July 3, 2013The influencial socialite C.Z. Guest, the subject of a new book out from Rizzoli, was an avid equestrienne. Seen here circa 1970, Guest rode nearly every day of her life, always properly attired. Photo by Elvin McDonald, all images courtesy of Rizzoli
An arbiter of high society, accomplished equestrienne, noted gardener, avid tennis player and renowned hostess, C.Z. Guest was always I met her several times, beginning in the 1980s, when I was an editor at Town & Country. She was handsome in an Ivy League sort of way: erect, tall, elegant in simple couture and pearls but almost no makeup, with an imperious, accented voice that betrayed her Boston origins. She was fearless, daring and hugely self-confident.
Susanna Salk, author of Rizzoli’s recently released C.Z. Guest: American Style Icon, never had the pleasure of meeting her subject, who died in 2003 at the age of 83. And so, for this new volume, which Salk describes as an “appreciation,” she compiled reminiscences and memories from several friends who knew Guest well, including William Norwich, Oscar de la Renta, Iris Love, Joan Rivers and Diane von Furstenberg, who says in the book, “Nothing about [C.Z.] was fake or phony. She was real class, real woman, real mother, real friend.”
Guest married her blue-blooded husband, Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, an heir to the Phipps steel fortune, in 1947, and they went on to be leading members of the Old Guard for decades. She was elected to the Fashion Hall of Fame, distinguishing herself with the understated elegance of her Mainbocher and Givenchy gowns. She hired Stéphane Boudin of the Jansen decorating firm in Paris to do her house on Long Island at the same time he was helping Jackie Kennedy at the White House. She even made the cover of Time magazine in 1962 as the epitome of old-fashioned American society.
Guest, in tennis whites, collecting flowers with her dog Tiger.
Only in the late 1970s did she happily become a working girl, writing books about gardening and a garden column that was syndicated to 350 newspapers, including the New York Post. She designed a line of cashmere sweaters, sold garden products and developed a fragrant insect repellent she sold on QVC. And, after Winston’s death in 1982, she entertained “at home” many of the leading talents of her day, from the worlds of fashion, horticulture and more.
Salk, a frequent contributor to 1stdibs, writes that she wanted to do this book “as a kind of tribute to Guest’s timeless power,” and her subject’s singular style does indeed come through clearly in the book’s many portraits, including those by, among others, Lord Snowden, Irving Penn, Michael Mundy, Mary Hilliard and Slim Aarons.
Aarons, a former colleague at T&C, always used to defuse praise by saying he merely took “snaps of beautiful people in beautiful places.” The tributes from friends and the photos in this book, shot at Templeton (the Guest estate in Old Westbury) and at Villa Artemis (the Palm Beach home of her in-laws), prove his point. As British royal portrait painter Alex Talbot Rice says, “She was a real pistol.”
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