![]() ![]() Now you go into a place and everything looks transactional.” And you felt that there were delicious conversations taking place at every table. You wore your latest Givenchy or Balenciaga. Those restaurants were so beautiful, and people felt they had to live up to the elegance of the setting. “It was just what you did automatically, go to lunch with friends. Guest, the Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-and the Olympian redoubts where they partook of their ritual midday meal, including Le Pavillon, the Colony, Quo Vadis, and La Côte Basque, memories long repressed by women’s liberation and political correctness suddenly came rushing back in torrents of nostalgia mixed with pride: but of course they were there when “there” was the place to be.ĭeeda Blair rhapsodized about the exquisite atmosphere of La Grenouille and La Caravelle, two of the leading temples of fine French cuisine, where she’d lunch with the dowager philanthropist Mary Lasker or the ubiquitous Nan Kempner in the early 1960s, when her husband, William McCormick Blair Jr., was J.F.K.’s ambassador to Denmark and they’d stop in New York on their way home to Washington. But once the ladies who no longer lunch were reassured that this was to be a largely historical piece, harking back to the high-society goddesses who constituted the original lunch bunch-Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, Slim Keith, C. I was beginning to feel like an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy era. Princess Firyal of Jordan, Mercedes Bass, Louise Grunwald, Gayfryd Steinberg, Susan Gutfreund, and Deeda Blair all swore they were not now and had never really been ladies who lunched. ![]() “I never have liked ladies’ lunches that much, because even in Houston I don’t like to waste my time.”Īnd so it went. ![]() “First of all, I don’t classify myself as a lady who lunches,” snapped Lynn Wyatt, the wife of Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt and a veteran of the New York-London-Paris-Gstaad social circuit, with a tinge of anger in her drawl. “I was always blessing the ceiling that I had work to do, because the thing I loathed the most is having lunch with a bunch of women-even if they’re good friends.” But what about the countless photographs from Women’s Wear Daily in the 1970s of Ertegun and her late business partner, Chessy Rayner, dashing out of fashionable East Side restaurants with Pat Buckley and Nan Kempner? “Well, we had to eat,” the pencil-slim Ertegun explained. “I was never part of it,” insisted Mica Ertegun, the society decorator and widow of music-business king Ahmet Ertegun. Today I made a date with a friend, and I said, ‘Do you mind if we skip lunch and go directly to the Neue Galerie?’ ” ‘Oh, my God, leave me out of that story,” exclaimed Judy Taubman, the super-social wife of the shopping-mall-and-auction-house tycoon Alfred Taubman, when I told her I was writing an article on “the Ladies Who Lunch.” “People don’t do that anymore. ![]()
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