Pat Buckley
This is what a townhouse looks like...!
23 Gramercy Park South last year for $18.5 million. The buyers of the 27-foot-wide landmark were Colombian heir Andrés Santo Domingo and his wife, socialite and Vogue contributor Lauren Santo Domingo. Apparently they weren't completely satisfied with their purchase, because the house is about to undergo a serious renovation.
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She died of an infection after a long illness, according to her son, Christopher Buckley.
Mrs. Buckley was a commanding presence at designer fashion shows and big charitable and social events, but she attained that distinction not only by her social clout and force of personality. At a soupçon under 6 feet tall, she was Manhattan’s tallest reigning socialite. At times she likened herself to a jolly green giant, or a stork.
She was a moving force behind the annual benefit dinner and dance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which she turned into one of the most prestigious and in-demand social events of the New York season. She served as chairwoman of the gala from 1978 to 1995 and raised millions of dollars for the museum.
“There have been weeks along New York’s charity circuit when it looked as if Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. was chairman of everything,” Charlotte Curtis once wrote in The New York Times.
Her fund-raising ability left her peers in awe. In addition to her work for the Metropolitan Museum, she raised large sums over the years for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery, as well as AIDS causes and Vietnam veterans.
“Get Pat on a committee, and everybody will come” was a familiar refrain in benefit circles.
Patricia Alden Austin Taylor was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on July 1, 1926. Her father, Austin C. Taylor, had lumber and mining interests, was a director of the Bank of Canada and helped establish thoroughbred racing in British Columbia.
Her education alternated between tutors and private schools that gave her a knowledge of languages, music, art and most of the basics other than mathematics. That small flaw precluded further education at Canadian universities that insisted on some proficiency in mathematics, and changed her life.
In 1948, she went off to Vassar College, which at the time was more accommodating to the mathematically challenged, and acquired a roommate named Patricia Buckley. Two years later she married her roommate’s elder brother, then an instructor of Spanish at Yale, and left college. They settled in Hamden, Conn., while he wrote “God and Man at Yale,” his first book.
Although Mrs. Buckley maintained that her interest in fashion was an evanescent flirtation, she was voted onto the International Best-Dressed List several years, and in 1975 she was named to the Best-Dressed Hall of Fame. She was a major supporter of American designers and a fixture at many of their semiannual shows. When she saw a design that she liked and considered versatile she would, on occasion, buy it in six or seven different colors.
She was admired for her sense of humor, which was caustic and irreverent, and she didn’t always easily conform. She refused to give up cigarettes and puffed away even in nonsmoking areas of her favorite restaurants — when they still had them — an illicit privilege the proprietors allowed.
“Life is very difficult and everything kills you,” she once said. “The only thing you can do nowadays is sit fully clothed in the woods and eat fruit.”
She used to tend her garden in Connecticut wearing a bikini, without regard to ultraviolet rays and “those loathsome Lyme ticks.” Her husband — who, she said, “covers himself up as if he were going on a safari” — contracted Lyme disease anyway.
Mrs. Buckley, who became a United States citizen in the early 1990s, enjoyed describing herself as a housewife, even when it became unpopular to do so. She ran three homes: a duplex on Park Avenue, a house in Stamford and a Swiss chalet rented during the skiing season.
Despite her own highly visible profile, she generally identified herself as “Bill’s wife and Chris’s mother.”
“I’m a lot of other things too, but those come first,” she said. Christopher Buckley, the satirical author and editor, was her only child. “He’s one of the funniest writers I know, probably because he has my sense of humor,” she said.
In addition to her husband and son, she is survived by a granddaughter, a grandson and many nieces and nephews.
As one of New York’s leading hostesses, she entertained royalty, industrialists and figures from the literary and music worlds. But her son said that beginning in the mid-1960s, she also served dinner every other Monday night to the editors of Mr. Buckley’s magazine, National Review.
Throughout her life she clung to certain traditional views, some tempered over the years but never entirely discarded.
“Women were born to be taken care of by men,” she told Women’s Wear Daily in 1977. “I do think that’s the law of the universe.
“There are many, many unfortunate cases where there isn’t a man, and I feel a great compassion for those who do not have a man in their lives.”