Cornelia Guest: Tales From a Remarkable Life
How did Andy Warhol convince a teenage Cornelia Guest to pose topless for a portrait? “Oh, he didn’t, I couldn’t wait,” says Guest, who is now an actress, animal advocate and author. This happened in the early 1980s, way before social media and Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian’s infamous tapes. “Andy said, ‘Your mother’s going to kill me,’” – her mother being C.Z. Guest, a Boston Brahmin and Best Dressed List Hall of Fame fixture and one of Truman Capote’s most famous swans, who remained at the pinnacle of high society throughout her life. “Listen, find me a 16-year-old girl that does not want to piss off their mother royally,” says Guest, laughing at the memory. “I was like, this is going to be a good one!”
Winston F. C. Guest & Ernest Hemingway
Her mother, she adds, never batted an eye. “My mother was so smart. She just knew exactly how to handle me. I’m sure she probably shut the door and beat a doll in my place, but she never flinched.” Her society doyenne mother, a renowned gardening columnist and equestrian had herself posed in the nude for painter Diego Rivera while in Mexico in her younger years and had a short stint performing with the Ziegfeld Follies.
Guest’s father, Winston F. C. Guest, an heir to the Phipps steel fortune and a cousin of Winston Churchill, was a world-class polo player, businessman and close friend of Ernest Hemingway, who was best man at their wedding. Guest’s parents eloped to Havana and wed at Hemingway’s ranch there; Enrique Rousseau, Lilly Pulitzer’s husband, married them. “I have their original marriage certificate; it’s all written by hand. It’s quite amazing,” she says.
Templeton
Guest’s childhood home, Templeton, on Long Island’s Gold Coast, where her parents entertained a Who’s Who of society, fashion and royalty, including Cornelia’s godparents, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, has been razed.
As sad as it was to see the place where she grew up demolished, in a sense, Guest doesn’t mind, because the place was so well-loved until the family sold it. “It was so beautiful, and we had so much fun there,” she says. “It was just a beautiful old country house; it wasn’t modernized, and I’m glad, in a way, it’s gone.”
Guest’s teen rebellious streak didn’t hurt her reputation in the slightest – she was pronounced the “debutante of the decade” when she came out in the 1981-82 season, and no one since Brenda Frazier, whose 1930s debut made such a splash that she appeared on the cover of Life magazine, has had as much acclaim as a debutante.
Guest grew up surrounded by renowned people from different circles, and in addition to Warhol, close friends from her earliest years included Truman Capote, Halston, Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta, Diana Vreeland, Francesco Scavullo, Boy George(who lived with her for six months), and Sylvester Stallone, whom she dated and accompanied to a Reagan-era White House event where they ended up on the cover of the New York Post. Many of these folks were at her 18th birthday party at Mortimer’s, the Manhattan bistro favored by movers and shakers.
Sex and Vanity
And Cornelia continues attracting interesting people and making her mark on the culture – Crazy Rich Asians author Kevin Kwan is a dear friend, and Cornelia is a character in his latest novel, Sex and Vanity.
An award-winning equestrian, Cornelia is an actor whose recent roles include a recurring part in the Twin Peaks reboot Twin Peaks: The Return. The native New Yorker also made a decision to move her nonprofit animal sanctuary, Artemis Farm Rescue, to Texas, where land is plentiful, and the weather is warm. She’s a longtime board member of the Humane Society of New York and a vegan.
Acting Career: Twin Peaks, David Lynch & Lena Headey
Being cast in a key role on Twin Peaks was a dream job for Guest. Producer Mark Frost and creator David Lynch were “amazing” to work with. Lynch told her to go all out, “go for it and have fun.”
Guest, who has shot more than 30 film and TV projects, gets parts in various ways – sometimes she auditions, sometimes there’s serendipity involved, like The Shuroo Process, currently in theaters and starring Eric Roberts, Donal Brophy and Emrhys Cooper. “They were using a friend of mine’s farm down the road from my place in upstate New York as a location,” says Guest. “And she said, ‘You know, there’s a great part in this. You need to meet these guys.’ So, I met them, and kaboom, next thing I knew, I got the part.”
