NEW YORK — In honor of what would have been Oleg Cassini’s 93rd birthday, friends gathered Tuesday night at the St. Regis to raise a glass and recall some of his life’s lighter moments.
Besides the many colorful stories recounted for the crowd, and the few that were exchanged in confidence about the designer, who died March 17, a video and slide show left guests with indelible images of a charismatic man. Shot after shot captured his indomitable spirit — a white-haired Cassini outrunning Kenny Rogers in a televised celebrity multisport competition; the designer clad in a tuxedo, riding a galloping white horse; another of him hamming it up in the Kennedy White House wearing a jeweled turban and makeshift monocle — much to President John F. Kennedy’s delight.
Far from a maudlin memorial, the upbeat event was capped off by the crowd singing “Happy Birthday” as Cassini’s wife, Marianne, cut a birthday cake.
Earlier in the evening, Diane von Furstenberg openly approved of the lively atmosphere. “I think it’s absolutely wonderful, and so relevant and appropriate that we would come here and celebrate life because Oleg was all about life.”
She recalled how flattered she was to be asked to present him with a Council of Fashion Designers of America Board of Directors Special Tribute Award in 2003. Referring to their arranged lunch before the event, she said, “Actually, I was intimidated, and that doesn’t happen very often. He was a flirt. Here was this real good-looking playboy, so full of gallantry and so full of life.”
During her opening remarks, Marianne Cassini said her husband “liked to win — and usually did,” and described him as “a man’s man and a ladies’ man, too.” Donald Trump echoed that second point with a teenage memory. “Many years ago, I used to go to the tennis tournaments at Forest Hills, which is now the U.S. Open, and I would see Oleg — this great-looking guy — and he always had the most beautiful girls. And I’d have a girl from Queens and a girl from Brooklyn and, for some reason, it never felt right.”
Trump added that after he and Cassini became friendly about 10 or 15 years ago, the designer implored him, “‘Donald, never, ever lose your looks. Do whatever [it takes.]'”
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“I didn’t know if he was telling me something or telling me something,” Trump chuckled. “He was an exceptional guy in terms of sage.”
The crowd laughed readily when Trump touched upon Cassini’s fastidiousness. “As good as he was, he wasn’t easy. There was a little suffering in there. Do we know that, Marianne?”
CFDA president Stan Herman experienced that firsthand from Cassini and his mother, when he worked briefly in the Fifties as a sketcher in the designer’s East 61st Street office. “His mother clocked me in every morning and watched when I went to lunch and when I came back. I was told at the end of the day if I was late or early.”
Lavelle Olexa, senior vice president of fashion merchandising at Lord & Taylor, also had a memorable start with the designer, but not on Seventh Avenue. They became acquainted after debris from his Gramercy Park home fell into her backyard, and became fast friends. “Debris, even of such pedigree, was debris just the same,” she laughed.
Last year, Cassini broke all attendance records at Lord & Taylor’s flagship here, when hundreds braced a snowstorm to see him, Olexa said. More recently, when the designer appeared to be tiring, she playfully encouraged him to carry on. “He told me, ‘Then, for you, dear, I shall live to be 120,'” Olexa said.
Regis Philbin, whose talk show Cassini appeared on in the Seventies and Eighties, recalled a night on the town in the early Eighties with his former costar, Kathie Lee Gifford, “who was then single, available and looking. And there was Oleg Cassini, who was then single, available and always looking.
“Watching him operate was almost like watching Cary Grant in a movie. She was charmed, she was flushed and she was ready. When I think about what could have happened that night, it could have been Oleg and not Frank Gifford,” Philbin said.
Before the speakers took to the podium, Debbie Dickinson, who modeled for Cassini in the late Seventies and early Eighties, recalled rising at 5 a.m. to appear with Cassini on Philbin’s talk show. “Oleg was one of the few people I would wake up that early for,” Dickinson said. “Regis loved him and just let him take over because he was such a great conversationalist.”
With the exception of Perry Ellis and Karl Lagerfeld, Cassini was the only designer she worked for who always did something to celebrate the work, she said. “He would take you to lunch in the limo. He would make you feel treasured, and that is not a common thing,” she said. “He was in a real class by himself, not something fabricated for the fashion industry.”
Interior designer Carlton Varney provided perhaps the most moving remarks. When he was a young designer at Dorothy Draper, he and Cassini would have long chats and review sketches in Sardinia, Italy. Many years later, when one of Varney’s sons was born with Down’s syndrome, he turned to Cassini, who has a severely disabled daughter, for guidance. “He invited me to his home in Oyster Bay and spoke to me for hours. He gave me courage. He gave me hope,” Varney said. “That was the Oleg you didn’t know.”