![]() Jayne’s gossip-column mentions came fast and often in 1938. Years later, she would entertain a dinner partner with the tale of a visit as a teenager to William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, where his mistress, Marion Davies, took her to the bathroom to sip from a bottle of liquor she kept hidden in the toilet tank. ‘These people know how to work their prestige and power…they run to settle scores and control New York socially as much as to exhibit art.’Īfter high school, Jayne took the sorts of jobs a pretty girl could get in Depression-era Hollywood, working in retail and modeling, and nibbling at the edges of filmdom. Chuggy brought Jayne to the unfashionable outskirts of Beverly Hills in the 1930s the husband stayed behind. She was born in 1920 in Flint, Mich., to Frederick “Fritz” Larkin, then a contractor, although later a State Department architect who may have been undercover for the OSS or CIA (it’s unclear), and his wife, Chuggy Larkin, a whiskey-voiced Southern-accented nightclub habituée. So it’s a little ironic to note that Wrightsman had no breeding to speak of. Her gifts - paintings by Delacroix, Vermeer, El Greco, Rubens, de La Tour, and Tiepolo, and 18th- and 19th-century decorative objects, many crafted for the kings of France - went from her homes to the museum’s suite of Wrightsman Rooms and reflected her ability to make herself and her surroundings over in the image of Bourbon France.īrooke Astor, Jane Engelhard, Pat Buckley, Nan Kempner and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis all predeceased her, making her the last of a breed. One of the museum’s greatest benefactors, she gave it works of art and objects of decor that harkened back, as did she, to a time when taste was inextricably linked to great wealth. ![]() Wrightsman may have been nouveau riche, but her taste and style were a calculated homage to an aristocratic way of life that she reinvented and then outlived. on Saturday at age 99, it was the end of an era. When Jayne Wrightsman, art collector, society maven, trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a stiletto in a velvet glove, died at her home at 820 Fifth Ave. ![]()
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