She recently wrapped production on Nine Bullets, with Lena Headey, Sam Worthington and Barbara Hershey. Gigi Gaston, an old friend, directed and wrote the film, and invited Guest to audition. She also appeared as Halston’s Directrice D.D.Ryan in the Amazon docudrama Halston. “I wore a black wig and glasses, and no one knows it’s me,” she laughed.
Artemis Farm Rescue
In 2015, Guest purchased a 456-acre estate in Ancramdale, in upstate New York, to house her animal sanctuary, Artemis Farm Rescue, which specializes in miniature horses and donkeys. She hates cold weather, but Long Island, where she spent much of her life, never got very cold. “It never occurred to me in all my genius that if I moved up north in New York it would be any colder. But who thinks of New York as a tundra? I never did,” she laughs. “And so, after being negative 17 and with five feet of snow outside, I said this is just not for me.”
She considered Tennessee, and then a friend mentioned Texas, where she’d spent time in Houston promoting her cruelty-free line of bags and jackets. Guest had never spent time in Dallas, so decided to check it out. “I’ve never been one of those people that research things endlessly. I make a decision pretty quickly. Right or wrong, I’m a jumper. And so sometimes you jump in a puddle and sometimes you don’t. And even when you jump in the puddle, you wash yourself off.” She went to Dallas, found a house, and when the pandemic arrived shortly after, it turned out to be a good place to be locked down – she could walk her dogs everywhere, stores and restaurants remained open, and it wasn’t cold.
East Texas
Recently she found a 450-acre place in East Texas for her animal sanctuary. Before leaving the New York location, Thirteen Hands Rescue adopted what was left of the two hundred of the mini horses and donkeys she had rescued, so this is a fresh start. “I have to get settled in. Last year we had a major ice storm. I want to get through another winter to sort of see what I need and what I don’t need.” Although a few animals she rescued from a kill shelter are on the way, and she is building a barn on the property.
For now, she has two miniature donkeys, Madonna and Snooks, and one mini horse, Hubert – that are really pets with which she will never part. She also has an assortment of dogs and cats, and her 18-year-old African Sulcata tortoise, Socrates. “This tortoise hated New York so much in the winter. He’d stick his head out and look at me like, what is wrong with you? I am an African Sulcata. I am not from the North Pole.”
Raiding Carolina Herrera’s closet, washing ponies with Oscar de la Renta
Carolina Herrera is a longtime family friend. “I adore her, she’s so elegant and I always think what, would Carolina say?” says Guest. She’s a perfectionist with a classic look, and over time Guest has realized that classic style works best for her as well. “Carolina’s clothes are always so beautiful. Her closet is my favorite place to steal clothes from. I will steal whatever I can get my paws on, and she knows it.”
Oscar de la Renta would visit the Guests on Long Island often, and take Cornelia’s brother, Alexander, to play miniature golf. She was much younger, but the late designer would teach her. She’d wake him up early in the mornings to help her bathe her pony, Memo. “He’d come back in the house, and my mother would say, ‘Oscar, where have you been?’ And he’d say, ‘I was with Cornelia in the barn washing Memo.’” And while you’re trying to picture that elegant man slopping around a barn, Guest doesn’t remember if he dressed down, she was only four or five years old at the time.
Halston
Halston was a neighbor and friend and greatly influenced Cornelia, teaching her how to walk properly in a dress, with her shoulders back. “I’ve always had good posture from riding, but you kind of relax. And he was like, ‘no, no, no, you never relax.’”
He gave Guest a pair of Elsa Peretti hoop earrings that she still has. “I wear them all the time, and the simplicity, yet again. You look at these people that really have stood the test of time and it’s so beautifully classic. They sort of stayed in their own lane. This is a lesson in life. When you find a lane that’s good for you, stay in it.”
MAKE THIS A PULL QUOTE
She also notes that the late designer was ahead of his time, utilizing cruelty-free Ultrasuede fabric back in the 1970s. When Guest launched a bag line, she also used Ultrasuede. Halston didn’t use the synthetic fabric to avoid animal cruelty, it was so that women could throw a dress in the wash and shake it out and it was ready. “But think of the maverick that Halston was. None of these people could have done what they’re doing today without him because he really paved the way.”
