SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM 333
Swan SongLee, Gloria, Marella: Truman Capote likened
this trio of beguiling women to swans, and this
year they all took flight.
All three of them led lives of wonder, beauty, and tragedy (they
each lost children too young—two to suicide and one to cancer).
Nevertheless, in 2003 Lee Radziwill told me over lunch at the Relais
Plaza in Paris, “I look back on my life as a landscape that has been full
of richness, excitement, and adventure, having
lived in the most interesting places at the most
interesting times.” Lee still turned heads then
with her lithe figure—clad by her adoring
friends Marc Jacobs, Giambattista Valli, and
Martin Grant—and eyes that Capote once
described as “golden-brown, like a glass of
brandy resting on a table in front of firelight.”
(Those eyes didn’t miss a trick: Lee would
recall, for instance, how Nureyev took a beat
every time he entered a restaurant so that the
crowd could register and acknowledge him.)
Meanwhile, Gloria Vanderbilt—to the
mortification of her son Anderson Cooper—
wrote a pornographic novel at the age of 85
(and, to my delight, read from a particularly
spicy chapter to a very prim group at an Upper
East Side hostess’s soirée).
Born to a dying middle-aged millionaire and his beautiful, brainless
teenage bride, Gloria was soon the subject of a scandalous custody
battle that riveted Depression-era America. At the age of 21 and an
orchidaceous beauty, Little Gloria was already on her second of five
marriages (to the composer Leopold Stokowski, 42 years her elder)
and enjoyed liaisons with men including Howard Hughes, Frank
Sinatra, Roald Dahl, Gordon Parks, and Marlon Brando. Like Lee,
she acted, briefly, but eventually her life would feed a series of novels
and poetic autobiographies—even her emails, like her famed art
collages, were exquisite compositions.
The swan-necked Donna Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto was
born to a Neapolitan prince and an heiress from Peoria, Illinois,
and after she married Giovanni Agnelli, the charismatic scion to the
Fiat empire, in 1953, the couple soon became the de facto king
and queen of Italy. “Her poise suggests comparison with a Boldini
portrait,” wrote Valentine Lawford in our pages in 1967, her beauty
“a Donatello statue—inexplicably walking in the woods and valleys
of Piedmont, or perched above the Adriatic or the Aegean in the
bow of a yacht.” Marella brought a sense of American practicality to
the environments she collaborated on with such design titans as Gae
Aulenti, Stephane Boudin, Renzo Mongiardino, Ward Bennett, and
Amedeo Albertini, adding her signature wicker furniture and sprigged
cottons. (“One applies a certain technical know-how, some culture,
and a certain amount of taste,” she said. “It is my little soufflé.”) These
seductive interiors, filled with Marella’s arrangements of garden
flowers, were backdrops to both family life
and legendary entertaining.
Although their lives intersected, they were,
of course, very different women, united
by the aesthetic and cultural curiosity that
fueled them. “I do everything there is to
do, see everything there is to see with great
joy,” Lee told me. In her 80s, Marella
worked with Madison Cox, Alberto Pinto,
and the young architects of Studio KO
on her last masterwork, the fairy-tale house
Ain Kassimou in Marrakech, to prove
her adage that “gardens breathe and are
alive, just as we are.”
“Life only gets better after 30,” said Marella
to Vogue in 1977. “Then it gets fantastically
beautiful. Guilt gets lost in time—you have to
make your own joy.”—hamish bowlesThis year marked the loss of three noted society
doyennes—each famous for her beauty and style.