Before anyone even thinks that this is a recent photo of me and Peter Barry in Palm Beach, it is the 1943 shot by the famous photo journalist, WeeGee, of two wealthy dinosaurs arriving at the Metropolitan Opera. It is titled, "The Critic" for obvious reasons and was always my favorite, a stinging sociological study taken in the middle of a war. Until tonight, I didn't know who those two dowagers were; I was reading about the great society painter, Giovanni Boldini, when I came across a comment by Nicholas F. Warner that the portrait of Lady Decies below was the same woman in the WeeGee photo.

Astounded, I looked up the photo and--sure enough--there was the same face 38 years after Boldini painted her in Paris. The lady on the left was Warner's great-grandmother, Mrs. G. W. Kavanaugh and the one on the right was his godmother, Lady Decies, born Elizabeth Drexel. Drexel wrote several "tell-all" books for her time, a time intimately acquainted in Newport society with THE Mrs. Astor, Alva Vanderbilt, and the great iconoclast herself, Mamie Styvesant Fish. (Elizabeth had an arranged marriage of sorts by these women to Harry Lehr, an unfortunate situation for her when Harry informed her on their wedding night that he refused to sleep with women and only married her for her money.) Upon Lehr's death, she married Baron Decies of England and settled into yet, another unhappy union; her immense wealth seemed to get her, and the husbands, through it all.

But, the best part for me was Warner's father telling him about fighting in WWII on Anzio beach when German planes dropped pamphlets with the WeeGee photo saying, "While you are fighting, this is what's going on at home", and it was HIS grandmother. I love stories like that.