Studio 54
As for Halston’s substance abuse problems which were documented in the recent TV miniseries, Halston on Netflix, Guest was unaware. “I was so young. I was so protected. People always say to
me didn’t you see this at Studio 54? Well, I think I was probably the best-protected person in New York between Halston and Steve Rubell, no one ever hit on me, no one ever offered me a drug. So, I was very protected in this crazy world. I really never saw what was going on upstairs. I never saw any of that, and so I had such a different perspective of it than everybody else.”
Truman Capote
While attending the exclusive boarding school Foxcroft, in Virginia, Guest wrote letters to Truman Capote complaining about the place, which she detested. So, Capote tried phoning her repeatedly, and the dorm mother, an English teacher, thought it was a prank.
This happened four days in a row and, unaware of the calls, Guest was hauled into the principal’s office and told that her friend was pranking the dorm mother every night, calling and saying it’s Truman Capote. I said, “It probably is Truman Capote.” The teacher accused her of lying and grounded her for the upcoming weekend when Guest’s mother was coming to visit. “I said, ‘Mom, I can’t leave.’ She said, ‘What do you mean you can’t leave?’ And I said, ‘Well, I think Truman’s been trying to get me and they think I’m lying.’”
Her mother barreled into the head mistress’s office, demanding, “How dare you accuse my daughter of lying?” She told them that she’d spoken to Capote, and he was, in fact, trying to get in touch. C.Z added, “Cornelia informs me that the dorm mother is an English teacher, and if this woman is stupid enough to not know Truman Capote and his voice, she shouldn’t be here. I’m taking my daughter out of your school.”
Diana Vreeland
C.Z. was holding her newborn daughter in her arms, and when Diana Vreeland approached to see the new baby, the infant saw the hands and the nails and started to cry. “Later in life, I was fascinated, I used to sit and watch her,” Guest says. “She always said, ‘I terrified you when you were little. You didn’t like my red nails.’ It’s funny!”
The Duke & Duchess of Windsor
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were Guest’s godparents, and the Duke enjoyed watching the young Cornelia ride. She called him ‘Sir,’ while Wallis Simpson was ‘Duchess’. She was scary for a little girl, Guest recalls. “She was very stern, and he was very open and would talk to me. I don’t think she really had a lot to say to little kids. But he loved ponies and would watch me ride, so he showed a little interest. She, not so much.”
The Duke passed away in 1972, and the Duchess lived until 1986, and Cornelia visited her at her home in Paris a few times as a teen. “It was still very formal, but that’s so much that generation, the formality of it, that we really don’t have so much anymore.”
The Infirmary Ball
At the Infirmary Ball, an annual staple on the New York City social circuit formally known as the Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball, the girls are lined up in the Waldorf kitchen and sent out one by one to curtsy, and then they sit down, in formation, on the floor, holding candles. The debutantes are required to wear white dresses.
When Cornelia Guest made her debut at this event in a white dress by Carolina Herrera, her mother waylaid her just as she was about to sit. “Pssst, come here,” C.Z. Guest whispered to her daughter. “You’re not going to sit down on that filthy floor in this dress.” “She grabbed me and we left for Studio 54,” Guest says. The dress ended up getting filthy anyway when she fell on the dance floor which was covered in artificial snow while dancing with her pal R. Couri Hay. When they brought the dress to Madame Paulette, the famous Manhattan society dry cleaner, the proprietor took one look at it and asked, “Where was Mademoiselle?”
Looking back at the debutante scene of the decadent 1980s, Guest says it was fun. “We had a good time, and I never took it seriously. I mean, I took it seriously because I had respect for it, but it needed a little spicing up.”
She appreciates the social graces instilled in her growing up in such a lofty atmosphere. “I love manners and I love discipline and tradition.” PULL QUOTE. “In life, you have to work hard. It’s like acting, you’re always honing it, and I think that’s important. You have to know the history of things; you have to know how things came to be.”
As mother and daughter both indulged their rebellious sides while embracing high society, today they share a love of life’s simple things. “I always say, we’re country people. The cities are great. We like to go out. We like to have fun, but we’re happiest at home with our animals and our gardens and being out in nature,” says Guest.
“I’m so happy in the mud, planting carrots, taking care of my dogs, mucking out a stall. That’s what makes me happy, that and being on a movie set. ”
