immediately—very one-sided,
needless to say. My life is a constant joy. That sounds disgusting, I know. People
call me Pollyanna Kempner. There's always a silver lining—oh God, ding-ding-ding,
strum on the strings of my heart for a while. Isn't it awful? But a positive
attitude is the only thing that pulls you through all sorts of adversity—which I
refuse to admit. If you don't admit it, it doesn't exist, right?"

Nan is like the Energizer Bunny. She just keeps flipping along, no matter what
happens," says her best friend, Pat Buckley, the wife of the conservative thinker
William F. Buckley Jr. "Guts she has plenty of. She pushes herself. She makes
herself do everything." Aside from her life-threatening emphysema, Kempner went
through a difficult hip-replacement operation a few years ago, after tripping on
her John Galliano stocking-shoes in her bedroom. Her habit of finishing off
whatever is left on the plates of her dinner partners has led many to suspect that
she has an eating disorder, an idea she dismisses by saying, "I'm a miracle of
nature." Her most painful ordeal, however, was the near breakup of her marriage to
Thomas Kempner, a Wall Street investment banker, in the late 1980s, when an affair
of his became a local scandal.
Buckley grants that Nan is "probably the best-dressed woman I've ever seen in my
life, and I've known many." But, she adds, "there are many facets of Nan that
people don't quite understand. She's not the frivolous person that the press writes
her up as being." In 1998 the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
honored Kempner and Buckley for raising $75 million during the 30 years they had
co-chaired annual galas for the hospital. "Nan has never shirked any community
responsibility," says Jill Carter, who has known her since the 1940s and puts her
up at her house when she visits Los Angeles. "If Nan says she'll take a table, you
can count on her."

Diana Vreeland said, "Theres no such thing as a chic American woman The one
exception is Nan Kempner."
"She's terribly friendly and interested in everyone she meets," notes Samuel
Peabody, the Fifth Avenue philanthropist. "She's always reaching out to people,
even those who may not cotton to her." Indeed, Kempner's range of friends is
surprising. "I adore Nan," declared Joan Didion when I ran into her at a book
party. "Of all those uptown ladies," says artist Ross Bleckner, "Nan is probably
the most interesting. She's ballsy, she cuts through things, and she appreciates
the different cultures of New York."

"She's never boring to be with," adds Vogue writer Marina Rust, part of a group of
bright young things, including Rufus and Sally Albemarle and Coca-Cola heir Alex
Hitz, whom Kempner has added to her ever evolving party list. "And it's never
boring at her house. Maybe she doesn't ask boring people. But she has those great
big wonderful sofas that you just sort of sink into, and nobody ever wants to
leave. She'll say, 'Come by for a casual spaghetti dinner on Sunday night,' and
casual is Saint Laurent and the spaghetti has caviar on top. The food is always
really good. I've had lunch, just the two of us, and it's always perfect lamb chops
or something like that, and there are always chocolates on the table, and she
doesn't mind if you take one before dessert is served.

"What makes her really special is that she can say anything to anyone," Rust points
out, "which sometimes can be very helpful. For example, she was having lunch with
my father and me at his club, and Ian [Connor], whom I'd been dating for a little
over a year at that point, was late. And as soon as he sat down, Nan said, Tan,
I've been thinking of giving Marina and you an engagement party. When will that
be?' He proposed a week later."

Kempner's oft-quoted "zingers," as one friend calls them, occasionally get her in
trouble. Mutual friends were dismayed by ill-chosen remarks she made about Anna
Wintour's private life to a New York Post reporter, and W was bombarded by furious
letters to the editor after Kempner was quoted as saying, "I think most people in
the world look so disgusting. I loathe fat people. I really have a hang-up. I can't
stand flesh. You know, that wiggly-jiggly fat. Don't misunderstand—I know how lucky
I am. They should bottle my enzymes." Fortunately, most of Kempner's bons mots are
directed at herself: "The only plastic I want is plastic surgery." "I wouldn't miss
the opening of a door." "They say the camera loves me; the truth is I love the
camera."

