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Jerome Robert "Jerry" Zipkin (December 18, 1914 – June 8, 1995) was an American socialite. He was known for his friendship with Nancy Reagan, with whom he attended many of her social events, and for his role as a "walker," or social escort, for women at high-society events.[1][2][3]
He was a celebrated fixture on the international scene for 50 years, being referred to as a man about everywhere. He was a favorite escort of many fashionable society women, and he was a longtime friend, escort, and confidant of Nancy Reagan. One of his early good friends was the noted English author
W. Somerset Maugham. Jerry's ability to respect confidence was reported as legendary.
Zipkin was born on December 18, 1914, in Manhattan to David Zipkin and Annette Goldstein. His father was a prominent New York real estate developer. Zipkin attended the Hun School of Princeton and then Princeton University, where he studied art and archaeology for two years. After leaving college he briefly moved to Florida, then returned to New York to assist his father in managing the family properties, which included the building Jerry lived in on Park Avenue.[1][4][5]
Zipkin became known as a "walker," a man who would escort fashionable women to social events when their husbands were busy or did not care to accompany them. The term first appeared in Women's Wear Daily to describe Zipkin. Many of the women of Zipkin's acquaintance relied on his advice on fashion and styling.[1] Also known as "the social moth," Zipkin became a trusted confidant who would give candid advice, often pointed or acerbic.[2] The title character of the 2007 movie The Walker was based on Zipkin's social life.[6]
In the 1940s Zipkin spent time in California, and was introduced into Hollywood society, becoming acquainted with
George Cukor, Paulette Goddard,
Claudette Colbert, and
W. Somerset Maugham.
Aline, Countess of Romanones, met Jerry Zipkin playing
poker at Hattie Carnegie's with Elsa
Maxwell in the late 1940s. Mica Ertegun
met him in the late 1950s, playing canasta
with Tatiana Liberman and Lydia Gregory, the great hostesses of Manhattan's
White Russian set. Lynn Revson, the
widow of Revlon founder Charles Revson, recalled Zipkin as a regular guest on
their yacht, the Ultima II, in the late 1960s
and early 1970s: "He was constantly playing backgammon, bridge, gin— he played
every game!"
"Cards were a very important part of
his life," said his old friend Bill Blass.
"He always won, I might add. Nobody
could beat Jerry." It was Zipkin's expertise at bridge
that carried him to the card table of his
most important European— and only
male— mentor, W. Somerset
Maugham.
From 1949 until Maugham's death in
1965 at age 91, he was a frequent
houseguest at the sumptuous Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat in the South of
France, where the rich, cynical, closeted homosexual writer entertained the
kings, queens, and jacks of international society in the grand
style that Zipkin came to assume as his
own. He also amassed a vast collectio
of Maugham manuscripts, first edition:
letters, and memorabilia, which he eventually sold to the University of Texas.
In 1949 Zipkin stayed with
W. Somerset Maugham on the French Riviera. Maugham may have used his friend as the model for the snobbish Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge.[2]
In the mid 1960s Zipkin became acquainted with Nancy and Ronald Reagan, becoming a close friend to Nancy. They continued the friendship, which intensified, when Reagan ran for elected president. Zipkin accompanied the Reagans to campaign events and was with them on the night Reagan won election. Women's Wear Daily modified the "social moth" epithet to "social mouth," acknowledging Zipkin's reputation as a "nebulous, bitchy, very, very pretentious and affected" man. However, Zipkin was equally regarded for ferocious loyalty to his friends.[4]
A letter of introduction from a New
York canasta chum, Sophie Gimbel, the
designer wife of the chairman of Sak
Fifth Avenue and owner of Gimbel's,
brought Zipkin to his original Los Angeles patroness, Anita May, the fanatically chic wife of the chairman of the
May Department Store Co. It was
at May's Beverly Hills dinner partk
in the early 1950s that he came to know
the future First Lady Nancy Reaga
and many of the fashionable women
who would make up her California
court, including Mrs. Alfred Bloomingdale, Mrs. Armand Deutsch, and Mrs
Ray Stark.
