Nan Kempner - what a quote

Her father told her: "You'll never make it on your face, so you'd better be interesting."

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, in Bonfire of the Vanities, the skeletal ladies-who-lunch on the Upper East Side.

Addicted to haute couture, she entertained on a grand scale, while 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 - 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.
AdvertisementAdvertisement

It was her love affair with couture that fuelled 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 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 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; 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 while 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, 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 in 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 the 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 she 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.

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."

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

The Telegraph, London

Find out more about the Author of this blog at his website Rob Tencer pr.