Some find her frankness refreshing. "One of the things I like about Nan," says Pat
Buckley, "is that she is so utterly, totally, deliciously politically incorrect."
"Nan loves the spotlight," says author Annette Tapert, who helped Kempner write her
cookbook, R.S.V.P.: Menus for Entertaining from People Who Really Know How. "A lot
of people try to pretend they don't like publicity, but she's up-front about it. I
think she's a frustrated actress. She really could have been one of those movie
stars from the 30s or 40s. She's like something out of The Women—Eve Arden meets
Roz Russell meets Kay Thompson."
As Kempner once told a reporter, "My theory is, whatever it is, if it's in print,
it's gotta be good for you."

Like most high-profile figures, Kempner has her detractors, who claim that she
embellishes her family background and glosses over the affairs she has had. None,
however, was willing to go on the record, partly because of her frail condition,
partly because it's just not done in these circles. Though Kempner claims to "like
everyone," she has had her share of running feuds with rival Manhattan hostesses,
most notably Mercedes Bass, the wife of the Texas-based billionaire Sid Bass, and
Judy Taubman, the wife of shopping-mall magnate and former Sotheby's chairman
Alfred Taubman. Her problems with Judy Taubman go back to the 1980s, when the
Taubmans took the Kempners to a ball in Argentina on their plane, only to learn
upon their return that Nan was going to work for Christie's, Sotheby's principal
rival. Kempner professes not to know what went wrong with Mercedes Bass. "Mercedes
used to be one of my best friends," she told me. "She doesn't speak to me anymore.
I don't know what I did to that woman. It upsets the hell out of me. I've never
lost a friend in my entire life." As distraught as she appeared to be, Kempner
couldn't resist a wisecrack about "the Duchess of Bass," jokingly adding, "you need
a plane to go to dinner at the Basses."

Despite the attention her outlandish remarks, fabulous parties, and personal
tribulations draw to her, it is for her almost fanatical devotion to the waning art
of haute couture that Nan Kempner will earn her place in social history. If fashion
were a religion, she would be its Ayatollah Khomeini. She acquired her first
couture ensemble, a white satin sheath dress with a white satin mink-trimmed coat,
in 1958, from the first collection the young Yves Saint Laurent designed for the
house of Dior. According to Kempner, she was in Paris for the shows with her
mother, and she had already exhausted her mother's generosity. "So I cried and
cried until I got them down to a price I could afford," she later recalled. "Yves
came downstairs to meet the girl who cried so hard. It was the beginning of a
wonderful friendship." She has also said that one of the reasons she has stayed so
thin is in order to fit into the samples worn by the models, which are usually sold
at half-price. As Valentino, another couturier she is close to, has explained, "Nan
always looks so wonderful in my clothes, because she has a body like a hanger."

Valentino said, "Nan always looks so wonderful in my clothes, because she has a
body like a hanger."
Since 1961, when Saint Laurent opened his own house, Kempner has missed only one of
his twice-yearly shows, in 1993, because her father died, and she has accumulated
some 250 of his creations. Her couture collection, which also includes numerous
pieces from Valentino, Courrèges, Ungaro, and Marc Bohan—who succeeded Saint
Laurent at Dior—is thought to be the largest in private hands. She also has kept
well-chosen examples from such American designers as James Galanos, Halston, Bill
Blass, and Calvin Klein. Everything is neatly hung or stacked on custom-built racks
and shelves behind cotton curtains in the former bedrooms of her children. Much to
her husband's delight, she told me, this treasure trove has been sought by museums
and has provided the Kempners with sizable tax deductions over the years. The bulk
of the collection remains intact, however, and will presumably go to the Costume
Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Meanwhile, Kempner is still buying.
Since she can't fly to Paris as frequently as she would like, she says, "my new
heaven is Madison Avenue. I'm crazy about Donna Karan and Michael Kors."

