Clue No. 1. Their first name ended in an "e". Second clue: "de" followed before their surname. Put the two together and you have the obit for Christophe de Menil, Designer and Patron of the Arts, Is Dead at 92.
A famous thoroughbred trainer Christophe Clement recently passed away. A male. This Christophe is decidedly female. One look at a dress she wore and there is no doubt.
The 19-gun salute takes up six column and nearly an entire page accompanied by 7 photos! Count them. Unless you've donated the crown jewels to a Metropolitan Museum dinner, you're not likely to have ever heard of her. The circles she traveled in are so tiny that saying she was part of the 1% of wealthy people would be an insult.
Ms. de Menil is seen above in what to me looks like a Grace Kelly pose in a four-leaf clover dress, a dress so wide that if Grace Kelly wore it in the movie 'Rear Window' she would have never made it through the door to help photographer Jimmy Stewart in his attic aerie overlooking a murder suspect.
The lede to the obit, as usual tells us all:
Christophe de Menil, a costume designer, an oil heiress, philanthropist and financier of scores of the world's leading figures in art, design and architecture, died on Aug. 5 in her home in Manhattan.
With a lede like that, Manhattan is the only possible place she could have passed away in.
A far more playful lede, that would no doubt be rejected by the editor and certainly land the writer in newsroom purgatory, could have been:
Christophe de Menil, whose first husband was Robert Thurman, eight years her junior and who was deep into mind-altering drugs, who, when he and Christophe divorced, remarried Timothy Leary's (think LSD guru) ex-wife, a German-Swiss model, one of whose children they had together was Uma Thurman, a best supporting actress nominee.
Now, if you were to have known all that, then you sat next to Ms. de Menil at a benefit dinner for something and someone whispered in your ear.
There is absolutely no way that at the start of Ms. de Menil's obit could you have ever predicted LSD, Timothy Leary and Uma Thurman would factor into the narrative. We live on a Möbius strip.
Of course it is a tangential link to Timothy, LSD and Uma, more like within Kevin Bacon and the Six Degrees of Separation.
Ms. de Menil's fabulous wealth—no figure given; a W-2 statement probably never had her name on it—came from her mother, Dominque, being part of the Schlumberger family oil fortune. The company still exists today.
One of the sub-headings tells she was: An heiress whose life focused on intensive artistic involvement.
Ms. de Menil was a fashion designer herself, and next to Alexander McQueen, she was a favorite of her own designs.
Aside from Timothy Leary's name appearing in her obit (it probably made some intimate friends wince) there are more bold face names mentioned than you can count. It's a week's worth of New York Post Page 6 bold face names.
•Robert Wilson, avant-garde theater director
•Willem de Kooning, artist
•Twyla Tharp, choreographer
•Frank Gehry, architect
•Robert Rauschenberg, artist
•Merce Cunningham, dancer, choreographer
•Kitty Carlisle Hart, actress, television personality, Moss Hart's wife
•Susan Sontag, writer
•John Cage, musician
•Patricia Lawford Kennedy, actor Peter Lawford's wife and JFK's sister
•Larry Gagosian, art dealer
•Philip Glass, musician
•Charles James, fashion designer
•Robert Whitman, multi-media artist
•Hans Namuth, filmmaker
•Uma Thurman, actress
•Trisha Brown, choreographer
•Michael Heizer, sculpture
•Terry Riley, composer
•Marie-Helen de Rothschild
•Bianca Jagger, model, actress, Mick Jagger's wife (for a while)
•Alexander McQueen, fashion designer
Marie-Christophe de Menil traveled in circles I was never in. I like to think I once held th door for Ms. de Menil when I delivered flowers to her building. But that never happened either.
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