Remembering Nina Griscom, the Socialite Who Relished Scandalizing Park Avenue
“Naughty and nice was her middle name." That's how Blaine Trump remembered her friend Nina Griscom, the socialite, entrepreneur, model, TV personality, and Town & Country cover girl who died Saturday in New York at age 65 from complications of A.L.S.
Friends knew Griscom as a classic American beauty who had the hallmark wit and curiosity of the perfect host and guest. But they also relished her rebellious streak. A couple years before her death from Lou Gehrig’s disease, Griscom went to get a tattoo of a porcupine at Hustlers Parlour in Brooklyn as a gesture of support for a sick friend. It wasn’t her first choice, but the highly recommended Bang Bang in Soho would not take her reservation on short notice.
Her mother, the sensible social figure and philanthropist Elizabeth Rohatyn, thought her daughter was nuts to do it—“unsavory” Griscom reported in one of her cheeky columns. Her friends thought she was nuts, too. But they weren’t all that shocked either, knowing what else she’d gotten into in the past.
“She sparkled and inhaled life,” Trump continued. That and a pack of Marlboros a day, a habit she picked up at age twelve while at Swiss boarding school, as she confessed in her own words in T&C in 2013.
In her six plus decades in the Manhattan fishbowl, Griscom took on whatever came her way and caught her fancy. This was not typical behavior at a time when social swans were busier raising money than making it. But she was of the new generation.
Griscom modeled for magazines (once wrapped in a towel), designed handbags and opened and closed retail shops in Southampton and on Lexington Avenue, dealing with the occasionally abusive customer or vendor with the grace of a Miss Porter’s School alumna. “She really just wanted to make people happy,” said Susan Magrino, the public relations doyenne.
That came across when Griscom hosted two TV shows in the 1990s, one about restaurants with the food writer Alan Richman, the other an HBO entertainment news show with Matt Lauer. One night in 1993 she was holding a microphone in front of a big camera at the 21 Club. She was covering a party for Barbarians at the Gate, the movie about the corporate raiders and wretched excess of the 1980s, and she had to fend off friends and neighbors used to gossiping and preening with her. “I’ll be up for a quick drink later,” she told them.
If it seemed strange to her peers that the step-daughter of the late Felix Rohatyn, an investment banker who helped solve New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and became an ambassador to France, was playing paparazzi instead of socialite, she didn’t seem to care. It’s no wonder she had no qualms about having a yard sale of her ballgowns at the Regency two decades later. “If she wanted to do something, she’d do it,” said Cornelia Guest, who used to follow Griscom around parties when she was underage because Griscom would slip her champagne.
“She just never took herself or anything too seriously,” said Marjorie Gubelmann, whose move from social circles to society DJ seems inspired by Griscom’s go-for-it pluck.
Griscom didn’t even seem to care what people thought—including her late mother who had something to say about everything, she often noted—when she married an Argentinian waiter from La Goulue, Leonel Piraino in 2007. Piraino went on to a successful career in real estate; it was her fourth marriage and by all accounts a loving one to the end.
Nina's first husband was Joe Hunter, a Ford modeling booker; her second, Lloyd Griscom, a businessman whose grandfather was ambassador to Italy and an early I.B.M. investor. Her third marriage, the one that gave her a daughter, Lily, now in her early 20s, was to the society plastic surgeon Daniel Baker. It combusted in 2002 due to Griscom’s affair with Pepe Fanjul, the Palm Beach sugar baron who decided, after a floodlit dalliance, not to leave his wife, Emilia.
Bill Blass, who trotted Griscom around like something between a trophy wife and a billboard for his clothes, dropped her. So did others. She soldiered on, even visiting Blass regularly in his last years.
“She shocked people but she lived life thoroughly and honestly,” said David Patrick Columbia of New York Social Diary. He last saw Griscom a few months ago moving slowly with a cane at Sette Mezzo, the Upper East Side restaurant. She was in black, looking like a fashion statement and “taking it all in,” he recalled. She was laughing and game, although unable to speak; her much-celebrated cigarette-throaty voice, which one casting agent decades ago described as “golden gravel,” had succumbed to her disease.
Columbia, who published a speech the day after she died that she had written for an A.L.S. event but was ultimately unable to deliver, marveled at her spirit. “Right to the end she knew she was living in circus and she enjoyed it,” he said.
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