"French Cooking By The Clock" 1965 RAYNER, William and Chesbrough
$125
RAYNER, William and Chesbrough
[224] pp.
A Signet Book/ The New American Library
First Printing October, 1965
7" x 4 1/4"
Chessy Rayner (1932-1998) was a decorator, fashion icon, editor and author of "New York: Trends and Traditions,", a published book about significant Manhattan interiors.
Mica Ertegun was her partner in the design company MAC II.
Rail-thin, exotically featured and crowned with a lion's mane of hair that gave her the look of a space-age Nefertiti, Chesbrough (Chessy) Lewis Hall was born in 1931 in Perrysburg, Ohio, into a privileged world where little was expected of a young woman except a fairy tale debut, a comfortable marriage and an entry in the Social Register.
The only child of Richard Hall and Chesbrough Lewis, a cafe society beauty famously photographed by Horst and Avedon, she dutifully followed her social destiny: finishing school, Briarcliff Junior College and candle-lighted wedding at St. Thomas Protestant Episcopal Church in Manhattan, in 1952, to William P. Rayner, a stockbroker who later became an executive at Conde Nast Publications.
The Rayners were celebrated in Vogue as "a fast-paced, super attractive couple", and rare was the week when her haunting face and couture-clad frame did not appear in Women's Wear Daily.
Her star quotient increased exponentially in 1963, after her mother remarried, becoming the wife of Iva S. V. Patcevitch, the chairman of Conde Nast. For the rest of her life, she was one of the best-dressed and most-photographed fixtures of the Manhattan social scene.