SNAPSHOT
Clockwise fom left: Yves Saint Laurent and Nan Kempner, 1978; Nan Kempner, Fran Stark, and Jacqueline de Ribes; Kenneth Jay Lane and Nan Kempner at The Plaza Hotel, 2004.
“I’VE ALWAYS LIKED being noticed, and I work hard at it,” said Nan Kempner in an interview with Annette Tapert in 1999. Mrs. Kempner surely succeeded in her conquest, for she will forever be known for her extraordinary fashion (she is a member of Fashion’s Hall of Fame), charitable giving (she helped raise $75,000,000 for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center over 30 years), and remarkable dinner parties (Nan’s intimate Sunday-night spaghetti dinners were not to be missed as you never knew who might turn up: Princess Di? Nancy Reagan?). Born Nan Field Schlesinger in San Francisco in 1930, Nan’s father, Albert “Speed” Schlesinger, owned a successful car dealership and reportedly told the young Nan, “You’ll never make it on your face, so you’d better be interesting.” Nan’s mother, Irma Schlesinger, was a San Francisco society fixture who was quite a fashion plate herself. Nan married Thomas Lenox Kempner, a member of the Loeb banking family, in 1952 and had three children. The couple lived in London for a short time before moving to New York City and into a 16-room duplex on Park Avenue and 79th Street, where they resided for over 45 years. Nan was a known force at the Paris couture shows and Yves Saint Laurent became one of her closest friends. “I spend more 144 QUEST
money than I should and less than I’d like to, much less,” she told WWD in 1972. “I couldn’t keep my husband if I spent more.” Nan’s jewelry collection was as famous as her clothing, with names including JAR, Verdura, David Webb, and, of course, her good friend, Kenneth Jay Lane. “If Nan liked something, she would get one in every color,” recalls Mr. Lane. “She had my bamboo hoops in every color.” Wendy Lehman remembers how Nan would fasten her lovely JAR dragonfly pins and David Webb brooches to her headboard at night. Antoinette Guerrini-Maraldi recalls Nan’s having the quickness of mind to hide one bag of jewels beneath her seat when robbers pretending to be florists delivering flowers robbed her at her flat. On another occasion, when intruders broke into the Kempners’ apartment and tied up Nan, she reportedly had the quick wit to hide a JAR diamond earring in her mouth. The Kempners were robbed twice in the seventies but it never hindered Nan’s spirits. Nan loved to dress up and did so until the day she died. In a 1994 interview, Nan recollected, “Our car would drop the kids off at school, then Tommy would pick me up, and he’d say, ‘Now, who are we today?,’ and I’d be Pocahontas, Nanook of the North; I’d be—God knows—the River Boat Queen. It was such fun. Indeed!”—Elizabeth Meigher
P H OTO BY RO B I N P L AT Z E R / T I M E L I F E PI C T U R E S / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; ROX A N N E LO W I T; PAT R I C K M C M U LL A N
NAN’S STYLE