Kempner's significance in the world of modern fashion goes beyond numbers. As

Houston hostess Lynn Wyatt, a fellow resident of the International Best-Dressed
List Hall of Fame, explains, "She has the keenest eye. She can put things together
better than most professional stylists. She just has a knack. She's imaginative.
And she knows what's right for her. Even in a bathing suit, she'll have on this big
hat. And you wonder, How did she get that in the suitcase?"
"For me, she is the most elegant," says the Parisian designer Georgina Brandolini.
"Forget eveningwear, because that's obvious. She's also the most elegant in the way
she wears daytime clothes. A pair of gray flannel trousers with a white blouse,
flat shoes, and a big pearl necklace—I remember her dressed like that for lunch at
Valentino's chalet in Gstaad. 'What more do you need?' she said to me."

"Nan is the one who started to play with fashion in a really chic way," says Pamela
Gross, the editorial director of Avenue magazine. "She's the one who said, Don't
wear it straight off the rack—put it with jeans. She taught us all how to make
fashion personal. You cannot not see her as an icon of style."

The art historian John Richardson recalls the late Diana Vreeland telling him,
"There's no such thing as a chic American woman—the look is always too contrived,
it doesn't come naturally. The one exception is Nan Kempner."

Yves Saint Laurent calls Kempner "la plus chic du monde."

Nan Field Schlesinger was born in San Francisco in 1931, to prosperous Jewish
parents who would move up in the city's social circles over the years. "I'm the
only child of only children," she said, typically leaving out the sad reality that
each of her parents had a sister who died young. "My father was very successful,
thank God. He had S&C Motors, which was the Ford Motor Company up and down the West
Coast. My mother was a self-feeder, meaning she had her own dough. Her grandfather
was named Clayburgh, as in the King Ranch. He decided ranching wasn't for him and
came to San Francisco to pan for gold. He ended up owning most of the town, or a
good deal of it." (For the record, the owners of the 1,300square-mile King Ranch,
in Texas, spell their name Kleberg and are Protestant.)

Nan's father, Albert "Speed" Schlesinger, graduated from the University of

California at Berkeley in 1925 and opened a Ford showroom four years later with a
$3,000 loan from his father, who was in the wine business. By the 1950s, S&C Motors
was among the 10 largest Ford dealerships in the country, and he had been appointed
head of the city's Parking Authority and Visitor's and Convention Bureau. In 1960
he headed Democrats for Nixon in San Francisco. "A1 Schlesinger always had a slap
on the back for the fellows and a hug for the ladies," recalls Jill Carter. "He was
easygoing and loved life. He adored Nan, and she adored him.

"Nan's mother, Irma, on the other hand, was a difficult woman," says Carter. "She
had her own opinions and didn't care to change them, but she had a certain flair.
Nan takes after her in the fashion and furniture departments."

The Schlesingers lived in a three-story house with spectacular views at 2690

Broadway, in Pacific Heights, one of the city's richest neighborhoods. Their home
was burglarized four times in 14 years. In the 1954 burglary, Irma lost two mink
coats, a mink jacket, a sealskin coat, and a baby-lamb coat. In 1965 their
chauffeur made off with $ 126,000 worth of her jewelry, which was recovered in a
sock hidden in a vacuum-cleaner tank in the Schlesingers' garage.

The Schlesinger marriage was not perfect, according to John and Frances Bowes, the
San Francisco art collectors, who have known Nan and her family for decades. "Speed
was definitely a ladies' man," says Frances Bowes. "I remember a party at our
house, when he was talking to a younger woman, and Irma came over and threw a glass
of wine on her."

"I was very lonely as a child," says Kempner. "That's why I like people so much. I
had a family of dolls. I was surrounded by my dolls, and each one had a name and a
personality. I lived in never-never land. Frankly, I think I still do."

Was she always fascinated by clothes?

