Lost amid the rapturous attention paid to the deaths of Bea Arthur and Marilyn Cooper recently was an obituary in the New York Times for another feminine role model: Catherine di Montezemolo, doyenne of fashion and society. Sister of Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt, Catherine was perhaps less known outside her own circle, but she left an imprint among her friends and colleagues. I interviewed her for Quest back in 1988. Here’s an excerpt that in no way does her justice but might remind a few of you out there of what a talented and delightful woman she was. I’m calling it Twin Peaks here simply because I was always amused that the name Montezemolo means “twin mountains”. But when you think about it, Cathy and her husband, Alessandro, were “twin peaks” of a sort. Of talent and grace. She died on Wednesday, April 22nd, at 83 years old. (Photo, below, courtesy of DPC/NY Social Diary).
Elegant Simplicity
Back when Catherine di Montezemolo was just starting out as an editor at Vogue, Diana Vreeland called her into her office for a dressing down. The legendary editor laid out the fashion spread Cathy had compiled and yelled, “This is so boring! Everything is so boring! This model looks like an Australian singer. That one looks like she belongs to the P.T.A.!” Shaking Cathy by the shoulders, D.V. intoned, “Don’t you understand — this is Show Biz!”
It was a lesson Catherine di Montezemolo has never forgotten. “A lot of people were terrorized by her,” Catherine says. “Diana could drive you up a wall, and she did, but she always had an extraordinary sense of humor.” Diana’s advice, however, stuck in Cathy’s mind throughout her long and varied career working at Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, House & Garden, and later as fashion director of Lord & Taylor. Indeed, it’s an allusion to show biz that Catherine uses to explain why she’s still working hard as a fashion designer. “It’s like the smell of greasepaint for an actor,” she says.
Catherine di Montezemolo grew up in Manhattan as Cathy Murray, one of seven children from a prominent Irish-American family. [Her sister Jeanne would later achieve fame on her own as the wife of Alfred Vanderbilt III.] Her father was a commissioner of the Port Authority and held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The Murray clan spent a good deal of time at their 65-acre ocean-side estate in Southampton, residing in “a huge barn of a home” that had once housed cattle and horses. It was a fantasy playground for the five girls and two boys. Besides swimming, tennis, and horseback riding, there was roller-skating in the abandoned chicken coop behind the barn and ice-skating on the front lawn whenever it froze over in winter. During the Thirties, Cathy’s father built a beach house on the ocean that she especially cherished because she used to ride her bicycle on its roof.
Back in those days, Southampton was much different than it is today. “There were a lot less people and lots more land. We used to have hunts and horse shows,” Cathy says. “We would ride across people’s property like they do in England without any thought of private property.” Life, however, was not an endless succession of fun and games. Cathy’s father died in 1937, and the beach house was demolished when a brutal hurricane tore across Long Island the following year. “There wasn’t even a splinter left,” she says, when the storm finally ended.
A proper Irish-Catholic, Cathy attended the Holy Child Convent School in Suffern, New York — an unlikely environment for an aspiring fashion designer. But Cathy combed through copies of Vogue her mother forwarded and cut out pictures of dresses she thought were beautiful. In 1945, while still a teenager, she landed a job as a rover at Vogue, working as Sally Kirkland’s assistant. “I used to run and pick up boxes of clothes and bring them to the studios,” she recalls. “It was a wonderful training ground for me.”
During the next thirty years, as she rose through the ranks at Vogue, Cathy worked with the world’s best photographers and models. Diana Vreeland sent her on a shoot in Greece with Richard Avedon and Jean Shrimpton for a feature they called “The Shrimp at Sea.” She also flew to Hawaii with Jean and another great beauty, Penelope Tree — a job she remembers as “a bit touchy” because the photographer David Bailey had been the lover of both.
Catherine quickly developed an eye for the unexpected. That, after all, is what Diana Vreeland wanted. “Diana loved to break the rules,” Cathy says. “For her to like something, it had to have a twist, a quirk, a squirt of lemon.” A case in point was Lauren Hutton. “I remember I went to a showing downtown, and I saw this girl floating around who didn’t look like anybody. She had a space between her teeth, and was absolutely beautiful. I said, ‘Come up tomorrow to the magazine because we’re having a run-through.’ The next day she appeared at the office, and Diana spotted her right away.” Lauren went on to become the country’s top model, and a popular film star.
While many of her co-workers enjoyed the jet-set lifestyle that came with working at Vogue, Cathy preferred going home at night to her husband, Marchese Alessandro di Montezemolo. She credits the longevity of their marriage to their being “great friends” and sharing common interests. “We enjoy each other’s company,” she says. Introduced at a party in honor of Patrick and Dolores Guinness, below, the couple were married in May 1960, and immediately afterward built a house on a stretch of property in Southampton not far from the barn in which Cathy was brought up.
To Catherine, Alessandro was a dashingly handsome romantic figure, an internationally acclaimed horseman and polo player who had served with the Italian cavalry. Alessandro for his part was impressed by Cathy’s beauty, charm and boundless energy. In 1974, a change in jobs for Alessandro prompted the di Montezemolos to move to Milan. Cathy left Vogue and secured a position as European editor of Harper’s Bazaar. At the same time, she launched a line of clothing called “Noi” with her friend Jack Bodi.
When Catherine and Alessandro returned to the States (where he became chairman and CEO of Marsh & McLennan, Inc., the international brokerage firm), Geraldine Stutz (below) of Bendel’s suggested that Cathy create a collection of quality sleepwear for the store. The idea took off. Soon twelve other stores, including Saks and Bergdorf’s, carried the label, but the novice designer found herself getting in over her head.
“The problem was that I was doing everything myself,” she says. “The selling, shipping, fighting with contractors, buying the fabrics.” Running the operation as a cottage industry out of the maid’s room in her United Nations Plaza apartment, Cathy often worked until two in the morning, shipping out orders. Alessandro told her, “Either you get a partner, or forget it.”
Just at that moment, Lord & Taylor stepped in and offered Cathy a job as vice-president and fashion director. It was an especially exciting period for her, one that she compares to her earlier days at Vogue. In a store, as in a magazine, she says, “you have to be an editor, because you have to constantly look ahead and be selective.” But Lord & Taylor was an ongoing challenge. “The store point of view was a very definite one. You didn’t get funky and wild, you had to put yourself in the position of the customer and not wander off.”
In 1986, Cathy resigned from Lord & Taylor and revived her business as a designer of at-home clothes. She and Alessandro sold the UN Plaza space and bought a pied a terre just off Beekman Place. This time around she is avoiding the pitfalls of the past. “For the moment I’m selling to people directly,” she says. One of her first clients was, not surprisingly, her old boss Diana Vreeland. “But that,” Cathy is quick to point out, ” is purely “a labor of love.” 
