What’s in a name? Plenty, apparently, if it happens to be Penelope.

It may seem silly to judge a person by her first name, but if the appellation is Penelope one has good reason to pay attention. Especially if she’s written a book. Be sure to crack it open and start reading with passion and pleasure. I’ve rarely encountered a Penelope who was not adept with a pen. Although, surprisingly, they are few and far between.

When I ran my bookstore, Brooks Books, above, a few years back in Tivoli, NY, I had a special section designed specifically for authors named Penelope. It was not necessarily one of the more popular spots. Few people even knew it existed. Most customers came in asking for certain authors by their last names. “You got any King?” I would hear ad nauseum. As if the only purpose of a bookstore was to provide readers with yet another outlet for another novel by that prolific prince of darkness. I could always tell those customers were only stopping in to get out of the rain or to find a place to park their kids for a few minutes while they went to the ATM, or bought a beer at the deli. They never purchased any books. And not because I didn’t have any Stephen King. I had loads of Stephen King. But I didn’t have a first edition of Carrie which is all these type of people long for. It’s the white trash equivalent of finding a copy of Tamerlane by Edgar Allan Poe at a yard sale.

Then there were the clients who asked for the latest tome by David Sedaris. I have to admit I’d never heard of David Sedaris when I opened my shop. But after just a week, I knew every book the man had ever written. I had to explain to these prospective buyers that I ran an antiquarian bookshop and people did not part with their David Sedarises, no matter how much they were worth. They were simply too invaluable. Try the Beinecke Library at Yale, I’d say. I’m sure they have the collected works of David Sedaris, all signed, in “mint” condition, unread.

Same with Joyce Carol Oates. I can’t tell you how many times people would lumber in and demand a copy of her latest output. I can’t tell you because in the five years I actually ran a shop, not one person ever asked for a book by Joyce Carol Oates. And she wrote so many of them that one would have to open a separate wing just to house them all. And one would have to be open 24/7 to keep up with the publishing schedule.

Then there were the Sybille Bedford types. “Got anything other than Jigsaw?” they’d ask, with a puzzled expression, stepping gingerly out of the rain (it rained a lot even back then). “No,” I’d say. “Not yet. I had A Compass Error last week, but it seems to be misplaced. Someone must have pilfered it.” They’d wander over to the garden section and peruse an old Gertrude Jekyll book. I could always tell if they were serious connoisseurs of landscape literature if they pronounced her last name right. It rhymes with “fecal”.

Occasionally someone would come in and mumble under his breath, as if entering an adult emporium, “Got any Updike?” I’d then show him to an entire wall of books that no one had even thumbed through. He’d shake his head, mutter to himself, look right and left, then say that he’d tried to read The Centaur, but just couldn’t get into it. He’d usually leave with a copy of the local Chronogram, which was left in a pile for free by the door. Every now and then, I’d sell Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, but only if it still had a dust jacket and wasn’t soiled.

On rare occasions, a customer would sail in — usually a female pushing a baby carriage (very often without a baby in it) — and inquire: “Do you have….the latest…Prose?” I knew who they meant — Francine Prose, of course. She taught at Bard nearby and had quite a following. I kept her in a special section marked “Prose and Kahns” — The latter being works by Alfred Kahn. But inevitably these Prosians would already have the book I had in stock and would curse loudly as they jammed the stroller in the French doors on their way out.

The one book I was guaranteed to sell every week was The Da Vinci Code. People would snarl and say they had heard it was crap, but they’d buy it anyway. Just so they had something in their hands to prove to their spouses or housemates that they hadn’t wasted the entire day browsing through junk shops and used book stores.

