The wife of William F. Buckley Jr. was a force in her own right.
The wife of William F. Buckley Jr. was a force in her own right.
P at Buckley, the arresting, original figure who illuminated the social and philanthropic spheres of New York for four decades, was born 100 years ago today. She was not just the wife of William F. Buckley Jr., the renaissance man of American conservatism — editor, broadcaster, novelist, wit, polemicist, bon viveur, one-time CIA agent, New York mayoral candidate, accomplished harpsichordist — and a devout Catholic. Pat was a force in her own right. Together, they made a formidable double act.
As Bob Colacello put it in a sparkling profile for Vanity Fair in December 2008, they were “a study in contrasts — Auntie Mame and the Absent-minded Professor, Pericles and Cleopatra — but those who knew them best understood how in tune they were mentally, morally, politically, and romantically.” They called each other “Ducky.” Colabello quoted from their good friend Henry Kissinger’s eulogy at Pat’s memorial in 2007: “Theirs was one of the great love stories of our time. The combination of Pat and Bill brought about a binary reaction that perhaps only a nuclear physicist could explain.”
The New York Times’ description, rather oddly, said: “At a soupcon under six feet tall, she was Manhattan’s tallest reigning socialite.” As the daughter and wife of wealthy men, she was born to and sustained by privilege, yet she balanced the high life with good works, throwing into the mix a wicked, worldly wit, a gift for friendship, a bold style, and a total disregard for the politically correct.
Patricia Alden Austin Taylor was born on July 1, 1926, in Vancouver. She was one of the three children of Austin Cotterell Taylor, a self-made industrialist, rich from lumber and mining. Her mother, Kathleen Elliott, daughter of the chief of police of Winnipeg, was a great beauty.
Educated at home and then at Crofton House School, Pat loved horses and hunted. Her father’s thoroughbred, Indian Broom, raced unsuccessfully against the legendary Seabiscuit. The family lived next door to the Trudeaus, the family of two future Canadian prime ministers. With typical hyperbole, Pat would claim “the king and queen [George VI and his consort, Elizabeth] always stayed with us when they were in Vancouver.”
When it came to further education, Canadian universities denied her entry as she could not master math, but this did not bar her from the fabled Vassar in New York’s Hudson Valley. There, she shared a room with Patricia Buckley, one of ten children of the oil baron and lawyer William F. Buckley Sr. When, in a life beset by the breaking of bones, Pat was left in the lurch when her partner for a dance broke his leg skiing, Patricia arranged for her brother, William Jr., to step in. They met a few more times, and then Pat broke her back in a hunting accident.
A year later, Buckley visited her in Canada, and within three days, they were engaged. Pat’s mother thought she was marrying down; Buckley was a Roman Catholic. In 1950, after Bill’s graduation, they were wed in Vancouver. The Taylors conceded a Catholic wedding but insisted on a blessing from the Anglican bishop — Sir Francis Cooke Caulfeild Heathcote, Bart. (no less), the bishop of New Westminster — at the reception for 1,000 on the lawn of Shannon, the Taylors’ stately estate. Despite Bill’s ardent, enduring devotion to his faith, Pat never converted. At times when in company and Bill’s Catholicism was mentioned, Pat would declare, “I’m Church of England.”
In his loving, funny, acute and deeply personal memoir, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir (2009), their only child, Christopher wrote, that they
never discussed religion. I doubt, for that matter, that he and she had ever discussed it. I don’t think I ever once heard Mum utter a religious or spiritual sentiment, a considerable feat considering that she was married for 57 years to one of the most prominent Catholics in the country. But she rigorously observed the proprieties. When Pup taped an episode of “Firing Line” in the Sistine Chapel with Princess Grace, Malcolm Muggeridge, Charlton Heston and David Niven, Mum was included in the post-taping audience with Pope John Paul II. There’s a photo of the occasion: she has on more black lace than a Goya duchess. The total effect is that of Mary Magdalene dressed by Bill Blass.
In 1951, Buckley published God and Man at Yale. The young couple then spent nine months in Mexico where he worked for the CIA.
