Remembering Jayne

When Jayne Wrightsman died in April at the age of 99, it didn’t just mark an end to her tastemaking talents and philanthropic prowess. It marked the end of an era. Hamish Bowles looks back at her outsize life.

- Hamish Bowles

JAYNE WRIGHTSMAN FIRST SAT FOR VOGUE in 1946, arriving at the studio where Cecil Beaton was working only to discover the exquisite actress Vivien Leigh “coming out in this bower of lilac,” as she recalled. “She was so beautiful.” So beautiful, in fact, that Jayne was taken aback when she learned that she was expected to sit on the same set. “Mr. Beaton, I’m not staying here to be photographed,” she declared. “Oh, yes you are!” he said.

Jayne and Beaton became friends from that day. “I loved him,” she told me. “Thank God we had Cecil, or we’d have no Mrs. Wrightsman,” she added in her characteristically self-deprecating way. “He used to come every year and say, ‘My dear, shall we do it one last time?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes!’ ”

Wrightsman, who died in April at the age of 99, was a legendary cultural philanthropist—a brilliant autodidact who became an expert in the French decorative arts of the eighteenth century and a fabled enricher of the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and other notable institutions. She was also a renowned hostess as well as a best-dressed style maker known for her unerring eye, exquisite taste, and sly wit.

Born Jane Kirkman Larkin in Flint, Michigan, she had a classic American story of determined reinvention. Her father was president of the Realty Construction Company, and her whiskey-voiced mother, Aileen (known as Chuggy), who hailed from Alabama, seems to have been as louche and untidy as her daughter was straitlaced and disciplined. Jayne endured a broken childhood, and after her parents separated she moved with her mother and three siblings to Los Angeles, where Chuggy frequented the bohemian Café Gala (and where her daughter added the quirky