"Yes. I used to dress those goddamned dolls nonstop. Boy, were they well dressed.
And I used to design clothes for them. I made my own paper dolls, because I
couldn't stand the things in paper-doll books. They weren't risqué enough or fancy
enough. I've always belonged to the more-is-more school. But I would much rather be
the least dressy person in a room. My mother always told me, 'Put it all on and
then take half of it off.' My mother dressed divinely, and my grandmother was
unbelievable. I come from a long line of clotheshorses."

Nan was one of the few Jewish girls enrolled in the Sarah Dix Hamlin School for
Girls, which in those days had a religious quota. Because she was chubby, when she
was 12 or 13 her mother sent her to a diet specialist, who ordered her to eat
"sandwiches" made with slices of iceberg lettuce instead of bread. She has often
spoken about leafing through cookbooks as a teenager, fantasizing about the
delicious things she couldn't eat. At 14 she started smoking Parliaments, her
mother's brand. Her parents had a house on Lake Tahoe, and John Bowes recalls how
slim and athletic Nan was by the time she turned 16. "She looked great water-skiing
on one ski, and she looked great on the slopes too. She was a babe on skis."

"After the Hamlin School for Girls, I went to the Connecticut College for Women,"
says Kempner. She couldn't wait to take her junior year abroad at the Sorbonne.
"Believe me, getting to Paris was like getting a green pass. My great love was
George Plimpton, who was studying at Cambridge in 1951. I did a lot of commuting,
as did he. I loved him dearly, and he remained a great friend until his death a
year ago, which I think was one of the sadder things that ever happened. I don't
understand it, and Tommy Kempner doesn't understand it, either, but I've always
appealed to intellectuals. Maybe it's because I'm so stupid and have so much to
learn from them."

She met Thomas Lenox Kempner, a graduate of Choate and Yale, in New York the summer
she returned from France. "I was crossing Madison Avenue at 72nd Street, and a car
stopped, and it was Tommy Kempner, who was sharing an apartment with my best friend
from San Francisco, Clarence Heller. Everybody in San Francisco wanted me to marry
Clarry—it was all sort of preordained. They were about to go into the Rhinelander
drugstore, which is now the Ralph Lauren shop, and have a sandwich. They said,
'Come with us,' and Tommy looked at me and said, 'Your skirt's too tight.' My
answer was 'The better for you to see my figure.' I was so filled with dislike for
that man."

Later that summer Nan was invited to a weekend party at the Heller-family compound
on Lake Tahoe. "I was absolutely astonished— I seemed to have been paired off with
Tommy Kempner, which I did not like at all. We were at each other's throats. We
argued about everything. But he was awfully intelligent, and I was rather
fascinated. And then, all of a sudden, one day, everything changed. We became
engaged at Thanksgiving time, and we married on the first of March, 1952."

Tommy Kempner's maternal grandfather, Carl M. Loeb, was a co-founder of the

investment banking house that became Loeb, Rhoades & Company, and his family was
part of the German-Jewish aristocracy of Manhattan known as Our Crowd. The Loeb
family gave the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park to New York City. Today the firm is
called Loeb Partners, and Tommy is the chairman.

Nan and Tommy were married by a rabbi in the ballroom of the Hotel St. Francis. "It
was a black-tie wedding, very glamorous," recalls Jill Carter. "Nan's mother did
it. At the reception there was a whole trellis of greenery with those tiny white
lights—it was the first time anybody had ever seen anything like that." Nan
designed her own antique-satin wedding gown, in the medieval style, with a very
long train.
After an extended tour of the Continent, the newlyweds lived in London for a year
before settling in New York, where Tommy went to work for the family firm and Nan
became involved in all the right charities, including the Junior Council at the
Museum of Modern Art. Among her new best friends were two heiresses who had married
into distinguished old East Coast families, Lily Auchincloss and Judy Peabody. "We
were in the same exercise class, at Nicholas Kounovsky's gym," recalls Judy
Peabody. "I felt like a timid little mouse next to Nan, who was this energetic,
elegant, fleet-of-foot young woman. I was terrified when Kounovsky put us on a
swinging trapeze, but Nan was without fear. She was pregnant, but that didn't stop
her."