I guess I took a kind of perverse pleasure in contriving a corner in my shop devoted to my favorite authors named Penelope. I have to admit, the idea didn’t start off as being quite so specific. The notion grew out of one book in particular: The Bookshop. I don’t know how I first came to read this little magnum opus. I think I was riffling through an old copy of the New York Times Magazine, or was it the Book Review? I stumbled across an article by Mira Stout on a fascinating British lady named Penelope Fitzgerald. I used to know Mira at Vanity Fair in the mid-80s, back when Tina Brown edited it and it still lay some claim to having snob appeal. Mira and I were fellow Contributing Reporters, although I think she got paid more. I read the piece primarily to find out more about what Mira was up to. We both got let go around the same time. She, I learned, was in London leading what appeared to be a teddibly civilized existence among the British cognoscenti. I was jealous. But all those feelings soon vanished as I read her wonderful essay. This Penelope Fitzgerald sounded like a writer I could sink my teeth into.

So the next time I found myself in a used bookstore (I frequented them all back then, when there were actually hundreds to choose from), I asked the owner if he had a copy of The Bookshop. He looked at me as if I’d asked him for the key to the bathroom. Bookstore owners hate giving out those keys. And now I know why. The first time I did it at my own store, when a customer came in and begged me to let him use the toilet, I had to open all the windows even though it was the dead of winter. There was frost on my Thackeray. But I guess I was lucky this time because the fellow did indeed have a copy of The Bookshop. It was only $40, he said. A First Edition. And it wasn’t even signed! So I went home and ordered a paperback from Amazon.

What can I say about this extraordinary book other than it changed my life? First of all, Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t write it until she was over 60. She’d hardly even been a writer up until then. Her first book in 1975 was a biography of Edward Burne-Jones. Then she penned a mystery in 1977, The Golden Child. It was a moderate success. The Bookshop came out a year later, and garnered raves. It’s a wickedly funny — some might say droll, but they’d be wrong — account of her adventures opening a bookstore in Suffolk, in the countryside of England. Based on her own experience, the novel unfolds in a sure, steady stream of precise, subtle, penetrating prose. The tiny thumbnail sketches of local residents are as good as any caricature by Cruikshank or Hogarth. The plot twists and turns in unexpected ways, making the word unpredictable seem cliched. There’s even a ghost to give it some color, although it hardly needs any more of that. I have rarely read a book that I found so immediately pleasurable. It’s also a brilliant warning against anyone who has ever fantasized about opening his or her own bookshop. But it’s a disguised warning. One is so enchanted by the concept that one overlooks the cautionary tale at its core.

The immediate effect is to inspire one to go out and do that very thing as soon as possible. Which I ended up doing. And wouldn’t you know it? My experience owning a bookshop was almost identical to hers. The resistance from locals. The gossip swirling. The logistical nightmares and disasters (have you ever tried to get the smell of skunk out of a leather bound volume?) The lack of sales. The ingrates. She hit the nail right on the head. If only I’d taken her admonition seriously — or never read the book at all — I’d be a rich man today.

I’ve given The Bookshop as a gift to countless friends. And I sold so many copies at the store that I was constantly scouring eBay for cheap copies to line my shelves. I’m not sure others shared my enthusiasm. Penelope Fitzgerald is something of an acquired taste. But not long after Mira Stout’s comely ode appeared, another article about Penelope popped up. This time in The New Yorker, or was it New York? Arthur Lubow wrote it. Another friend of mine, Arthur did a better job of telling the basic facts of this curious author’s life. But some of the bloom had come off the rose, for me, that is, because by then she was established as a major writer. The darling of the literati. Everyone knew about her and some of the fun of being in the know evaporated.

That didn’t stop me from reading her other books, No Means of Escape, Human Voices, The Gates of Angels, At Freddie’s, and even The Knox Brothers, her toothy exegesis on her religiously-inclined forebears, a pride of literary lions. Each subsequent book of hers was unique. No two alike. To read The Blue Flower, about the German poet Novalis and his passion for a 12-year-old girl (and which won the National Book Critic’s Award), right on the heels of The Bookshop is to wonder if Penelope Fitzgerald really existed at all or was she like Penelope Ashe (authoress of Naked Came the Stranger) a mishmash, a composite of writers, a scribe by committee?