He didn't play cards with Nancy
Reagan, but they spent countless hours
on the telephone shuffling the society
deck. His most obvious influence was
on her clothes and her guest lists. Like
Talleyrand, who took his niece to the Congress of Vienna to give nightly parties, Zipkin understood that an engraved invitation is worth a thousand
policy papers, and that seating can be
an effective diplomatic tool. His old-fashioned fixation on the importance of
appearances assumed new relevance in
the image-conscious age of television
politics.
"Jerry had an eye," Nancy Reagan
told 10 days after his death. "And whenever Jerry said something, he was
right. He was very instinctive about people. He was a great teacher. You
could learn a lot from Jerry—about art, about books, about history— if you
left yourself open to it. He enjoyed it— to teach you. Friendship was the
basis of it all. Ronnie was very fond of Jerry, too. And Jerry was a big
defender. God help anybody who said anything against Ronnie to Jerry. God
help them. And he never forgot. I'd forget, but he wouldn't." Among his
friends, his loyalty was legendary, as was, said Park Avenue hostess Nan
Kempner, his discretion. "I'd call him and say, 'Have you heard?' And he'd
say, 'Where did you hear it? I've known it for two months and kept it
secret.' He could keep secrets better than anyone. You could trust Jerry
with your soul." Not everyone remembers him with such unalloyed fondness.
"I mourn the Jerry I knew," sais Denise Hale, a friend of 35 years. "Not
what he became. In the 1980s he became like the chief eunuch of the last
empress of China."
Jerome Robert Zipkin, the son of Annette Goldstein and David Zipkin, a
successful real-estate operator, was born on December 14, 1914, in New
York City, and lived for most of his life in a 14-room apartment at 1175 Park
Avenue, which his father built. He attended the Hun School in Princeton,
New Jersey, and spent summers with
his parents and younger sister, Eleanor,
at Elberon-by-the-Sea, a Jersey Shore
resort frequented by well-to-do Jewish
families. In 1932 he entered Princeton
University, where he majored in art
and archaeology and was a member of
the fencing and tennis teams and the
debating society. He left Princeton in
his junior year, with the stated intent of
traveling in Europe. The real reason,
according to a friend, was a nervous
breakdown. He completed his education at Rollins College in Winter Park,
Florida, where he joined the French,
German, and Interracial Clubs. Mickey
Ziffren, wife of the prominent Los Angeles lawyer Paul Ziffren, met Zipkin at
Rollins. "The dilated nostrils were already there," she said. "We both fell in
love with the same Italian exchange
student— a count to boot— and I got
him. Jerry wasn't visibly anything. He
always kept a veil around his private
life."
She also remembered a Christmas dinner at the Zipkin apartment: "The furniture was velvet and dark. His father
was a sweet old boy. His mother was
taking a course in Flemish art. They
had art around the house."
But Jerry really understood modern art
early on. The first Matisse drawing I had he gave me as a wedding present in
1938."
Steven Kaufman, a Seventh Avenue
fashion executive, met Zipkin that same
year and became a fast friend of the
family. "Mrs. Zip was a c-a-m-p," he said. "Jerry was madly insane for her
and she for him. After Daddy died, in
1944, he bought her a lot of clothes. Balenciaga was his favorite. They'd goto
Europe together and stay at the Plaza
Athenee in Paris, Claridge's in London, the
Ritz in Madrid. They
were both ardent Republicans, to the point
of nausea."
Zipkin and his
mother shared the
Park Avenue apartment until her death in 1974. Starting in
the early 1940s, they
also rented a house
in Beverly Hills for
part of each year. One of his
first New York social sponsor was
Ruby Schinasi, the wife of a Turkii
tobacco tycoon who entertained lavishly at her Riverside Drive mansion, and introduced him to the Hollywood movie
star he would remain close to for the
rest of his life, Claudette Colbert;
he
was also devoted to Joan Bennett
more than ever after the 1952 scandal of her husband, Walter Wanger,
shooting her lover, Jennings Lang.
In his later years, Zipkin would tell
friends that he spent the war "gathering information for the O.S.S. at the Stork Club." An official of the Veteran
of the Office of Strategic Services said
that there is no record of him as
member of this precursor to the C.I.A.
Zipkin would also proudly announce
"I've never worked a day in my life."
But he was listed as president of the
family real-estate company as early as
1941, and Bill Blass remembered that
the 1950s "Jerry went to his office every
day. He ran the business until he realized it was interfering with his social
life,
so he sold it. And from
then on he specialized in friendship. It
became his profession."
