Chessy Rayner, 66, Decorator and Fashion Icon, Dies
Chessy Rayner, a decorator, fashion icon, editor and author of ''New York: Trends and Traditions,'' a recently published book about significant Manhattan interiors, died on Thursday night at Sloan-Kettering Medical Center in New York. She was 66.
Mica Ertegun, her partner in the design company MAC II, said that Mrs. Rayner died of lung cancer.
Rail-thin, exotically featured and crowned with a lion's mane of hair that gave her the look of a space-age Nefertiti, Chesbrough (Chessy) Lewis Hall was born in 1931 in Perrysburg, Ohio, into a privileged world where little was expected of a young woman except a fairy tale debut, a comfortable marriage and an entry in the Social Register.
The only child of Richard Hall and Chesbrough Lewis, a cafe society beauty famously photographed by Horst and Avedon, she dutifully followed her social destiny: finishing school, Briarcliff Junior College and candle-lighted wedding at St. Thomas Protestant Episcopal Church in Manhattan, in 1952, to William P. Rayner, a stockbroker who later became an executive at Conde Nast Publications.
The Rayners were celebrated in Vogue as ''a fast-paced, superattractive couple,'' and rare was the week when her haunting face and couture-clad frame did not appear in Women's Wear Daily.
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Her star quotient increased exponentially in 1963, after her mother remarried, becoming the wife of Iva S. V. Patcevitch, the chairman of Conde Nast. For the rest of her life, she was one of the best-dressed and most-photographed fixtures of the Manhattan social scene.
But rather than idling indefinitely in the social spotlight, Mrs. Rayner went to work for Ladies Home Journal, moved to Glamour, and then became a fashion editor at Vogue from 1956 to 1964.
By the mid-1960's, William Rayner said, ''The bubble was off the champagne.'' Bored with the business of fashion and chafing under her dictatorial boss, Diana Vreeland, Mrs. Rayner left Vogue and went in search of what William Rayner called ''less ephemeral, more creative'' work. The couple were divorced in 1989.
She is survived by her mother, Chesbrough Patcevitch; a half-brother, Charles Minot Amory 3d, and a nephew, Charles Minot Amory 4th, all of Palm Beach, Fla.
She and Mica Ertegun, the wife of Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, toyed with opening a restaurant. Though accomplished cooks -- Mrs. Rayner wrote three cookbooks -- friends decided that their individual talents, Mrs. Rayner's sense of color and Mrs. Ertegun's architectural eye, would offer more long-term opportunities. MAC II -- the initials stood for Mica and Chessy -- was founded in 1967. For several years, its office was a large closet in the Erteguns' house on the Upper East Side.
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Though House and Garden hailed the company for its ''consistently clean and crisp adaptations of shifting modes,'' initially, fellow designers looked upon the two young stylish women with disdain. Sister Parish, the white-gloved martinet of American decorating, dismissed them with chilling politesse: ''Chessy is a nice girl. And Mica does not have to work.'' Everybody else called them ''the girls.'' As Mrs. Rayner wryly told Vogue soon after MAC II opened, ''You can see how much dignity we command.''
Their first published project was a bedroom for the 9-year-old daughter of a friend, with tall bookcases made of bamboo poles and topped with burnt-orange felt valances. Soon, however, they became a force to be reckoned with, and by the early 1980's had amassed a portfolio of residential and commercial projects for boldface celebrities like the artist Kenneth Noland, the television producer Douglas Cramer and the fashion designer Bill Blass. Marian McEvoy, the editor of Elle Decor magazine, said that what distinguished their projects was ''pragmatic glamour.''
''Chessy was a decorator, not a re-decorator,'' said Arnold Scaasi, the fashion designer. ''One of the reasons that I chose her was because she told me I could keep all of my old furniture.''
MAC II's spare, uncluttered rooms are known for luxurious but simple finishes, comfortable seating and art that is part of the space, not a dominant element. In one New York living room, moody paintings by Manet and Van Dongen seemed to be emerging from the surface of the gold lacquered walls as from the bottom of a pond.
But despite her professional eminence, Mrs. Rayner, who enjoyed discovering beauty in unlikely places and at underwhelming prices, did not shy from projects that her equally celebrated competition might consider beneath their dignity.
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To furnish a landmark house designed by the architect Stanford White, she and Mrs. Ertegun cheerfully bought everything at Sears. For another project, it was all department-store furniture and Herculon fabrics.
In the pages of Elle Decor, where she was the special projects editor from 1992 until her death, Mrs. Rayner was forever exhorting readers to delight more in $2 water glasses than in $2 million chandeliers. Her home on St. Martin, the Caribbean island, will be featured in the May issue of Elle Decor.
''Not everything has to be refined,'' she once said to a reporter who visited her country house in Southampton. ''That's too easy and too boring. I like amusing things, funny things, offbeat things. In fact, if anything, I wish my taste were even more offbeat.''
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