Sam Peabody remembers Nan as an expert horsewoman. He had given up a career in

banking to teach at the Rye Country Day School, in Westchester, near the estate of
Tommy Kempner's mother, who had given her son and daughter-in-law a small house on
her property. "Nan would ask me to lunch, and she always came in right after
riding. She wore white linen jodhpurs, which I had never seen before. I thought
they were very sexy, so she wore them as often as she could," Peabody says with a
chuckle. "I then went to teach at St. Bernard's, in Manhattan. One day I was
teaching my fourth-grade class when the headmaster came by. He was showing the
school to Mrs. Kempner, who was considering enrolling her first son there. When Nan
saw me, instead of just waving hello, she walked mto the room and kissed me. It was
very embarrassing. The students were shocked. But she knew exactly what she was
doing."

The Kempners had three children in rapid succession. Both sons have done everything
right. Thomas junior, 52, who is known as Speedy, attended Yale and the Harvard
Business School, then married Katheryn Clewes Patterson, a graduate of Stanford and
Harvard Law School and the daughter of a president of Chase Manhattan Bank. They
have a town house on the Upper East Side and a house in Southampton. James, 47, who
also graduated from his father's alma mater, is married to Cynthia Hayden, a fellow
Yale graduate. They live in Conyers Farm, a private enclave in Greenwich, which Nan
refers to as Happyville. Kempner revels in her six grandchildren—three from each of
her sons. She recently gave a 21st-birthday bash for her eldest grandson, Nate, yet
another Yalie, at Soho House. She is less involved in the life of her daughter,
Lina, 49, an artist who lives in the East Village in Manhattan and is everything
her mother is not. "My daughter wears the same pair of jeans day in and day out,
and the more paint she has on her shirt, the better she likes it."

The Kempners bought their current apartment in 1956, hired Michael Taylor from San
Francisco to decorate it, and, except for having Gabhan O'Keeffe stencil the
library walls a few years ago, haven't changed a thing since. The living room has a
Signac, a Georgian mirror, a Coromandel screen, and an Aubusson rug, but the sofas
are covered in sporty, caramel-colored corduroy. There are two small Magrittes in
the library, and the dining-room walls are lined with antique Chinese paper, but
both rooms are cozy and comfortable rather than rich and overwhelming. Nan is known
for the superb food she serves at small, candlelit dinners, but on occasion she has
packed in as many as 75 for a buffet. More often than not, her guests of honor have
been pals from Europe and California, anyone from Y.S.L. partner Pierre Berge to
London restaurateur Mark Birley to Los Angeles hostess Betsy Bloomingdale to—her
biggest catch ever—the late Princess Diana.

Kempner entertained the Princess of Wales in connection with her job at Christie's,
which was holding an auction of Diana's dresses to raise money for AIDS and cancer
research. Her work with the auction house, which consisted primarily of persuading
her old-money friends to sell things and her new-money friends to buy them, was the
last in a string of part-time jobs she has had since the mid-1960s, when she was a
fashion-feature editor at Harper's Bazaar. In the 1970s she was a U.S.
correspondent for French Vogue and a design consultant to Tiffany. She also did
public relations for Aristotle Onassis's Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, where
condominium apartments were being marketed for $600,000 and up. As Kempner
explained to a reporter at the time, "There will always be a group of people with
some money who want to live better than anyone else." All of these jobs justified
her pursuit of publicity and covered some of her enormous travel and entertaining
expenses.

