The real C.Z. Guest — played by Chloë Sevigny on ‘Feud’ — once covered a mobster’s funeral for The Post
nypost.comFeud: Capote Vs. The Swans,” was a pillar of society, a fashion icon, a muse to artists and a confidante to movers and shakers.
Readers of Page Six will recall her as the mom of “Deb of the Decade” Cornelia Guest.She belonged to the small circle of wealthy, beautiful women such as Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill and Joanne Carson who reigned over Manhattan society in the 1960s, sharing cocktails and vicious gossip with “In Cold Blood” author Truman Capote at La Cote Basque.But those of us who knew her as the New York Post’s gardening columnist from 1980 to 1992 — a quirky interlude in her glamorous life and in the paper’s history as well — remember her as a sweet, funny and generous friend who delighted in the colorful characters and grungy atmosphere of the newspaper’s former home at 210 South Street.The creaky building’s multitude of mice and sneeze-inducing odors didn’t faze C.Z.
When I apologized for them on her first visit, she laughed. “Are you kidding?” she asked in her Boston-Brahmin voice, which Sevigny captures with uncanny precision.“My husband Winston and I hunted tigers in India with the maharaja.
Do you know how terrible tigers smell?” she said. “Terrible!” I wasn’t bold enough to ask her whether the beasts in question were more malodorous alive or dead.It fascinated me that a social icon twice named “the world’s best-dressed woman” was at home among us.
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