THE FLAMINGDEBUTANTERosamond Bernier shares her colorful 94-year

history as an art impresario and a social dynamo inan enchanting new memoir. LeslieCamhi reports.

he world's most glamorous art lecturer turned memoir-ist, Rosamond Bernier, who will be 95 in October, has tamedwild animals, flown her own plane, and befriended the likesofHenri Matisse, Leonard Bernstein, and Frida Kahlo. As anexpatriate American in Mexico during the 1940s,she presidedover a menagerie that included an ocelot, an anteater, spidermonkeys, various tropical birds, and (most incongruously) asmall penguin, which she took swimming off the coast of athen largelyundiscovered Acapulco.

As the first-ever European Features Editor for Vogue inpostwar Paris, she lived at the Hotel Crillon-where, in a city

still recovering from wartime deprivations, she had the ben-efit of hot water-and charmed Picasso with her Mexican-accented Spanish. ("He had just started his love affair withFrancoise Gilot," she recalled recently, "so he didn't give meany trouble on that score.") Equally at home in bohemianartists' studios and amid the otherworldly extravagance ofher friend the American-born Baroness Pauline de Roth-schild's wine estate, Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Bernierstepped lightly across continents and over social conventions.Possessed of a furious work ethic, she nevertheless claims alifelong habit of breakfasting in bed. When she lives >400

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cofounded the popularly priced yet top-quality French artmagazine rOElL, which she ran from 1955 to 1970, its mottowas "All the arts, from all countries, and from all times," andher great ambition, she said, was "to see it read in the Metro."(She did.)

If F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed that there were nosecond acts in American lives, it was only because he hadn'tmet Rosamond. In 1970, after 20 years of marriage, findingherself suddenly divorced and jobless, she moved to New York,embraced a new career as a "professional talker" (her descrip-tion), and soon married the love of her life, New York Timesart critic John Russell. Her uncannily vivid lectures on art andartists, stunningly delivered from the stage of the MetropolitanMuseum at 8:00 P.M., with impeccable diction, without notes,and in full eveningwear, sold out months in advance.

After some 250 performances, Bernier gave up lecturingin 2008, the year Russell died. Having lovingly nursed himthrough his final illness, she sat down a year later to write "notat all a chronological memoir," she says. "I would write some-thing about Fernand Leger, then something about Mexico,then something about Paris. After a while, I had quite a lot ofmaterial, and my friend the agent LY1IDNesbit asked to see it."

Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir (Farrar, Strausand Giroux), animated by Bernier's inimitable voice andcharm, includes encounters with countless luminaries from theworlds of art and style. Written in short, ellipticalchapters, itchronicles everything from her solo crossing of the Atlantic onan ocean liner at age ten to attend a dreaded British boardingschool to clear-eyed appraisals of Alberto Giacometti (in-tensely modest but with "violently ambivalent" feelings towardwomen) and Karl Lagerfeld (a man of princely generosity anda certain inevitable ruthlessness). Sometimes, in reading it, I

wished she'd included more about herself, a figure at once elu-sive and possessing alarming vitality, peeking out from behindthe portraits of the great and the famous. Self-effacement isnot an aid to the memoirist's art, nor does it seem in keep-ing with her character. But her razor-sharp insights, playfulhumor, and deep humility throw the colorful personalitiessurrounding her into high relief

"I don't consider myself exceptional in any way. I think I'vehad exceptional good luck," Bemier says on the telephonefrom New York, where she lives in an apartment scattered withtreasures connected to her life in the arts-a Picasso collage, agouache Mir6 made for her, casts of her own and John Russell'shands by the sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Yet those who knowher well describe a woman of seemingly boundless resilience,iron self-discipline, and an optimistic nature. "She would never

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give way, when traveling, to irritation or misery or anything likethat," says the British painter Howard Hodgkin, who spent amonth in India with Bernier and Russell in 1984. "She has themost amazing ability to make the best of any situation."

Hodgkin's partner, Antony Peattie, recalls, on the same trip,a visit to the nature reserve at Bharatpur. ''We were driven outinto the countryside in bicycle rickshaws-gradually nightfell and we couldn't see anything," he says. ''And then we weremade to sit through a wildlife film in the cold, which basicallyconsisted of animals killing each other. Well, Rosamond notonly had brought along the appropriate shawl, but she alsobrought out a flask of alcohol."

Some of My Lives tells the story of a shy little girl, bornin Philadelphia to an English mother, who died when Rosa-mond was eight, and an American father, an accomplishedlawyer and the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Earlyon she learned to negotiate the big personalities surround-ing her. Her father's support of the Philadelphia Orchestrameant that, during a childhood steeped in music, Rosamondwitnessed the conductor Otto Klernperer, a frequent house-guest, throwing butter balls at his wife across the dinner table.

Composer Aaron Copland, resolutely homosexual, fellunder her spell and remained a lifelong friend, as did LeonardBernstein, who later joined her in exploring the flamencobars of Barcelona's barrio chino and galloping wildly acrossdeserted Dutch beaches. It was through BRIGHT LIGHTSmusic, too, that she first met Frida Kahlo FROMLEFT:A

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-•..multicolored swaying skirt, an embroidered huipil (traditionalovershirt), piles of pre-Columbian necklaces, and an elabo-rate hairstyle woven with flowers and ribbons. Decades later,she wore a gift from the painter, a bright-blue rebozo, or scarf,while lecturing on Kahlo's art at the Metropolitan Museum.