But she also paid a price for this exposure. In 1975 her apartment was burglarized,
and an estimated $2 million worth of jewelry belonging to her and a houseguest was
taken. Four years later she answered her door and was confronted at gunpoint by two
burglars, who handcuffed her and made off with all the jewelry she had acquired
since the previous robbery. The story that went around had her calling her friend
the costume-jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane the next day and saying, "I'll take a
dozen of everything."

In her heyday, Kempner thought nothing of flying to Europe 10 times a year, for
every fancy ball and big society wedding. She never missed the opening of the San
Francisco Opera in September or Swifty Lazar's Oscar party in March. She had to be
where the action was. In the 1970s she was part of New York's fastest social set,
what Women's Wear Daily called "the Cat Pack," along with Mica and Ahmet Ertegun,
Chessy and Billy Rayner, Isabel and Freddie Eberstadt, Diane and Egon von
Furstenberg, Gloria Vanderbilt, Mary McFadden, and Kenny Lane. She was a regular at
Studio 54, often appearing in a couture gown straight from a benefit and dancing
till the wee hours with Sterling St. Jacques, the towering black male model. In the
80s she was right in the middle of the New York branch of the Reagan group—Jerome
Zipkin, the Buckleys, Estée Lauder—but she had a hard time keeping state secrets.
As Pat Buckley recalls, "Jerry was always telling her, 'Zip it up, Nan.' " Her
almost manic need to be everywhere with everyone exasperated even her closest
friends, and it was most likely the reason she was banished from the party pages of
WWD for several years. But even John Fairchild, its then publisher, has come back
to her table.

"He's become my new best friend," she told me. "I said to him, 'I've missed you
terribly, because nobody else was as rude to me. I just loved being rude back and
forth.'"

When I asked her to name her closest friends today, she hesitated. "You could fill
your whole article with the names of people I like. You name them, I love them."
But she eventually named Pat and Bill Buckley, Kenny Lane, and Peter Bacanovic, the
Merrill Lynch stockbroker recently imprisoned for his role in the Martha Stewart-
ImClone scandal. Friends have cited her kindness to Bacanovic as a prime example of
her loyalty. "Her concern for my well-being helped me make my difficulties a little
more survivable," Bacanovic told me. "Nan was sometimes not well herself, but when
my situation became very tense, not a day would pass without multiple phone calls
from her and open invitations to meals. Even when she was traveling and it wasn't
easy to reach out, she always did."

On May 24, 1988, the society columnist Suzy's lead item in the New York Post
announced that Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lenox Kempner "have decided on a trial
separation after 37 years of marriage.... Rumors that the Kempners' marriage was in
trouble have been going on for months, even years, but they always managed to keep
it together somehow. There have also been persistent rumors that there is another
woman involved."

The next day Billy Norwich, in his column in the New York Daily News, named the
other woman: "brunette Iris Sawyer, an intellectual [who] is the ex-wife of
political consultant David Sawyer." Two weeks later Newsday columnist James Revson
called the Kempners' "separate lives ... the best-kept open secret on Park Avenue,"
and quoted Iris Sawyer, who told him that her affair with Tommy Kempner had started
seven years earlier, after they were seated next to each other on a flight to Los
Angeles. "We celebrate it every year by taking that flight," she revealed, adding
that the only thing Kempner had ever given her was a Rolex watch. Sawyer accused
Nan Kempner of using the trial separation to force her husband to end the affair.
According to Sawyer, she told Tommy that the only way to resolve the situation was
for him to go back to his wife.

Close friends say that Nan was so angry and embarrassed that she seriously
considered getting a divorce. "Do you know how many men there are out there?" she
told one. "Yes, but I wasn't aware they were looking for women our age, Nan," the
friend replied, adding, "Tommy hasn't done anything you haven't done." In fact,
there are numerous tales of both Kempners' having had flirtations and flings with
married members of their own set. When I asked Nan Kempner if they had an open
marriage, she declared, "Oh, no. Tommy thinks I am the Virgin Mary. And I shall
remain so until my dying day. My mother always said, 'Even if you're caught in bed,
it wasn't you.' My only regret is things I didn't do. And I don't have many of
those. Life is just too much fun. Why make it so miserable?"

