C.Z. Guest, who’s portrayed by Chloë Sevigny in the TV series “Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans,” was a pillar of society, a fashion icon, a muse to artists and a confidante to movers and shakers. Readers of Page Six will recall her as the mom of “Deb of the Decade” Cornelia Guest.
She belonged to the small circle of wealthy, beautiful women such as Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill and Joanne Carson who reigned over Manhattan society in the 1960s, sharing cocktails and vicious gossip with “In Cold Blood” author Truman Capote at La Cote Basque.
But those of us who knew her as the New York Post’s gardening columnist from 1980 to 1992 — a quirky interlude in her glamorous life and in the paper’s history as well — remember her as a sweet, funny and generous friend who delighted in the colorful characters and grungy atmosphere of the newspaper’s former home at 210 South Street.
The creaky building’s multitude of mice and sneeze-inducing odors didn’t faze C.Z. When I apologized for them on her first visit, she laughed. “Are you kidding?” she asked in her Boston-Brahmin voice, which Sevigny captures with uncanny precision.
“My husband Winston and I hunted tigers in India with the maharaja. Do you know how terrible tigers smell?” she said. “Terrible!”
I wasn’t bold enough to ask her whether the beasts in question were more malodorous alive or dead.
It fascinated me that a social icon twice named “the world’s best-dressed woman” was at home among us. The Post of the 1980s was as far removed from La Cote Basque as Earth is from Pluto.
C.Z.’s wealthiest days were behind her after polo-playing hero Winston lost a fortune in bad investments. A scene in “Feud” shows her crying when IRS agents show up at their estate to repossess furniture.
But she was likely still richer than all of The Post’s 1,000 employees combined. Her cool, WASP-ish demeanor and elegant outfits by designers such as Adolfo and Givenchy seemed otherworldly amidst the newsroom’s chain-smoking, rough-and-tumble crew who came to work in whatever schmattas they could throw together.
“People couldn’t help but stop what they were doing to stop and stare at her,” my colleague Diane Reid fondly recalls.
But C.Z. wasn’t “slumming it.”
She wrote several books on gardening. She loved plants, flowers and every shoot that starts from the Earth, and enjoyed sharing her knowledge. When a reader called with a “horticultural emergency,” she got on the phone to help.
Reid once enjoyed a tour of C.Z.’s Old Westbury estate, Templeton. “She started working in the garden, better dressed than most women going to a black-tie event,” Reid marveled. “She was down on her hands and knees, right in the dirt with her gorgeous clothes. It’s an image I’ll never forget.”
C.Z.’s weekly garden-advice column, with headlines such as “The Earthworm Is Our Friend,” was an oddity amidst the Post’s then-sensational mix of crime, scandal and politics.
Her passion led to odd adventures in journalism. When Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House in 1985, our then editor, Roger Wood — whose wit included a touch of playful sadism — assigned C.Z. to write about Castellano’s floral arrangements at a funeral home in Brooklyn.
“I went with a photographer,” she told me later. “I said, ‘My God, there are all these different funerals. It’s like a movie theater. Let’s make sure we go the right one!
“There were all these women in black — black scarves, black everything. I looked at the man in the coffin. My God! How’d they put him back together?”
Sadly, although C.Z. wrote the story, it never ran.
She dreamed up a “Greening of New York” competition for amateur city gardeners, who sent in photos of their work, and made visits to the most promising ones.
Many were in what were, at the time, truly scary neighborhoods. I tagged along to meet an East Harlem barber who grew geraniums and zinnias in a window box above a corner notorious for drugs and gunplay. While I sweated out the expedition, C.Z. coolly talked plants and mulch with the fellow as comfortably as if we were in Palm Beach.
The Greening contest culminated in a City Hall awards ceremony to be presided over by Mayor Ed Koch.
I went with C.Z. and former Consumer Affairs Commissioner Kitty Carlisle Hart. The winners — most of them ill-at-ease amidst the Blue Room’s baronial surroundings — awaited their moments of glory with nervous anticipation.
But Koch was an hour late, and the three of us had to pacify the restless crowd. Kitty, a famous former actress, talked about flowers in the Marx brothers’ “A Night at the Opera,” in which she had appeared 50 years earlier — but nobody listened.
“There were pitchforks all over the place,” Diane Reid remembers of the garden-themed implements meant to be given out to winners. I feared that fed-up guests might rush the stage with them like horror-movie extras.
But C.Z. saved the day. Her soft blue eyes picked out awestruck attendees she knew from making her garden-wrangling rounds — and made them feel like City Hall stars: “Hoover, are you still planning to grow summer snapdragons next year? Elvin, it was so lovely to meet your wife. Does she help you in the field?”
Her charm dazzled everyone so much that it was a letdown when Koch finally showed up. I thanked her as we left, “You were just in time. I was getting nervous.”
“Oh, why? They’re nice people,” replied C.Z.
She was nice, too — the only gentle “swan” at Capote’s table of gossip and greed.