Mexico, where she settled as a young newlywed with herstill younger husband, Lewis Riley, Jr., "was a place whereyou felt that everything could still be invented," Bemierrecalls. "It was extraordinarily vibrant-architecture wasbooming; there was wonderful folk art. And of course thecolors and nature were wonderful." There were also colorfulhouseguests, such as the writers Jane and Paul Bowles, beforethey discovered Tangier, and the English novelist MalcolmLowry, author of Under the Volcano, whom Bernier failedto redeem from alcohol. lives >420

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Having amicably dissolved her first marriage-her hus-band went on to marry Dolores Del Rio-she was newlysingle and visiting ew York from MexIco in 1945 whenshe encountered the entire high command of Vogue in asingleafternoon. "She charmed my mother, who was a fierce,powerful woman and not easily charmed," recalls the authorFrancine du Plessix Gray, daughter of Tatiana du PlessixLiberman and stepdaughter of Alexander Liberman, whowould remain a legendary presence at Conde Nast for somehalf-century. "Alex sawall the qualities she had," du PlessixGray continued, citing Bernier's "charisma, intelligence, sexappeal, amazing ability to draw people out, and brilliantmastery of the art of conversation."

She was also capable of great kindness, especially to chil-dren, although she had none of her own. "She used to take meto lunch when I was thirteen 0[, fourteen, and she was the firstadult who made me feel interesting as a child,"du PlessixGrayremembers. Lavinia, Lady Grimshaw, Bernier's stepdaughterfrom her marriage to Russell, recollects her younger daughterlearning a Viennese waltz from Bernier at age five.

Vogue, where Bernier began as a fashion editor, sent herto Paris in 1947to report on the arts. Fashion was a happyby-product of this endeavor. "A Vogue salary, at the time,could feed a mouse," says Bernier, "but the couturiers wereall extraordinarily nice to me." She was wearing Schiaparelliand photographed by Brassai when she interviewed Mirafor Vogue in Barcelona; on a visit to Matisse, the masterhimself suggested a yellow scarf to go with her full-lengthorange coat by Balenciaga. (The motherly Madame Maria,her vendeuse at Balenciaga, "would call me up when therewas going to be a sale,"Bernier says by way of explanation,"and she knew what fitted me.") After she founded L'OEIL

Aaron Copland gave the bride away; Leonard Bernsteinwas the groom's witness; the art dealer Pierre Matisse, son ofHenri, was his best man; and Johnson himself planned theparty "with the attention to detail given to the designing of askyscraper,"Bernier writes.

A lifetime member of the International Best-DressedList, Bernier has style that extends "to the rhythm of hersentences," says her friend the painter Alex Katz. "It's in theway she looks, the way she lives,the way she talks. She'd neversettle for anything pedestrian." Katz's 2007 double portrait ofBernier and Russellis destined for the Metropolitan Museum.(In 2002, David Hockney painted the couple in watercolor,lavishing attention on Bernier's gold slippers and Russell'ssignature red socks.)

The Met is also the repository of some nineteen coutureoutfits donated by Bernier to the Costume Institute. Sixmannequins, arrayed in her clothing, joined her onstage, asthe museum's surprise, for her last lecture there. Titled, likeher memoir, "Some of My Lives," it looked at the history offashion, a subject that she'd never touched before. For thelecture, a bejeweled Bernier swarmed across the stage in aflowing print gown that looked likePoiret but was somethingHalston made for her when she returned to Paris in 1970 tolecture at the Grand Palais. "Through the clothes," Berniersays, "you could tell the story of the people, the times, ofwhat was going on in theater, and the THE EXCLUSIVEmusic being played. John used to say FROM LEFT: A

. SKETCH OF BERNIERthat you can make the history of art INTERVIEWINGinto the history of everything and that coco CHANEL FOR

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with her second husband, French journalist Georges Bernier,"as there is great respect for the arts in France, someone likeMadame Gres made me at least nine outfits," Bernier recalls.Husband number two is pointedly absent from her memoir,but Bernier says her stepson from the marriage, art historianand lecturer Olivier Bernier, whom she raised from the ageof seven, remains her closest friend.

Championed byPicasso,Braque, and Leger,L' OEIL, whichsold for the equivalent of 48 cents today, included full-colorreproductions and essays on subjects ranging from Bavarianrococo churches to the School of Paris to the latest develop-ments in architecture, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art.Bernier covered Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecti-cut-little imagining that, in 1975,she and John Russell, anearly contributor to the magazine, would be married there.

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in Southern India. (This time, when the staircases provedtoo daunting, people carried her.) She had been to see DerekJacobi in King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Musicand James Levine conducting Wozzeck at the MetropolitanOpera, and she was busy planning her birthday party atthe Century Club, to coincide with her book's publication."She has a more hectic social life than any 94-year-old Iknow," du Plessix Gray remarks. "She's still a kind of flam-ing debutante." In an e-mail, her friend the French writerAnka Muhlstein, wife of the novelist Louis Begley, citesBernier's indomitable creative instinct as part of what keepsher going.

I mention that one day, I'd liketo be an older person enjoy-ing New York's cultural treasures. "Well, come and give mea ring!" Bemier says. 0

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