NEW YORK, July 28 — You would not have called her camera shy. In more than half-century in the public eye, Betsy Bloomingdale courted photographers, drawing them into her orbit with a come-this-way cocktail of glamour and fizzy good cheer.
When she died last week, Bloomingdale was 93. The social doyenne, philanthropist, fashion plate and widow of department store heir and Diners Club developer Alfred S. Bloomingdale would be remembered as the last of a tribe, adept at elevating the social civilities — entertaining, dressing and the rituals of seeing and being seen — into something of an art.
“In everything she did, she had a light touch,” said Bob Colacello, her long-time friend and a Vanity Fair contributor. The effervescence that defined her, often masking a formidable perfectionism, helped place her on intimate footing with royalty, corporate titans, show-business luminaries and politicians. Her devoutly chronicled, decades-long friendship with Nancy Reagan won her the sobriquet First Friend.
“She had this kind of joie de vivre that made her seem at times very Pollyannaish,” Colacello said. At the same time, she was elegant, he added, “like a cross between Babe Paley and Lucille Ball.”
Bloomingdale, born Betty Lee Newling in Los Angeles to Australian émigré parents, may have relished the comparison. True, she made a near fetish of documenting the manners and mores of the European elite. She meticulously jotted in her diary the menus, table settings, seating arrangements and furnishings of the Rothschilds, Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, São Schlumberger and their patrician like. Yet, as admirers point out, she rarely took herself too seriously.
“She was correct, but at the same time, she had a sense of cosiness and spontaneity,” said her friend Alex Hitz, a Los Angeles chef and society fixture. Her sense of fun was reflected “in the most elegant little hors d’oeuvres, peanut butter and bacon, that were served at every dinner,” he said, and, more visibly, in the clothes she wore.
Early treks, at her husband’s suggestion, to the Parisian couture houses instilled in her an appreciation for Valentino, Balmain and the minimalist fashions of Marc Bohan for Dior.
“We both loved Marc Bohan,” remembered her friend Lynn Wyatt, the Houston society figure. “We lived at opposite ends of the United States, but we would always call each other and tell each other what we bought, so we wouldn’t wear the same dress at the same event.”
Bloomingdale cultivated a taste as well for the Americans James Galanos, Oscar de la Renta and Adolfo, whose little bouclé luncheon suits and lustrous evening looks — among them the brocade vest and gleaming silver pantaloons she wore as a hostess in the late ‘60s — became a signature.
She documented a wardrobe that was built on audacious colour, especially red, as duteously as she did her menus, keeping detailed notes on when each gown had been worn, with which earrings, bags and even hosiery.
Yet she was neither rigid nor predictable, eschewing a codified style in favour of a look that veered from the sleek understatement of a mock turtleneck cashmere caftan, or the slender one-shoulder gowns she favoured in the ‘70s, to the more showy effusions of the Reagan era, as in the lavishly feathered cape she wore atop a filmy gown to a Metropolitan Museum of Art costume exhibition in 1985.
Bloomingdale’s fondness for frills was still in evidence a year ago, when she wore a scarlet evening dress with outsize belled sleeves, girlishly bowed at the shoulders, to Vanity Fair’s Oscars party.
She was devoted to finery, entertaining and dressing with theatrical flair. “Giving a party or hosting a dinner is in many ways like a performance,” she wrote in 1994 in “Entertaining With Betsy Bloomingdale: A Collection of Culinary Tips and Treasures From the World’s Best Hosts and Hostesses.”
“You are the producer, director, stage manager and finally the actor,” turned out, accordingly, she might have added, in a costume befitting a star.
Yet she was never pretentious. “She was happy with the duchess or the flower girl,” Hitz said. “She was not a snob.”
Nor did she balk at bending convention to her tastes and whims. Hitz remembered giving a party, the invitation calling for tieless shirts and jeans. “Well, Betsy was a game girl,” he recalled. “If somebody said blue jeans, she was going to wear the best damn blue jeans in the house, with shoes as high as the Empire State Building.”
From the start of the Bloomingdale-Reagan friendship in the 1950s, through Ronald Reagan’s term as California governor and his years in the White House, Bloomingdale shared her sedulously cultivated fashion sense with the first lady.
“Nancy didn’t travel as extensively as she may have liked, certainly not as extensively as Betsy,” Colacello recalled. “I think Nancy looked to her as a kind of style mentor.”
A child of the 1920s, Bloomingdale held cinema idols, a favourite among them Merle Oberon, as her own early fashion role models. “So much of her taste was informed by Hollywood, when Hollywood was a beacon of style,” Hitz observed. “America was in the midst of a grim Depression, but Hollywood was building emerald cities.”
Bloomingdale ultimately turned for inspiration to the East Coast social elite. “She thought Babe Paley was so chic, so soignée,” Colacello recalled, “and that she had such beautiful homes.”
Yet her tastes remained her own. “She was always on the more feminine side," Wyatt said. “She wouldn’t go so much to the modern. I think she knew what flattered her.” Bloomingdale rarely placed a couture order for Yves Saint Laurent, Wyatt said: “That said something about her, that she knew her style.”
Friends interpreted her fondness for ruffles, puffed shoulders and bows as the outward expression of unflagging high spirits. “The last time I saw her, Betsy was leaving Nancy Reagan’s funeral” last March, Wyatt recalled. “She was in a wheelchair. She had her caregivers surrounding her. I came over to say hello. She was still smiling.” — The New York Times