How could one person write two so disarmingly different works of art? But there’s no mistaking the mark of genius. Fitzgerald’s use of language is completely her own no matter what the subject being surveyed. I particularly enjoyed Offshore, an autobiographical novel about a group of misfits living on house boats on the Thames. It’s gripping without any trussed-up suspense, poignant without wry manipulation, haunting without any real horror. It’s simply true-to-life.

Thus was born my Penelope obsession and shrine. I started off with as many of Fitzgerald’s books as I could find. Then somehow — perhaps by subconscious design — I placed a copy of The Pumpkin Eater, by Penelope Mortimer, above, on the same shelf. I have to confess I hadn’t read it. I’d seen the movie with Anne Bancroft that was based on it. I knew Mortimer’s work from other films as well. Who can ever forget Bunny Lake Is Missing, which she wrote with her husband, John Mortimer, best known for his Rumpole of the Bailey series?

Penelope Mortimer is actually a very interesting figure. Born Penelope Fletcher, in 1919, she had a somewhat difficult childhood, attending seven schools in seven years. She married the Reuters journalist Charles Dimont when she was 19. Her first novel was published in 1947. Two years later she married a young barrister, aka John Mortimer. The Mortimers soon became the hub of the swinging London set. The Pumpkin Eater came out in 1962 and put her on the map. As Penelope Mortimer evolved, she moved more into film criticism and wrote screenplays, memoirs and a biography of the Queen Mother. She died in 1999.

It wasn’t long before someone who worked in films commented on my growing Penelope shelf. She knew everyone in the business. We joked about other Penelopes. One named Cruz whom I learned was an actress. Another named Tree, a stunning model whom I recalled with relish from the 60s. This friend, who was an agent, had some good stories about her. And then there was Lady Penelope of Wangford, a stylish fashion plate, below, whose picture I found on the internet. We both agreed she was the quintessence of chic.

We wondered why there were so few famous Penelopes. It’s not a common name. But it should be, considering the source, the premier Penelope, the one who started it all. The faithful wife of Odysseus. Patience personified. The lonely weaver who loomed so large in literature. Come to think of it, Margaret Atwood wrote an homage to her: The Penelopiad. And let’s not forget the Natalie Wood film, Penelope, which is a cult classic, as are all movies with Natalie Wood in them. You can’t help but be charmed by someone as cute as that particular Penelope.

As my interest grew, I found some striking similarities within my Penelopesian war chest. First off, one has to be a British subject to hold any sway as a noted Penelope. Why this is true is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is part of the indomitable Anglo soul; that stiff upper lip thing. Penelopes by their very nature are patient, strong, unbending. One doesn’t think of them as sexpots, simply because of the quaint, almost melodic, resonance of their name. But invariably they have an innate feline appeal. Some like Penelope Neri write fashionably erotic historical romances such as Cherish the Night. Someone named Penelope Tremayne wrote Below The Tide, “the true story of a remarkably courageous woman.” Penelope Sassoon wrote Penelope in Moscow, which sounds like a pleasant romp. Penelope Dyan penned mysteries, including Caution Tape. Others like the very beautiful Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward are secret agents. Although Lady Penelope only exists in the realm of the imagination. She won’t be born until 2039.

It is almost de rigueur among Penelopes to be preternaturally versatile. Take for example Penelope Lively. I hadn’t read much of her work, but she was much in demand. So I dug around and came up with a handful of her books. Not so much to my taste, but very popular with my customers. And for a bookstore owner, any author who moves off the shelves, is a favorite author.

She was born in Cairo in 1933, as Penelope Low. She read history at Oxford, then married Jack Lively in 1957. Her first book, in 1970, was Astercote, a work for children. Her other books in that genre include The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and A Stitch in Time. Her best known work might be Moon Tiger for which she won the Booker Prize in 1987. And Consequences. Or The Photograph.

I’m more inclined to pick up her non-fiction efforts, including A House Unlocked and Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived about her upbringing in Egypt.

