Hampton Style - May 9, 2008 -

On a recent rainy morning at Templeton, the Old Westbury ancestral estate of Cornelia Guest- author, actress, socialite-the lady of the house is crouched down on the staircase landing in the same curve-hugging lemon gown she wore to last year's Oscars. At the request of a photographer she is dragging her resisting 140-pound dog, Bear, across the carpet, trying to better position him for his close-up. We may all be fruits of our breeding, but we needn't necessarily be its advocate. At this moment, Cornelia is exhibiting a persuasive argument.

While still a teenager, Cornelia was dubbed "Deb of the Decade" and in short order produced The Debutante's Guide to Life, a canny answer to The Preppy Handbook, in which she chronicled the life she was born into as the comely daughter of style icon C.Z. Guest and Phipps heir Winston F.C. Guest. Cornelia's beloved Bear is a Great Pyrenees, a medieval dog of war and the foreboding breed used to guard French chateaux. But in this tussle of wills, my money's on the blonde in the Herrera.

Cornelia's family tree bore fruit as close as it gets to American aristocracy-C.Z., a pedigreed debutante from Boston, and Winston, an international polo star, counted Winston Churchill among his cousins-but she was not raised to be a woman who sips tea and waits for nice things to happen to her. With marked independence and no shortage of tenacity, Cornelia leads a life now marked as much by pluck as by privilege. "I was so lucky to have my mother and father," she explains. "They weren't pretentious; they weren't cut off. My mother didn't sit around having lunch. She loved the country and early morning rides, and she instilled that in me. When I got off my horse, I washed it. I took care of my dogs. I was up at 6 every morning riding. I grew up on the back of a horse. Even now, I like being able to come home and wake up with the birds."

Where she wakes up is at Templeton, but among the estates of America's industrial elite in Old Westbury, her family's roots reach much further than the current residence. Winston's grandfather was Henry Phipps, the steel baron partner of Andrew Carnegie, and his father Frederick Guest purchased from Alfred DuPont the baronial White Eagle, an estate designed by Carrere and Hastings, architects for the New York Public Library and Frick Mansion. Winston inherited the sprawling home upon his mother's death in 1959 and given the modest size of his own family, he sold it nine years later. Its current incarnation is NYIT's de Seversky Center, a renowned conference and dining facility that makes good use of the impressive home and grounds. In liberating himself from the sprawling property, Winston found himself very much in step with his contemporaries who were also downsizing; fortunately for him, his extended family afforded impressive options. He moved his family into what was formerly the guesthouse of Old Westbury-the mansion that is now a museum, but was then home to his uncle John Phipps. An alley of linden trees still leads from the main house to Templeton, which has expanded over the years to suit its current Guests. On 15 acres, the current incarnation has 28 rooms, including 11 bedrooms. With the addition of new wings and sections, Templeton's exterior forms a telltale ornamental patchwork of bricks and timber.

This pastoral setting was the stage for Cornelia's charmed country-girl lifestyle, but bucolic leanings aside, as a moneyed member of New York's nobility, she was also expected to have a society coming-out. Her youthful fearlessness turned out to be suitable training for her moment in the spotlight of the debutante (and media) arena of 1982. Christened "Deb of the Decade" by no less than Andy Warhol and the New York Times' Eugenia Sheppard, the girl who was happiest at home with her horses and dogs became the first celebrity socialite of her era. Cornelia insists, however, that she wasn't about to swap her riding helmet for a tiara. "It was just a lot of fun, I had a coming-out party-it was what you did. I wrote a book, I met a lot of fun people. That was it." To hear her tell it, she had no intention of trailing her fellow debs into a suitable marriage and safe positions on charity boards. New York in the '80s was a party, and for Cornelia it had just begun. While she already counted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as godparents, she now counted among her chic coterie Andy Warhol, Halston, Mick Jagger and countless other members of New York's fashion and art scenes.

Anyone who considers Cornelia's youthful trajectory as rebellious hasn't studied her mother's own nascent years in much detail. After C.Z.'s debut she indulged in a stint as a showgirl before eloping to Cuba in 1947 and marrying Winston at Ernest Hemingway's Havana ranch. The writer, a longtime friend of the groom, served as best man. Earlier, another exhibition of C.Z.'s free spirit found manifestation when she posed nude for Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Winston, determined to control the painting, tracked it down to Havana, where he rescued it from behind a bar by paying off the bar owner. It was never brought into the house, but he mollified his wife by commissioning from Salvador Dali a portrait which still holds pride of place over the drawing-room mantel.

Wearing pearls, a cardigan and a printed-chintz dress, Dali's C.Z. is cast in divine light and draws you in with her cryptic expression. If WASPishness were a religion, this would be the Madonna.

By the time Cornelia became a bird of the night, C.Z.'s wilder days were long behind her. "I used to go out to Studio 54 and would then drive home at four in the morning and crawl into bed. I lived on the ground floor and I would shut the windows and draw the blinds. My mother, of course, was having none of it. At 6:30 in the morning she would take out the hose and point it at the window behind my bed. Can you just imagine the noise that made? And if the window was open, I would get soaked. Then she'd say 'Oh, hi!' Of course she'd know I had just returned home ...We think we pull one over on our mothers; we pull n-o-t-h-i-n-g over on them." In homage to her mother's nude portrait, Cornelia too was painted by the artist of her day: a beautiful topless portrait of her by Andy Warhol hangs in her bedroom. "I didn't have to sit for him. He just took a polaroid of me and sketched it from that."

Not so unlike Warhol's '60s heiress acolyte Edie Sedgwick before her, Cornelia hoped to build an acting career off the back of her growing social success. The '80s It Girl moved to Hollywood and was met with curiosity, even adulation, from the industry which embraced her as a vaulted young blue-blood. She was cast briefly on Falcon Crest but the American public appeared not quite ready to shed national fame on Cornelia, neither as a persona nor as an actress.