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"  It&amp;#039;s hard to believe that there was a time when well-brought-up girls might have preferred to stay in Locust Valley with their ponies and French governesses rather than head for Manhattan to disappear into the demimonde. Nowadays, busting out of the gilded cage is standard socialite behavior, but Cornelia Guest did it first. Or if not first, she certainly did it loudest. At age 18, with her mother&amp;#039;s pal Nancy Reagan newly installed in the White House, the daughter of polo-playing Winston and fashion icon C.Z. Guest took her fresh-off-the-horse style to the glittering nocturnal corridors of Studio 54, Xenon, and Regine&amp;#039;s. The press dubbed her the Deb of the Decade. &amp;quot;I was really, really lucky,&amp;quot; says Guest on an early-autumn evening soon after putting Templeton\u2014her famous family home in Old Westbury on Long Island&amp;#039;s Gold Coast\u2014on the market for $11.9 million. (The price tag includes neither Salvador Dal\u00ED&amp;#039;s portrait of C.Z. nor Andy Warhol&amp;#039;s of Cornelia.) &amp;quot;When I was living in the city, I had these people who protected me: Andy, Halston, Scavullo.&amp;quot; All three functioned as de facto fairy godfathers for the young Cornelia. Halston taught her how to walk in a dress on the makeshift runway in his studio, and fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo would watch her collect ribbons at the Hampton Classic horse show. The equestrian habit may have saved Guest from the other popular habits of the day\u2014or night, as the case was. &amp;quot;I loved to go out,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but I was on a horse the next morning. And there was my mother at home waiting to wake me up by pointing the garden hose at my bedroom window. The truth is, I didn&amp;#039;t have that bad-girl gene.&amp;quot; Guest was four years old when she first met Warhol at one of her parents&amp;#039; Templeton dinners. &amp;quot;Andy came up to my room and played with me all night,&amp;quot; she remembers. &amp;quot;We became great friends.&amp;quot; Guest recalls the time Warhol joined her at the International Jumping Derby in Newport, Rhode Island. The hotels were booked that weekend, and she and her retinue were staying on a friend&amp;#039;s yacht. &amp;quot;One night, the captain came up and said there was a hurricane coming and we needed to go out to sea and ride it out,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Andy turned whiter than he already was. I realized he didn&amp;#039;t know how to swim.&amp;quot; Those were the days when Guest was running around making the most of her mother&amp;#039;s advice: &amp;quot;Be polite, meet everybody, and have a wonderful time.&amp;quot; Meet everyone she did, everywhere from Studio 54 to Hollywood, where she walked the red carpet on the arm of Sylvester Stallone. For the most part, C.Z. embraced her daughter&amp;#039;s social appetites. (After all, the elder Guest had her own seditious streak: She left her blue-blooded Boston family for a brief stint in the Ziegfeld Follies. She married Winston, an heir to the Phipps steel fortune, at Ernest Hemingway&amp;#039;s ranch in Cuba.) &amp;quot;My mother was a maverick,&amp;quot; Guest says. &amp;quot;She liked all different people. She&amp;#039;d go to the Factory, and I&amp;#039;d go with her and sit under Fred Hughes&amp;#039;s desk. If Andy taught me anything, it&amp;#039;s that you get wisdom from every possible place.&amp;quot; Guest grew up among much older people. Her mother was in her 40s when she was born. Her godparents included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor--regular Templeton guests, to whom little Cornelia invariably curtsied--and that fixture of French high society, the baron Alexis de Red\u00E9. &amp;quot;So many ghosts,&amp;quot; she says, sighing. &amp;quot;But that part of my life is gone.&amp;quot; Stepping out from under C.Z.&amp;#039;s long shadow has not been easy. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not my mother,&amp;quot; she says, smiling. &amp;quot;For one thing, I don&amp;#039;t go to lunch.