When they returned to the U.S. in 1952, they bought a waterside house in Stamford on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound, which was to be the family home for the rest of Pat’s life. She painted it Bermuda pink “so sailors might see it and drop in” and gardened in bikinis.
In 1955, Buckley founded National Review, which, with his books, a syndicated column, and a television show, Firing Line, made him the father of modern American conservatism. Pat became known as its den mother.
When learning to cook, Pat took lessons in New York with James Beard, the father of American gastronomy, and every second Monday for four decades from the 1960s, she would serve dinner for her husband’s editors. This could be intimidating. One young editor recalled his first meeting, for which he arrived in tails and with a cane. Pat asked if he was injured. He admitted the cane was “an affectation,” to which she retorted, “Well, will you please leave your affectation in the hall?”
In 1965, Bill stood for mayor of New York. As a result of a skiing accident, Pat was confined to a wheelchair during the campaign. “I’d sit and smile and nod. That was a plus,” she said.
When asked what he would do if he won the election, Bill issued his classic response: “I’d demand a recount.” He got only 13 percent of the vote. Pat claimed to be relieved not to be first lady of New York. “I’m a housewife. What’s wrong with being a housewife?” (She would also frequently — but rather unconvincingly — refer to herself as a “simple country girl from the backwoods of British Columbia.”)
As well as the Stamford home, they had an Upper East Side duplex in Manhattan and every winter, they rented Chateau de Rougemont, a former monastery near Gstaad in the Swiss Alps. The Buckleys’ chef, Julian Booth, recalled their high life in Gstaad: “We would have the Greek night, with King Constantine, the Goulandrises, and Taki. Then we’d have a German night, with Count and Countess von Oeynhausen. And then the Danish night, when Princess Benedikt would come. And the Monegasque night — the Grimaldis and David Niven.”
From the 1960s on, Pat was regularly photographed by Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She was not a conventional beauty, but the cameras loved this huge-haired, wild-eyed reed. She favored giant costume jewelry and the American designers Bill Blass, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta, and her willowy, almost impossibly slim frame suited their creations.
From 1978 to 1995, she chaired the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and raised about $2 million each year for the museum through a gala benefit. The tickets rose from $150 to $800 in her time, but by 2005, under Vogue editor Anna Wintour, they had reached $3,500. “My friends can’t afford to go anymore,” sighed Pat.
She retained her philanthropic instincts, and with her friend and fellow clothes horse, Nan Kempner, she raised $75 million for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Other hospitals, AIDS-related causes, and Vietnam veterans benefited from what she called her “money-raising.” She told Women’s Wear Daily, “I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to give away so I give in service. There are certain institutions I think need support. Oh, support — supportive, I hate the words. It sounds like a truss for a hernia.”
Her manners, like her table, were exquisitely old-school, but she had a weakness for gossip. One of her husband’s editors mused that she would have approved of Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s injunction, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit here by me.”
Her wit could be mordant. When J. K. Galbraith brought Teddy Kennedy to visit the Buckleys at Rougemont one winter, Kennedy asked if he could borrow a car to go back to Gstaad. Pat said: “Certainly not — there are three bridges between here and Gstaad.”
In the 1990s, she became a U.S. citizen. She was also entered into the Fashion Hall of Fame in that decade.
Her greatest love, apart from Bill and Christopher, was for a succession of King Charles cavaliers. She called them the most pampered dogs in New York; when one had surgery, she spent the night with it at the vet’s clinic.
Life was not all snaps and schnapps. She had four hip replacements and two ectopic pregnancies, and she suffered much pain in her last years. In 2005, she told the New York Observer, “I don’t look forward to anything in New York anymore. I’ve done it.”
Pat’s death on April 15, 2007, at 80, was a release for her but a great blow for Bill. He had depended on her for so long. As Christopher put it, “Even when Mum wasn’t speaking to him — which was about a third of the time — she looked after him: packing his bags, making sure he had everything he needed.” “I’m just an Arab wife,” she was known to say. “When Bill says, ‘Strike the tent,’ I do.” He survived Pat by a mere ten months.
“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.”
But that was never the choice or fate of Pat Buckley. Too original and unabashed to be a grande dame, she was an extraordinary, incandescent character who enriched and invigorated the lives of many.