Nina Griscom, Model, Entrepreneur and 'It Girl' of the '80s, Dies at 65

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.

Griscom, who would all but retire the title of best dressed at charity events, began modeling by posing for fashion industry grande dame Eileen Ford while still in college.

“I wasn’t discovered at all,” Griscom told The New York Times in 2015. “I marched right into there myself.”

She went on to model for magazines, in one instance famously draped only in a towel for a Gillette Bare Elegance body shampoo advertisement.

From 1990-93, 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.”

Griscom and Alan Richman, the food writer, were hosts of “Dining Around,” a series of restaurant reviews that ran on the Food Network from 1993-98; they later opened home-decorating stores in Southampton, New York (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.

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, 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, Griscom, in a gesture of support for an ailing friend, paid $150, plus tip, to get a 2-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,” Griscom conceded. Her mother agreed.

“ ‘It’s neither savory, nor sound’ was the reaction of my famously elegant mother, Elizabeth Rohatyn,” Griscom recalled, “who, it should be noted, regularly applied that phrase to many of my well-chronicled life choices.”

Nina Louise Renshaw was born in Manhattan on May 8, 1954. Her father was Charles C. Renshaw Jr., an editor and publishing executive.

Nina graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, and attended Barnard College in Manhattan, where she majored in psychology.

Among her other jobs, she was a consultant to Revlon, the cosmetics company.

She is survived by her husband, Leonel Alfredo Piraino, a real estate investor and broker whom she married in 2007; a daughter, Lily Elizabeth Baker, from her marriage to Dr. Daniel C. Baker, which ended in divorce. An earlier marriage, to Lloyd P. Griscom Jr., a businessman whose family had been among the first investors in IBM, also ended in divorce.

Friends described designer Bill Blass as a father figure to Griscom, who could turn heads at society balls billboarding the latest claret-colored fashion by Blass, embroidered gold by Vera Wang or silver-and-black by Arnold Scaasi.

“You know who’s so good at that throwaway thing is Nina Griscom,” Craig Natiello, a designer for Halston, said in 2000, adding, “She always looks like she just came out of the pool, put on that great dress and looks fantastic.”

Griscom venerated the Roaring Twenties and lamented the loss since then of manners and elegance. “I don’t see anybody entertaining nicely at home,” she said in an interview for the GiGi line of handbags. “I haven’t seen a thank-you-note in a long time. It’s very serious and ponderous and vulgar.”

She also bemoaned the fettle of her daughter’s generation. “I don’t think they have as much fun or are as adventuresome as we were,” she said.

Her glamorous adventures, romantic and otherwise, were fodder for gossip columnists, but rarely surprised her friends.

“Nina was madcap, crazy, gay in the old-fashioned sense of the word,” said Louise Grunwald, for decades among the city’s most influential hostesses. “She was unique in the social history of that period of New York in that she was outrageous and fun but highly intelligent. No matter how outrageous she was, no matter how much she’d had to drink, she could always get away with it.”

In the fall, Guy Trebay, a fashion reporter for The Times who knew of her illness, contacted Griscom asking if she might agree to an interview — what might be her final interview — for a profile of her that he was writing. (The article, titled “The Party Girl, Till the End,” appeared in November.) Griscom replied on Instagram with characteristic audacity.

“Is this,” she asked, “for my obit?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

Nina Griscom, Model, Entrepreneur and 'It Girl' of the '80s, Dies at 65

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