ANUaDmAeX Lee Canfield, Prince Stanislas (Stash) Radziwill and his wife, Grace, and the Earl of Dudley and his wife, Laura.” “Well! Within two years,” she continues, “Michael divorced Lee and married Laura. Stash divorced Grace and married Lee. Dudley divorced Laura and married Grace. Jimmy later wondered what the chef served that night for dinner!” I first met Solange in the early 1970s when she and her beautiful daughters operated the first art gallery in Saratoga just down Union Avenue from the fabled racecourse. There were nightly openings that often turned
loves are her first husband, the handsome Parisian doctor, and fly-fisherman, Henri Deschamps, and her last, the saintly Dr. Fred Herter, former head of surgery at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and past president of the American University of Beirut, who nursed Solange back to health after a bout of cancer. He has now been her loving husband for 33 years. Of her longtime pal Jackie Kennedy, Solange writes, “Jackie was a peerless friend. She had a unique way of making everybody feel important while effacing herself.” Jackie often went to see Solange in recovery at the hospital.
thought there was anything the matter with her…When I found out she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, I wrote her a little note saying something about the many advances that had been made, and she immediately wrote back a beautiful letter on that baby blue stationery of hers, downplaying her illness and saying it was nothing at all, though she, of course, knew she was dying.” Solange and Fred now divide their time between an elegant, art-filled penthouse on Park Avenue and Black Hole Hollow Farm in Cambridge, N.Y. The dedication of her lively book reads, “For my children and grandchildren,
This page, clockwise from left: Solange in Paris with Jean de la Bruyère’s Jaguar; a stop at the South Dakota Badlands on a road trip with Jean from
x l i b r i s Co r po r at i on
New York to Edmonton; from left to right, Aristotle Onassis, Solange, Felix Mirando, and Pierre Salinger play cards en route to Guadeloupe.
into late-night parties at her pretty farm in nearby Battenville. The guest list included Mary Lou and Sonny Whitney, Paul Mellon, Walter and Kay Jeffords, C.Z. Guest, Cortright and Tootie Wetherill, Johnny von Stade, E.P. Taylor, and Penny Tweedy, the owner of Secretariat. Speaking of marriages, Solange herself has been married six or seven times (but who’s counting?), though she writes that the only men she really
Later, during the Onassis years, there were high-spirited cruises on the Christina. When Fred and Solange went to stay with Jackie on Martha’s Vineyard the summer before she died, Solange remembers,“She seemed so well—swimming in the icy ocean, walking briskly on the beach, taking us to Gay Head to watch the sunset, giving wonderful dinner parties with George Plimpton and William Styron…one couldn’t have possibly
without apologies.” And Solange’s memoir closes with this reflection on the Herter’s happy life together, “We are lucky, at the end of our lives, to be surrounded by loving children and grandchildren and numerous friends. One couldn’t ask for anything more (realistically), and I count my blessings every day and pray (very realistically) that life will go on like this for a while longer.” Ad multos annos! u AUGUST 2011 83
QT0811_Audax.indd 83
8/11/11 8:21 PM