Quite similar in many regards is Penelope Gilliatt, above, who wrote the brilliant 1971 screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday. Born in England, she attended Bennington College in the States and became the film critic of The New Yorker. I had copies of her novels, A State of Change and One By One, plus her screenplay at home (with groovy pix from the flick). It had always been one of my favorite films, back when you couldn’t open a book, magazine or turn on the TV without seeing Glenda Jackson.

I brought all of Gilliatt’s books in and added them to my growing, and soon to be groaning, Penelope shelf. In time, people began to notice the section. Someone quipped that it was a “panoply of Penelopes.” Emboldened, I sought out more. But other than Penelope Hobhouse, who is the queen of expensive gardening books, my cup ran dry. Aside from some lesser known, newish, authors: Penelope Holt and Farmer, there aren’t too many Penelopes out there penning away. An exception is Penelope Rowlands, who has just written a chic biography of the great fashion editor, Carmel Snow — A Dash of Daring. That’s one I need to add to my list.

A quick glance at IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, has led to a mysterious Penelope G. Knapp, originally from Rochester, then Chicago, who wrote a novel which became the 1919 film, The Broken Butterfly, starring Pauline Starke. It looks like a real tear-jerker.

Alas, not a single copy exists on the web. I wonder if it’s any good. I’d like to add it to my collection of books containing the word “Butterfly” in their titles. But that’s another post.

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.”

These days with everyone and his grandmother holding up the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep and Martha Stewart as the great arbiters of literature, acting and design, respectively, it pays to hark back to another time when three unusual ladies, all named Draper, also excelled in these fields. Muriel, Ruth and Dorothy Draper defined their era, and yet are hardly household names today. Lately I’ve found myself delving into books by and about them, including a relatively new one called In The Pink, a lavish biography of Dorothy Draper by Carleton Varney, below.

Dorothy has always had the upper hand when it comes to coffee table books. Her work demands extravagant attention. But the legacy of Muriel and Ruth can also be found in used bookstores and on eBay. Muriel wrote her memoirs, Music at Midnight, in 1929, an ode to her life as a “saloniste.” The latter didn’t write any books that I know of, but there is a lively book of letters and a marvelous biography, The World of Ruth Draper, by Dorothy Warren.

MURIEL DRAPER

Let’s start with Muriel Draper, above, as shot by Carl Van Vechten. Born in 1886, this tiny sparrow, graced with little in the way of looks or natural ability, simply used her wits and charm to seduce the greatest minds of her generation. It’s hard to imagine any other person who could count among her close friends Henry James, John Reed, Max Ewing, Osbert Sitwell and Gertrude Stein, or Lincoln Kirstein, Artur Rubinstein, e.e. cummings and Paul Robeson among her lovers. (Photo below from Beinecke Library collection. Link here: Yale.)

She was to the manner and the manor born, growing up at Birchbrow estate in Haverhill, MA. Her father, Thomas Sanders, had his ups and downs in the livestock and leather businesses (he was also one of the earliest backers of Alexander Graham Bell) and money flowed in and flowed out. But they lived well. Her mother was a Saltonstall. Both parents had long lineages among the old guard of New England dynasties.

Determined to see the world, Muriel married Paul Draper, a Harvard-educated lieder singer, who also had money, and who happened to be the brother of monologuist Ruth Draper. This was before the Great War, at the height of the era of luxury ocean liners, of Americans descending upon London, Paris and Rome with piles of greenbacks and letters of introduction. Muriel took Europe by storm, befriending Bernard Berenson, violinist Albert Spalding, heiress Mabel Dodge and the aforementioned revolutionary John Reed who later wrote Ten Days That Shook the World about the Russian Revolution. One could argue that Muriel Draper started her own revolution, of style, taste and Culture with a capital C.