As for her husband's dalliances, she said she always found out about them. "Every
time he sent a present to anybody, it was always on my bill. But I was thrilled. He
had very good taste. They were all my friends. And I want to tell you, if I took it
as anything other than a compliment, I wouldn't have half the number of friends
that I have.... A couple of them have been quite out-and-out open about it."

"But doesn't that hurt you?" I asked.

"Why should it? As long as they're attractive. The only one that really killed me
was that disgusting woman, and he wouldn't go when I said, 'Out of here! I don't
want you anymore if that's what your taste is. Yuck! There must be something wrong
with you. I don't know what people are going to say.' And I got him to a shrink.
He's still at the shrink. And he's much warmer and much more open than he used to
be."

Although the Kempners were soon reunited, Nan continued her continent-hopping
without Tommy, except for the three weeks they spent every September at the Hotel
Cipriani in Venice with their old friends Marguerite and Mark Littman from London
and Deeda and William Blair of Washington, D.C. Tommy Kempner, however, proceeded
with a business venture he and Sawyer had begun shortly before they broke up,
buying a $2.4 million East Side town house to renovate and sell at a profit. Things
did not work out, and in 1994 a disheveled and bankrupt Sawyer went public again,
in a lengthy New York magazine story by Roger D. Friedman entitled "The Woman Who
Wouldn't Get Lost." Sawyer alleged that Kempner had refused to sell the property
for $3.7 million before the real-estate market collapsed in 1990 and that he had
later tricked her into signing away her rights for a mere $40,000 before he sold
the house in a foreclosure auction for $ 1.7 million. Both Kempners refused to talk
to Friedman, and Nan later told Norwich that such bad publicity "just washes off."

A scandal like that would have ruined almost any other society figure, or at least
taken her down several rungs. But not Nan Kempner. As Polly Kraft Cutler, the
Washington artist and political hostess, observes, "Nan gets away with it. Because
she's not a bitch, she doesn't have her claws out. She seems so good-humored. She
has a very generous spirit. Women like her. You get a kick out of her. You don't
judge her. She's great company. She's always interested in you. She doesn't talk
about herself, and she doesn't self-dramatize. And when you see Tommy and Nan
together, though you know all these things about them, they always seem at ease
with each other, which is nice."

"Nan is very loyal to Tommy Kempner," says Annette Tapert. "She's always very
complimentary about him, and she's always talking about him. 'Tommy Kempner this'
and 'Tommy Kempner that'—she always calls him Tommy Kempner." In 1999, Tapert was
enlisted to work on Kempner's cookbook, R.S.V.P., which combined three of Kempner's
passions—food, entertaining, and fancy friends. Beautifully photographed and
handsomely laid out, the volume features meals put together by two dozen upper-
class hosts and hostesses in their city apartments and country homes. There's a
girls' lunch of com-and-feta soufflé given by Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece;
golden risotto cake and curried-lobster salad at Oscar and Annette de la Renta's in
the Dominican Republic; Ann Getty's surprise birthday party for her husband,
Gordon; Barbara de Kwiatkowski's venison dinner at Calumet Farm, in Lexington,
Kentucky; and "a perfect fall lunch" with Anne Bass at her Connecticut estate. All
royalties for the book were given to Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and Kempner made an
extended promotional tour of America and England. Asked by a reporter from The
Atlanta-Journal Constitution how the book was being received, she said, "Everyone
has been delighted. I think this is the right time for a voyeurism cookbook."

On May 17, 2002, the Kempners gave a $500,000 party for 476 friends at the New
'York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.
"That was one of the greatest parties that's ever been given," says publicist and
family friend Paul Wilmot. "Sammy Goz and his band were flown in from Paris—that is
the ultimate. Kilos of caviar were passed twice. The entrée was chicken hash with
wild rice. That's what's great about Nan—she understands that high-low thing."

