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.