By 1911, Muriel was in London where she started a salon at Edith Grove to which John Singer Sargent, Norman Douglas and Henry James were frequent guests. It was a long way from her father’s cow pastures and saddlery shops. Music was her passion. She sat at Pablo Casals’ knee while he played his cello. Artur Rubinstein tinkled the ivories while Chaliapin crooned. Soirees often lasted until dawn when champagne and raspberries were served. It was a life of careless luxury and leisure, but one that she worked very hard at.

As World War One began to rage, Muriel returned to America with her two sons Paul and Sanders, soon divorcing her husband, who was an incurable alcoholic. He’d run off with legendary actress Jeanne Eagels. He died at 38 in 1925. She struck out on her own, taking a cue from Elsie de Wolfe and another Draper, unrelated, Dorothy, who had started her own interior design business around the same time. The Beinecke Library at Yale has archived much of Muriel Draper’s work in this area, but a photograph by Walker Evans, below, and comments by friends about her personal surroundings also give the impression of whimsical simplicity, a banishing of Victorian clutter with an emphasis on the telling objet d’art or gifts from famous admirers. Edmund Wilson described her decor as “stale white calla lilies in a big white vase, cameo china ashtrays with cupids on them, and a white skull of a cow hanging on the wall.”

In the ultimate “shabby chic” flat, over the old Coach House in Manhattan, she continued to entertain on Thursday evenings, becoming the preeminent hostess of her day. She had, as one writer noted, “an uncanny ability to link the right people.” She even tried to get Irving Berlin to write her a jazz opera dealing with “skyscrapers and bad whiskey.” Sadly, it never came to pass. Later she lived in high style in a townhouse at 312 East 53rd Street next door to Edmund Wilson. The house had its own garden in back.

Draper also voiced her opinions on fashion and the arts, writing for Vogue and Town & Country, and penned commentary for The New Yorker under the nom de plume “Repard Leirum,” her name spelled backwards. She was a key figure championing the Harlem Renaissance, even attending a drag ball at the notorious Savoy Ballroom. Some dubbed her “the white negress” for her devotion to the cause. Sketched by Romaine Brooks, she was pals with opera’s Mary Garden, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, and Florine Stettheimer. By 1929 she wrote her memoirs Music at Midnight, captivating critics and readers with her zany adventures in high and low Bohemia. Thanks to its success, she took off on a lecture tour across the States, wowing the hoi polloi with tales of international cafe society.

Her later years were less merry. During the Depression, she became devoted to the cause of Communism, traveling to Russia in 1934. Like many under the influence, she misread Stalin’s largess as a liberal ticket to progress. She did not see clearly the cruelty beneath his grand schemes. Nevertheless, she stood by the cause even when it was no longer fashionable. In 1937 she began her own radio show on NBC, “It’s a Woman’s World.” In 1949 she became the president of the Congress of American Women which did not put her in good stead with Senator McCarthy. Perhaps it was the fact that she attended pro-communist rallies wearing the latest creations by Clare McCardell.

Muriel Draper died in 1952, nearly forgotten. Obituaries referred to her as the mother of Paul Draper, (shown leaping above), since he was then a well-known dancer. The golden age of the salon was long gone. And yet Muriel Draper’s name lives on in books being penned about timeless figures such as James, Kirstein, Van Vechten and mystics such as Georges I. Gurdjieff. Even as a footnote, she radiates chic.

RUTH DRAPER

In a similar vein, Ruth Draper, above, born 1884, used her enormous charm and talent to embody exotic characters she created for her stylish monologues. As Muriel Draper’s sister-in-law, she must have attended her fair share of literary and artistic salons where she could study the soaring language, speech patterns and tics of the high Bohemian set. Born into money (her father William H. Draper was a noted doctor), Ruth was the granddaughter of Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun. She decided to become an actress on the advice of Ignaz Paderewski, a family friend who visited her home in 1913.

At one of these house parties, she entertained her young friends by impersonating a Jewish tailor. The effect was electric. From there she tackled diverse characters, including one based on a family dressmaker. She often used the people around her for inspiration. She did, in fact, perform in one play: A Lady’s Name starring Marie Tempest and Beryl Mercer. That was in 1916. Two years later she was in London entertaining the troops for seven months after the Armistice.