"Jerry was among the last people
who luxuriated in the life aristocrats
used to lead, of reading, traveling, and
socializing," said Ahmet Ertegun, the
co-founder of Atlantic Records. "He
had this interest in all forms of society,
not just grand society. He had contempt
only for uninteresting people, and he
had a witty way of showing it. He also
had the greatest collection of the greatest artists' smallest works."
The Henry Higgins of the Reagan
administration could quickly turn into
its Addison De Witt, the acid-tongued
critic in the film All About Eve. Bob Colacello was
once standing next to Zipkin at a cocktail party when a lady who suspected
that he had blackballed her from the
White House guest list asked him,
"Why don't you like me, Jerry?" Without a moment's hesitation, he snapped,
"Have you got a pad and a pencil and
an hour and a half for me to list the
reasons?"
"His goodness and sweetness were
entirely subjective and personal," said
Jennifer Phillips, wife of the retired director of the Phillips Collection in
Washington. "If he decided, for one reason
or another, that you were one of his
people, he was incredibly kind and supportive. And if he thought you were
going in the wrong direction, he could
be very 'instructive,' shall we say."
Phillips was one of the influential
Georgetown hostesses Zipkin brought
closer to Nancy Reagan. Another was
Oatsie Charles. Interestingly, both were
Democrats and very friendly with Katharine Graham, the all-powerful publisher of
The Washington Post. In general,
he pushed the worldly and sophisticated
onto White House dinner lists: Diana
Vreeland, David Hockney.
Valentino,
the Safras, the Zilkhas, the Erteguns,
the Count and Countess de Ravenel,
the Viscountess de Ribes, the Duchess
de Cadaval. ("His buddies,'" as one former East Wing staffer put it.) He was
such a fan of Robert Mapplethorpe's
classical portraits that he took the risk
of arranging for Reagan's kitchen cabinet to sit for the controversial photographer.
Some said his influence extended to ambassadorial appointments, and
cite Ronald Lauder, the son of his good friend Estee Lauder, who became ambassador to Austria, and his successor in Vienna, Henry Grunwald,
whose wife, Louise, is the daughter
of one of Zipkin's oldest canasta
cronies, the late Manhattan real-estate heiress Ruth Tankoos. (Louise
Grunwald claims that Zipkin
didn't know about the appointment until she told him.) He was
undoubtedly involved in the fall
from grace of Thomas Enders, the
ambassador to Spain. Enders had
been thought a likely candidate
for ambassador to West Germany, but that post went to Richard
Burt, the husband of a Zipkin favorite,
Gahl Hodges, one of Nancy Reagan's
social secretaries.
As Zipkin's social power grew, so did
his list of enemies. First and foremost
was John Fairchild, the publisher of W,
who gave Zipkin the two epithets he
could never shake, "the Walker" and
"the Social Moth." Like Zipkin a list-maker at heart, Fairchild had his art department airbrush Zipkin's face out of
photographs of him arriving at White
House dinners. Then there were Truman
Capote, whom Zipkin never forgave for
telling tales about mutual friends in Answered Prayers, and
Dominick Dunne,
who portrayed him as the poisonous
Ezzie Fenwick in People Like Us— another characterization that made its way
into Zipkin's obituaries.
"I think he should have been called
'the Social Mouth,' " said Kenneth Jay
Lane, referring to Zipkin's great talent
as a raconteur, which relied on an almost Proustian deluge of detail. As Lynn
Wyatt said, "When he told you about
a party, he would start with the gravel
in the driveway. Listening to him, I
would feel that I was there more than if I
had actually been there."
A year before he died, when he knew
he had terminal lung cancer, he began choosing things in his apartment to leave to his friends. Each present was beautifully wrapped, and people started receiving them two weeks
before his death: a Faberge pillbox to
Joan Rivers; Verdura cuff links to Robert Higdon, the finance director of the
Margaret Thatcher Foundation; an onyx-and-diamond table clock to Reinaldo
and Carolina Herrera.
Four days before he died, Nancy
Reagan paid a two-hour visit. "I told
him. 'Gee, Jerry, I had a terrible time
getting up here. I didn't know what to
put on. Was it too short? Were the
sleeves too long?' He got a kick out of
it, I think."
