Strained relationships

Gstaad

An article in Vanity Fair about a man I knew for over 40 years has turned me into Orlando Furioso. Oleg Cassini died in 2006 when he was well into his nineties. We met in 1956 on an aeroplane going to Bermuda to play a tennis tournament. Cassini was a good club player and a so-so skier, back in the days when few people skied. He was a heterosexual dress designer who designed very ugly clothes for women and even worse ones for men. Women, however, had made Oleg famous in an age when people were celebrated for proper reasons. He first married Gene Tierney, the beautiful sloe-eyed star of Laura, in the Forties, then romanced Grace Kelly during the Fifties, losing her to Rainier, a loss he took very badly and talked about often in the years to come. He hit the big time when Jackie Kennedy picked him as her favourite American designer when the Irish clan took over the White House in January 1961.

What about his ugly designs? you might ask. Jackie was a clothes-horse and knew the great European designers. Well, the orders had come from above, JFK himself, because Oleg was an American and, more important, pimped for the young President. Oleg and his brother Igor, known as Ghighi, were Italians who had come over to America claiming noble Russian and Italian blood. Although they’re not around to defend themselves, I’ve always believed their title to be a bogus one, as well as their name Cassini. Mind you, it’s not important. What is extremely important is that Oleg had one daughter with Gene Tierney, Tina, who is now fighting for her share of the large fortune he left, a fortune claimed by a woman he spent the last 30 years of his life with.