The fragile-looking older woman whom they flanked-and who continued to clap in her singular slow, intense way-was a far less familiar figure: rarely photographed, intensely private, deeply shy, wary of publicity, seemingly chilly and excluding to those beyond her protective inner sanctum, Jayne Wrightsman is nevertheless considered by many to be the grande dame of New York society and one of the great art collectors and museum patronesses of the last part of the 20th century. Two would be familiar to many in the audience-or, indeed, to anyone who knew the highly chronicled beau monde of New York City: on one side, Annette de la Renta, philanthropist and elegant wife of the designer Oscar de la Renta, and, on the other, Mercedes Bass, second wife of Texas billionaire Sid Bass. In their stead: the severe, driven chic intrinsic to a certain echelon of New York society and which seemed, that night, more than usually appropriate.Īfter the audience joined in an emotional chorus of "God Bless America," it leapt to its feet to applaud Daniel Rodriguez, the Police Department tenor who had sung it onstage.Īmong those who rose, in Box 45 of the first tier, were three reed-thin, dark-haired women, dressed in column-like black.
("I hate opera, but I love my wife," financier Saul Steinberg once famously remarked.) The mood was highly charged, though the audience itself looked subdued, with few of the glittering necklaces and important brooches that signify, in that rarefied world at least, the ebb and flow of affluence. No seat remained empty New York's elite filled the hall: music as elixir, but also as social draw. The late arrival of Peter Jennings seemed to cause a collective sigh of relief: reassurance, perhaps, that there would be no late-breaking crisis that night. That music would resume, that the Berlin Philharmonic had not canceled-these were hopeful symbols to a city still shattered less than a month after the terrorist attacks of September 11. The opening-night concert of the Carnegie Hall season was about to begin. From Wrightsman's turbulent youth to her bond with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to her impact on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, FRANCESCA STANFILL charts the making of a grande dame But even friends know little of her life before she married Charles Wrightsman, who left her his vast oil fortune in 1986. Intensely private and utterly controlled, Jayne Wrightsman inhabits the pinnacle of New York society as one of the late 20th century's greatest art collectors.
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