But never one to follow in anyone’s footsteps, Ruth blazed a bold new trail as a monologuist, delivering her mesmerizing scenes on an almost bare stage with minimal props and sets. She claimed to have been inspired by Beatrice Herford, who did comic satires of women. But Ruth took this type of humor to a whole new level. The world she created lay entirely in her voice, her mannerisms, her inflection. She first made her mark at the Aeolian Hall in London in 1920, variably introduced as a “reciter,” “diseuse,” “impersonator,” and even “elocutionist.” But she didn’t like being pigeon-holed that way. “I am not any of those,” she said in one interview. “I am an actor.”

To hear her render The Italian Lesson, which is almost a mandatory rite of passage for most gay men of an artistic bent, is to hear a genius at full tilt. Each tone, each pause, each syllable as carefully delivered by Draper is a piece of a brilliant puzzle, leading to a fully realized portrait of a very complex and hilarious personality — a rich socialite who treats translating Virgil like just another appointment in her society date book. But she invented many types: A Maine coastal villager. A Scottish immigrant. A Slavic grifter, spouting gibberish. A German governess. A social-climbing hostess. (Could she have been poking fun at her sister-in law?) Her lesser known incarnation The Actress is a study in psychological deceit. How people, not just those in the theater, use language and rhetoric as a kind of ever-evolving disguise. It is a hauntingly brilliant performance.

Ruth Draper performed for over 40 years, touring schools, colleges and clubs. She traversed the United States for four years straight in the 20s and then South Africa in 1935. In 1938 she dazzled audiences in Ceylon, India, Burma, Java and Australia. She went to South America in 1940. Perhaps for this reason she never married. She was forever on the road.

In 1954, after giving one of her farewell performances, she was given an honorary degree by Cambridge University. She died two years later of a heart attack at 72 at her East Side apartment, during a run at the Playhouse Theatre on Broadway. No one has ever approximated her uncanny ability to create stage sketches with such thrilling precision and insight into the human soul.

DOROTHY DRAPER

While not a member of the same family as Ruth and Muriel, Dorothy Draper, above, certainly had their uncanny sense of style. Born Dorothy Tuckerman in Tuxedo Park, New York in 1889, she was the daughter of Paul and Susan Minturn Tuckerman. Dorothy attended Brearley School in Manhattan, then married George Draper in 1912.

By the early 20s, Dorothy was anxious to break out on her own. She opened a design firm in 1923, having begun to refurbish apartments for the firm of Douglas Elliman, an upscale real estate agency. Her company developed wallpaper, fabric designs and designer sheets. Her look was modern, sleek, clean and vibrant. No fuss, no muss. But, like the woman herself, bustling with energy. Most of all, her aesthetic exuded a cool glamour that society women clamored for. Soon she was asked to do the interiors for the posh Hampshire House on Central Park South; the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, above, and numerous Newport estates.

Her goal was always to upset the apple carts. She demanded to know why American women were some of the best-dressed in the world, but their homes were some of the worst-dressed — dreary and dull. She dove into her profession with a revolutionary zeal, forcing women across the spectrum to “think pink,” to reexamine their tired attitudes, to break out of the mold.

Author of three books, including the effervescent Decorating is Fun! Dorothy Draper is credited with pioneering the notion of “total coordination” in room design. But it was her radical use of color that distinguished her from other society decorators. Dorothy had an artist’s eye, using vivid black and white tiles, red carpets with black accents, stylish moldings and fixtures in a theatrical way that had never been done before. And has rarely been achieved since. Dorothy Draper died in Cleveland, Ohio in 1969 at the peak of the mod craze. It’s a testament to her timelessness that even then she was considered very much in vogue.

So there you have it. Three unique women. Three extraordinary lives. Three very different viewpoints. But one shared goal: seek revenge — live well.