Nan's old San Francisco friend Frances Bowes was touched to be seated at her table,
along with Pat Buckley, Annette de la Renta, Mica Ertegun, Colombian billionaire
Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Venezuelan billionaire Gustavo Cisneros, Prince Amyn Aga
Khan from Paris, and Mark Birley and the real-estate heiress Vivien Duffield from
London. "My advice to husbands," Tommy Kempner told Billy Norwich, "is let your
wife do what she wants to do because she'll do it anyway." That Sunday's New York
Times ran a column of Bill Cunningham photographs, including one of Nan, looking
young and radiant, dancing with Prince Pavlos of Greece. "In my dreams," Nan
Kempner confided, "I go to that party every night."

The only off note was the lack of toasts. According to a close friend, Nan had just
been diagnosed with emphysema and didn't want the party to seem like a memorial. On
July 16, Richard Johnson reported on "Page Six," "Socialite Nan Kempner is itching
to hit the party circuit after spending three weeks laid up in a London hospital
bed with pneumonia."

In January 2003 she had a relapse during her annual visit to the Buckleys in
Gstaad. "She was desperately ill," says Pat Buckley. "I had a party for her the
night she arrived, and I called up the doctor and had her put in the hospital in
Saane the next day. Four or five days later the hospital called—I was going down
there twice a day—and they said, 'We're having a terrible problem, because we
cannot get a clot out of her lung. We think she should have a helicopter to take
her to the hospital in Bern.' When I got to the hospital, Nan was choking, and the
doctors were shoving this vacuum down into her throat. I said, 'Nan, I have a
helicopter waiting to take you to Bern.' In between gulps, she said, 'I'm not going
to Bern.' I said, 'Nan, why are you not going to Bern?' She said, 'I don't know
anybody in Bern.' "

According to Frances Bowes, Kempner finally gave up cigarettes "when she almost had
to have a tracheotomy—they were going to slit her throat open. It scared the hell
out of her, so she stopped. And she didn't have a problem doing it."

Kempner spent a long stretch of last spring in New York-Presbyterian Hospital,

where she received a constant stream of friends in her flower-filled room, dressed
in her prettiest couture peignoirs. She managed to make it to Ronald Reagan's
funeral in Washington with Tommy in June, but she spent a large part of the summer
resting in bed in the house they rented in Southampton.
"Tommy Kempner really is a divine husband," she told me shortly after Labor Day.
"He came to me and said, 'Darling, we have to talk. Would you mind terribly if we
didn't go to Venice this year? I don't think my legs can make it on and off those
boats anymore. But I'll make it up to you. I promise.' I said, 'Oh, goody, that
means a major piece of jewelry.' Tommy said, 'Well, I was going to charter a plane
and have it stay in Venice in case you had to be flown to a hospital immediately.'
I said, 'Well, that's $150,000. And three weeks at the Cipriani is another $70,000,
which brings us up to $220,000.' So Tommy gave me an enormous gold-and-diamond
spray from Fulco di Verdura's first collection, in 1939, which makes it a real
antique—and it's still eight years younger than me!"

During our lunch she insisted, "I'm fine. I've had a renaissance. I'm better than I
was before I got sick. I mean, I get out of breath, but who doesn't at my age? I
still get breathless over beautiful young men."

She fought with her doctors to allow her to fly to Lyford Cay, in the Bahamas, for
Thanksgiving and to Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, for Christmas. In
January, wearing a fur-trimmed and embroidered Valentino evening jacket, she was
wheeled into the Metropolitan Museum by Kenny Lane to the Erteguns' party for the
American Turkish Society. "I'm like a barnacle," she told me. "I cling to people,
and I feel terrible when I'm alone." Then she added, "You've seen the Verdura pin
Tommy gave me. Ybu know the thing about that pin? When he gave it to me, it was so
big. It's shrunk."