Nina Griscom, a model, television host, fashion plate, columnist and entrepreneur who came to be known as an “It” girl in the high society whirl of 1980s New York, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 65.
The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was diagnosed in late 2017, said Kelly Breheny, her personal assistant.
Ms. Griscom grew up among the rich and the influential, the daughter of Elizabeth Fly Vagliano, a major benefactor of cultural and educational institutions and later the wife of Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who helped rescue New York City from fiscal insolvency in the 1970s.
Ms. Griscom, who would all but retire the title of best dressed at charity events, began modeling by posing for the fashion industry grande dame Eileen Ford while still in college.
She went on to model for magazines, appearing on the cover of Elle France, and in one instance famously draped only in a towel for a Gillette Bare Elegance body shampoo advertisement.
From 1990 to 1993, Ms. Griscom was a co-host of “Entertainment News” segments on HBO with Matt Lauer. She was hired, she said, because she could memorize scripts quickly when the cable network was “too cheap for a teleprompter.”
Ms. Griscom and Alan Richman, the food writer, were hosts of “Dining Around,” a series of restaurant reviews that ran on the Food Network from 1993 to 1998; they later opened home-decorating stores in Southampton, N.Y. (sharing space there with Antony Todd, the Manhattan event and floral designer) and on Lexington Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, selling such items as scented candles suggestively named “Flirt,” “Revenge,” and “Sultry.” The Southampton store closed in 2005; the Manhattan store in 2009.
Ms. Griscom was a rebel from birth. She started smoking before she was a teenager (“I picked up the habit when I was shipped off to school in Switzerland at age 12,” she wrote in her Town & Country magazine column in 2012) and had worked her way up to a pack of Marlboros a day, but stopped years ago.
Besides opening the decorating stores, Ms. Griscom styled handbags for the GiGi New York Collection, even though she acknowledged, “I am the first to say that I have zero formal training in design.”
She festooned her Park Avenue apartment with old master drawings as well as African and Oceanic artifacts. (“An African fetish in the shape of a phallus, I admit, is not for everyone,” she told Architectural Digest in 2017.)
Even past the point at which most of her contemporaries had matured, Ms. Griscom, in a gesture of support for an ailing friend, paid $150, plus tip, to get a two-inch porcupine tattooed on her right inner forearm.
“Traditional decorum suggests that getting your first tattoo after the age of 50 is like sporting a miniskirt in your 70s — a tad age inappropriate,” Ms. Griscom conceded. Her mother agreed.
“‘It’s neither savory, nor sound’ was the reaction of my famously elegant mother, Elizabeth Rohatyn,” Ms. Griscom recalled, “who, it should be noted, regularly applied that phrase to many of my well-chronicled life choices.”
Be First to Comment