Ladies Who Lunched

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception



The Duchess of Windsor 1962 and Jacqueline Onassis with Truman Capote 1968

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Vanity Fair's ode to a by-gone time when ladies lunched ... this piece would receive just inclusion in the series "Let's Bring Back" (check my early blog entries for that fun series).

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. Feeling like an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy era, the researcher began to doubt their project of intent. 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. Z. 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.

Read on at the link.  Slide show here: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2012/02/ladies-who-lunched-slideshow-201202#slide=1