She was hostess to stars, royalty

Published 12:00 am Friday, July 22, 2016

Betsy Bloomingdale, the socialite and renowned fashion leader who was the widow of Alfred Bloomingdale, the department store heir, and a celebrated hostess to royalty, world dignitaries and show business luminaries, died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93.

Family members confirmed her death with several news organizations, including Women’s Wear Daily and Vanity Fair magazine, which said the cause was complications of a heart condition.

Vivacious, celery-thin, with a husky, confiding Lauren Bacall voice, Bloomingdale was a high-octane doyenne of the Social Register whose friendships — many remarkable for their longevity — encompassed presidents and princes, tycoons and leaders of government, entertainment, publishing and the arts.

She lived in palatial homes in Los Angeles and New York; shopped for $20,000 gowns at Paris houses of couture; frolicked with the Kissingers, the Cronkites and Malcolm Forbes on Rupert Murdoch’s yacht in Morocco; attended the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1981; and dined regularly with President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan at the White House in the 1980s.

In the exclusive Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles, her neighbors over the years were Hollywood legends: Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson. She kept diaries of the dinner parties she had given since the late 1950s, many for charities, and took photographs of table settings to avoid using the same one twice. She was perennially on lists of the world’s best-dressed women.

For decades, she and her husband were trusted friends of the Reagans. With homes a few minutes apart in Los Angeles, they shared soirees, holiday gatherings and family occasions, and celebrated a succession of Reagan’s triumphs as he, with the help of Alfred Bloomingdale and others in the Reagan “kitchen cabinet,” ascended from film star to the California governorship in 1967 and to the presidency in 1981.

Betsy Bloomingdale was born Betty Lee Newling in Beverly Hills on Aug. 2, 1922, the daughter of a socially prominent doctor. Growing up, she knew Cary Grant, James Stewart and Merle Oberon. She attended the Marlborough School in Los Angeles and Bennett College in Millbrook, New York.

She briefly aspired to an acting career before becoming, in 1946, Bloomingdale’s second wife. They had three children: Geoffrey, Lisa and Robert. There was no immediate word on Betsy Bloomingdale’s survivors.