She Made Friends and Kept Them: An Anecdotal Memoir

Cowles can boast of having known Everyone Who Was Anyone for the past 50 years, and she does. She lists in the index in this memoir more than 1000 of them, but only a few receive more than an obligatory paragraph no more exciting than a listing in Who's Who. And those who get fuller treatment are seen through a prism of banality and self-congratulation: she and the Queen Mother exchange hospitalities; Marilyn Monroe is a guest; Clare Booth Luce selects her to be ""ambassador"" at the coronation of Elizabeth II; she is in Africa on the very day and near the spot where Hemingway's plane was downed. Present at the signing of the Korean War armistice, she is cold though warmly dressed, and the landscape reminds her of a Braque painting. The trivia of her anecdotes are at odds with her once-flamboyant image when, as the former wife of Gardner Cowles, whose media empire included Look magazine, she parlayed his wealth and influence and her own ambition and talent into a career as editor, writer and painter, which provided entree into the social, artistic and political circles of the time. With his backing, she produced a spectacular magazine called Flair, which had a year's run in 1951 then folded. Now remarried, she has been living in England, where she paints, renovates old mansions, jets around the world and socializes with important people, as well as some ""plain but interesting"" ones. (Oct.)