Having a Marvelous Time

When the New York Couture Group's stable of fashion "experts" named Jacqueline Kennedy No. 1 among the world's best-dressed women, there was little surprise: they like publicity; Jackie is news. She spends a lot on clothing and obviously has style. No. 2 was a name far less familiar--Mrs. Loel Guinness.

As any reader of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar can testify, Mrs. Guinness should be better known. She has a lean figure, the profile of a latter-day Nefertiti, and hair like black velvet. At 47, Gloria Rubio von Furstenberg Guinness is a classic example of a woman who knows what money can do--and does it with grace. Her husband is related to the famed Guinness brewing clan and is a multimillionaire (banking, airplanes, etc.). They scorn cafe society's more redolent haunts; they are just rich people who maintain a bejeweled private life, do nothing deliberately to attract publicity.

The Guinnesses have an apartment in Manhattan's expensive Waldorf Towers, a villa in Lausanne (with a bowling alley in the basement), a 350-ton yacht that plies the summer Mediterranean, a seven-story house on Paris' Avenue Matignon ("My husband is a perfectionist, and so he would rather build a building than live in an apartment"), a stud farm in Normandy, and a mansion near Palm Beach at Lake Worth, Fla. The Florida property is divided by U.S. Highway A1A, faces the lake on one side and the beach on the other; the two halves are connected by a specially built tunnel under the highway that Mrs. Guinness has had decorated with furniture and screens painted by a young French artist she is interested in. They also keep three planes--an Avro Commander for short hauls around Europe, a small jet, a helicopter for Loel Guinness' hops between the Lake Worth house and the Palm Beach golf course.

All These Homes. Does this multiplicity of havens mean constant anxiety, brought on by decisions, decisions, decisions? Not for Gloria Guinness. "In a way," says she, "it is a very bourgeois little life we lead. So many people think it is difficult keeping all these homes, but I believe it is easier to keep five than one. You can't possibly spend twelve months at any one place."

Since the Guinnesses keep moving from one house to another through the year, they found that packing and unpacking could become quite a chore. Loel Guinness hates luggage anyway, so the two keep complete wardrobes at the ready in each of their homes. Thus they need travel with nothing more than the clothing on their backs ("You don't have to waste time in customs, and you don't have to declare anything. It's wonderful!") and, of course, their constant retinue--two chefs, kitchen maid, personal maid, valet and three chambermaids--who can lug any last-minute packages.

The skeleton staff is a necessity, since the Guinnesses would much rather entertain than be entertained. "I give many more dinners in Paris than in the States," says Gloria. "All the lonely boys come to see us. Actors, writers, scientists, professors, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, members of Parliament, Art Buchwald. It is exciting! When anybody comes to town they call up and we ask them to dinner. It is delightful, and so much more fun than the planned formal party."

At Lausanne, she plays hostess to any of her favorite people who happen to be passing through: Truman Capote, Yul Brynner, David Niven, Noel Coward. At Lake Worth, the Guinnesses can usually count on people in the Kennedy orbit, including the fun-loving Kennedys themselves; at one party, held when Jacqueline Kennedy was in Florida recently, Gloria and Mrs. Kennedy had a high old time doing the Twist* on the tile floors by the patio. Says Gloria: "It's a gay, amusing life."

It was not always so. Born in Mexico, Gloria moved to New York when her father, Writer Jose Rafael Rubio, crossed ideologies with Dictator Porfirio Diaz. In 1933, she was shipped off to Europe, and two years later married Count Franz von Furstenberg. When Hitler came to power, Gloria and her two children, Franz and Delores, fled to Madrid while her husband stayed on in Germany. In Spain, she got a "friendly" divorce that was to help her get exit visas, but the visas never came through, and the count married another woman (and fathered Actress Betsy von Furstenberg). Gloria met Guinness in 1949 on a yachting trip, married him in 1951.

Sudden Vulgarity. Much of her wardrobe is designed by Balenciaga ("He has been dressing me since 1938") and Givenchy. In Paris, she keeps "very elegant, very different" gowns. She wears Chanel suits only in Lausanne, because, she says, so many others wear Chanel suits in Paris and New York. She never wears shorts ("You have to be a girl to wear shorts; nobody but a child looks right in them"). In her early Palm Beach days, in fact, Gloria was torn by a dilemma. A dress was too chic for downtown wear, she decided, and of course shorts wouldn't do. "So I appeared on Worth Avenue in trousers from Capri." Suddenly everybody was wearing Capri pants, and "suddenly they became vulgar. In a way, I am to blame for all that happened."

Her favorite "at home" costume during the day is a comfortable robe; she picks them up for about $12.95 apiece in Manhattan. She buys her underwear in the U.S. "because it is so much better than in Europe. You go into Bonwit Teller and buy a girdle, size small, and you get it home and it fits. It's unbelievable! Incredible! You can't do this in Europe!" It is not so simple with hats, however, which "must be made on your head. A ready-made hat will not be you. While I am sitting for a dress, I sit ten minutes longer, and Balenciaga works on a hat."

Little Diamond Things. Gloria rarely takes any designer's ideas without insisting on changes. She will have Balenciaga take off a button here and there, change the collar, or even have him run up something out of a skirt from this dress, the neckline from that, the sleeves from another.

Gloria Guinness keeps busy all the time and insists that she is never bored. When she is not giving a dinner party ("always include one person who talks well or laughs") or moving on from yacht to plane to villa to house, she likes to encourage young artists, designs "little diamond things" to be made up for her by Cartier's, helps her husband in the photo darkrooms. Right now, she is writing a play about permissive parents called Why Must Women Have Children? "It will probably be absolutely lousy. The producer I showed my first play to looked at me and advised: 'Burn it.' But I'm enjoying it. I'm having a marvelous time."

*This was after Jackie's lookalike, Stephanie Laye Javits, wife of the nephew of New York's Republican Senator Jacob Javits, was seen Twisting at a Fort Lauderdale nightclub, precipitating a news report that it was the First Lady herself (TIME, Jan. 5). The White House indignantly set the matter straight, making clear that Jackie would never Twist in public, certainly not when her father-in-law was seriously ill.

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