"I feel very strongly that he stayed
alive until he saw her," said Bill Blass. "It was all very planned, his
departure." Zipkin had met with the rabbi of Temple Emanu-EI to arrange
his funeral a year in advance, and reportedly laid down the law: "No
eulogies, no prayers, no Hebrew." And that's the way it was.
"the perfectly restrained Episcopalian
service in a synagogue," according to one mourner. "No mixed flowers" was
one of his strictest style rules, and all
the flowers were white— lilies, baby's
breath, peonies, and, on the highly polished cherry-wood coffin, roses of Sharon. It was all over in 20 minutes, and
then his friends filed out: former senator Abraham Ribicoff and his wife,
Casey, Henry and Louise Grunwald,
Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder, Leonard
and Evelyn Lauder, columnists Aileen
Mehle and Liz Smith, Steven Kaufman,
Lily Safra, Ahmet Ertegun, Chessy
Rayner, Carroll Petrie, Mark and
Duane Hampton, Blaine and Robert
Trump, Sam and Judy Peabody, Oscar
and Annette de la Renta, Maria Goulandris, Anne Bass, Pat Buckley, and
Princess Firyal of Jordan. Afterward,
there was coffee at Le Cirque.
On December 1994, Zipkin
told friends
he was on a "reprieve" from his chemotherapy.
He had just come
back from Bill
Blass's house in
Connecticut, where
he spent every
Christmas. "It was
perfect— not a poinsettia in sight," he
said in his familiar
sharp nasal bark.
Zipkin inherited his art-filled apartment on Park Avenue from his parents. His mother continued to live there until her death in the 1970s. Within those red-lacquered walls and on those zebra rugs lived a man with a thirst for the high life: Zipkin was an inveterate collector whose tastes ranged from furniture (Louis to Lucite) to Meissen figurines and precious boxes of every description.
"He had a wonderful eye," said Kenneth Jay Lane, the costume jeweler, "and his apartment was like the cave of Ali Baba."
In the last weeks before his death from lung cancer, Zipkin sent gifts to many of his friends and evidently planned the dispersal of his finer chattels with exacting care.
Louise Grunwald, who was at his side when he died, said: "Jerry was a control freak. He sold a lot during his last year and made about 70 bequests to friends, many of which he gave before he died. He had his death planned in minute detail, and even had a photograph of each gift stuck onto an index card with the name of the friend who was to receive it. He wasn't leaving anything to chance."
Nancy Reagan said: "That was typical of Jerry. He was an extremely thoughtful man, and he did take a good deal of care and thought to see that his friends were remembered."
Another close friend, Boaz Mazor, who works with couture clients for Oscar de la Renta, commented: "The richer you were, the bigger the gift. That's how he valued life. The richest ladies got Faberge boxes, and several men received cuff links from his enormous collection."
Zipkin owned over 2,000 pairs, surely qualifying him as the Imelda Marcos of cuff links.
Renowned for his acerbic wit and rudeness to waiters and cabdrivers, Zipkin was fondly remembered by his friends for his generosity, thoughtfulness and unswerving loyalty. "If you were on his good list it was one of the best places to be," said
Robert Woolley, a close friend."And if you were not, it was no fun at all." Woolley, the Sotheby's auctioneer, added that he had advised Zipkin to make bequests before his death. "I told him he might as well get the pleasure of receiving a little gratitude."
After Zipkin's death, 198 lots from his estate were auctioned at a two-day
Sotheby's Arcade sale. Those items represent no more than a fraction of the myriad objects that cluttered the Zipkin family's apartment, which he shared with his mother until her death in 1976. Perhaps the most fitting emblem for the king of the walkers
was Lot 241, a mahogany walking stick with an 18-karat gold handle in the form of a coiled serpent.
"My instructions were to sell everything and transfer the funds to a charitable trust in his name," said Howard Daitch, of the New York law firm of Tenzer Greenblatt. Daitch, who was Mr. Zipkin's lawyer for over 30 years, added that the estate was valued at over $2 million. He and the other executor, Robert Becker, Zipkin's accountant, administered
the trust, set up to make grants to encourage young people in the arts.
Jerry Zipkin died on June 8, 1995, of lung cancer. He was attended at his death by Nancy Reagan and longtime friend
Stevie Kaufmann.[1][2]
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