&amp;quot;  Actually, she makes lunch. And cookies\u2014lots of them. For the Humane Society of New York&amp;#039;s spring auction, Guest baked a thousand chocolate-chip cookies herself. They&amp;#039;re the first item in her planned line of prepared foods. That&amp;#039;s just the beginning: Cornelia Guest Events, the catering division of her burgeoning empire, counts Bulgari, Donna Karan, and Est\u00E9e Lauder as clients; an entertaining book is in the works, as are jewelry, accessories, and home-furnishings lines. Lest it go unmentioned, Guest and her products are vegan. For a woman who grew up in a house where elephant tusks adorned the front hall and, as she says, &amp;quot;a pound of butter a day kept the doctor away,&amp;quot; Guest&amp;#039;s new business suggests that the rebellious impulse persists. Today, Templeton is a veritable menagerie. Guest has nine dogs and a donkey named Madonna. And just as the estate&amp;#039;s ample vegetable gardens and orchards have been feeding its chatelaine for the last few years, Guest hopes that her plant-based products will feed everyone else\u2014&amp;quot;from Whole Foods to Ralphs to JetBlue.&amp;quot; She has been doing her research close to home, or in it. At her big Thanksgiving party last year, the mostly French crowd refused to believe that the boeuf in Guest&amp;#039;s boeuf bourguignon was in fact wheat gluten. &amp;quot;One friend kept joking about whether Grimaldi&amp;#039;s would deliver a pepperoni pizza to Old Westbury,&amp;quot; Guest says, &amp;quot;but really, people love my food.&amp;quot; Her mother&amp;#039;s work in the Templeton gardens resulted in a weekly horticulture column syndicated in 350 national newspapers. Though Guest credits the estate with her own passion for Mother Nature, she feels that the time has come to turn over, quite literally, a new leaf. &amp;quot;I want my own house and my own garden,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve made Templeton as much my own as I could, but in some sense I always felt like a visitor. I want to build a place of my own. I want my own legacy.&amp;quot; She will miss the little red dining room and her mother&amp;#039;s rose garden, which she has recently dotted with birdhouses. Most of all, she&amp;#039;ll miss her dog graveyard. &amp;quot;All my little buddies are there,&amp;quot; she says\u2014even Sweep the Market, her bay thoroughbred. &amp;quot;I want to see kids at Templeton,&amp;quot; says Guest, who has never married and describes herself as &amp;quot;dating and having fun.&amp;quot; She hopes that a new generation of little girls will discover Templeton&amp;#039;s chipmunk holes and baby hawks&amp;#039; nests. Meanwhile, she&amp;#039;s shopping around for a farm on Long Island or in New Jersey, where she&amp;#039;d like to plant an organic garden and open a farm stand. It&amp;#039;s a vision that couldn&amp;#039;t be more different from her parents&amp;#039; home, where a parade of souffl\u00E9s would glide through the kitchen doors and land softly on a table packed with grandees. Guest remembers walking down the stairs in one of the little green dresses that Mr. Saint Laurent sent from Paris, awed by such splendor. &amp;quot;It was beautiful, but it was another time,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not how I&amp;#039;m comfortable, and I think that people nowadays who are drawn to that are drawn to the pretense of it. I see it all the time in New York, unfortunately. There are times you wish you could have Pat Buckley, Diana Vreeland, Hubert de Givenchy, and Mr. Fairchild on a panel watching The Real Housewives.&amp;quot; By the standards of her time, C.Z. displayed her own brand of simplicity. Compared with the other swans who ruled New York and Truman Capote&amp;#039;s imagination in the 1960s\u2014Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, and Slim Keith\u2014C.Z. was uncontrived. &amp;quot;She taught me that to be a lady, you have to be a tomb,&amp;quot; says Guest of her mother, who recognized that Capote could come back to bite her. &amp;quot;My father always used to say, &amp;#039;You know what you&amp;#039;re dealing with.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; That C.Z. did not confide in Capote\u2014and so was spared when he wrote the thinly veiled Answered Prayers\u2014allowed her to stand by him when others didn&amp;#039;t. She had other priorities: C.Z. was, more than a hostess or a fashion plate, a gardener.  For Guest, this is her mother&amp;#039;s legacy. &amp;quot;I never watched my mother dress to go out,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And fashion has never been the easiest for me. Was it easy for my mom? I don&amp;#039;t know. Then it was about loyalty; she was loyal to Adolfo and Mainbocher. And they never didn&amp;#039;t dress, those women.&amp;quot; Guest tugs at the charcoal-colored cashmere enrobing her shoulders. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the simple things we take,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I love a sweater over my shoulders. I learned that from her.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a609/cornelia-guest-interview/>